“What the hell?” he growled, squatting down. With the twin tires in the way, she could only see part of his knee, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t see her. She froze as he reached out to touch the tire. “Those stupid fucks.” He straightened, his feet first pointing one way and then the other.
It was now fifty-fifty for Sadie. Her black Converse sneakers were sticking well out from beneath the back of the truck, but she couldn’t move any further without alerting the man. If he went to the back, she would try to crawl the extra few feet, only she didn’t like her chances.
To her great relief, he went to the front. “Smitty is gonna kill them both,” he whispered and then went inside. Sadie slumped in relief, her cheek resting uncaringly in the dirt.
“That was friggin’ close.” Her limbs were jumpy and weak, and she wanted just to lie there for a minute to collect herself, but there was no telling who would come out of the house next. She slithered backwards until her head cleared the rear bumper.
Very gradually, she lifted herself up so that she could peer over the bed of the truck. The windows of the house were hung with festive blankets of pink and white. No one peeked out.
“Finally, a good sign,” she said to herself as she squatted down again, going on her hands and knees to the first trailer. It was out in the open, and so she made sure to keep as much of it between her and the house as possible.
She scrambled a hand up under the tarp and felt around. There was no mistaking the edge of a cardboard box and so she moved further up the trailer. More boxes.
Thankfully, they weren’t sealed, only folded down. She stuck her hand in one, hoping for guns, but finding food instead. Like the boxes, canned food always felt just like canned food and nothing else, except for maybe very old motor oil.
She pulled out a can and made a face. “Beets? Hmmm. Let’s try that again.” She reached in once more and took the first can on top. More beets. A third try and a third can of beets. She put them back.
In her opinion, beets tasted like dirt and eating the brown leaves from the forest floor would have been more palatable to her.
It was a big trailer; there had to be more than just beets. The next box yielded sauerkraut. She groaned, shoved the can back and moved on to the next. “Finally,” she whispered as she gazed down on a can of beef ravioli. Her next reach into the grab bag revealed a second can of ravioli, but the third gave her pinto beans and the next was pickled jalapeños, something she had never heard of before.
She was in the middle of another grab when she heard the gravelly crunch of a coming vehicle. “Smitty,” she whispered. She had an odd fear of the man. She imagined it had been him lying in wait for her the night before.
None of the others she had run into had struck her as all that smart, but the leader would be different. He would be smart enough to outguess his opponents.
Stuffing cans into her coat, she backed away from the trailer, her eyes flicking from the house to the road with every other step. “Sound carries, Sadie,” she said to herself, realizing she had misjudged where the danger to her was really coming from.
The truck was far off but Doug and Brian had to have heard it. They’d be hurrying back from their “Sadie-hunt.”
Sadie turned and sprinted for the house she had spent the night in, foolishly thinking that its relative warmth was some sort of refuge. Gently, she clicked the front door closed behind her and then went to the window and stared out through a slight gap in the curtain.
A minute later, Doug came hurrying down the road, trying to appear as if he had been gone only a minute. Brian acted the same way, going straight to the truck and squatting down next to the rear tire. He went to work tightening the lug-nuts and likely would have even if they had been as tight as they could go. He wanted to appear busy.
Hunkered down, Sadie watched as a truck came barreling down the road, kicking dust into the air. By the way they were acting, Sadie was altogether sure this was Smitty. He pulled up, kicked the truck’s door open and then gazed down at Doug and Brian with a distinct lack of fondness on his face. He was a big, beefy man who filled the doorway of the truck and then some. “Still at it? What the fuck? I gotta wonder, how long does it take you bitches to change a fucking light bulb?”
“The nuts were frozen on there,” Brian answered. “You know how it is.”
“I know you two morons have about three minutes to get those tires on before the stiffs show up.”
Brian popped up, wiping his hands. “I’m already done. I was just keeping Doug company. He gets scared out here by himself.”
