by Mark Tufo
So. Maybe the world wasn’t ready for Arctic Blast Beer, a cold detonation with every twist top!
CHAPTER 17
Journal Entry - 15
I knew where I wanted to go, I just didn’t know if it’d be worth it. It seemed like a considerable amount of preparation to walk a measly fifteen feet. Almost directly straight out from my front door in the middle of my lawn was a storm drain, I know what you’re thinking, oh how convenient! Well it wasn’t when I was throwing the football around with my boys, I had once had to go to my doctor because I had hyper-extended my knee on the damn thing. Who puts a storm drain on a lawn? I had never opened it or seen it opened in the time that I lived here. After some serious prying I was finally able to force the frost to yield its prize. The cover came up with a loud bang. I had a momentary glimmer of guilt and even stopped to look around and see if anyone had noticed my transgression. There would be no 9-1-1 call tonight. The top thudded to the side, the sound deadened by the frost in the air. I took out my flashlight and shone around in the hole for all the good it was going to do. If I had looked closer on the day that I tripped I would have realized it wasn’t a storm drain, I guess I just always assumed, but we know about that idiom. It was an electrical conduit. That made much more sense being in the front lawn. The problem was that it was no more than twenty-four inches around and most of that space was taken up with, wait for it, wait…yup, you guessed it, electrical cabling. All right, so much for exit strategy Plan A. The more I looked down that hole the more trapped I felt. We weren’t so much holding the zombies out as we were keeping ourselves in. Hell, we were like cattle all penned up awaiting our slaughter. I could not escape the truth of that phrase.
If I had not let the stupid higher reasoning overrule my gut feelings I would have packed everyone up and left that night. Oh how I wish that was how it had played out.
I went back into the house, grabbed another beer and sat with Paul in the living room. He didn’t say much as he was still asleep. I sat in the dark. I was in a brooding mood. Complacency meant death. My mind was feverishly coming up with and summarily dismissing possible escape plans. I had some viable ideas for defense and I would employ those later in the morning, but I could not for the life of me come up with a foolproof plan for evacuation WHEN the time came.
Tracy awoke me some hours later. I had fallen asleep in the chair still clutching my half drunken beer. I hadn’t spilled any but I still hadn’t finished it and with the thing now being body temperature warm and my mouth tasting like burnt cheese, that wasn’t going to happen, party foul be damned!
Paul was in the kitchen getting a glass of water as I walked in and dumped the remains of my beer into the sink.
“I see nothing’s changed since college,” Paul said with a small laugh.
I wasn’t awake enough to catch the barb.
Paul moved on. “So what’s the plan for today?” he asked.
“Ass,” I said to him. I had finally caught his meaning.
Now it was his turn to be lost. “Don’t get me wrong buddy, I’m always up for a good time, but I’m not sure this is the right time,” he answered.
At first I didn’t garner his meaning. It was going to be a long day if we were always one sentence apart in our communications. I stopped for a second and thought about restarting the whole conversation. It just didn’t seem like the prudent thing to do. I started on a whole new subject instead.
“Well, Alex is going to be using about every able bodied person he can find to begin setting up defenses.”
Paul looked perplexed, so I explained everything that had happened the previous day with the assembly of zombies.
Paul didn’t look overly concerned but he was a master of disguising his true feelings. That’s why I never played poker with him. I had every intention of bringing Paul, the boys and myself to go help Alex, but first I was going to need a few hours to take care of some things at the house. My wife blanched at a few of my suggestions and made me alter a few of the more, well ‘altering’ ideas. First things first, I had Travis go scrounge me up a couple of ladders. I would have sent Justin too, except that he was still extremely weak from his ordeal. I needed a couple of ladders, lightweight and strong. Two of the longest that he could find should suit my purposes just fine. I grabbed some food supplies and extra water and placed them in my Jeep. I then got Brendon to follow me in his truck outside the complex. When we came back ten minutes later on foot, the guard looked like he wanted to ask us what we were doing, but he just shook his head and let us in. The next thing I did couldn’t have been a bigger waste of a half hour of my life unless I had watched What Not To Wear on HGTV. I reinforced the gate in my backyard to the point where a charging rhino couldn’t have busted through. I didn’t nearly get the return on investment that I had hoped for. I’d like to think that I noticed a hole in my defenses but at this point I was much too busy patting myself on the back.
The next thing I did had my wife ranting throughout the house that I had completely lost my mind. I don’t know, I thought it was one of the coolest ideas I had come up with. I was under the complete false sense of security that my house was now impregnable. Yeah right, but that is the ultimate beauty of being paranoid, I mean prepared, there’s always something more you can do. Tracy was pissed that I was about to devalue our home. I honestly couldn’t understand where she was coming from. First off I didn’t think we would be retiring here and second, REALLY? Resale value? Who’s gonna buy? I don’t think there is a zombie family down the street looking for an extra bedroom. I could be wrong, as I usually am with Tracy, but I didn’t think so. So I went ahead with my plan and in the midst of it I think Tracy went to the clubhouse to see if there was any rum for her coke.
