Now, almost two weeks in, they were still eating like kings with hamburgers and hotdogs for every meal. Today was the last meat meal, though. The genny was out of fuel and the stuff in cold storage was gone. They gave smaller portions to the animals and tried to teach them to hunt but they had used the last of the meat this morning. They were saving the canned chili, usually used for the Coney’s, because it wouldn’t go bad. Tobias and Annalise had gathered all the junk food in the shops, smashed out the glass in the vending machines and had boxes of chips and candy bars but they couldn’t live on that. They needed nourishment. Real food. The chickens in the petting zoo gave eggs every day but it wasn’t enough to feed eight rapidly growing children. The cow gave them plenty of milk and Murray said you could make butter out of it by skimming the cream. The twins were eager to try it and had started a list of things they needed when the group went into town. A butter churn from an antiques store was added to it. The pair knew their way around a kitchen and had taken over the cooking duties. For a brief couple of months, they had decided they were going to be world famous celebrity chefs and had wreaked havoc in their parent’s kitchen. Between the cooking shows and the recipe books, they had learned a lot and gotten pretty good before they lost interest.
Cody had been formulating a supply run plan. There was a seldom used access gate on the back of the property that would put them a couple of miles outside Putnam. Otis and he had checked it out and found no undead hanging around. The crowd at the front gate had swelled to nearly a hundred. They just milled about in the parking lot until one of the kids captured their attention then they renewed their assault on the gates. He wondered how many it would take to overcome their defenses. That was something he didn’t want to find out. They would have to deal with them sooner or later, but they were weaponless. Murray assured them that a bullet through the brain would shut them down permanently, but there were no bullets. There were no guns to fire them. All they had were pitchforks and shovels. Cattle prods and tranquilizer guns. There were a few kitchen knives but nothing that would slow down the screaming undead if they shoved a section of fence over. They had tried a few different things against them but so far, they had avoided the whole problem. They couldn’t keep doing that, though. They needed to come up with a solution. Harper had jabbed one of them with a tranq stick but it had no effect other than increasing the attack on the wrought iron bars. The cattle prod made them dance but that was about it and it only worked on one at a time.
Each of them had been spending their days tending and befriending the animals, teaching their companions to hunt or at least eat fresh killed meat with the fur still on it. They had learned how to rig snares from one of the books and were introducing the animals to freshly killed rabbits with the blood still hot. They had let most of them out to roam free but many of them came back to their pens every night and Millie never wandered far.
The golf carts were dying. The short days and the weak sun would barely charge them enough for ten or fifteen minutes of power before they came to a stop. Murray extended the solar panel cables and spliced them all together so they directed their energy into one battery. It was enough to keep a cart and their phones fully charged. They pulled the invertor from the generator, hooked it to the oversized battery for 110 power. It gave him juice to run the computer but laptops and external hard drives were on his list of things to get from town. He wanted backups of backups.
There were plenty of downed trees, branches and brush inside the fences and Donny designed a crude harness to hook up to Teddy. With only a little coaxing, he was dragging whole logs out of the woods and up close to the work areas. The old buffalo seemed to enjoy the work and certainly the attention he got. The apples Vanessa found on one of her trips to the edges of the park helped with his motivation, too. With each of them taking an hour long turn each day with the axe, they had quickly amassed a couple of cords of firewood to keep them warm all winter. They scraped out a big firepit a good distance from the main house and got in the habit of having a campfire every night with the brush they trimmed off the logs.
Swan and the wolves had become inseparable. They shadowed her and were never far away. She would hurry through her chores of cleaning the barn stalls or spending an hour chopping wood but when they were finished, she’d run with her wolves. Her second family. They would play and hunt and chase the antelope but they never caught anything. Even the rabbits eluded them as they darted this way and that then finally disappeared down a hole. Sometimes they curled up together in the tall grass and slept, her between them, warm and protected. She was filled with delight when Cody told her that the swell in Lucy’s belly was babies. There would be wolf cubs soon.
Vanessa and Ziggy prowled the vast acreage of the park searching for edible berries and nuts, using some of the books Murray had put on her phone. The Ostrich towered over the ten-year-old, nearly double her height at a little over eight feet. Vanessa led the giant bird with a leash for the first week or so but the more time they spent together, the less time Ziggy wanted to spend apart from her. Cody thought the old mother bird had come to consider Vanessa as the child she never had. As the only one of her species in the park. She may have been lonely and not even realized it. The two became inseparable and Murray helped her rig up a saddle. Ziggy hardly felt the girls sixty pounds on her back and with her able to run thirty miles an hour, they could reach the far corners of the park faster than anyone else. She was protective, too. Her sharp eyes were constantly on the lookout for anything that would harm her or her chick. One evening, eating their last burgers around the campfire, Vanessa told them how Ziggy had defended her from a strange attack. They had been at the blackberry patch along the fence near the road. An opossum had come at her through a hole burrowed under it.
“I was gathering berries and Ziggy was hunting for lizards or something.” Vanessa said. “and that creepy little thing tried to bite me. Not just once, it acted like it was hungry and I was the main course. It was savage! I screamed and started to run but she was there almost instantly.”
