“Cheri!” he yelled. “It’s me! It’s Eric!”
She hesitated and squinted her eyes at him.
“Eric?” she stammered. The next blow knocked him out.
~*^*~
~14~
Eric struggled to escape the fog he found himself in. He dreamed of his mother. He dreamed about his new undead friend. He heard children laughing and talking. Slowly, he opened his eyes and saw two small forms in front of him.
“Mom!” one of the children yelled. “He’s awake!”
Eric’s head throbbed when the child yelled. He went to rub his eyes, but couldn’t move his hands. He couldn’t, in fact, move anything. As the fog lifted, he could see that he was tied up on a small bed. Two children sat nearby watching him. He heard footsteps approaching and he watched as Cheri entered the room. She looked different than he remembered. Her hair was shorter than he’d ever seen it, and she looked much older. Still, a decade of being apart from her had done nothing to heal his broken heart. There was something about her that mesmerized him. His heart started to pound and he started feeling that longing all over again. He thought she looked like an angel as she opened her mouth to speak.
“You idiot! You broke my window. You probably led half the population of Michigan to my house. And where did you get the police car? Did you steal it?”
Eric tried to rub his head, but the ropes prevented him from doing so.
“I’m a cop,” he lied. “Really, I just came to check on you.”
“That’s funny,” she stated. “Your uniform says St. Mary’s Hospital Security. I suppose you stole that too.”
“No, I got blood on my uniform and didn’t want to scare anyone. Could you please untie me?” he asked.
“The safety of my children is a little more important than your comfort right now. You’re just lucky I didn’t have a gun.”
Eric thought about it, and he did feel lucky. She could have shot him when he came through the window.
“Cheri,” Eric tried to reason with her, “I’ve never been dangerous; maybe persistent, but not dangerous. I’ll fix your window. Just please untie me.”
“Don’t do it, Mom!” one of the children said. “It’s a trick! Hit him with the bat again!”
Cheri looked at Eric and shook her head.
“Don’t worry,” she reassured her children. “One thing is true; he’s never been dangerous, just obnoxious.”
She untied the ropes.
~*~
Lindsey and Autumn had followed the bikers down to see if they could find something for Autumn to eat with her medications.
“I don’t know where to start looking,” Lindsey said, surprised by the size of the kitchen.
“I’ll check over here,” Autumn said, yanking open the door to the walk-in freezer. As she opened the door, she let out a scream. A body had fallen against her, and she struggled to stay on her feet.
Snake raised his pistol and fired a well-placed shot into its head, which splintered into small pieces.
“You okay?” he asked the girl.
“Yeah,” Autumn replied, visibly shaken. “Good shot.”
“Probably not necessary,” Snake said, examining the frozen body.
Lindsey ran over to see what was going on. The headless victim was in a nurse’s uniform.
“Someone was either locking somebody in or locking something out,” Snake said. “Either way, it didn’t turn out well.”
Lindsey looked at the frozen body. “Maybe the dead outside will freeze like this when winter comes.”
Gunner shrugged and said, “Let’s hope it’s all over by then, and we don’t have to find out.”
~*~
After being untied, Eric rubbed his wrists. They still had the rope marks from being bound so tightly, and he was surprised that his circulation wasn’t cut off.
“I have some sheets of plywood outside,” Cheri said curtly. “You’re going to help me board up all the windows, so I don’t have any . . . any other morons breaking in.”
Eric rubbed his head.
“Can I get an aspirin? My head really hurts.”
Cheri grabbed the bat again and started to bounce it into her hand.
“Okay,” Eric quickly got up and walked outside. He thought about jumping into the car and leaving, but he was finally with Cheri again, the real one. It was worth the pain.
She showed him the plywood, a saw, and a cordless drill, and told him to get to work.
He started with the window he had broken. Measuring it, he cut the plywood about a foot larger. He saw the hard brick exterior and reasoned that he couldn’t drill into it. Bringing the plywood inside, he located some finishing nails and secured it to the drywall surrounding the window. As he was putting the last nail in, Cheri stepped into the room. Eric beamed with pride as he stepped back to show her his handiwork.
She shook her head and walked out the door without saying a word. He followed her to the outside of the window and watched as she pushed on the plywood with very little effort. The board fell with a thud onto the floor. Cheri turned and glared at Eric, who sheepishly looked down to his feet. She pointed at the hole where the window used to be.
“The object is to keep whatever it is out there from getting in,” she said sarcastically. “It would be my guess that they would be pushing from the outside. That’s why I told you do attach it from the outside. Do you get it this time?”
Eric desperately tried to piece his ego back together.
“You can’t drill these screws into brick,” he explained.
“See this wood around the window?” She pointed at the window casing. “Drill into that.”
“But what if they try to unscrew . . .” He thought about what he was saying and stopped himself. “Got it.”
Eric moved the materials back outside and fastened the plywood the way Cheri had shown him. He repeated the same for the other windows until the entire house was secure. As he was gathering up the remaining tools, he saw a plume of dust chasing a truck on the road leading to the farm.