Doug looked like he was about to argue when Smitty cut him off. “If you’re done, you can get this tire on the trailer. Let’s see if you two can work together for a change.” He reached back across the seat of the truck and pulled out a sturdy little tire. “I pulled it off one of those dinky Airstreams down at the RV park. It’s good as freaking new.”
“Great,” Brian said, forcing some fake excitement into his voice. “If that stupid bitch thinks she can mess with us, she’s got another thing coming, right Smitty?”
Smitty’s eyes flicked up at the walls of the gulch for a moment before he answered: “I don’t know about that. I bet she’s just getting started. We know she’s got guts. She could’ve run but she didn’t. She could’ve stayed hidden, but she took a risk and went on the offensive. No, she ain’t done. She’s out there planning and scheming.”
This was news to Sadie. “A plan? I don’t have a stinking plan, unless not dying and not getting caught by these bozos is a plan. Which it isn’t.”
Seconds later, Smitty went inside, leaving his two flunkies to rush around. Brian jacked up the trailer, while Doug went to work on the lug-nuts. They were halfway through when the first zombie could be seen making its way slowly down the road.
The two men fled into the house. Sadie hoped that a hundred more zombies would join the first. They would provide excellent cover. She’d be able to sneak out and do some more mischief and maybe steal some more food.
Only three more zombies showed up. “Great. Four zombies aren’t enough. So what do I do?” Nothing came to her and she ended up sitting next to the window for the entire morning, half of which was spent snoring with her head lolled over on her shoulder.
When the sun was as vertical as it would get at that time of the year, the slavers ventured outside, armed with shovels and axes, and, in one case, a strange spear. They attacked the four zombies, killing them rather easily.
“Okay, I want three teams,” Smitty said, tossing aside a bloodied shovel. “No Doug, don’t go stand next to Brian. You two are worse than an old married couple. Doug and Bill. Brian and Mike, Pecos and Juan. You’re going to search each house quickly but thoroughly. Bill you take the houses on the north side of the street, Mike you and Brian got the south. Juan and Pecos will take the little offshoot roads. If you see something, give a yell.”
“But not too loudly,” Mike added. “You don’t want to stir up the stiffs. But if you happen to, pull the old ‘in through the front door out through the back.’ Try not to shoot your guns if you can help it.”
Sadie was still trying to rub sleep out of her eyes when the three groups broke up. Though she should have been ready, her mouth fell open as Juan and Pecos headed straight for “her” house. She had all of twelve seconds to hide and ten of those seconds were wasted as she stared around in shock.
It was an average little cottage. Other than the living room she stood in, there were two bedrooms, a single bathroom, a kitchen and a dining room. And there wasn’t much to any of the rooms other than just the usual stuff. The living room held a single sofa pushed up under the front window, two high-backed chairs, a coffee table and a knickknack shelf.
That was it.
The only places to hide were places a two-year-old would think was smart. Of course, she could run out the back door in broad daylight, making who knows how much racket and have all seven slavers, with their perfectly working trucks after h
er in no time. They would hound her into exhaustion.
Sadie had no choice but to go with a pathetic hiding spot: behind the couch. There was a gap of about eight inches so the curtains could hang straight. She wiggled into it sideways, just as the door opened. She stopped in mid-wiggle, not knowing if her feet were sticking out or not.
She closed her eyes, her teeth gritted, figuring that any moment one of them would grab her by the ankles and haul her out of her idiotic hiding place. She was still in her state of rigid uselessness when she heard a click and suddenly, there was light playing through her lids.
For a foolish moment, she wondered if they had flicked on the overhead light, but then she remembered the power was out and she nearly blew out in exasperation at her own stupidity. It was a flashlight that had been clicked on and it gave her some hope.
The house was lit in two shades: darker than dim and she was in black hiding in a naturally dark spot. Maybe they won’t get me, she thought. Yay me.
