by P. R. Sharp
...Teeter...
TEETER v.i., & n. 1. v.i totter; move unsteadily.
There were loaves and rolls of bread, cartons of milk, boxes of cereal and snacks like biscuits, crisps and ready to eat pasties and salads. We put any food that was past saving to one side and put all the tinned stuff (baked beans, soups, canned fruit, corned beef, tuna etc,) into the cupboard above the kettle, along with a jar of hot dog sausages, (that mechanically recovered chicken seems to last forever;) and all the fresh stuff on the counter top. There were things none of us would eat; like a bag of sprouts. And there were things that we had to throw away, like the milk and the bread, which was curdled or rock hard after sitting on the back seat of a car or lying in the road, cooked by the hot September sun. Plus we had to eject the pasties, salads and all the packed meats like the bacon, barbeque burgers and sausages. A whole chicken that was on the verge of getting up and walking out all by itself, was given a quick send off and launched skyward in a plastic bag over the palisade defence to land in the car park with a splat. A couple of the infected wobbled over to investigate and fell onto it like drunks on a ten pound note. Of the remaining fresh food, we were able to save some carrots, a bag of apples and a net of oranges. There were teas and coffees. Daily staple stuff. We wouldn't win any awards for dietary content or variety, but at least we wouldn't starve.
Not yet.
We were lacking in one area, though; medical supplies. On checking the contents of my family sized first aid kit, we had one large wound dressing, two small wound dressings, a triangular bandage, two melolin dressing pads, a tube of eye wash, deep heat, nurofen gel, a resusciade, some latex gloves and a few plasters. We needed antibiotics, disinfectant, surgical tape, pain killers... In short; we needed a small pharmacy. So that was next on our list of required items. (One bag did contain some nappies, some wet wipes and a large tub of sudacrem; so if Jonny B shat himself, at least he could clean himself up.) On the plus side; we had plenty of booze. A box of Merlot plus six bottles of white wine, two bottles of red wine, two bottles of Pimms, fifteen small bottles of Stella Artois, eighteen cans of 1664 and a four pack of Carling. Standard Bar-B-Q refreshments.
...Tilt...
FUCK v. & n. (vulg.) As in… oh fuck, holy fuck, what the fuck?
We put all of the booze into the dark and silent refrigerator and threw everything else out, leaving us with a cupboard full of tins and various items that would keep for at least another day or two; maybe a week if we were lucky.
We needed a way to boil water and a safe and practical way to cook...
The camping stove that I had taken from Rinko's garage hissed and spluttered out a pathetic flame before farting itself to death, so I hauled the remaining 25kg bottle of butane up onto my good shoulder and carried it into the kitchen, and after much careful surgery on the opposing hoses, we spliced the two together and bound them with gaffer tape and superglue. We left it for a half hour to bond, as we three bonded over a can of Carling each; then we lit it. The initial flame was immense, so I dialled it down to a whimper and test cooked some baked beans, which we ate with spoons, communally from the pan.
We didn't speak again until we were all sat up stairs. I can't speak for the others, but I was happy to eat my beans in peace. I wasn't even that hungry. But the action of us all gathered around that sauce pan of beans, silently taking it in turns to share our hot victory meal was poignant and at the same time, a little hopeless. But the conversation soon started flowing as soon as I passed around our first joint of the evening.
As is often the case.
Rinko had never smoked weed before, but she was open to experimentation; and Jonny B was a light weight when it came to Asian Relaxation Techniques. So we took it slow.
The sun was going down; I closed the curtains, and by the light of a few candles, we got stoned and released the cork of conversation. Primarily, it revolved around our need for a plan. We could stay, gather more food, and make this place bullet proof. There were still a number of cars we could try. Gathering more food would eventually mean straying further from the compound, to cover a wider area of opportunity. We'd be putting ourselves at risk with no guarantee of success. So we ration what we have. We go house to house if necessary, and we stock pile as much food as we can find over the next few days and take pleasure in our one hot daily repast. In the mean time, we fortify this place and equip ourselves for an escape to the country. We would need a vehicle and enough fuel for say, two hundred miles. We had water. For now. We couldn't use or flush the toilet, so we would have to find a means of relieving ourselves that would not stink up the flat. We also needed a way to bathe; because we do stink.