“Cheri, we’ve got company!” he yelled.
They watched as the truck got closer. Cheri’s eyes widened as she recognized the vehicle.
“Kids!” she yelled into the house. “It’s your dad!”
“Miguel,” Eric muttered under his breath as a look of disdain crept across his face.
The truck sped into the drive, and a middle aged Latino man jumped out. Rather than the sagging jeans and the tattoos that Eric had expected, Miguel was wearing a dress shirt and nice pants. His glasses gave him a scholarly appearance and his hair was neatly trimmed. He ran to the children and scooped them up in his arms. Cheri joined them, and they engaged in a group hug that almost made Eric lose his now-digesting chicken.
“You had me scared to death,” Cheri told him. “I didn’t hear from you and I thought all sorts of things. If it weren’t for the kids, I probably would have lost it.”
“I’m here now,” he reassured her with a hint of an accent. “It got real nasty up north. The University was completely overrun. It was awful.”
He looked at the children and didn’t want to say any more. He turned to Eric.
“I’m glad to see there are still some cops working.”
Eric was about to spin a web of deceit, but he caught steel in Cheri’s eyes and decided against it.
“I’m not really a cop. I’m a security officer.”
He reached to shake Miguel’s hand and found himself shaking with rage. Eric had never met him in person, but had hated the man from afar, blaming him for stealing Cheri. Sure the breakup had happened years earlier, but until she married Miguel, Eric had felt that he still had a chance. And now he was shaking the hand that had caused so much turmoil in his life.
“Miguel, meet Eric,” Cheri said.
Miguel immediately withdrew his hand.
“Crazy Eric? The stalker?” Miguel’s mouth hung open like a toilet seat in a men’s restroom.
“It’s okay,
” she reassured him. “Really, he’s harmless, uh, aren’t you, Eric? You’re over that clingy stalking thing, right?”
Eric was silent for a couple seconds too long.
“Heck, yeah,” he finally said, with false enthusiasm. “I’ve even got a girlfriend now. She’s kind of quiet. We never argue, and she’s crazy about me. She can’t keep her eyes off of me.”
Cheri wondered what type of woman would find him attractive in his present state but she never would have guessed the truth about Eric’s new girlfriend. When they had been together, he had at least been fit, he hadn’t been ugly, and as for his intelligence, well, she thought, he hadn’t been ugly. Now he had let himself go. He was flabby, unkempt, and when his pants hung down far enough, she could swear he wasn’t wearing underwear.
“What brings you out here?” Miguel inquired.
“My Aunt has a home not too far from here,” he lied. “I was checking on her and saw Cheri outside, so I asked if she needed help.”
He prayed that Cheri wouldn’t rat him out.
As Cheri was contemplating the pros and cons of telling Miguel the truth, one of the children, a six year old girl named Marie, blurted out, “Mom hit him with the bat!”
Miguel smiled at Cheri and looked back at Eric. “Well, I guess you know your place.”
Eric did his best at faking a grin as he imagined thrusting his sword through Miguel’s heart.
Cheri chuckled under her breath.
“Actually, he was just leaving,” she said, hoping Eric would get the hint.
“I think Eric and I need to have a little talk.” Miguel motioned for Eric to follow him.
~*~
It had been a long time since Keith had had to empty a bedpan or change a colostomy bag and he’d forgotten just how unpleasant it was. After thoroughly scrubbing and donning new gloves, he checked each patient again. When he reached the room of a patient named Lenny, he noticed a bandage on the man’s shoulder that he hadn’t seen before. Lenny was asleep, so Keith peeled the bandage back and noticed a wound that looked suspiciously like a bite mark. It didn’t take him long to realize that Lenny wasn’t just asleep. He was completely unresponsive.
“Marla?” Keith asked, sticking his head out the door. When she didn’t reply, he went to search for her. He found her in a patient’s room, poking under a bed with a broom.
“Do you know anything about Lenny, the patient in room 306? He seems to have a human bite on his shoulder, though there’s nothing about that on the chart.”
“Oh,” she said, thinking about it for a moment. “Oh, now I remember. You know how he always likes to go for a walk? Well, he came back just before I went on break and he asked for a bandage. He said someone bit him in the cafeteria.”
“And you didn’t think that maybe this should be mentioned, especially under the current circumstances?” he asked, stunned. “I even had you check our patients for bites.”
She shrugged. “You can read the chart, can’t you?”
“It isn’t on the chart,” he reminded her.
He returned to the nurses’ station to get the gun, Marla right behind him.
“What are you going to do, shoot him?” she asked.
“I may have to,” Keith sighed. “For now, I’ll just watch him. You’re going to have to handle the other patients for a while.”
He sat down in the chair across the room from Lenny and waited for the inevitable.
~*~
Eric and Miguel walked to the hay barn in the back, where Miguel sat on a bale of hay outside the door. Eric stood with his arms crossed in a way that revealed his lack of trust in the other man.
