by Geo Dell
Molly was still working alongside Tom and Bob. Between the three of them, they had finished the third Suburban, complete with tube bumpers, top racks and rock slider side steps, along with larger, wider tires and the heavy duty suspension parts they had used for the other trucks.
They had also installed two winches on this one, front and back.
“We'll use it to pull out any of the other trucks that get stuck, whether in front of or behind us,” Bob said.
They had wandered over to look over the Hummers, and Tom had gone with Jeff to show him where the tires were stored. Jeff had found the tires he had wanted immediately, and Tom had helped him to get them back to the garage.
Mike had left to locate Candace and the others. He'd finally found them, over their heads in boxes, in a large storage building attached to the rear of one of the chain stores.
“Looking for flour,” Candace told him. She turned and pointed at three large boxes resting on the concrete floor. “Those are one pound bags boxed and untouched. All the twenty five pound bags we found are wet or eaten into, or both.” She shrugged, leaned towards him and gave him a quick kiss. He looked injured.
“Baby,” she said. He looked around. They were momentarily hidden in the stacks. He pulled her to him and kissed her harder.
“Bad, Mike,” Candace said, pulling him closer to return the kiss.
“You guys,” Patty said coming around the corner of a stack of boxes. She smiled though.
Candace giggled and Mike rolled his eyes. “Okay... flour,” he said and began looking in earnest.
~
An hour more of searching located two more boxes of the one pound bags, a palette of twenty five pound bags full of rat burrowed holes, and several cases of peanut butter.
David and Ronnie had loaded up two large rolling carts, and they were all helping to pull them out through the main store and into the parking lot. The peanut butter, the salvageable flour, several cases of vegetables and canned meats, several kinds of energy bars, along with dozens of cases of sports drinks filled the carts.
“No bottled water at all,” Patty said.
“I know,” Candace said. “And we have a lot, but it's not like we can turn a tap and get more.”
Everyone murmured agreement or nodded their heads. There were cases upon cases of sports drinks and vitamin water, and they had taken several cases of those, but they found no bottled water at all. As they were pulling the carts back, they ran into the men from the garage coming back from a stream that ran behind the garage area back along the wood line.
The water was ice cold, but everyone liked to stay clean, and it was amazing, Mike thought, what you could get used to when there was no alternative.
“I do miss hot showers,” Bob said. “I think a new Nation will have to find a way to do hot showers.” Everybody laughed.
“I'll be up later,” Candace told Mike. She'd simply picked up new clothes while they were in the store, as had Patty and Arlene.
As they headed down towards the wood line, Annie, who had stayed behind to help Tim pick up the garage, called out to them to wait for her. She caught up and joined them walking down the trail to the small stream.
The men had picked up their own clothes and headed to a spot around a small bend in the stream, out of sight of the women.
~
Lilly and Jessica had cleaned up a few more of the motel rooms, including a double with adjoining doors to keep the children together. They had heated water and bathed the children in one of the bathtubs. Getting the water up from the stream had seemed as though it would be the hardest part, but Tim and Annie, testing out one of the lifted Suburbans, had taken them down with several large water containers, helped them fill them, then drove them back up in style.
The kids loved riding in the Suburban. It was just another game to play.
They had not even given them too hard a time about taking a bath. Jessica took over watching the freshly scrubbed children while Lilly left to go down to the creek to get herself cleaned up.
Sandy and Susan were coming up the path as Lilly was going down.
“Cold?” she asked. The day had warmed up. She was hopeful.
“Jesus, is it ever,” Susan answered through chattering teeth.
“Oh well,” Lilly said.
“We need to get one of these Brainiacs to figure out how to get us hot water,” Sandy said. “I may never warm up again.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” Susan said dead pan.
Lilly laughed and headed down the trail, leaving the two of them walking slowly, arm in arm, up the trail.
When she arrived, Molly, Annie, Arlene and Sharon, along with Candace and Patty were already there.
