They went back out the front door a few minutes later. None of them looked back at the house they’d been trying so hard for so long to get to. Without the kids there it was just another pile of wood and concrete slowly molding away in the blazing humidity of Florida. The only reason they hadn’t left immediately was Kelly had insisted on spending a few minutes searching the house to make sure they had all the letters and had read all of them to see if there were any other clues. They hadn’t found any clues, but Tony had been struck by how sure the kids seemed in their letters that Randy and Kelly would come for them. How sure the mom had been that her daughter would endure. He wasn’t able to even think of a way to begin to describe how powerfully moved he was by reading the letters.
They hiked out to the gate and continued to retrace their steps all the way back to the intersection by the drug store. At the intersection they turned right instead of heading across the parking lot to the drug store. After the discoveries back at the house they all had questions and things they wanted to say. They just weren’t able to actually talk about anything as they had to maintain strict noise discipline. In the dark walking along the side of the road their visibility was extremely limited. To make it a little more miserable clouds had moved in and they were slowly getting drenched by a light rain that started falling. The clouds that brought the rain also blotted out the moon. This had the effect of making it even darker which made it a lot more treacherous to hike the sides of the overgrown road they were on.
Kelly slipped in the mud on the side of the road and bit her tongue to keep from cursing in frustration. They were sticking to the sides of the roads and with the rain and overgrown vegetation the sides were slick and treacherously steep. Picking herself up and wiping mud and water off the legs of her pants she kept on moving forward. She was tired. She was so tired, but she was driven by a need to find her kids and make sure they were safe. A primal urge to find and comfort them. This instinct and drive were so strong sometimes it amazed even her.
They moved forward in the night. The moon occasionally making an appearance to give them the brief hope they’d be able to actually see where they were going to step before disappearing once again behind the dense cloud cover. Miserable and soaked they moved forward. The spark of hope burned bright in Kelly’s heart. They were so close and the letters she’d just seen spurred her on. Randy was on a different level. His thoughts tended to the more pessimistic side. He was spurred on by the ideas that they were too late. That all they’d find was the pathetic decaying corpses of his children. He thought if maybe he moved faster, they could prevent that. He had to fight over every step he took to try and tell himself it wasn’t a mistake. To tell himself they had to go to one place then the next. He couldn’t be everywhere at once.
His frustration came to the forefront as they began to encounter Zombies. Leading the three of them Randy was the first to have his foot connect with one of the sleeping beasts. Peering down he saw the mud-covered face of an elderly woman curled up into a fetal position covered in dirt and leaves. Her eyes were closed, and she didn’t seem to even register the jab to her leg from his foot. Pulling his foot back carefully he raised his machete over his head. Making sure he had room to swing the blade without hitting either Kelly or Tony he chopped down as hard as he could while maintaining his focus on the woman’s head. He dropped to one knee to complete the downward chopping motion and was rewarded by the sound and feel of the machete popping through a skull and sinking into the soft gooey center.
He put his foot down on the cracked open skull and worked his machete out. He briefly wondered how long it’d taken for Kelly to consider it normal to have to pause to wait for her husband to work his blade out of the head of a dead old woman before continuing forward. There was nothing normal about any of this. A few steps later he encountered another sleeper. This one was a young boy. Swallowing his natural pity for the small frame he smashed the boy’s skull in half with a strong downward strike of the machete. Feeling as though he’d left part of his soul behind him with the tiny corpse Randy kept moving forward.
Tony brought up the rear of the small party. His thoughts were miles way from where they were at right now. He was a single guy with no kids of his own, but he had plenty of nieces and nephews. He loved them all. He felt like that gave him some sense of what Randy and Kelly must be going through. His head was on a swivel as Randy led them deeper into the sleeping herd. He knew one misstep could spell the end for all of them. He knew they shouldn’t be rushing into this with zero planning the way they were. He understood why they were doing it though. He understood that drive Randy and Kelly must be feeling. He envied them for having that strong of a purpose. He felt like he was just along for the ride.
Their progress kept slowing as they encountered more and more sleeping Zombies. Normally the Zombies would’ve found a house to nest in but since they’d moved this way so fast, they assumed the Zombies must’ve just lay down where they were standing when they got tired. That meant the herd probably had stopped in this general area somewhere. Randy was in the lead and knew that if the herd had stopped here that meant there was a good chance that they were bunched up around Donna’s house. The problem was he only had a vague idea of where Donna’s house was. He stopped and waited for Kelly to catch up. Then he stared at her until she got the idea and took the lead.
Randy fell back into the middle of the pack. He followed behind Kelly as she led them deeper into the miserably humid night. She gradually moved them from walking along the side of the road to walking in the middle of the streets as the ditches filled up with sleeping Zombies. Feeling super exposed but making way better time they marched briskly down the middle of the road towards Donna’s house. Kelly sped them up as she mentally did the math to figure out if they’d have time to check both Donna’s house and her mom’s house that night. She wasn’t letting herself think they’d actually find the kids quite yet. She was scared to let herself hope for that much. Scared of how low she’d go if it didn’t end up working out.
