The Reanimates (Book 2): The Highway (8 page)

Storms Settling In

The snow began to fall again. We weren't going to be able to leave any time soon. I felt a bit trapped by this change, but knowing that the home owners were not coming back fixed some of the mixed feelings I had about taking over the bedrooms. I talked Tanya into taking DaWayne into the guest bedroom and setting him up there. Tanya insisted that Mercedes take the other bed, and after a moment of protest, she finally accepted it.

Mercedes was an awesome woman. In the old days she would sit on her rocking chair on her balcony, when the weather wasn't so hot that you melted into a puddle of sweat, and watch over the common grounds. She had a kind word for everyone. If you needed something that was within her physical limits, like a batch of cupcakes for a school party, she would whip it up in a heart beat and go beyond. I know this because I remember that one year I was supposed to make cupcakes for the harvest festival the first grade class was having. I had picked up one of those box mixes and had intended to make them the night before the party. I got called back to work because of a staffing issue, and Trent wasn't home yet. I needed to have someone watch Drew. Mrs. Mendez, our downstairs neighbor, wasn't home so I knocked on Mercedes door to see if she would be willing to keep an eye on him. She happily agreed. Drew asked me about the cupcakes and I told him to talk to his dad, maybe he would have enough time, and reminded him that in the worst case scenario I would buy some pre-made ones from the grocery store on the way to school. Mercedes volunteered to make them so I ran back to my apartment to get the mix and eggs. She took them and said she'd have Drew be her special helper.

The next morning when I got home there was a pile of cupcakes on the table so I snagged one. It was not cake mix cupcakes. These were absolutely amazing. When Drew came out of the bathroom I asked him about the cupcakes. He told me all about the adventure they had making them from scratch. I remember the delight on his face when he told me he didn't know that you could make cupcakes like that, he thought they only came from the mix box.

I remember knocking on Mercedes door after I took Drew to school to pay her for watching Drew the night before. I pulled $40 from my scrubs pocket. When I went to hand it to her she had an offended look on her face. "I didn't help for money. You keep that. He's a good kid and he made an old lady feel useful. That was worth more than money." I nodded in understanding and thanked her again. As I turned to leave she said, "Please bring him around more often. I promised to teach him how to make cookies and, by his request, how to make birthday cake, since he told me birthday cake is the best kind of cake." I smiled a big smile and agreed instantly. She seemed to have a glow about her knowing that she was going to be able to cook and have a kid around again. I realized how alone Mercedes must feel. She had mobility issues and in a second floor apartment, she had to feel trapped. With no family, she spent most of her days alone. I vowed to make sure I spent more time with her and to send Drew to visit as well.

With Mercedes and DaWayne settled in we all had to decide what to do with everyone else. Trisha came up with the idea of the boys room and a girls room for the kids. We set all the girls up in the sewing room, including Trisha, who didn't want the little ones to feel alone and the boys in the reading room. We helped them set up all their bedding in rows. I suggested that Matt and Lucas set up their families in the master room, since there were so many in their group. We realized in the living room that the sofa was a hide away bed. Tyreese, Tanya, Trent, and I insisted that Jody and Erin take the pull out. They would create a natural roll guard for JJ. I quite liked the spot we were in, near the right side of the fireplace. Tyreese moved their bedding closer to the fireplace as well, off to the left side.

After everyone was settled, we called a meeting. Trent started it off. "Good morning, everyone. I figured it was time to figure out what we are doing here. It's snowing a lot. The roads are covered. Until I can come up with a snow plow plan we're stuck here. There are worse places to be. We have running water and tons of wood. In a while, I plan on locating the propane tank. I also want to set up a scout team to find out if there are other people here or if there are zombies.  We can do a house to house search, but the scout team will fine tune the details. Now if there are no questions I'm going to turn this meeting to Cali." The faces turned to me expectantly.

"Okay, my turn huh?" I began. "As I'm sure you all know, we have running water!" A round of applause erupted and I grinned. "I'm totally thrilled about this, too. It has been a while. We'll be able to wash up and flush the toilet again. The perks are great but to be the downer in the group, I have to say that I'm concerned that the water will lull everyone into believing its safe. To me all water is tainted unless proven otherwise. We still need to boil it before we plan on drinking it. We can set it in a snow bank to cool it down afterward to drink. It would suck to have learned the hard way that we should have done this in the first place.

"I don't want anyone to get sick right now. We have limited resources med wise. Keep warm and with every dinner I will put out a multivitamin and I really want everyone to take it. It's easier to prevent than to fix.