She stroked the bird’s neck as it was nestled beside her.
“Didn’t you girl? You slashed that thing but good.”
The four-inch claws on Ziggy’s feet had eviscerated it, nearly cut it in half.
“But why would it attack you?” Murray asked. “They don’t eat people, they eat road kill and rummage through trash. They were bad at our house. My dad had to make a cage to keep them out of our garbage cans.”
“Not much road kill any more. Or trash.” Swan said. “You think it had rabies?”
“I don’t know, I hadn’t thought about it. It was just weird, that’s all. I was proud of Ziggy for killing it.”
“Were there any zombies by the fence?” Tobias asked.
Vanessa shook her head. “Not really. There was one in the ditch but it was all busted up and most of it was gone. It could barely move.”
The twins exchanged a look and nodded to each other.
“What?” Cody asked. “What are you two not telling us?”
“We noticed it a couple of days ago.” Annalise said. “The coyotes and possums and vultures are eating the undead. We were on the roof of the aid station, watching the ones at the front gate and trying to figure out a way to kill them. If you’re quiet, they don’t notice you. They never look up.”
“That’s gross.” Harper said. “But maybe that will solve the problem. Maybe that’s nature’s way of getting rid of them.”
“Maybe.” Cody said. “But what if it’s contagious? What if the animals are turning into them? What if that possum was the first and the rest of them come after us?”
Nobody had any answers for that and all they could do was hope it was an anomaly, just a crazy possum.
“Maybe you got too close to its nest and it was trying to protect its babies.” Murray said. “Has anyone else seen any of the others acting aggressively?”
No one had, the only weird thing was the animals that usually ate road k
ill were now eating the zombies.
“Same thing only different.” Cody finally said. “Dead and rotting is dead and rotting, right?”
“We’ll just have to keep a close eye on them.” Swan said, an arm around each of the wolves. “Maybe the Savage Ones will be content to eat the undead. Stinky meat is what their used to, right?” They shouldn’t bother us, we’re not dead.”
Most of the scavenger animals were normally nocturnal and avoided humans, but they’d taken to feeding at all times of the day. They paid no mind to the living, gorging themselves on the abundance of zombies. They ignored each other, too. Some were natural enemies but with more food than they could ever eat that stood still and let them feed, they left each other alone. The coyote didn’t need to try to kill a raccoon for dinner. Dinner was standing at the front gate. After a few bites, dinner would fall to the ground and they could tear into the soft and squishy parts.
No one had seen the hyenas since they fled the zoo and they had mostly forgotten about them. Out of sight, out of mind.
Donny and the Yewan were at the fire every night, listening and watching, but he wasn’t sleeping in the house anymore. He preferred to bed down in the hayloft with blankets and the panther for company and warmth.
It hadn’t taken long for the animals to start reverting back to their true natures. Swan was teaching the wolves to chase rabbits, the panther was stalking birds and going up trees after raccoons. They made sure to keep the gates closed to keep them out of the petting zoo as the instincts to hunt continued to evolve. Their daily supply of eggs and milk wasn’t much, but it helped, and they didn’t want to lose them.
The two polar bears were content to eat fish. The twins had built fish traps and the Mississippi was generous. Their coats had taken on a glossy appearance from all of the oils in the fish and they were something to behold. Like Vanessa, the twins had used leashes at first to lead them to the river and back but the bears had always known humans. They learned quickly and soon the two nearly albino children were frolicking with them in the cold water and riding them around the park. They had to teach them to fish by wading out into the shallows and standing still. The fish that darted off came back after a few minutes and the bears learned quickly how to spot them and paw them out to the bank.
Otis on the other hand, showed no interest in hunting or stalking prey. He was happy eating human food. Especially Spam. He’d chuffed and bobbed up and down like an overexcited puppy after his first taste. He’d devoured the two cans they’d found stuffed in Derek’s desk and begged for more. While he didn’t care for the hunt, he was quick to show the other animals who was the dominant creature in the park. After a dustup with Popsicle, he’d walked away with one chewed up ear, and a new scar on his snout, but Popsicle didn’t challenge him again and the other animals in the strange family recognized him as the alpha. It had been frightening for them to watch, the giant bears battling for supremacy. They couldn’t stop them, they couldn’t interfere, and a single swipe of a paw would have killed them. When it was all said and done, it had mostly been growls and roars. Mostly posturing and neither animal came away from the fight with much damage.
Cody had watched the strange twins and the polar bears diving into their pool chasing the fish they’d pulled from the traps in the river. They seemed almost oblivious to the cold water as they splashed and played with the two big bears, eating and sharing the raw fish with their ursine friends. He was the oldest and part of him wanted to tell them it probably wasn’t a good idea to eat uncooked meat but what was sushi? What was steak tartare? And who was he to tell anyone what to do? If grownups were here, they’d be yelling at him for letting Otis inside the house and if the truth be told, when he actually thought about it, he really didn’t think they would survive for long. Winter was coming, they were surrounded by zombies and all the grownups were dead. They were all being a little crazy, a little irresponsible, but it was okay. They were living in a crazy world and he tried not to think about it.