Soaked to the bone they followed Kelly until she came to a stop in the middle of the asphalt looking over at a medium sized house. It looked just like all of the other houses they’d been passing to Tony and Randy. Randy had only ever been there one time when he’d dropped off Cait or Kelly to take Donna’s dog out or something like that. The rest of his family had been over a lot more than that which was good since Kelly was able to recognize the house. Randy looked closer and saw that the windows and front door had all been ripped out. A few lumps littered the lawn which he assumed were decomposing bodies.
Given the density of the bodies they’d passed lying in the ditches and on the cold hard ground he knew the house they were looking at was probably packed to the rafters with nesting Zombies. The same as all of the other houses on the street. That meant they were going to have to poke around in a house filled with Zombies in the middle of the night to see if there were any other clues. Randy was thinking they really needed to slide between the houses and find a space somewhere to meet and quietly discuss next steps when Kelly took off down the sidewalk straight towards the house. Seeing that she obviously wasn’t in a planning session mood Randy cracked his neck and tested the weight of the hatchet and machete he held in his hands.
Kelly walked quickly towards the front door of the house. She felt a stronger sense of urgency as she got closer and saw the front door had been ripped off its hinges. The foyer to the home was dimly lit by the moon peeking through the rain clouds above. They were going to need to search every room in the house. That meant they were going to need to kill a lot of Zombies. She didn’t care how many Zombies they had to kill she was going to search the house from top to bottom.
In the foyer of the home the trio of would be rescuers stood motionless listening to the sound of the nesting horde all around them. It was a larger house on the inside than it had seemed from the street. There were plenty of windows to let in the dim outside light. By this sliver of illumination Ra
ndy was able to make out how screwed they were. Zombies were literally covering the floor and furniture. Several were stacked on top of one another grunting and writhing around to find the best place to sleep. The smell in the house was awful. The deep moist scent of fecal waste and the acidic smell of urine mixed with a whole new level of body odor coming off the sleeping piles of sore covered bodies in waves.
There was no way they were hacking their way through this house. Not if they had any desire to live through the next few minutes anyway. They were going to need to tiptoe around the bodies and try to find clues. Not that there was much hope of finding anything useful in this Zombie carpeted pile of garbage. It was going to be like a group of drunk teenagers trying to find a lost set of car keys in the dark at the city dump while pit bulls were on patrol. Randy wanted to pull Kelly and Tony out and go try Brenda’s house. He didn’t bother trying though since he knew she wasn’t going to leave until they’d at least made an effort to cross this house off the list.
Kelly sobbed silently as she slowly led them deeper into the darkness of the house. The smells were assaulting her, and she felt like she might vomit. She couldn’t see anything. She had no idea what it was she was trying to find in this mad house. She knew she may be leading her husband and their friend to a horrible death. One misstep and this whole house could become a giant tomb for them. They’d die in a storm of undulating teeth and clawing Zombies. Kelly almost turned back. Her foot hit something though. She bent over to figure out what it was and found a bunch of electronic components that came out of some sort of boom box that’d been smashed to pieces. She’d hoped for something that would’ve persuaded her to go deeper into the house.
She reached up and grabbed Randy’s hand and motioned for them to leave the house. He put his finger to her lips signaling her to stay quiet and wait for him there. He wanted to finish searching the house just to make sure. More to keep Kelly from trying to get them to come back in here the next day than because he thought he might find anything else. Moving his feet in a semicircle in front of him with every step he worked his way down the hall. Occasionally he’d be forced step over piles of bodies on the floor. The occasional contact wasn’t really a huge deal in the dark since the Zombie’s just assumed it was one of their own poking into them to try and get comfortable.
He made it down the hall and looked into the bedrooms which were covered in piles of sleeping Zombies. Not seeing anything in there of interest he turned and went down the hallway towards the last door he figured he’d check before leaving. He could barely make out the broken door at the end of the hallway in the dim light. On the borderline of checking out the last room or not he went with his instinct to check out the anomaly of the broken interior door. He carefully made his way over to the door and moved it around on the broken hinge to slide into the room he now recognized as a bathroom.
Standing in the small space of the tiled bathroom he sensed an urgency to get out of the house. Kelly and Tony were standing out in the middle of it all with no chance to survive if something happened to wake up the Zombies. He turned to leave, and the bathroom door squeaked on its hinge and fell off completely. Randy caught the door as best he could and turned around to awkwardly try and lean it against the wall. Trying to avoid making too much noise he still managed to get the end of it caught in the shower curtain. Going with the flow he started to lay the door down on its side in the tub with the top still tangled in the shower curtain. He was doing everything with exaggerated caution now to try and avoid making any more noise.
The door hit an empty jug on the side of the bathtub that fell into the tub and landed on a pile of towels and other rags. Randy couldn’t see anything in the dark moldy room. He felt around on that end of the tub to try and see what had just fallen. He finally got the door settled to a point where he didn’t think it was going to fly around anymore. Not really finding anything in the pile of rags he got up to walk out of the bathroom. He heard a little whimper come from the tub. He froze.