It wasn’t that she was apathetic to her fate, she only wished there was more to it than crawling around in the shadows. Yes, Jillybean always advocated “getting close” to her enemies, but she also did things. So far, the only thing Sadie had managed to do was temporarily disable two trucks and steal four cans of…
“Uh-oh,” she said, under her breath. The four cans of food she had stolen from the trailer were sitting on the couch just next to the armrest. If one of the men looked down and to their right they would see the cans plain as day.
“I’ll get the kitchen and the backyard, you check the backrooms,” one of the men said.
They moved through the house, creaking floorboards and knocking into the various items that had been strewn about by previous searchers. At the first opportunity, Sadie unsquiggled and crouched next to the couch, watching as light beams went this way and that in two different parts of the house.
With four deft movements, she snatched up the cans and hid them beneath the couch and then she re-squiggled just as the sound of footsteps approached.
“Nothing,” one stated.
“She’s not going to be this close,” the other stated.
“You never know. If she was smart, she would be cuz we’d never…” The two men left, their voices trailing to nothing as they shut the door behind them.
Sadie wilted in relief and laid in her uncomfortable hiding spot for a few more minutes before she squiggled out again. She eased up to the window, but there wasn’t much to see. The three teams were off searching homes, and the house across the road was quiet and seemingly dead.
What was going on in there? Were the soldiers being abused? Were they handcuffed together? Were they being fed or given water?
“I gotta do something besides hiding and stealing a few cans of food.” She sat there for a moments as her mind spun—as it spun in useless circles. No plan came to her. No crazy idea of an explosive device made of pickled jalapeños, bleach, and year-old dish soap sprang to mind.
Time passed and Sadie’s nails were bitten down to ragged edges and still she hadn’t come up with a plan. “I could rush Smitty. He’s in there by himself. He won’t expect it. It would be a total surprise. I could use a, uh…I could use…son of a bitch! It’s a stupid idea, damn it!”
She beat herself up for her stupidity for the next three hours and then the teams came back empty-handed and cranky. In that time, she decided that if she couldn’t think of a way to free her friends she would do everything in her power to keep them stuck in the crappy little town of Poudre Park.
“Maybe if I keep messing with the slavers, they’ll give up and just leave,” she said. It would be dangerous, but she planned to use the dark to disable the trucks on a more permanent basis. She might not be able to make a bomb, but she had a lighter and there was gas in the trucks and gas would burn, big time.
At about four in the afternoon, she ate half a can of ravioli, thinking she should begin rationing her food. “I’ll be here a long time harassing their sorry assess.” Or so she thought.
Night time was supposedly her time, but as the sun set there was a lot of activity outside the house across the road. The slavers went back and forth from the house to the trucks carrying bags and boxes. It wasn’t long before the soldiers from the Valley were dragged out, one after another, their hands cuffed behind their backs and their heads hanging low in defeat.
“They’re leaving,” Sadie whispered, feeling a shiver of insanity come over her. A part of her wanted to rush out there wielding her stupid knife and her even stupider baseball-sized rock.
“But that would be giving up,” she said. It wouldn’t be suicide. They wouldn’t kill her. They would take her and use her and when they had their fun, they’d sell her.
In defeat, she watched as Captain Grey was pushed into the back of the second truck. He was the last. “Mount up!” Smitty said to his men as he climbed into the lead vehicle.
The evening was on the verge of becoming night and the sound of their diesel engines was a roar. It almost seemed to be a challenge to Sadie’s courage. She gripped her knife until her knuckles turned white, and then she let it clatter to the floor as Smitty turned onto the road and drove out of there with the second truck following.
A minute later all that was left of them were the echoes bouncing around the walls of the gulch. “Fuck,” Sadie said, going to the door and creaking it open. She stood on the porch, not knowing what to do with herself. Without gas—and where would she find gas in the middle of the mountains—she couldn’t follow after the slavers.