The twins were an odd pair to begin with, but the absence of any adults had exacerbated their behavior, maybe more than everyone else’s. They’d taken to drawing Nordic runes on their bodies with permanent marker, touching them up often as the sun and dirt worked to fade and erode them.
Murray zipped around in his chair, always in motion and the little capuchin monkeys became attached to him like he was their second mamma. At first, they hid under his coat when the panther or one of the bears would pad alongside his chair but they grew comfortable around the predators when they realized they had no interest in eating them. He taught them to fetch things for him and they were eager to please, chittering merrily and jumping around swinging on things. He didn’t even try to keep them on a leash when he first freed them. They could smell the undead, as did all the animals. They sensed everything was different somehow and clung to the humans that were still human. Their entire lives, it was all any of them knew. The humans had always been their caregivers, had always given them food and water. They would be lost without them.
Murray dug through the tool sheds, opened closets, rifled through desk drawers. He was always in search of anything that would give them an edge, always scrolling through his tablet looking at one of the thousands of books he had on it. He inventoried everything, jotted down notes and considered possible alternative uses for each item. The park had a fairly well-equipped maintenance garage where the caretakers had kept the various mowers and carts in good running order. There was just about any tool they would need but without any machinery to fix, there wasn’t much use for most of them. He was organized and methodical and Cody was thankful. Murray would have a list of all the things they needed when he finally swallowed his fear and they ventured out for a supply run. He’d been putting it off for as long as possible because some of them, maybe all of them, might not make it back. When he first started thinking about going to town, he hadn’t even considered taking the animals, they might wander off and they’d never see them again. He’d changed his mind, though. They had all been working with their companions for hours and hours every day and the bonds were strong. He wasn’t worried about any of them running away anymore. He didn’t think they could drive them off if they tried.
Harper was the next oldest to Cody, she was thirteen and sometimes he couldn’t help but notice how long and tan her legs were. He caught himself staring more than once after she took a quick, cold shower with the pull bucket they had rigged up. Her scream from the icy water and giggles afterward made him smile as she rushed to the fireplace to warm up beside it, her t-shirt sticking to the pointy places on her chest. She was really pretty and he’d get a little tongue-tied if he thought about her as a girl and not as one of the crew. If he thought about what it would be like to kiss her and not shovel cow manure beside her.
He’d always been awkward around girls at school, they were a mystery with their own ways and the ones he liked probably wouldn’t want to talk to him anyway. Besides, what were you supposed to say to them? Did you see the new Star Wars movie? They’d probably laugh at him. With her it wasn’t a big deal. He had to talk to her and everybody else, she was just one of the crew. It wasn’t official or anything but everyone sort of looked to him for guidance or to settle an argument. He depended on Murray to keep things organized and everyone did the jobs they were supposed to do without him having to remind them. It wasn’t like before. If you didn’t do the dishes or mow the yard when you were supposed to, the worse that would happen is you would get yelled at. Now, if you didn’t do your job, something bad could and probably would happen. Didn’t milk the cow? She might die. Didn’t water the chickens? They might die. Didn’t walk the perimeter looking for breaches in the fence? You might die. Everything was a lot more serious now.
Harper made him laugh when she told him she had every intention of riding Bert right through a horde of zombies, high on his back, out of reach of their grasping hands.
“Bert will knock them all over like bowling pins and I’l
l have a morning star to make sure they stay down.”
“A what?” Cody asked.
“Morning star. You know one of those ball and chain spikey things. Just swing it and kaboosh. Bye-bye Mr. Zombie head.”
“Brutal.” he said with approval.
Cody and Murray had inventoried the animals in the park and considered which ones were edible and how much meat they would provide. No matter what kind of math they did, the answer was not enough. There were a few gazelles and antelope no one would mind losing if they got desperate, they were truly wild and kept their distance but if they started eating them, all of them would be gone in a matter of weeks. There were the goats and sheep from the barnyard that would keep them from starving a while longer, but they wanted to breed them and create large herds, enough to be sustainable. The twins said they could even make cheese from the milk. The rest of the animals weren’t really edible and he’d go hungry before he tried to eat Millie or Teddy. They didn’t have a way to preserve the meat anyway, not that there would be much left if they could catch one of the antelopes. The bears and wolves ate a lot.
The fish traps were bringing in a basket of fish everyday but the panther and the bears were devouring them as quickly as they were caught and were still hungry now that the storehouse meats were gone. There just wasn’t enough.
Murray wanted a smokehouse but they didn’t have everything they needed to build it. All their plans and ideas were kind of moot anyway until they left the park for supplies. The town might be crawling with the undead with no way to get near any of the shops.
None of them had lived in Putnam, only knew it from passing through on the main road. They knew there was a grocery store, all their parents shopped there but they didn’t know much else about the town. There were mostly boring antique or record stores and candle shops. Things they saw when they passed through but never paid any attention to. The kind of places where they’d rather sit in the car and play on their phone while their moms went inside.
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