"Now there is one last thing we need to talk about. We know that at some point there were zombies in Scipio. The previous owner of the house had a wife that was infected. He put her down so don't worry about her, but we can't be fooled into thinking everything is great because the town is tiny. Be safe, okay? Any questions?"

Tyreese raised the first question. "Do we know what happened to the guy?"

I drew a deep breath before answering. "We do. He committed suicide in the barn. He left a note about how he came to that solution."

The room sat silent for a moment. None of us knew the guy, but we all felt for him and the pain he was in.

Scipio's Scouts

Trent, Tyreese, Matt, and I were the members of the scout team. Trent had tried to argue me off the team but failed. My first argument on going was what if we find a person alive that needed medical attention. That didn't work. Trent retorted that he knew enough stuff to get the person back to me. The most compelling argument I made was the girl factor. "Trent," I started, "try to imagine being a woman with two small children. Zombies have just ripped through killing everyone you know. Now three strange men are pounding on your door asking if there is anyone inside. She's scared for her safety and for her children. She doesn't know if you're bad guys. A girl, like me, who is clearly there on her own free will, knocking on her door with the strange guys would help dial her anxiety down and maybe no one gets shot." Trent and Tyreese looked at each other and gave a look of defeat. Both turned to Matt, who started laughing.

"Don't fight this. We already lost." Matt said, between chuckles.

Being from California, we were absolutely unprepared for snow weather. It came down to being left with no choice but to raid the owner's closets before we went out to brave the elements. I felt like I was grave robbing as we shuffled through to find something that would fit. Once we were sufficiently bundled up, we went outside. Even with the coats and scarves the cold bit into us. I stumbled in the drifts. We decided that going right would be a good start. The snow started to fall again. The impending storm brought in deep thick clouds, and the light from the sun seemed to be turned off. The first house we came on was built with a similar floor plan as the house we were staying in, single story with a living room and kitchen on one end and judging by the way the windows were laid out a couple bedrooms on the other side. We peered through windows that had gaps in the curtains and saw no movement. We knocked on the doors and no one answered. Tyreese tested the knob and found the door unlocked. We crept inside and through the living room to the kitchen. It was a fine balance to make enough noise that if there were people inside that they knew we were people too but in the event of zombies to be quiet enough to not bring a horde on us. Tyreese went through the hall with his gun drawn to make sure we were really alone here. While he was gone I shone a light around the living room, mostly being nosy about the people that lived here. There were several family photographs hanging on the wall, a picture of Jesus, and the Salt Lake Mormon temple. When Tyreese came back and gave us the all clear, we slid our back packs off our shoulders and put them on the counter. We opened all the cupboards and grabbed as much food as we could find. I crept into the bathroom to see if they left behind any medicine. There was a half full bottle of headache medicine, children's aspirin, and a half-finished antibiotic prescription. I had the grim thought that at least antibiotic resistance was not a large deal anymore. I bagged up the finds and went into the next room. I was looking for blankets to make more floor padding out of since it was a lot harder on that floor than I had anticipated. I didn't find the blankets that I was after, but that was fine by me. In the smaller bedroom closet were many buckets of emergency preparedness goods. They were gaining in popularity over the years with disasters like hurricane Katrina and various earthquakes. I remembered that I saw a picture of a Mormon temple hanging in the hall. Between being in Utah and the temple picture it was safe to say this was part of their year supply that the Mormon Church encouraged. Score for us. There was likely water somewhere too. The guys were in the other room so I called for them to see our spoils. They whooped with joy and got the hand truck from the garage that they had discovered. We quickly discarded the hand truck idea when we realized that we had to trek it back through the deepest snow I'd ever been in. Wheels and snow would not work well. Matt went back in the garage and produced 3 garbage pail lids. Trent had seen twine in the garage so he went in for it. When he brought it back I ran the twine through the holes in the handles of the trash can lid to be able to tow them. We piled the lids up with several of the buckets and then ran the twine through the bucket handles to tie them together. Within moments we were on our way with our first load.

We decided to call it enough after the first house was gone through. We weren't in a rush and had found a nice supply of stuff, which was going to take a few trips. We were laughing and joking as we were walking down the street. The surprise in our good fortune had been a great morale booster. We weren't paying attention to where we were walking when Matt tripped over something in the road. He landed hard into the snow. He stood back up and went to investigate what tripped him up. From our point of view there was a slight snow drift around where he fell. He was brushing away the snow piles in front of him to see what made him fall when he made a gruesome discovery, almost losing his hand in the process. The unknown obstruction was a zombie. At the last brush away of the snow, Matt uncovered a twisted face, lower jaw snapping away. The zombie lying there was immobile with the exception of that teeth breaking, snapping jaw.

