Rotting to the Core (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 2) (8 page)

“You need to learn to live in the moment once
in a while.” Kat strolled confidently through the dusty kitchen,
stopping briefly to check a wine rack on the counter. She pulled a
bottle out and examined the label. “Ooo! Barefoot Moscato! Come
here a sec.”

“Really? You're going to take time to steal
somebody's liquor?” Jake turned and Cho shoved the bottle into his
pack. “Are you gonna raid their medicine cabinet too?”

The blue-haired, young woman actually
considered that for a moment, then shook her head. “Nah. We still
have that bag of weed we found in Old Hall, and it probably
wouldn't be worth the trouble to search. What would be here anyway?
Some outdated Codeine? Maybe a bottle of Nyquil or some Vapo-rub?
And we've had this discussion before, haven't we? It's not looting
if there's no one to loot from. I'm
salvaging
a tasty bottle
of yummy-yum that would go to waste here.”

Looking skyward, Jake shook his head and
swore he'd get even with the Gods for everything he'd been forced
to put up with since the zombie apocalypse began. He didn't think
anyone would blame him if he took up heavy drinking as a hobby at
this point.

“Let's just keep moving, okay?” Jake hurried
to the front door and checked outside. “It'll be dawn soon, and I'd
like to get as far from that horde back there as we can.”

Thankfully, all the nearby zombies had been
drawn off by the Charger's alarm to the opposite side of the house,
and the street in front was empty. Quickly unlocking the deadbolt,
O'Connor crept out on the large front porch and Kat closed the door
behind them. There was no point in doing so. No one would be coming
back to that home in the foreseeable future—it just made her feel
better. Unlike Jake, who was concentrating on the street, she felt
a twinge of sadness after noticing a blood-smeared, stuffed
Snuffleupagus under the porch swing.

They moved through the front yard, over the
abandoned avenue, and into the opposite house, repeating their room
clearing process after gaining entry. The interior of that dwelling
had been privy to some violence, but whether that was when the dead
rose or afterwards Kat was unable to tell. There were several
decomposed, partially-eaten corpses in the family room and kitchen,
one of which the blue-haired young woman was positive was a child
under ten years of age. While it was sad, the sight didn't
immediately have the same effect on her as it did upon Jake. He
knelt on the filthy linoleum next to the body and slowly examined
it.

“Seven or eight” He looked back towards the
front of the home. “Looks like gunshot wounds in the chest there.
Can't tell if it was postmortem.”

Cho stood beside him, calmly gripping her
sword and glancing around the kitchen. “There's a lot of damage in
here. Could've been caused by automatic weapons fire I guess.”

Jake pulled his Tanto and carefully dug at
the corpse's shoulder-blade.

“Oh, God. Don't do that.” Kat gagged. “It's
covered in yuck!”

“Real mature. There's a round in the bone
here. I want to see what type.” Jake continued prying at it until
the bullet popped free, then picked it up gingerly with two
fingers. “It's .223. Could've come from a number of weapons.
Anything from a Bushmaster ACR to a belt-fed Shrike uses it.”

“How do you know that?” Kat asked with some
surprise.

“You do remember George used to be my
landlord, right?” Jake reminded her.

“Oh, yeah. That would do it I guess.” She
crouched down beside him. “So what does it tell you?”

He tossed the bullet to the floor. “Nothing.
These people could've been zombies, or they could've been
survivors. There's really no way to tell. Not without a handy note
that reads:
You're next!
or something.”

Kat stood and folded her arms, unconsciously
pushing her breasts together slightly. “Not funny.”

Jake shrugged and rose to his feet, still
focused on the child-corpse. “You know what's really sad? This
happened, all over the world, even before the zombies appeared.
It's just that nobody noticed unless it was plastered all over the
5:00 pm news. Human beings have been victimizing and murdering each
other since the dawn of history, since before written language was
invented if we want to be brutally honest about it. The only
difference is that now, it's right in our faces. All day. Every
day. Kind of make you wonder what people are going to be like after
all of this. Will we improve, or just stagnate in the brutality of
it all and let civilization go swirling. I wonder if there will be
anyone left in a few years to even worry about things like
that...”

