All That I See - 02

CHAPTER 1

On the first day of spring, Sara and I were in the sunroom
examining
our shallow trays of dirt. A man stood ou
tside the window looking at us
, but we ignored him. He’d been out there for days, and he was alone.
His clothes were shabby, and he was
dripping wet from the rain. He had no nose, just a dark, jagged hole in his face.

“Here’s one!” Sara said, excitedly.

I peered over her shoulder. There was a tiny sprig of green poking out of the dirt. Soon, it would grow into a pepper plant
.

“Another one!” she said, pointing to a second tray.

It made me smile to see her so excited about our new babies. I always got excited over seedlings, too, but I
rarely ever expressed my excitement openly
.

“Good,’ I said. “If all of the seeds we planted germinate, we should have twelve tomato plants and ten bell pepper plants.”

“That’s good, right?” she asked.

“It’s better than nothing,” I said. “We’ll need to go seed h
unting soon. These leftover packet
s I had from last year aren’t going to be enough to feed us.”

“But you have
several
partial packets.”

This was true. I had a few spinach seeds, some
carrot
seeds, some
squash
and Swiss chard, and an unopened packet of
cucumber
seeds, but they wouldn’t be enough. I wanted to have enough to put away for the winter. I didn’t want to deplete our food stores too quickly.

“I was hoping we could stay in a while longer,” Sara said. “Give them more time to die off.”

When she said this, she nodded toward the man outside. I glanced up at him, not wanting to s
tare too long at his gray, nose-
less face.

“It’s been over a month
since Canton B
,” I said. “
The infected
don’t seem to be going anywhere.”

We hadn’t left the house in more than a week.
We’d found a place that was relatively safe and comfortable, and we’d been content just to hole up and lick our wounds (figuratively speaking, of course).

The house
was on the
edge
of Clayfield
and sat on a little quarter acre lot. The whole property was surrounded by a tall wooden fence in the front and a chain link fence in the back. It had a gas stove in the kitchen and gas logs in the living room and in the back porch/sunroom. We’d had running water, too
,
until two days prior when the water
turned
brown then stopped completely.

When the man made his first appearance we were alarmed, thinking he’d climbed the fence, and we wondered what that might mean. But when no others showed up, we presumed he must have been inside when we closed the gate. We spent an afternoon discussing where he might have been hiding, but then forgot the matter.

This house wouldn’t be our permanent residence. We
’d
have to find a new place when it was time to plant a garden and when we ran out of water. We still had
most
of our stuff loaded in the school bus and on the hay truck outside. If we needed to, we could leave right away.

I’d gotten started on our garden
the day after we’d moved in
. We wouldn’t actually plant a garden until after the last frost, but we had to start our tomato and pepper seedlings early and indoors.

Sara poured some water on the seed flats then gave me a quick hug and a peck on the cheek before heading back into the kitchen. She was an affectionate
young
woman, especially so since Jen had gone, but I hadn’t been able to return her affection. She was undaunted, being open with me about her feelings, but not putting any pressure on me to reciprocate. She knew I was still upset over Jen’s absence. She also knew I’d get over it eventually.
I was never that wise or patient at her age.

Sometimes I questioned my hesitance when it came to Sara.
If it had just been a matter of physical attraction, there would be no hesitance. I was attracted to her plenty. But she wanted more than that, and she was a good person. I couldn’t take advantage of her like that even though my body wanted to. My conscience had been one of the things that had survived the end of the world.

She made better decisions than Jen, she was prettier than Jen, and she was far nicer than Jen. It might have been the age difference. She was only 19
, soon to be 20, and that did bother me a little. Really, though, my resistance came down to this: she wasn’t Jen.

I looked out at our nose-less visitor. He’d wondered over to the fence and was just standing there staring at nothing at all. I followed Sara into the kitchen. She met me with a steaming cup of coffee.

She smiled as she put it in my hands, and looking at her, I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t completely smitten with her. I just couldn’t get Jen out of my head. Jen was still out there, and I was scared as hell I’d run into her again.

I put on my rain coat and
took the .30-06
upstairs to one of the bedrooms. Just outside the bedroom window was a
steel
television
antenna
tower. It was narrow, and bolted to the house. It was co
nstructed in such a way that I c
ould climb it like a ladder. There was still an
antenn
a mounted on the top, but I don’t think the homeowners had used it in a while, because there was a small satellite dish attached to it, too.