“I heard it's really cold,” Lilly said to no one in particular.
“It really, really, really is,” Arlene said. She was standing in the stream, water up to her waist, shivering.
Candace dove under the water, bobbed up in the middle of the stream and swam downstream. “It's not bad. Keep moving,” she called back, “Keeps you warm!”
Lilly peeled her clothes quickly and looked doubtfully at the water, “Okay, if you say so, here goes!” She ran into the water and dove under. She surfaced next to Candace.
“It's so cold. You lied,” she laughed. She splashed Candace who giggled and splashed her back. A few seconds later everyone was involved in the water fight.
“Now that warmed me right up,” Arlene said a few minutes later as the water fight came to a close.
“Yeah, me also,” Lilly said. She was out of the water on the grassy bank drying herself off and getting dressed.
Candace sat close by with Patty. The two of them working to brush each other's hair out.
A few minutes later, Janet Dove came down, “I Thought I'd better get down here while I had the chance. Dinner's going. I have a little time to myself,” she said.
“I can't believe how well you run stuff,” Patty told her.
“Yeah, for real,” Lilly said. “You so much have it together. I wish I did,” she said.
Janet looked embarrassed. “Oh, it's just helping out. If I didn't do it, somebody would,” she said.
“That's true,” Candace said, “but I doubt they'd do it anywhere near as well as you do.”
Janet blushed again. “Thank you, Candy,” she said.
Lilly smiled. Janet Dove was about the only person she knew of who could call Candace Candy. She meant to ask her why that was someday, but she was pretty sure she already knew why. Janet was like everybody's mother. She was the ultimate nurturer. And a mother could get away with things no one else ever could.
A few of the women were still in the water. They all waited for each other and left as a group.
~
Mike sat on the sun warmed rock and looked out over the water. Jeff came and sat down next to him.
“You have things running pretty smoothly,” Jeff told him.
Mike laughed. “Not me. I don't lead... not really.”
Jeff raised his eyebrows. “Maybe you don't realize it, but you do.”
Mike sighed. “Yeah... Okay, I guess I do. Not a job I asked for though. I hate to say it out like that. Makes me responsible.” He laughed. “Guess I'm responsible anyway though.”
Jeff nodded. “I found myself in the same situation” He looked out over the water for a few moments. “Listen, I wanted to talk to you.”
Mike turned from the water. “Sounds serious.” His eyes focused on Jeff's own.
“It sort of is... it is. Hell, I just don't know.” His eyes came up and focused on Mike. “Have you had any problems with the dead? I mean people who are supposed to be dead?”
Mike looked at him for a few seconds, thinking he must have missed some other part to the conversation, or possibly heard him wrong. “Uh... I have to say, Jeff, you lost me.”
Jeff sighed. “Yeah... Okay... This will sound like bullshit, or crazy.” He took a deep breath. “Okay, so we're going through this small town. What it wa
s is, I came upon this body. Well, it seemed to be a body.” He shook his head. “No... Look. I came upon this body. It was a body. No doubt at all. And then the goddamn thing got up and took off. Scared the shit out of me. Okay, I know that sounds crazy. But, well, I wondered if you might have come across anything like that at all?” He ended with a look of grim determination in his eyes.
“Okay. So... Uh, you … Okay, so really you mean like a... a...”
“A zombie,” Jeff said. “I know how that sounds, and I would guess that means you haven't had any problems... experiences like that.”
Mike shook his head. “I... No. I haven't. None of us have. I don't want to sound like an ass, but you're serious?”
“I'm serious. Look, I'm not an over reactor. This woman was dead. I didn't think so at first, but afterward I realized she had to have been dead. No doubt at all. I saw all that Un-Dead stuff on TV in the old world. I didn't buy any of it at all. But this... This was different. I actually saw this with my own two eyes.”
Mike nodded, unsure what else to do or say.