Not sure of exactly what he’d just heard he turned and walked back towards the tub. He knew a Zombie could be curled up in the tub and making noises. He knew he should just walk out and tell Kelly he hadn’t heard anything. He knew he couldn’t do that. If there was the slightest chance it might be one of their kids in that tub, he had to check it out. He just wasn’t a fan of sticking his hand down where a Zombie could decide to snack on one of his fingers. He knew that was exactly what he needed to do though.
He walked over to the tub, knelt down on the floor and reached into the tub like someone sticking their hand in a garbage disposal. He gingerly pulled the pile of rags to the side. A small body sprang out of the tub and jumped on him. Randy fell over backwards with the little banshee he’d let out of the tub. The silent banshee proceeded to scratch and punch him all over his body. Randy had his machete up and ready to strike when it dawned on him that a Zombie would’ve bitten him by now. A Zombie would also have been screaming it’s head off. His attacker jumped up and tried to run around him. He reached out an arm and wrapped it around the small person dragging her back to him kicking and flailing. He pulled the kid over to where he could whisper in their ear.
“Not a Zombie. Let me help you get out of here.” Then he picked up the random survivor he’d managed to find.
“Daddy?” Randy almost dropped his little girl he was so shaken hearing her voice there in the darkness. A new fear threatened to paralyze him. He realized he had to get her out of there alive. He pulled her back in close and went to a corner of the bathroom.
“We can’t talk here baby girl. Are your sisters here? Just nod.” He whispered as quietly as he could directly into her ear.
Zoey shook her head for no. Randy kissed his brave little girl on the forehead and took a deep breath to calm his nerves. Once he felt slightly more secure, he went through the open doorway and out into the hall. By the extremely dim light filtering through the windows he was able to see Tony and Kelly’s eyes get bigger when they saw he was carrying someone. As they moved into the living room and she realized who it was he was carrying Randy saw a host of emotions flicker across Kelly’s face. Her first instinct had been to see if the other kids were still in the house. She stared at Zoey then gave Randy a questioning look. He shook his head no.
As soon as they got out the door Kelly took Zoey from Randy. Tony moved in close with a big grin on his face and patted Randy hard on the back then gave him a big thumbs up. Zoey had been kicking her feet and trying to get to her mom as soon as she saw her. Kelly held Zoey tightly in her arms as they started walking down the middle of the road away from the lake house. The lake water Zoey had been drinking from the jug in the tub got the best of her and she spewed a stream of clear vomit all over her mom. Kelly just held her little girl closer until the sickness passed and then kept on walking down the road. It was surreal how elated she could be covered in puke walking down a road bordered on both sides by sleeping ghouls.
Elated to find Zoey and chilled to the bone that the other girls were not with her. Tears of joy, fear, and sadness intermingled running down the fierce mom’s cheeks as she carried her baby down the street.
Chapter 19: Solitary
She had no tears left to cry. They’d thrown her into an empty supply closet and locked the door. The cramped space smelled like pine sol and vomit. Caitlyn tried to think what she could’ve done differently. How she could’ve made sure they didn’t end up like this. Nothing popped out at her. After all the Zombies they’d dodged the biggest threat to them had turned out to be other survivors. If everyone else on the planet had just turned into blood thirsty Zombies, they’d have been fine.
Bloodthirsty Zombies they could deal with. Those scenarios made sense. Groups of survivors hunting down other groups of survivors with drones and throwing them into closets for reeducation didn’t make any sense at all. Splitting families apart was just hurtful and mean and small minded. She’d cried for hours. She’d let the self-pity and sadness and hopelessnes
s consume her as she sat on the hard floor in that dark confined space. When that tired her to the point of exhaustion, she’d passed out with her head braced against the wall.
At some point they’d opened the door and slid in a bottled water and some kind of granola bar. She’d been in the middle of a nightmare when they opened the door. A nightmare that turned out to be true when she realized she really was locked in a closet. She’d really lost Myriah, Zoey, Doreen and Ali. In her dream her mom and dad finally found her. They’d been carrying the bodies of her dead little sisters. They’d stared at Caitlyn with revulsion.
She felt around in the darkness looking for any sort of weapon she could use. She told herself she’d be ready the next time they opened the door. She wasn’t really sure what it was she’d be ready for, but she knew she’d feel a lot better if she had some way to go on the offensive. She didn’t take to just sitting in a closet waiting for someone to open the door and decide if she lived or died. They hadn’t killed her yet so she felt she could be reasonably sure she might survive the next time they opened the door.
She ate the granola bar and drank the water. She’d hesitated to drink the water at first fearing it might be poisoned. Then she’d realized all they had to do was open the door and shoot her in the head if they wanted her dead. Plus, the bottled water cap made a little click and a hissing noise when she got it opened. That settled it for her as she couldn’t really see a group of men working late into the night to perfect putting the lids back on poisoned water bottles to take out unsuspecting young girls they’d locked in closets.
Zombies! (Book 3): Violence Solves Everything Page 18