Now that Harley was taken care of, it was a good time for me to get a shower. I felt dirty and gross from the zombie attack, and I wanted to be sure every last drop of blood was washed away. I was still wearing Kyle’s shirt. “I’m going to take a shower,” I told the others. We had fallen into the habit of telling everyone where we were going as a safety measure. I walked through the gym and down the back stairs into the basement locker rooms. We were fortunate that we still had running water if you could call it that. It was more like trickling water, and it was bone-chilling cold. I stepped into the shower stall and undressed. I laid my boots onto the floor.
I turned on the water and stepped under the puny stream, thankful at least that it was clean. I washed carefully and inspected myself for any cuts or scratches. Fortunately, there were none, but it had been a close call. Too close. I knew too well that Kyle had saved my life. I had been careless. It wouldn’t happen again.
I dried myself off using some scratchy brown paper towels and walked over to the lockers to look for some clothes. Beside the lockers, there was a large box filled with track uniforms, shorts, and t-shirts. They were still packaged from the laundry service. I found some shorts and a shirt that fit and got dressed. Technically, it was too cold for t-shirts and shorts in northern Indiana in October. With no heat in the building, we needed a plan for dealing with the coming season changes.
I rinsed Kyle’s shirt as well as I could in the cold trickle of water and scrubbed it with a sliver of soap. I rinsed, wrung it out, and hung it to drip dry over a drain. Looking through the lockers, I hoped to find better shoes for running. A pair that looked a little big was nestled in the foot of one locker, and I found some tube socks in another. I put them on and walked around the room to try them out. They weren’t perfect, but they would work.
Back in the gym, Harley told me that Jordan, Matt, and Kyle had taken the bags of canned food that Kyle carried into the kitchen to prepare for dinner. I walked down the hallway, through the cafeteria, and into the kitchen where I found them taking inventory of the stock left on the shelves. It wasn’t much, but I was glad to see that we had scored some soup from the diner downtown. It was nice to have some variety. There were also several cans of beans. I was sick of beans, but at least they were filling and provided protein. One thing we had an abundance of, rice, helped to bulk up even the wimpiest meals.
A group of older adults joined us to prepare the evening meal. To conserve food, we had restricted ourselves to two meals a day; one in the morning, and one at night. We all went to our usual workstations. I began opening the large cans of beans using the industrial-sized can-opener mounted on a large, stainless steel work table.
“I see you found some duds,” Kyle commented.
“Yeah, I guess so,” I affirmed, really missing my old clothes. “I washed your shirt, and it’s drying in the locker room.” My gaze drifted to his well-defined muscles as he stood talking to me. “It should be dry in a couple of hours or so.” I quickly recovered and pulled my eyes back up to meet his.
“Thanks.” He looked around, surveying the jobs everyone was doing. “Is there something else I can do to help?” he asked.
“Sure, we can always use more assistance with cooking.” I led him to the commercial stoves in the back where several of the men were pouring the beans into large pots and placing them on the burners. The gas stoves were fueled by two huge tanks of propane that sat outside the building. We also used the stoves to boil drinking water because Nurse Hoffstedder insisted on it. She said the water would be safe as it was for showers, but she felt that boiling it for drinking would protect us in case the virus contaminated the city’s water supply. We had been lucky for sure, but there was no telling how long the propane would last. I assumed it had been filled at the start of the school year, but we had no way to confirm this and no way of knowing how frequently they were filled during the year.
Kyle jumped right in to help the cooking crew. Some of the men were already working and were talking in concerned tones as we reached them. Several wore anxious expressions. Word had spread quickly about the zombies coming out earlier, and I’d noticed several people in the gym also looked worried.
I began filling the sink with water for washing the dishes after the meal. It would take that long to fill it up because the kitchen water was a trickle as well. I poured some bleach into the metal basin to sanitize the water for cleaning the dishes.
People commenced wandering into the dining hall for the meal, and I drafted four of them to operate the serving line. It was late compared to “normal” dinner time, but we found that eating late gave us something to do, and it took our minds of the zombies’ incessant screaming and pounding at the gates. The noise of people scooting chairs, talking, and rattling dishes almost covered up the sound of the zombies. For an hour or so, we could pretend that everything was normal again. After everyone was attended to, the kitchen crew served themselves and went into the dining hall to eat with everyone else. As usual, my friends and I shared a table. Harley wheeled her chair up to the end. She looked as if she felt better. The pain meds must have kicked in.
I sat down and began eating the beans and rice. Brown beans this time. It had been baked beans last night. Tomorrow it would probably be navy beans, or maybe I could talk them into fixing the soup. One of the cooks, a man everyone called Walker, was talking in a concerned tone about the food situation. He appeared agitated.
“Looks like we’re using a lot more food that we’re bringing in,” he was saying.
I looked at Kyle. He was the only one of us who made it back in with bags of food tonight. “Thanks,” I whispered.
His head gave a slight bow. “My pleasure.” He smiled, and his eyes met mine.