Jeff nodded back. “I know how it sounds. But I brought it up because maybe it will happen again. Sounds pretty lame in the light of day, I know. But, well. It's something to consider.” He stood from the rock. “I guess I better get in if I'm going.” He nodded once more and then looked at Mike. “I'm not a nut.”
Mike sighed. “I know. That makes what you said even more troubling.”
Jeff nodded once more and then turned back to the water. A second later, he walked off without another word, leaving Mike alone and wondering.
~
The evening meal was one of the best Mike could remember in a long time. Venison, beef, asparagus, rice and biscuits.
“How did you manage to make rice, or real biscuits,” Patty asked Jan.
“Really,” Candace chimed in.
“Bisquick, and a really big pot,” Janet Dove said.
“Bisquick, duh,” Candace said looking at Patty.
“Where did you find all these huge pots though, Janet?” Candace asked.
“The restaurant, Candy,” Janet said.
“And the Bisquick. We didn't even think of Bisquick,” Patty said.
“Oh, they have cases of the stuff over to the little store,” Janet said. “And flour too. You know, their store room is all concrete block. No rats like those others. I thought you knew,” She said.
“Nope,” Candace said, “You're the best, Jan. This is really good.”
“Absolutely,” said Patty.
“You bet.”
“Best I ever had.” And many other similar compliments flooded the air. Janet Dove flushed but continued to smile. “Thank you,” she said, “Thank you.”
~
After dinner, several of the people in the camp helped to do the dishes and clean up, including some visitors. The evening was warm, and everyone sat around one of the larger fires drinking coffee and talking low, watching the light fade from the day.
~Across The field~
She came awake in the dark. The boy pressed tightly against her side, his cold seeping into her own.
At first her vision had suffered horribly, but as time wore on, it had changed. Her eyes had changed. She knew that because she had seen them reflected in a shop window a few miles back as she had been traveling alone, before the boy.
The glass had been reflecting only the yellow-blue of the moon until she had stepped in front of it and then it had scared her so badly she had nearly run screaming at what she saw. What does the monster see when it looks in the mirror?
At that time she had still remembered who she had once been, had an idea of what she looked like stored in her head. When she stepped in front of the Moon-shiny glass, that picture flew away.
She had stopped, her knees buckling at the sudden urge to reverse and run away. She had actually taken two scrambling steps backward before she realized the thing in the glass - the Monster that has seemed about to pounce upon her - was nothing more than a reflection of her own radically changed self.
Her body had been reduced to skin and bone. The skin had stretched tight, illuminating the bones beneath it. Causing ridges and valleys where she had never seen any.
Her skin had peeled away from her face in a few places, and the bone showed through yellow-white, gleaming in the moonlight. Her black hair was a ruined mass of black. Stringy, tangled, plastered to her head like a helmet in places. But it was her eyes that had caused her to stare the longest.
They were silver slits in the moonlight, but as she looked closer, she saw that the irises were bright red, no longer the dull orbs they had become after she had died. She had seen those eyes reflected back from the water of the harbor in New York when she had started this journey. She had gone for water. She had to have water to survive; every living thing did. She had not yet realized that she was no longer a living thing.
The moon had been bright that night, reflecting off the trash strewn water. A drowned cat had floated by and transfixed her. She had been torn between vomiting and reaching into the water and retrieving the cat... bringing it to her mouth... tasting it. But the moment had passed, and she had shaken herself, come back to herself. And that was when she had seen her eyes reflected in the harbor water.
She was only hours dead then. She had been running from a group of men, and she had run right into the arms of someone else. Something else. She never saw him... her... whatever it had been. Its teeth had found her neck; the blood had spurted, and she had spiraled down into darkness.
When she had come to, she had thought maybe she had dreamed it. Maybe he had not killed her and left her for dead. But the sticky blood that coated her neck and clothes said otherwise. Later, as she wandered the dying city, she realized her heart was not beating. Her blood was no longer coursing through her veins. She had wandered, wondering her fate, and had found herself at the harbor.