The room below the front bedroom, on the ground level; used to be a shop. It's got a big window. If that goes, they could get through the back and down into the workshop. And then into the compound; we need to block the shop off from the workshop.
How do we get enough fuel for a two hundred mile journey?
We siphon it from the abandoned cars.
How do we secure the car park?
We use some cars to barricade the entrance; add obstacles, make it difficult for the fuckers.
And the boiler cupboard will make a good panic room if, for whatever reason, they get in somehow. At least we can lock ourselves in or get up into the loft before they get up the stairs. We should put some supplies in there.
Good idea. Good weed. Roll another one! Just like the other one.
I cracked open the box of Merlot and proposed a toast; we drank to those we had lost and we drank to our good health and we drank to our continued survival; and we drank to Chief Brody and to Matt Hooper and to Captain Quint and we drank to our legs. The increasingly slurred conversation turned for a while towards the infection and its origins and that feeling of hopelessness returned. We narrowed the source down to the following; man made (the favourite.) An ancient and recently awakened germ or wicked outer space
alien micro organism. After a few more drinks, we came to the understandable conclusion that we will almost certainly never know how this all started. Public Health Officials would obviously get kicked in the balls, and rightly so, for allowing this to happen in the first place.
Or... some military scientist will secretly be awarded a medal for engineering a powerful new bio weapon; and another for successful human trials. What if the whole thing was planned or some long over due evolutionary mutation? What if this is it? What if this is happening everywhere? Then we fight on for as long as we can. Damn right we do. It's a brave new world.
“And what will you do with that freedom?” A stoned Jonny B said doing an impersonation of Mel Gibson doing William Wallace. Funny as fuck.
Where is Wallace? Guarding the compound. I'm laughing so much; I hope that's sweat dribbling down my leg.
Rinko gets a coughing fit and passes me the roach. We laugh and quote lines from Withnail & I. I roll another joint, but not quite a Camberwell Carrot. We light another candle. My shoulder is killing me. I roll it to relieve some of the tension and the strangest thing; Rinko gets up, kneels behind me where I'm sat crossed legged on the floor, and starts to give me a massage. Jonny B smiles, snorts and his head lolls back against the sofa, fast asleep. Rinko rubs and kneads my shoulder with her finger tips and whispers in my ear, "Japanese massage is very good..." I close my eyes and have to agree. "Have you ever heard of the Wolf's Dilemma?"
I shake my head; no, what's that I ask.
"You have twenty telephone boxes all standing in a line and you're in one of them. But there's no phone, just a big red
button. All the phone boxes have them. So you're in one, and there are nineteen other people in the other boxes, okay?"
"Okay, I’m with you."
"You have to stand in the telephone box for ten minutes without touching the button. If everyone stands there for ten minutes and no one touches the button, you all get ten grand."
"Sweet..."
"However, the first person to touch the button within
those ten minutes gets two and a half grand all to him self, and the rest get nothing; not a bean."
"So if I touch the button, I get two and a half grand, all to myself?"
"Yes..."
"Or I can gamble that no one else will touch the button and we all win ten grand?"
"Yes..."
"Sounds like a kind of an emotion over logic thing?"
"Exactly. I read it... In a book."
"That's very interesting, but why? What's your point? Or are you just stoned?"
"I think you're both stoned and talking bollocks," Jonny B interrupted as he shook himself awake and coughed. "Bloody hell I'm wrecked." Rinko laughed and stood and announced that she was actually very stoned and could she crash out; I said sure and she disappeared into the bedroom. After about ten minutes of silence, Jonny B passed the joint to me and said through a yawn, "So what do you think of Rinko?"
"Well, she saved your sorry ass at least twice today. She's a good little splatter punk."
"Yeah, but what do you think of her?"
"I'm thinking I'm just old enough to be her granddad, as are you."
“But you’re both so skinny! You’re perfect for each other.”