I went halfway down the basement steps and looking up, I cut away most of the drywall above my head exposing the stairs that led to the second story. I then went back up the basement stairs and then onto the second floor risers. I cut away the carpet and pad. (It was old anyway, at least that’s what I told Tracy as I tried to calm her.) With a five-pound hammer and crowbar I removed four treads and four risers effectively leaving a four-foot by three-foot wide gaping wound in the middle of the stairs. All the noise had brought Nicole out from her shower prematurely. Her face had a look of bewilderment on it as she looked down at me and then at what remained of the stairs.
“Does Mom know?” She asked with concern in her eyes. “You know she’s going to kill you?” she answered when I didn’t respond immediately.
Nicole was privy to some of my more insane (or inane) ideas. Mostly her mom was able to get me to rein in the horses before they roamed too far away from the stable but not always. There was that one time in Canada when the Royal Mounted Police were involved. It almost became an international incident, but that’s ancient history, I was never charged.
“I know what I’m doing,” I answered huffily, a little ticked that she had the audacity to rain on my parade.
Now that I looked at my handiwork, I realized that I did sort of forget that this was still a functioning household. I couldn’t expect everyone to have to jump over this gap. If someone woke in the middle of the night and forgot, they’d find themselves in the basement in a heartbeat. I went and snagged my circular saw and proceeded to flatten out the stringers. Those are the supports that hold the tread and the risers. They go up and across in the same fashion as the stairs. They are basically the frame and the stairs are the shelving. So I just took the saw and cut off four triangles on each side, effectively making the stringers flat. The next thing I needed I didn’t have. I sent Travis out on his second scavenging trip. I hoped to hell Tracy was having a difficult time finding some rum, if she came home now with this giant perforation on her stairs my only hope was going to be getting on the other side of the hole and hoping she wouldn’t be able to bridge the gap. Thank God the boy beat his mother home. I would have taken him for ice cream if I had the time and there was any ice cream anywhere. He didn’t find exactly what I
requested but under such a short gun, beggars couldn’t be choosers. What he brought was a piece of countertop from one of the abandoned units. It was about 6 feet by 2-1/2 feet. I trimmed a foot off the bottom, then turned it over so the Formica top was now on the bottom. Then I attached four 2-1/2 inch lengths of 2 inch by 2 inch wood slats onto the counter bottom so there would be some sort of foothold. Obviously this would never pass a home inspection but I honestly didn’t think that was my biggest concern.
To finish off my wonderful contraption I anchored two large eyehooks on either side of the end of the countertop that would be facing the top of the stairs. I then anchored two equally large eyehooks at the top of the stairs, one as close to the wall as possible and the other as close to the railing as possible. The next thing was to tie it off. I needed to run rope from the ‘new’ stairs to the eye hooks at the top. I would like to say I knew how to tie these fancy quick release knots that would take a mere snap of the fingers to release but that wasn’t the case. After my fourth granny knot on each side I figured prudence was the best course of action for the day. I got my fifth and last eyehook and made sure that I found a stud in the wall as I anchored it. I then took a length of rope and tied a utility knife to the eyehook. So if needed, one would only need to get the knife and cut both ends of the rope releasing the ‘faux’ stairs. Now that I was almost done there was only one thing left to do, try the stairs. The stairs seemed a lot sturdier ‘in theory.’
“Hey Trav!” I yelled.
Travis came up from the basement where he and Tommy had been wrestling with Henry, who had gotten a whiff of Tommy’s secret stash of Pop-Tarts and was hell-bent on getting away with his prize.
“Yeah Dad?” Travis asked as he appeared at the bottom of the stairs.
He’s young, if anything happens he’d heal faster. “Aw shit.” I mumbled to myself. Guilt got the better of me. “I want you to stand there and get help if anything happens to me.”
Travis looked at me like I was nuts until I pointed at my makeshift stair sled. This wouldn’t be the first emergency room visit Travis had to make with his father. Travis even had the presence of mind to step off the landing and into the foyer in case I went tobogganing. I white-knuckled the handrail as I placed my first foot down on the makeshift tread. Not so bad, it was when I placed my second foot onto the ‘stairs’ that the swaying began. With the combination of being secured only by rope, and three inches of play on each side, I had successfully made the first in-home carnival ride. Travis laughed as my face turned the same shade as my knuckles. This was going to take some serious getting used to. Nicole had come to the top of the stairs just in time to view the festivities.