She had bent to bring the water in her cupped hands to her dry, cracked lips, and she had seen her eyes. Dull, colorless marbles in her head, barely reflecting light at all. And she had known - known she was dead. Not that all the other things had not already told her, but that her mind had finally clicked over, taken the information it had shoved to the corners of her cloudy thoughts and thrown it out into the conscious.
She had shaken it off, scooped the water to her mouth, swallowed and then gagged, vomiting the water back up.
That had been her glimpse of her old eyes. These eyes were not those eyes. There was nothing dead about these eyes. These eyes were alive, bright, reflective, hungry, intelligent... Predatory, she told herself.
Now she focused on the moon above, the moon that had never meant much of anything to the old Donita. Now it talked to her, pulled something inside of her, spoke to her very being.
She sat quietly, the boy beside her, and scented the air. Animals had been here. A dog... A rat... Something else traveling by had wondered about her deadness, but decided against tasting her, warned by some instinct. The dog worried her the most. She could tell from the scent that he had lingered. She would have to deal with the dog if it came back again.
Her hand reached over and shook the boy from twilight. The night was young. They needed to hunt.
~The Camp~
The fire burned hot but low, the heat feeling good as the temperature of the air dropped. The fires were still many, meat spread upon drying racks before the smoke and flame. A small group had been sitting, watching the stars come out, when one by one nearly all the others had come to sit and watch with them.
Quiet conversations passed back and forth between them. But it seemed as though there were other things on everyone’s minds, and the conversations began to die down after a short time. Mike broke the silence that had held for a few moments.
“So, Bob,” Mike began. “I... I don't want to put you on the spot, but after you left today we all, several of us anyway, talked a bit about what we're going to do, and that led to what you and Janet had talked about, and
I didn't really feel I knew enough about what it is you want to do, and really I didn't feel it was my place to explain it. So... I thought...” Mike finished.
“Sure,” Bob agreed. “What is it you want to know?”
“Well,” Lilly said. “Pretty much all of it, Bob. At least me. I don't know what it is you want to do, and I'd like to.”
“Same here, Bob,” Ronnie said.
“Us as well,” Jeff Simmons said.
Bob nodded, “Okay then,” he said. “What we really want to do is start the world over, but leave all the bad stuff out. I know that sounds like a pipe dream, and I've realized that, because that's what it mostly is, a pipe dream. There is no way to leave all that stuff out. Some of it is built into who we are, you know?” He paused.
“So now that this has happened, and the opportunity to really do something is here, I've had to revise my ideas. And I may have to revise them again. I think where I'm at is this, we, Janet and I, speak about the Nation, but it isn't really about that anymore either. It has been a long dream of some native people to go back to the land. To become, again, the people we used to be. But the reality of that life is a different thing. That romantic ideal is a long way from the life we would have to live.”
“So it's a compromise. Back to the land? Certainly. But we are not Quakers, or Amish, we'll use whatever modern advantages we can find or put our hands on that will help us. Certainly horsepower in the form of vehicles to at least get us to where we're going. After that? Will we need them?” he shrugged, “And how would we get fuel? No. I think we use them to get us back to where we want to be, and that might be it. It's probably going to be horses after that, so, somewhere between here and there we are going to have to get horses, and not just a few, a good sized herd. Maybe fifty, a hundred would be better. Seed? We'll bring all we can get. I don't know if anyone here has ever seen Indian corn, the stuff that sustained my people, but it was very small, sometimes no bigger than my index finger, and not much bigger around either. Generally it was bigger, but not much. Modern corn? Vast improvement. I guess you get my drift. We're thinking of taking every advantage we can with us. But, we're thinking back to the land too. No canned goods, although we'll certainly take more than enough to survive on until we have our own crops, animals, like that. It isn't going to be an easy life, that's for sure, but we are going to do it.” He paused and the silence held for a few minutes as what he had said settled in and everyone thought it over.