by Will Lemen
Gin broke in.
"We can't go three days without food! What are we going to do?"
"We're going to have to make an unscheduled stop. As soon as we see the next house, we'll stop and see what we can find," I replied in answer to her question.
After making the decision to essentially loot the next house we saw along the way, the river carried us along for nearly an hour before Billy stood up, pointed at a house, and shouted.
"Hey, there's a house, way over there."
It was a large white farmhouse setting back from the river about five hundred yards and partially obscured by a few trees, and we were about a mile from the point that we would want to land our boat.
"Quick!" I said. "Grab a gun and start shooting."
Looking around at both riverbanks and seeing no zombies (which was rare indeed), Jacob asked. "Shoot at what, I don't see any eaters?"
"Just shoot, the sound will draw all of the eaters in the area in this direction," I pointed out, just before I shot several shots into the air. "Then we'll quietly float past them and dock the Morphadite perpendicular to the farmhouse," I stated as I fired a few more rounds.
Billy and Jacob joined me in my noise making effort, followed by Gin, and for the next couple of minutes the four of us fired volley after volley into the air creating deafening cannon like reports. Each volley thundered along the rivers channel summoning any roving zombies that were within earshot to our location.
"Enough!" I yelled, "Hopefully that will do the trick."
"Now we'll just quietly float down the river past all the eaters that are investigating where that sound came from," I said.
"I hope you're right," Gin said apprehensively.
"It should work, every time we've shot at them, no matter how many we put down, more keep showing up," I concluded confidently.
"It won't be too long before we find out," Billy added.
As Billy had predicted, it wasn't long before we were cautiously approaching the riverbank and looking for a suitable place that the Morphadite could be moored.
"This looks like a good spot, not too steep and the current is slow here, and no eaters in sight, hand me the anchor and I'll tie it off short," I said, jumping out of the boat onto the stone speckled sandy bank.
"Looks like the noise making ploy worked dad," Billy said quietly. "I don't see any eaters around here."
"Keep an eye out for them anyway," I warned. "You know as well as I do that just because we don't see any of them, that doesn't mean that there isn't one or two of them or even more lurking in the area."
"Let's gun up people, and stay quiet while we're doing it," I ordered, using my best ex-marine whisper.
"Everyone strap on your pistols, Billy, you and I will bring the AKs and one drum magazine each. Jake, you bring that 9mm Sub-2000 you're so handy with and at least two spare high cap magazines. Honey, just bring your pistol and a couple of magazines, and you can carry the backpacks," I ordered again.
Outfitted, and on the march, our small band trudged through the thick knee-high brush toward the farmhouse in the distance.
"I'm just carrying these empty packs, and this walk is wearing me out," Gin said, in her best complaining tone.
"This is nothing; wait until we abandon the boat in a couple of days, then we'll be on foot until we can find some other means of traveling. With a lot more to carry than we have now," I explained, thinking after the fact that I probably shouldn't have mentioned the coming hardship to my wife, she was already starting to complain about walking with two empty backpacks.
"Thank God, we're almost there, I think your noise ploy definitely worked, we haven't seen one eater so far," Gin said softly.
"That's what I said back at the boat mom," Billy announced. As if there were a trophy for the first one to state the obvious.
"We don't want to draw attention to ourselves if we don't have to, so don't shoot any of them if you can help it. Use the butt of your rifles to smash in their skulls if we run into any and there aren't too many to deal with by hand," I whispered. "Maybe we can find a hand tool or something at the farmhouse to use as a weapon, something a little less noisy than our guns."
When we arrived at the front door of the house, it was standing wide open. I entered first, but not before giving Jacob strict instructions to stand watch outside, and not to enter the house, unless he heard a lot of gunfire coming from inside, or he saw zombies approaching, then Billy followed me in, and Gin hesitantly followed him.
The inside of the house looked like the people that had lived there had left in a hurry. That wasn't too surprising, I figured a lot of people left their homes in a hurry when all of this started. Nonetheless, we still needed to be very careful, we couldn't afford to assume that no one was living there, dead or alive.
"We need to stay together, and keep alert, we've got to watch our backs," I reminded them.
"It looks like that's the kitchen just ahead us through the next room. Most of these old farmhouses have a pantry, that's where we'll most likely find the food if there is any," Gin explained quietly.
She was right; the kitchen was straight ahead through the dining room which we were about to enter. A few more steps and we'd be in the kitchen.
"That's probably it, that door on the left with the broom beside it," Gin whispered softly, as she pointed to the door.
"Billy, you jerk the door open, and if there's an eater in there I'll clobber it with this," I said, as I snatched an iron skillet off the stove.
Lifting the heavy frying pan over my head, I signaled Billy to open the pantry door. He leaned forward and slowly turned the door handle, then quickly pulled it toward himself. The door opened slightly, and then slammed closed again as if it were spring loaded. My wife's eyes told me that she was frightened, as she proclaimed in a deep solemn tone not even trying to whisper.
"Something's in there!" she said.
"Who's there? Who's in there?" I asked in a stern yet low voice.
"Was that a growl?" Billy asked.