“First of all, we’re not skinny, we’re fit. You’re just used to hanging around with fat people. Or looking in the mirror,” I sniggered through the smoke.
"I think she was coming on to you! All that talk of pushing buttons. Push my big red button; she so horny for you... do you long time."
"Shut the fuck up."
"Only two dollar."
"Shut the fuck up..."
How we laughed.
***
HINT # 4:
Nappies can double as a large wound dressing. Wet wipes are good when you want to freshen up and have no running water. Sudacrem is a mild analgesic and good for sunburn and dry rash. Superglue will seal a small wound.
***
From the street, you can only see what's in front of your face. But from two storeys up, looking at the darkening sky from your vantage point through a crack in the curtains, you can see five streets over. You can see the school playing fields and the grid locked roads and you can see gangs of these things roaming the unlit streets, reacting to each other and to any signs of healthy human life. You see a pack of stray dogs running along the grass verge, dodging outstretched arms that hang like diseased claws, and wonder if one of them is Hobo. Would Moya be with them, had she lived? You hope there are other survivors, like you; hiding out in their own homes. You yearn to see the occasional candle or beam from a torch flickering behind closed curtains. You can see the houses that have caught fire and those that have been vacated. And there are many. And you ask yourself...
'Self? Is this the reality I have chosen?'
A single flash of brilliance is followed by a rumble of thunder that seems to last for an eternity and it starts to rain. One of those heavy, twilight summer downpours that lasts for a quarter of an hour and leaves a shimmering reflective skin of water on everything it touches, and a silence in its wake that can't be matched; until you hear a very distant, terrified scream and snap back to a very real reality, more electric than any storm.
When I was a kid, my mum used to say that the rain was God's bath tub overflowing and that thunder was caused by the archangels playing football, and that lightening was a goal. Father Christmas delivered toys to every child on the planet on the same night and that I'd get big and strong if I ate all my greens. Father Christmas can be in more than one place at the same time? He's a quantum entity. Father Christmas is Doctor Who! I hate brussel sprouts and the Universe hates me.
This is not the reality I chose for myself.
I'm very stoned. And Jonny B is snoring.
***
The next morning we put some of our plan into action, and our first order of business was to block the vulnerable shop frontage off from the workshop. This was easier said than done. There was no way we could board up the whole window; it was too big, floor to ceiling and running the entire width of the shop. And there was already a long crack in one of the panes. We decided our best bet was to barricade the door way leading from the shop back onto a small landing which led down a half dozen steps to the workshop. Since we wouldn't need the steps, we ripped up the floor boards and completely removed the stairs. This left a drop of about five feet, down into the back of the workshop. We cut them with a hand saw to fit the frame perfectly, then we used the nail gun to attach the planks to the shop side of the doorway; that is, until it ran out of juice. With no mains electric, we couldn't recharge it, so we had no choice but to make some noise and do it the old fashioned way with hammer and nails. We pulled up some floor boards from the room that had once been a lounge, next to and on the same level as the kitchen. It was walled off now, but in its day, the room would have been the social centre of the building. Cut to size, we hammered more planks into the door frame on the shop side, leaving just enough room for us to crawl back through onto the landing, and then we boarded up the entire inside frame. We completed the job just in time, too. As I crawled through the narrow gap, infected were gathering in the street, alerted by all the banging. In all, it took us about two hours, and when we were done, we were hot and sweaty but felt happy that even if the infected broke through the window and got into the shop space, they would have a hard time breaking through our solid obstruction.
As Jonny B and I worked, Rinko went through the workshop looking for more weapons. Mostly gardening tools, she found a long handled turf cutter, a metal dibber that would be useful up close for punching holes into skulls; her words, not mine! A combination mattock, hoe and fork and a long handled heavy cultivator. As far as melee weapons went, we had a small arsenal. Unfortunately, every weapon we possessed required an element of physical fitness that needed to be sustained for an unknown period of time to ensure our survival. I could swing my spade for about ten minutes before my shoulder played up. After that I was running on vapours. I wasn’t kidding myself. I had the strength, the speed, the technique and the aggression, but not the stamina.