“Any other day,” Miguel started, “I’d have you out of here so fast your head wouldn’t have time to spin.”
He grabbed a blade of hay and put it in his mouth and started to chew on it like a miniature cigar.
“Today’s different. Today, the world changed. Some things that used to seem important just don’t matter now. Other things we took for granted matter more than ever.”
Eric rolled his eyes, not interested in hearing Miguel’s philosophical musings.
Miguel pulled the blade from his mouth and threw it to the ground.
“I’m going to need your help, Eric. If my family is going to survive, they’re . . . we’re going to need help.”
~*~
Snake came back from the cafeteria and approached Jack.
“Jack,” Snake started in his raspy voice, “I need a head count for lunch. I’ve got a couple of my guys working on some hot meals. I just need to know how many.”
Jack thought about it. “We can ask Keith about the third floor and I’ll call up to ask about the other floors.”
He turned to Marla and tried to keep a straight face as she poked a closed umbrella under the vending machine.
“Marla, I don’t mean to disturb your, uh, project, but would you happen to know where Keith is?”
Marla looked up and thought about it for a second.
“He’s in one of the rooms. He said he might have to shoot a patient or something.”
By the time she finished her sentence, Jack was already moving down the hall.
~*^*~
~15~
Eric was bewildered. The man he had loathed for so long now not only needed him, but trusted him. His mind was in turmoil. He wrestled with the fact that Miguel wasn’t the demon he had imagined him to be. In fact, he seemed quite the opposite. He couldn’t face the fact that he had hated the man for so many years without reason. He would have to rethink everything.
Miguel stood up and started to walk back to the house.
As Eric followed, he noticed a small bandage on Miguel’s back where his shirt had traveled up. The patch was visibly oozing something pink. Eric guessed it was a mixture of blood and pus, from the looks of it.
Miguel turned to see Eric staring at the spot. He quickly pulled his shirt down and continued on.
Eric wasn’t sure what he should do. He decided to do what he did best and act ignorant, pretending he hadn’t seen anything, but he would have to warn Cheri when the opportunity presented itself.
Miguel stopped at a post that held an array of solar panels and he waited for Eric.
“I think this is going to end up being one of my better decisions,” Miguel said, pointing to the panels. “The university actually helped to pay for this. In exchange, I take groups of students here to see the system in action.
Miguel had entered the country years earlier on a work visa. The little money he had earned working as a laborer on various farms had been a windfall compared to the wage that he had earned in southern Mexico. He had quickly gained a reputation for his honesty and hard work. It had taken him over ten years to become a citizen, but when he did, it had been one of the happiest days of his life. Shortly afterward, he had met Cheri. They had married and had bought eighty acres of farmland in Gratiot County, which they had cultivated, allowing them to scrape out a modest living.
Miguel had been able to take some college classes during the winter, securing a degree in agriculture several years later. Soon he was teaching at the same university while Cheri had stayed home and raised their two children. Eventually they had leased out most of their acreage, keeping a small piece of land for their own use while the teaching job had brought home the bread.
“When the power goes out,” Miguel told Eric while pointing to the panels, “these are going to save our nalgas.”
Cheri came out to where Miguel and Eric were talking.
“Done with your pep talk?” she asked.
“I think we have an understanding,” Miguel replied. Eric nodded in agreement.
“I was just showing Eric our off-grid resources. If this crisis spreads, the grid could fail, and we would be forced to become self-reliant. We’d be in better shape than most people. We’d have power, well water, and a septic tank, and we have enough canned food in the basement to last us for quite some time.”
“Unless someo
ne realizes how good off we are and decides they need our stuff worse than we do,” Cheri interjected. “The way I see it, it’s already anarchy out there. Unless the military takes over, which I don’t see happening soon, we’re on our own.”
“That’s why I invited Eric to stay,” Miguel replied while walking to his truck.
“What?” Cheri didn’t try to hide her disapproval of her husband’s suggestion. “I know I said he wasn’t dangerous, but he’s got some serious issues.”
“Trust me!” Miguel growled in a manner that she had never witnessed before. “I’m sorry,” he said, calming himself, “but I’m worried about what could happen to you and the kids.”
He opened the truck box in the back and pulled out two pistols. “That’s also why I got these.”
Cheri was surprised. The frequent firefights in his hometown had made Miguel leery of firearms. To him, they just added to the upheaval of life in what used to be a quiet, peaceful town. Cheri didn’t see it that way. She felt that the people were to blame, not the guns. They had even argued over it in the early days of their marriage, but they had finally agreed to disagree. Now, with no law enforcement and civilization slowly deteriorating, he had changed his mind.
He handed a pistol to Cheri.
“We have you, Miguel,” Cheri argued. “We don’t need a half rate security guard.”
Eric bristled at her description of him. He was about to protest when the throbbing in his head reminded him that Cheri wasn’t in the mood for confrontation.
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