I opened the window and climbed out onto the tower. It was wet and slippery from the rain, but I was careful. I didn’t have far to climb anyway; I was going up on the roof. It was uncomfortably steep, but the black asphalt shingles gave me enough traction to reach the peak. Once there, I walked over to the chimney and sat on top of it.

Sara and I had been coming up here every day since we arrived
more than two weeks prior. We had a good view of the surroundings, and we liked to keep tabs on any infected people in the area. We didn’t want to be taken by surprise. So far as we knew, the only one that
was aware of us was
Spite F
ace (Sara’s clever moniker for Mr. No Nose). Even so, we were still diligent about checking every morning and eveni
ng for any changes in activity.

The week before
, we’d noticed a large group two blocks to the north of our location and made the decision that day not to leave the house anymore until they had dispersed or until we absolutely had to. We hadn’t left the house much anyway, because we hadn’t needed to
, but
we did go on a couple of supply runs during the first few days, not out of necessity, but as a distraction. Over the next few days the group of infected grew. It was obvious they were interested in a particular house, but neither of us could deter
mine if there was a survivor
in
there.

I put the rifle up to my
shoulder
and looked through the scope. The crowd had added to its numbers. There were both kinds of infected over there, but mostly it was those in the second stage.

The virus, Canton B, changed its victims in two stages. In the beginning, the infected suffered from a high fever and basically lost their minds. They became animal-lik
e and violent. Pain had little e
ffect on them, and they operated from their “lizard brain.” The second stage of the virus occurred after the victim’s death. We had not been able to determine if the virus itself was the direct cause of any deaths, but it was a possibility. Instead, most of the deaths occurred due to violence or accidents. In this second stage, the infected corpses became animated. They were still violent, mindless creatures, but even more so. Thankfully, the stage two individuals had even less dexterity, coordination, and speed than
those in stage one.

I looked over the crowd, trying not to linger on the faces; I feared seeing people I knew. Then I examined the windows of the house. Every day, we’d scanned the house for any sign that someone might be inside. That day I got our answer. The blinds on one of the windows on the second floor were open.
They had not been open before.
I couldn’t see inside, and I could
not
see any movement or activity, but it was a sign that there was another survivor over there.

I watched the window for a few
minutes, hoping for something
then I
checked out the rest of the area.

Back downstairs, I removed my wet coat, poured myself some more coffee and sat next to the gas logs in the living room. Sara was in there reading an article about gardening from one of my magazines.

“It says here that we can start squash indoors, too,” she said. “Did you know that?”

“There’s someone over at the house,” I said.

She put the magazine down in her lap
.

“Did you see them?”

“No, but the blinds were up on one of the windows.”

“Are we going over there?” she said.

“Eventually, maybe,” I said. “I was thinking that maybe we could do something to signal whoever it is so they’ll know we’re here. Maybe we can communicate with them to see if they need help.”

“Well, unless the crowd has diminished since yesterday, they need help,” she replied.

I reluctantly nodded my agreement.

“I’d still prefer to signal them first,” I said. “They might not need our help right away. We might be able to stay here a few more days. If we go help them, we’
ll probably have to relocate, and I’d like to rest a while longer.
”

“Okay,” she said, lifting the magazine again. “But soon, I think we need to get to the dirty work.”

The “dirty work” to which Sara was referring was
her
plan to clear out the infected. We’d decided after losing Jen and Brian that we needed to go on the offensive. We’d given ourselves some time to recuperate, and now I was having second thoughts. It was easy for me to agree to
the extermination of
those things while under the influence of those raw emotions, but I’d softened. Plus, I’d been thinking about how big the job was going to be. At the time of the outbreak, there w
ere
more than seven billion people in the world. We wouldn’t be able to destroy t
hem all, and even if we eradicat
ed every one of them from Clayfield, other
s could wander into
town. It would be a never-ending task.

“Yes,” I said with resignation. “I suppose we’ve taken it easy long enough.”

CHAPTER 2

I found a bright orange T-shirt in one of the closets upstairs and, feeding some rope through the sleeves, I made a flag out of it and tied it to the antenna outside. Hopefully that would get our neighbor’s attention when they looked out the window. With that done, I went back downstairs to make a sign.

The house was far enough away that I would need to make letters large so they could read them without magnification. So I painted the sign on a bed sheet, and I kept the message simple. I decided on “R U OK?”

“Looks good,” Sara said. “You should put a time on there so they’ll know to be at the window when we’re on the roof.”