When we were outside, we made sure that we always had our goggles and our mouth guards to hand, and checked ourselves regularly for cuts and nicks. We could not afford to get infected via ingestion or absorption because of errant spray back.
Since I was the only one who possessed a full set of skateboard pads, we fashioned some custom jobs for Jonny B and Rinko. I had my Black Nitro biker gloves, so Rinko wore my skate boarding wrist guards, which were too small for me. Her hands were much smaller than mine, so they moulded to hers perfectly, and allowed her a firmer grip on her sword; like reinforced mittens. For her knees and elbows, we sacrificed one of the four wheelbarrow tyres, first cutting the rubber into four equal segments with a craft knife; we used two for her knees and two for her elbows, all cut to size. And for Jonny B, we sliced up the plastic shell of a pesticide sprayer, and made him a chest plate, knees pads and forearm guards. I then gaffer taped these to the appropriate body part and we hit the road.
Armed with Wallace and the machete, Jonny B watched my back, as I siphoned fuel from parked cars; those that were not standing vacant in the traffic jam or been abandoned with the engine running. We managed to pilfer a full ten gallons before a small group of Septix approached from the four way junction and lurched towards the car park. Rinko and her sword dealt with them. She was fearless; and quick. Hit Girl, Elektra and Lady Deathstryke, all rolled into one. She let one trip over the barbed wire I had left at the top of the steps, then sliced her head in two between the eyes as she struggled to her feet; her once neat as a new pin hair style and see through purple summer dress now matted with blood, puke and bits of chewed up flesh. We were able to shift a couple of cars and block the car park entrance; enough to divert any infected to a small gap between the vehicles and hopefully cause a bottle neck if we got overrun. I added more barbed wire to impede them further, and wrapped some around the side gate, carefully weaving it through and around the riot sh
ields we had found in the police cruiser. Jonny B stood beside me, handing me the fencing tool as and when required, whilst Rinko patrolled the outer edge of the compound, keeping any infected at bay.
We all worked well together, a cohesive unit; and Rinko kept throwing me little smiles, which Jonny B picked up on. He elbowed me in the ribs at one point and I nearly decked
him, shooting him a look that said more than any punch could deliver. He backed off for a while after that. Yeah; the night before had been funny and the insinuation was right on my level. But now it was getting to be like a school yard jibe, and I didn't like it. He became slightly sycophantic; asking me what needed to be done. What did I think about this idea? What did I think about that idea? But he had put me in a mood, and I rejected all his suggestions without a word or a second thought for his feelings.
Before the outbreak, he had been a very belligerent person; likeable, but with an arrogant streak as wide as the Grand Canyon. He was never wrong, and would stoop to correct you, even when you knew your facts were correct and his were so way off base, they were in orbit. He had his positives, though. He was generous with his cash on a night out and was always punctual. Now, he was like a dog trying to win back his master’s favour after pissing on an expensive rug, and I was secretly enjoying watching him squirm.
I directed him to pull out all the spare palisade rails and he actually performed a micro bow before turning towards the workshop door. I decided I would cut him some slack and fetched a couple of warm beers from the refrigerator, passing one to Rinko who was sat on the kitchen steps, quietly sharpening her sword with my wet stone. She asked me if I wanted her to sharpen my spade, just as Jonny B came out of the workshop, carrying an armful of palisade rails, and I realised that Jonny B's cracks and innuendos regarding Rinko's obvious crush on me had made me embarrassed because, as the thought hit me like a truck, I did actually and naturally find her very attractive, but was rejecting the idea because of the age difference between us. She was seventeen and I was almost three times that; old enough to be her mother’s father. Jonny B had, through his childish rib prodding and constant nudge-nudge-wink-wink comments, hit a nerve. And his kowtowing was his submissive bully's way of saying sorry. But ever since his arrival when he got my attention by banging the locked side gate with his shoe, inviting every fucking infected within ear shot to my house; and his constant looking to me for guidance was really beginning to piss me off; and the fact that I did want to bang the shit out of Rinko was neither here nor there. I didn't want to be responsible for him.