“Do you remember Canada?” she asked straight-faced, and again turned her back to finish whatever she had been doing. Her point was made. Tracy hadn’t talked to me for over a month after that, this might even rival that momentous mark. As I reached the bottom rung of my contraption it slid over to the right. I had a death grip on the handrail, to the right I had a six-inch wide clear as day view of the basement stairs and they loomed ominously from this vantage point. This wasn’t going to work. If someone had to walk up or down the stairs carrying anything that required the use of one hand this stairway was going to become a major spillway. I thought long and hard as I pondered my fall below, should I just put the thing back together? At that point I just might have. The problem, however, was that I had cut the stringer and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out a way to put that back together again, at least not correctly. Humpty-Dumpty had nothing on me. There had to be a way to stabilize this moving nightmare. The whole point of this trapdoor was that it was a quick release mechanism. I designed it (Okay so ‘design’ might be a little strong) to keep unfriendlies downstairs if the need ever arose. This was not going to be worth it though if everybody alive was nursing broken bones.
I ended up attaching wood to both sides and after some serious pep talking to myself I braved another walk on the wild slide. Most of the play was gone so the swaying was kept to a minimum. At one point I even let go of the handrail; I was feeling a little saucy. Still, I didn’t want anybody on this thing unless they were completely aware of their surroundings. My next bold move was to place duct tape over both light switches, the one at the foot and the head of the stairs, to keep them on twenty-four seven. This also wasn’t going to win me any brownie points with the wife but at least I’d be able to see her coming when she went to push me down the stairs. I got Travis and quickly departed the scene of my crime. It would be for the best if I wasn’t there when Tracy decided to kill me.
Work around the wall was frenetic to say the least. Whatever Jed and Alex had told the workforce to incite them had done its job all too well. Alex had decided that it would be wise to begin the project on the shorter gate sides. His reasoning being that the zombies would look for the natural openings. He had split up his workforce into two equal parts and sent them on their tasks. He was constantly driving from end to end to supervise the progress. The idea was simple enough to implement and ingenious in its design. The problem was materials. Ideally 1 inch thick metal plating (roughly 4 feet by 8 feet) attached to the wall, braced with train track thick metal support beams welded to another footer plate with 1 foot spikes driven into the ground was the optimum set up. The strengthening pylons were spaced 8 feet apart from each other. Alex had only enough of the metal plating and supports to alternate with the less strong wooden supports and only on the sides with the gates. The long walls that were on the west and east sides were all going to be supported by 1 inch thick plywood and 4 by 4’s, still a formidable defense but not nearly as imposing looking as its metal cousins. Propping the RV was proving difficult; if even a modicum of pressure was applied the roof began to buckle. This troubled Alex but with time short and work to be done, this was a problem he would have to work out later.
The biggest concerns Alex fought with all day were the gates. They were by nature the weakest points of defense but because of pressure from the residents his hands were tied on how well he could bolster them, because whatever he put up to stop the zombies had to be able to be moved in a hurry in case of a mass exodus. What people weren’t understanding was that by that point there would be no mass exodus. Just like the song says, ‘Nobody gets out of here alive.’ It was like the roach motel in theory, if the zombies get in, the people don’t get out. But folks wanted to hold onto that hope, even as asinine as it was. They were putting themselves in MORE danger by being so pigheaded. That was why I was working so hard on my exit strategy.
CHAPTER 18
Journal Entry - 16
I found Alex up in the southeast corner. I had only known this man for a few days and I already considered him one of my closest friends. Funny how that happens. I’ve known some acquaintances my entire adult life and I wouldn’t go to their weddings unless there was an open bar. Alex and his family had made such an impression on me he was rapidly climbing up the charts to those few who I would take a bullet for. Dramatic I know, but Marines think of these kinds of things.
“Hey Alex, how’s it going?” I asked as I clapped my hand on his shoulder.
He turned to look, a scowl on his face. “Could be better, Talbot. I could have more laborers, more material and some engineers, other than that just peachy.” Then his demeanor changed, a grin split his broad face. “Heard about your home decorating.”
I was floored, I know news travels fast especially within a closed community but this is nuts. Then I discovered my culprit. Tommy meekly waved as he hefted the two hundred pound plating into place as if it weighed nothing more than its wooden counterpart.
Alex saw who I was looking at. “I wish I had fifty of him. The kid is strong as an ox.”
I smiled back at Tommy as he held the plating in position with one hand while with the other he fiddled around in his pocket until he was rewarded with a Three-Musketeers bar.
“And he works for minimum wage,” Alex laughed.
“Alex,”
I started in a serious tone. “That’s part of the reason I came to find you.” I spent the next few minutes telling him about my exit plan if everything went south. I also, to no avail, tried to get him to move closer to my house.
“I can’t move,” he bemoaned. “My wife finally feels safe. She has just stopped screaming in her sleep and she has some new friends that live around us. I know that they also provide a constant source of well-being for her. Mi amigo, I’m not even sure if what you have told me will work, although it’s a start. Ladders you say? Sounds about as safe as your sledding stairs.”
“Do you think these will work?” I asked pointing to the supports.
“For awhile,” he answered solemnly.
“That’s reassuring,” I answered caustically.
He shrugged. “What can I tell you, the walls should be fine once the stanchions are up. It’s the gates that are going to be the problem. Short of putting up a wall, I don’t know.” He shrugged again with the truth of what he left unsaid.