Gin answered quickly.
"That's what it sounded like to me, sounds like an eaters in there!"
"Billy," I said. "Pull as hard as you can, Gin you help him, ready, on three, one, two, three."
Billy and Gin tugged on the door handle with all of their might.
The door flew open, and upon seeing a dark red mucilaginous liquid smeared all around the mouth and running down the front of the large entity hiding in the shadowy darkness of the old farmhouse pantry. I swung the iron pan vertically down onto the top of its head; the pouring spout acted like a spearhead and effectively crushed a gaping cleft in the top of the skull of the oversized occupant loitering in the food closet.
"That's not blood all over his shirt," Billy revealed. "It looks like strawberry jam!"
"It is strawberry jam, there's the jar, between his legs," Gin said, pointing to a large jar nestled in the man's crotch.
"Doesn't look like that's the first jar of jam this guys eaten, he must weigh five hundred pounds. He's probably been hiding in here off and on since the outbreak began," I said, showing little or no remorse after butchering an innocent and defenseless citizen. "He couldn't hold the door closed because his hands were covered with jam.
"And he sounded like an eater because his mouth was full of it," Gin added as she scanned the shelves of the pantry for our much needed food.
"Well, better him than us, Billy can you step over this behemoth and reach what's left of the food in here?" I asked.
"I think so," he replied.
"Take it all, I don't want to have to do this anymore," Gin complained.
"You better get used to it, once we ditch the Morphadite, this will be standard operating procedure like it or not," I interjected. "This is going to be our way of life from now on."
Just as Billy cleared the last shelf in the pantry, Jacob appeared at the kitchen door.
"They're coming," he whispered.
"How many are there?" I asked.
"You mean horde?" Billy scoffed.
"Herd, horde, whatever, they're coming," Jacob answered sharply still whispering.
"Did they see you?" I urgently asked.
"No, I don't think so," he answered, shaking his head.
"Quick, let's go out the back door," I blurted out, probably a little too loud.
We dashed out of the kitchen, and through the screened-in porch that led outside to the backyard. The barn was only about fifty yards from the back door of the house. So we sprinted across the yard and through the three-foot wide opening between the two large sliding doors on the barn.
"Close the door, hurry!" Gin puffed, trying to catch her breath.
A loud rusty squeak accompanied the diminishing gap between the two barn doors, as Billy and Jacob quickly pushed the mammoth wooden door closed.
"They must have heard that, it couldn't have been much louder," I concluded.
"Nothing we can do about it now," Billy asserted, shrugging his shoulders.
"Right," I agreed. "Let's check out this barn and make sure there are no eaters in here!"
As he pointed to several rusty hand sickles with sun bleached and worn handles hanging at eye level on the wall of the barn. Jacob apprised us of their presents.
"Look at these!" he said.
"That's just what we're looking for, everybody grab one," I insisted, tossing my frying pan onto a nearby bale of hay.
With sickles in hand, we searched the barn for any rogue zombies that might be lurking there.
"No eaters dad, but look at this," Billy directed, as he motioned for me to look into one of the animal stalls.
The barn was devoid of life, or death, except for one starving horse, and of course us.
The horse had been locked in the stall without any food or water, and left there by its owner, most likely from the first day the apocalypse started.
"What are we going to do with it?" Jacob asked.
"I don't know, I've never owned a horse," I replied. "Look around, there must be some food in here that it will eat, what's in those sacks over there?" I said, pointing to a pile of neatly stacked gunnysacks.
Billy pulled his knife from its sheath, and stabbed it into one of the sacks.
"Its oats, horses eat oats don't they?" He asked, already knowing the answer.
"Yes!" Gin responded. "Horses eat oats!"
Billy put his knife back into its sheath, and proceeded to lift the opened sack, and throw it into the horse's stall. The starving horse slowly ambled over to the open gunnysack, and began to feast on the first meal it had seen in almost two weeks.
"Billy, open the stall so it can leave when it's ready, it needs water and we don't have any in here. When it leaves the barn it'll find some outside."
"Speaking of leaving the barn," Jacob announced. "I don't think that's going to be so easy, the eaters did hear the door squeak, and now they're right outside."
I rushed over and peeked through a crack in the wooden slats of the barns siding.
"Looks like all of them followed the sound, but I don't think they know we're in here yet," I whispered. "That means we have the element of surprise on our side."
Looking around the barn, almost in a panicked state, Gin asked. "Are those big doors the only way out?"
"There should be a smaller, regular door somewhere, so the farmer can enter the barn without having to wrestle with those big doors every time he goes in or out."
"It's over there, over in the corner, I saw it when we first came in, and it opens to the side of the barn, close to the front," Jacob informed us, pointing to the corner of the barn.
"Still, we're going to have to fight our way through those eaters, the tall brush surrounds the farmhouse and barn, and where it is cleared, there are fences. We don't want to be caught trying to climb a fence, and we know how hard it is walking, not to mention, running through the undergrowth. I think our best bet is to meet them head on, and use these sickles, not our guns, to chop our way through them," I suggested. "Unless someone has a better idea?"