“Wow, that's some great pillow talk. I bet
all the girls line up to listen to you wax all moralistic and
stuff.” Cho nudged him gently with one arm. “Come on, we'll
survive. As a species, I mean. Take our little group—”

“Do I have to?” He asked her dryly.

Kat smiled and motioned towards the back
door. “Smart-ass. What I mean is, we're doing alright. Yeah, we've
stepped right in it a few times, but we're all still here. Still
alive. Members of our group haven't tried to kill each other, and
we've been able to deal with most of the dangerous crap we've
encountered so far.”

Following her swaying hips, Jake considered
that for a moment.

“What about Mike and Nichole?” he asked.

“Ppppft...” Kat flicked her fingers and
checked the backyard. “They were never actually part of the group,
per say. Just selfish users. And pervs besides. Dead weight. Good
riddance to both of them, if you ask me. Don't give those two a
second thought.”

They trotted past a trampoline out back and,
after checking the next yard, jumped the fence. Jake thought about
Kat's words as they moved from house to house, avoiding the
occasional stray ghoul, rummaging through the abandoned domiciles
and moving ever southward. He wasn't so sure responsibility for
what happened with the two addicts they'd expelled from their
group, back when they'd been sheltering within Foster's Columbus
safe-house, didn't fall squarely on his shoulders.

It would take them a full day to circle
around the town of Bainbridge at their current pace, carnivorous
obstacles notwithstanding, and Jake would have plenty of time to
ponder the subject.

* * *

Sara missed ice cream.

That was something most people didn’t think
about, pre-disaster. All the stuff they would miss if the world
finally went to shit.

She’d been on the road for a while after
leaving her house outside Winthrop, roughly forty-five miles
east/south-east of Minneapolis. Her home had been kind of secluded,
but eventually the hungry dead fuckers had spread into her area as
well. There had been far too many to even consider fighting, so
she’d hefted her hiking pack and bugged out. Sara had kept to the
woods and back roads, killing quite a few stray infected along the
way with her SOG Fasthawk to avoid making any undue noise, and
headed away from population centers.

She thought about what she’d do for a
double-scoop of Moose Tracks as she fished the bottle of Absolut
out of the water. She’d camped that night next to a stream feeding
into Huron Lake, south of Route 60, and was well east of Sioux
Falls to avoid its large concentration of the dead. That being the
case, she was certain none of the creatures were about. No prey in
the area, no predators, ya know?

When she’d raided an abandoned Stop-n-Go
along the highway two nights back where she acquired a bag of
Turkey Jerky, a four-pack of cheap, disposable lighters and—to her
delight—an unopened bottle of top-shelf vodka from the manager’s
office, all of it went into her pack. She’d left said bottle dunked
in the stream all day to cool, after tying it to a large rock with
some 550 paracord from her survival bracelet—it wouldn’t do to have
good liquor float away, now would it?—and had prepped her camping
spot for the night.

Now, half-reclined on a large river rock as
she watched the sunset, Sara sipped easily at her vodka, wishing
absently for a good book to read, and thought about ice cream. She
pouted briefly at the thought of never tasting that sweet, creamy,
chocolaty goodness, since all of it was surely long sour and smelly
by now –much like the rotten things walking through the cities. She
went back to her vodka.

That reminded her. She wanted to keep an eye
out for an army-navy surplus store. Sara intended to find a gas
mask, post haste. Partially to help her avoid infection in case any
zombie goop got on her face—no apocalyptic facials for her, thank
you very much—but mostly because the zombies really smelled of
poo…

Dawn came, valiantly attempting to burn of
the healthy fog that had risen in the wee hours of the morning.
They had almost cleared the city limits when Cho's “Kitty-sense”
began tingling.

She and Jake were huddled together behind a
charred mobile home, now no more than some wreckage and the trailer
on which the shelter had rested, when she felt the first tickle in
her back-brain that something was off. O'Connor had been noticeably
withdrawn since they'd found that house full of corpses, real ones,
not the ones still walking about the landscaped, and Kat wished
he'd talk to her. She'd been about to broach a conversation with
him about something they both enjoyed, namely Anime, when she got
the feeling they were no longer alone. Thoughts of Super Saiyans
and the benefits of Veritech Fighters verses those of Gundam Armor
were shunted aside as Kat went into assassin mode.