I turned back to my plate, feeling my cheeks flush. “Usually, we do better than this,” I explained. “I’ll check in the morning to see if the other bags are still outside the gates where we dropped them.” I didn’t look up, but I swore I could feel the heat of his stare. “I don’t imagine there would be anyone else out there alive to take them, and of course, the zombies won’t bother them. I mean, why would they?” It seemed like I was rambling, and it made me feel stupid.
“All I’m saying is we need to do something soon,” Walker continued. “We need a plan.” Some of the other cooks nodded their heads in agreement. Walker gestured toward Matt and Jordan. “Didn’t you all see or hear anything out there today?” They shook their heads. “What about you?” he asked, turning to Kyle. “You were military living out there. Was there any news of a rescue operation or a plan to get us out of here?”
Kyle gave me a knowing look. I could see that he was reluctant to talk with Walker. I guessed he didn’t want the others to know about the military’s actions downtown. “No,” he said simply. “My communication system went down, and that was well before they would have had time to plan a rescue.”
“But they will come for us. They’ll have to come through looking for survivors.” Walker stated. It was more of a question without the inflection. He let the words dangle in the air like expectant fishhooks waiting for a bite. When Kyle didn’t answer, Walker’s face darkened. “Right?” he asked.
Kyle turned to his plate and didn’t respond.
Walker stood up and leaned across the table. “Why didn’t you answer me?” he asked in a harsh voice. He loomed over Kyle in an obvious attempt to intimidate him. Walker was a big man, and I cringed at the thought of the two of them fighting. Whatever the outcome, it wouldn’t be pretty.
“What do you know soldier boy?” Walker’s arm reared back, and his massive fist curled into a hard ball as he readied to swing at Kyle.
Before Walker could punch, Kyle was on his feet. He grabbed Walker’s arm and twisted it backward. In the blink of an eye, Kyle jumped over the table and yanked Walker’s arm behind his back with a sickening crunch.
Walker cried out as he sank to the floor. Kyle’s boot stabbed down hard onto Walker’s back. Several of the other men spra
ng forward. They looked like they wanted to break up the fight, and formed a circle around Kyle and Walker, but no one moved to pull Kyle away.
“Calm down, guys,” one of the men said. “We’ve got enough problems without fighting.”
Kyle eyed each of them in turn, and I noticed his face was cloaked in a stern but calm expression. He didn’t even appear out of breath. He glanced down at Walker, who was now whimpering in pain and apparently unable to move. “Are we good now?” he asked Walker. “Don’t ever try to pull anything on me, and we’ll be fine. You got that?”
“Yeah,” Walker groaned.
Kyle released the man’s arm, and it flopped onto Walker’s back.
“It’s best you two separate,” another man spoke. He beckoned to Kyle but stepped back when the soldier took a step toward him.
Kyle put up both hands, fingers fanned outward in a show of compliance. The men ushered Kyle and Walker to different sides of the room. Matt and Jordan exchanged nods and looked at me accusingly. See, everything was my fault. I left the table and went to talk to Kyle.
“I’m sorry I lost my cool back there,” Kyle said to me as I sat down beside him.
“It was a natural reflex,” I said. “When someone throws a punch at you, you react.
Everyone here is just so on edge. Some of us take it better than others.”
“Yeah, and I need to get used to being around people again, living people I mean,” Kyle said.
“How long were you hiding out there alone?” I asked “Ever since the first plume cloud. Maybe a month. I don’t know for sure. I lost track.”
Seeing that the fighting situation was diffused, the men who had intended to break it up began making their way back to their tables, leaving us alone. Kyle visibly relaxed. “So, what do you do for fun here?” he asked, smiling. The glint in his eyes suggested that under other circumstances, he might be fun to hang out with.
I appreciated the dry humor. “How about helping me with the dishes?” I asked as I stood up and started walking toward the kitchen.
“Gee that sounds great.” His tone was sarcastic, but he followed me anyway.
There was little scraping to do on the dishes because everyone had adopted a kind of bunker mentality that made them practically lick their plates clean. But still, doing the food trays by hand for a crowd like this was quite a job. Harley usually helped me, but in her condition, she was unable to assist. She couldn’t reach the sinks while sitting in the wheelchair. Instead, she sat in the kitchen with us and chatted. Well, actually she just sat and watched us work. Every now and then she giggled or made some off-the-wall comment. The pain medicine had an obvious effect on her personality and made her a bit loopy.
As I washed, and Kyle rinsed and stood the trays in drying racks on their sides on a work table. They had to drip dry. Before the incident, the staff at the school used commercial dishwashers, and towels were in short supply for that reason.
I was just finishing up the last trays when I noticed Kyle was staring out the window. “Something wrong?” I asked.
“That guy Walker was right you know,” he answered. “We need a plan. We have no more than maybe a week’s supply of food here. With all of these people, we’ll have a crisis on our hands when it runs out.” He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. Matt, Jordan, Harley, and I discussed it daily, and between us, we still had not managed to come up with a solution. With no television or radio, we had no idea what was going on out there. Cell phones weren’t working either. As far as we knew, no one in authority out there realized we were sheltering here. For that matter, we didn’t know how far the virus had spread and whether or not anyone else was still alive to come looking for us. “Hate to break it to you Kyle, but we have analyzed the situation over and over and have come up with nothing.”