No one offered an alternative to my plan, so we prepared to make our escape from the barn, and hopefully trek back to the Morphadite in one piece.
"Sling your rifles over your shoulders like this," I said as I demonstrated how. "We're only going to use our guns if we absolutely have too. We know gunfire attracts eaters quickly, and we already have enough of them to deal with as it is." I maintained, as I loosened my sling, and slid my head and arm into the gap between the rifle and the sling, mounting my AK-47 on my back.
I walked with resolve toward the door we had slated to be our exit point.
"Let's go," I ordered. "We'll line up in front of the door, I'll go out first, Jacob, second, honey, you go third, and Billy you bring up the rear, and keep an eye on your mother," I demanded.
We took our positions by the side door of the barn, lining up as I had instructed, and on the count of three, I shoved hard on the rickety wooden door, accidently folding it back far enough to break the top hinge off. This led to a loud crash, as the old wooden door, slammed into the side of the barn, resulting in the bottom hinge also tearing loose from the doorjamb.
Needless to say, the inadvertent noise of the door being ripped off its hinge's and subsequently smashing into the side of the barn, instantly attracted the attention of every one of the zombies that had been silently wandering around the barn aimlessly.
The usual snarling, snapping, and drooling ensued, the attack commenced, and our second land battle was on. Only this time, our van was not sitting thirty feet away in the driveway, this time, five hundred yards of dense vegetation separated us from the safety of our boat that was moored on the river that we had grown to hate, but hate it or not, we were still going to disparately try to return to it.
The first of the undead that tried to attack me came at me from my right side. It was a young woman, while living she had matured to somewhere between eighteen and twenty-five years, she had blonde hair and green eyes, however, they were severely bloodshot now. She was average height for a girl, about five feet, three inches tall. She was just the right height, that when I swung my sickle horizontally at her, I didn't have to bend, or stretch, or reach up or down. I just swung the sickle, in a very natural swing, like a pimp might backhand one of his whores in his stable, and hewed her head off, slicing right through the very middle of her neck, and dropping both her head and her body to the ground.
Her head rolled in front of me, and settled on her right cheek, she looked up at me from the ground, still working her jaws, and not giving up her attempt to feast upon me, just like Julie our former neighbor had done several days earlier on our kitchen floor.
"Not a bad cut, for a rusty sickle," I thought, as I kicked her severed head out of my way, knocking her front teeth down what was left of her throat at the same time.
Billy had taken another approach to using his sickle. I turned to check on my family, after my first kill, and saw that he had driven the point of his farming implement into the crown of a zombie's skull. The result of which was twofold.
First, the point of the sickle had penetrated clear through zombie's head, and seemed to be lodged somewhere in the attacker's throat. I could see Billy was having a hard time lifting the sickle vertically out of the now falling undead killer, as his weapon was stuck in the zombies head.
Second, before I could render him any assistance, he grabbed the sickle with both hands and tugged hard on the handle back toward his stomach, pulling the rusty concave blade through the face of his advisory, splitting it down the middle and exposing its now semi-divided brain along with a multitude of dark red liquid that splattered onto the front of his pants, covering him with zombie juices.
The hewing, slicing, and stabbing, was over in a remarkably short period, one or two minutes and when we left the farm, the body count was at eleven, the sickles had done their job well.
On the way back to the river, we encountered four more of the diseased, homicidal maniacs, and dispatched them summarily.
Arriving back at our boat, we found it exactly the way we had left it.
"Jump in and let's get going, before more of them show up," Gin said with a sigh of relief. "I never thought I'd be glad to see this stinking river again!" She said, shaking her head.
"It wasn't that bad mom, we went through those eaters pretty quick," Jacob jeered happily.
"Don't get cocky son, remember, the eaters only have to get lucky once, like the one that managed to crawl into the boat, we have to get lucky every time!" I countered with as much passion in my voice as I could muster.
Before climbing into the Morphadite, I reached down, and picked up a smooth round rock from the bank.
"Here, Jacob catch!"
"What's this for?" he asked.
"It's to sharpen our sickles," I replied.
I picked up the anchor and placed it on the bow. I pushed the boat away from the bank and using the head of one of the numerous corpses that had washed to the shore all along the river as a step I jumped into the boat.
My weight shoved the cadaver's face into the mud as the toe of my boot peeled off a chunk of hair and scalp that stuck in the tread of my boot sole.
"Start it up Billy, and let's get out of here," I prompted, flipping the rotting toupee from my foot before stepping onto the deck of the Morphadite.
Billy started the motor and backed the boat away from the riverbank. About twenty yards out, he turned the boat to the starboard side and crammed the shift lever into its forward position, and we slowly made our way to the middle of the river once more.
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GROUP THERAPY
"Hey dad, what do you think happened to that horse?" Jacob asked, looking rather dejected.
"I guess it'll be all right. I managed to rip the barn door off, so it had a way to get out of the barn. We killed all the eaters in the immediate area, so it probably left the barn in search of water; it's most likely fine," I said, trying to cheer Jake up.
"I hope so. How could anyone do that to an animal?" Jacob inquired, still looking forlorn.