“It’s going to be a long walk home,” she said to herself as she visualized her new plan: go back to the valley, gather the entire army and march on whatever city the slavers sold Captain Grey to. It was as sound a plan as she had ever made. She planned to leave that night, that very instant in fact.
“A long walk, but at least I won’t starve.” She could make three and a half cans of food stretch a long way, especially if one of those cans was pickled jalapeños. All by itself, that could last a week.
She stood in the road as the echoes gradually faded. When they were gone altogether, she turned to go back into the cottage she had commandeered to get her few belongings, only she stopped. There was something metal left behind.
“That’s a can,” she said to herself, with a touch of excitement. The can was an omen, she felt it in her bones. It was food and it would give her the strength to run part of the way back home. “Spaghetti and meatballs!” she said, forcing her voice from a scream to whisper. “What if there’s more,” she asked the night as she hurried to the house across the road.
Cautious as always, she paused at the door, leaning in towards it, listening for any movement. Even when silence greeted her, she didn’t rush in. Slowly, she eased the door back. The house was dark as could be and stunk of sweat and other unpleasant manly odors.
But smells didn’t bother her. What sat in one of the chairs did, however.
“That was easier than I thought.” One of the slavers shone a light into her eyes and blinding her.
Chapter 18
Jillybean
Normally for Jillybean, waking up in the new undead world was a slow, cautious affair. Normally, she tested the air with trepidation. Normally, her mind cycled from sleep to consciousness without missing a beat.
On that late afternoon, Jillybean seemingly woke in a whole new world. Her blankets were snuggly soft, and the air was warm and bright, and the room clean without the least hint of danger. Stranger still, when she awoke, it felt as if she were still in a dream.
She’d been dreaming of her house back in Philadelphia. Her daddy had been reading the paper at the kitchen table as her mommy bustled around making dinner. In the dream, Jillybean had been starving and she asked over and over: How long until it’s done?
Soon, her mommy said. You are almost done, but you have to have patience.
I don’t mean me. I mean the cookies.
That’s when Jillybean woke up, warm and saf
e, and with the scent of baking cookies in the air. It was wonderful, and caution went out the window as she hopped down from the bed, padded over to the dresser, and heaved it back from the door.
The smell was stronger in the hall, almost overpowering. She was close to running headlong into the kitchen with tears in her eyes, expecting not to see the old hag, but her mommy, miraculously alive and well.
But it was only Granny Annie in the kitchen, an apron decorated with reindeer and mistletoe tied about her midsection and white powder on one cheek. There was a tea set put out with light tendrils of steam lifting from delicate cups. Jillybean wanted to obsess on the intricate floral pattern, but the old lady spoke in her creaky old lady voice: “Oh, hello dear. I hope I didn’t wake you. I was just trying to prepare a surprise.”
Jillybean went up to the counter, standing on tiptoes to see what was being made. “What is it? It smells wonderful. It smells like cookies.” If such a thing were possible nowadays. Fresh baked cookies were not a part of this world of zombies and blood.
“Of course, they are cookies. Cinnamon, syrup cookies with a sugar glaze. Those specs? It’s sage, can you believe it? It’s all I had, but it works. Not that it was easy, baking, using a wood fire is devilishly tricky but I think I did pretty well with this batch. Here, try one.”
Carefully, Granny Annie picked up a delicate cookie in her blue-veined and liver-spotted hands, and gave it to Jillybean.
Her first bite was just over a nibble in size and yet, the flavor exploded in her mouth. Her next bite was bigger and the third finished it off. For a long time—a minute was a long time to a seven-year-old—she savored the remains of the cookie as the mushed remains disintegrated in her mouth.
With her eyes closed, she announced: “That was yummy. I mean it was really, really good.” This was her highest compliment. “Ipes would have…” She stopped, her eyes losing their focus as she tried to recall the last time she had seen her zebra. Amazingly, she had left him in the car!
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