She hadn't actually seen anything. The street
they followed was as empty as a lawyer's soul, and even the number
of scattered zombies had dwindled down to zero over the last hours.
There was
something
amiss though.

“What's up?” Jake mumbled, crouched close
enough that she could feel the ambient heat radiating from his
skin.

Kat shook her head and held up one hand,
silently asking for a moment. Jake trusted her instincts, so he
pressed his back against the mobile home's seared frame and stayed
silent. Looking around, Kat took in the immediate area carefully.
It seemed a fire had begun inside one of the cookie-cutter homes to
the west. Without a Fire Department to battle the initial blaze,
thanks to an unscheduled apocalypse, the prevailing winds had
fanned the flames into a conflagration that burned its way eastward
for miles. Cho and O'Connor had moved stealthily through the
charred wreckage of long-immolated neighborhoods for nearly
forty-five minutes now without seeing any movement whatsoever.
Maybe the quiet desolation was simply making her jumpy? No, that
wasn't it. There was something. Something out of place.

Kat extended her awareness and went still.
Most people couldn't do so. It took years of training to turn off
your intellect, quiet your personality, shut down and just
experience
.
The trick was to not only use your eyes or ears,
but all five senses at once without contaminating your surroundings
with random thoughts or assumptions. Kat had practiced daily for
years before developing the ability, and it gave her a finely tuned
“street sense” as some called it. Basically, the ability to
precisely locate everything in the nearby environment and its
location, even other people seeking to hide from her. That was the
reason, to Laurel's dismay, she could never surprise her roommate
with prearranged birthday celebrations. Kat always knew in advance
when and where everyone would leap from, even in public places,
joyfully yelling 'Surprise!' It was an extremely annoying trait
that served her well over the years, and she used it to her
absolute advantage now.

Her mind quieted. While Jake and the mobile
home didn't fade out of her awareness, the rest of the world came
slowly into focus. She could feel ash ground into the soil under
her feet. The breeze ruffled her short hair sending blue strands
back away from her face. She felt warmth streaming from Jake's skin
nearby, like radiation from a rogue sun. Kat heard something small
and furry scamper from its hiding place perhaps forty yards away.
Lifting her head slightly, her nostrils detected the faint but
noticeable smell of worn clothing left unwashed on a body for far
too long. Licking her lips, Cho picked up the distinctive taste
gunpowder. That could've been residue left on her or Jake's
clothing from their firefight with a group of raiders prior, but
she didn't think so. Their 'flavor', if that was the correct
phrase, would have been much clearer, sharper. This tasted old and
stale, almost flat. Letting her eyes relax and lose focus, Cho
allowed them to drift about seeking anomalies.

Yep. She began to see subtle hints that
someone was about, or had been not long before. There, slight
bending of the grass leading around the far edge of a nearby
trailer husk. There, dust had been kicked up by a boot or shoe,
coating the front of a burned doorstep. Below that, partially
obscured in the small, overgrown front yard, half a print, likely
from the same boot. Over there, a dry, sticky smear where someone
had attempted to open a can of pears without a can opener. The
dented, leaking can itself lay not far beyond. Finally, nearly
sixty yards distant, a seared, old Ford conversion van sat
half-melted to the road. What tripped the danger sensor hardwired
in Kat's brain, which sat just behind the 'bullshit-o-meter' and
above the 'chocolate detector', was the noticeable lack of dust on
the van's sliding side door. Everything else in the fire's path
displayed a thin layer of gritty ash, due to the intense heat
crisping the surface. The van's door had what Kat could make out
from that distance, hand-prints in the grime.

Pulling her awareness back in, she motioned
for Jake to scoot closer. Once he could see around the corner, Kat
pointed at the van. She made sure to keep her movements slow and
below the line of sight for anyone who might be watching from the
junked vehicle. “I'm thinking that would make a great hidey-hole to
surprise unsuspecting survivors. Or occasional zombies, for that
matter. There's a reason all the creepers had them before the
zombies started rising. All sorts of nasty possibilities.”