Kyle ran his hands through his blonde hair, which was an unruly tousle, having grown out from a military buzz cut during his time hiding out at the diner. A rugged stubble completed his ‘I’ve been roughing it’ look.
“I could try to get to the safe zone,” he said.
“What safe zone?” I asked. There had been no news of such a place. “You mean there’s a place we can go?”
“That last order I received…”
“The one where they told you to kill everyone?” I spat, my voice a harsh whisper.
He looked down and swallowed. “Yeah. They also told us to pull back to a safe zone about three hundred miles to the west. It’s an area outside the blast zone far away enough that the gas cloud would dissipate, and the virus would die out before reaching it.”
“It’s that far away?” My heart sank. I had been hoping for an easier solution. “And just how do you think you’ll get there?” It was a terrible idea. He would have to walk as far as he could by daylight and then find a safe place to hold up before nightfall. If he was lucky enough to find a place to hide, and that was something he couldn’t count on, he would still have to carry food. My rifle couldn’t be counted on because it had jammed and might do so again. “You would never make it on foot,” I said.
“If I can make it back to the diner, I have an assault rifle and ammo hidden in the freezer,” he said.
“Wait…” I started, rolling my eyes. “You had a rifle back there and didn’t bring it with us?”
“You had a gun on me, remember?”
“You could have said something,” I countered.
“Like you would have trusted me?” he shot back.
“You guys get a room!” Harley giggled, obviously still feeling no pain.
“It may be our only chance at surviving this,” Kyle reasoned.
I didn’t want to admit it, but he made sense. “Let’s talk about this with Jordan and Matt to see what they think,” I said.
It was Kyle’s turn to roll his eyes. “I don’t need permission to do this,” he said, looking irritated.
“No, you don’t need our permission,” I said, “But our lives are at stake here too. You owe it to us at least to listen to what they may have to say.”
We wheeled Harley back to the gym and found Matt and Jordan playing a game of checkers we had found in the library.
“King me!” Jordan said to Matt as he moved his red checker into Matt’s back row. From the looks of the board, Jordan had this game in his pocket, which kind of surprised me since Matt was the crowned prince of logic.
Matt’s lids rested low over his deep brown eyes, and his mouth was a flat line. He reached for a stack of red chips at his side and lazily dropped one on top of Jordan’s checker. He looked bored. Maybe that explained why Jordan was winning.
“Listen up guys,” I said, interrupting them. “Kyle has an idea to get us out of here.” “I’m all ears,” Matt said, perking up.
Jordan looked skeptical. “Something we haven’t already thought of and shot down?” he asked.
“Just listen,” I insisted.
“I’ve heard there’s a military safe zone west of here,” Kyle explained. “I’m going to try to make it there and send back some help.”
“Run by the military?” Jordan asked. “I thought you said they were shooting everybody.”
“They were,” Kyle said. “But I’m in uniform. I don’t think they’d kill me unless they knew for certain I was infected. Maybe I can get through and let them know there are uninfected survivors here.”
“You’ll never make it,” Matt said. “It will take you several days, and you may not be able to find shelter along the way.”
“It’s a dead man’s plan,” Jordan said.
“Staying here and doing nothing is a dead man’s plan,” Kyle said. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m leaving tomorrow at daybreak.”
The next morning, I retrieved Kyle’s shirt from the locker room while he packed a backpack with several smaller cans of food that we had stashed in the kitchen. I tossed in a manual can opener. I handed him the shirt. It was stiff and wouldn’t be very comfortable, but at least it was clean and virus-free. �
�Are you sure about this?” I asked him.
“It’s the only way,” he replied in a steady tone that made it sound like he was just going out to mow the lawn. I watched as he lifted his arms over his head and slipped the shirt down over his arms. The cloth fit snug over his biceps, and I realized I was staring. I turned quickly and reached to grab the backpack. I wasn’t sure why, but a sense of foreboding filled my thoughts, and I didn’t want him to go. Lifting the pack, I leaned forward to hand it to him. He grabbed the straps and slipped his arms through them, hoisting the bag onto his back. He positioned the straps over his shoulders.
I rounded up Matt and Jordan to go with me to look outside the gates see if we could pick up the remaining duffle bags of food that we had dropped the night before.
As we all left the building and walked toward the gate, Harley wheeled along behind us.
“Take me out with you,” she said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I chided. “We’re just going down the street, and we’ll be right back.”
“You need to stay here and take care of that ankle,” Matt said.
Harley looked disappointed, but she didn’t push it.
“Lock the gate behind us, Harley,” I told her.
We left the grounds, and Harley managed to pull her wheelchair up sideways beside the gate so she could reach the lock and snap it closed. Then she turned and wheeled back toward the building.
“We’ll be back in about ten minutes,” I yelled after her. “Have someone come to let us back in.”
“Will do,” she called out in answer as she struggled to roll her wheels over the threshold and into the building.
Viral Series (Book 1): Viral Dawn [Extended Edition] Page 17