Zombies freeze. No wonder we hadn't seen any before that point. We just assumed that when the zombies finished ripping through this town leaving no food supply that they has just migrated on. I think we were giving zombies more credit than they were worthy of. There were points where the physiology of zombies was similar to ours. They had to have water as a part of their cells. The cells worked by fluid and the transfer of ions to make the cells contract to move. Something had to carry the electrical charge of the hijacked brain stem to the rest of the body. If there was a way to send the charge though the frozen pathways, rock solid frozen meat would not bend, no amount of hijacking could overrun that, the body would just have to wait until it thawed enough to move again. Trent took his knife from the sheath and stabbed the zombie in the eye. Foul black fluid seeped into the snow, staining the crystal white with gore.

With this discovery, the snow all around stopped looking so clean and pretty. It now was nothing but camouflage hiding threats under its blanket. Part of me wanted to stand there forever because I knew that I was safe where I stood, but a bigger part of me said I needed to get home and away from the snow, to where I could see where I was going to step. I wished that we had gotten around to creating real hover boards before the world ended. There were so many things that the movies of the past promised we would have by the new millennium that now we were never going to have. I really wanted to have that flying car too. I had to believe that I was not the only one that was not amused by this situation. I started off a chat with the others about movies like Back To The Future with the auto drying jackets and self-tying laces, and how all of that stuff would have been neat right now. It took a minute but Matt joined in with the episodes of The Jetsons and how little space ships would totally have a real world application here. Trent threw his favorite episodes of the Twilight Zone into the mix. It kept us walking and kept us focused on getting back. I was so grateful when we made it back fully intact.

When we got back, we slid the supplies into the barn. The guys went in for coffee while I began to poke around the workshop. I wanted to come up with a multipurpose weapon that we could use when we were walking. I played around with the shovels and rakes that we took out of Tom's closet. I looked over the handles trying to come up with something that could work as a probe in the snow to feel for stumbling blocks. I sat down on the cold dirt to think when it occurred to me that I saw a set of skis in the rafters when we took Tom's body down. The pole could work as a lightweight probe if we took off the ring, and with a little sharpening it would sink into a skull well. It also hit me that if we took the skis and a chunk of wood we could make a sled to transport things from the houses easily. The garbage can lids had worked, but it would be nice to have something that was larger and flat all around.

The other thing I wanted to come up with was a close proximity weapon. Trent had a large hunting knife that he loved. Lucas had his sword. I had a gun and a cross bow but nothing that would help kill zombies that were close without making a sound. I made a circle in the barn to see what else could work with some creativity. Lying on its side was a lawn mower. I walked up to it and studied the blade. I don't think I ever really considered the set up of a lawn mower before that point. I figured that a lawn mower looked more like a fan. I was surprised to see that it was one straight piece. I ran my finger lightly on the edge and noticed that it was pretty dull. It didn't need to be razor sharp, after all, it was there to tear grass. I decided to take the blade off and turn one end into a handle and then sharpen the other to create a make shift machete. It was a cliché to have a machete in a zombie apocalypse movie, but maybe they were on to something.

I went to work on removing the blade since it looked easy enough; all I had to do was remove one nut, after all. It took forever to get it off! Years of caked on grime worked as cement locking it in place. When it finally moved an eighth of a turn I felt like I had accomplished a miracle. When it finally twisted all the way off, I had a layer of sweat on my face, despite the below freezing temperatures. I gently lifted the blade out and turned it over in my hands. I liked the weight and balance of it. It was about twenty inches long overall. I looked at the edges and decided which one I wanted to sharpen and which one I would turn into a handle. I poked around for strips of leather and discovered a belt with a broken buckle. I wrapped it around the handle as a grip and tied the ends off. I gave it a test swing and a wide smile crept across my face as I felt like a super hero with a sword of justice. I took my new machete and the zombie probe stick into the house to ask how I should go about sharpening it. When I showed it to Trent, he looked at it with appreciation, especially with the probe. He commented that making more of these would be easy, pieces of wrought iron would do the trick. I told him about my thought on turning the ski blades into a sled. He thought about it for a moment and came to the conclusion that it was better than nothing but we needed to come up with other ideas too. I showed him the machete like it was Excalibur handed down from the gods. I asked him what he thought about how to go about sharpening the blade, but he didn't have any ideas that we could do without a power grinder or sander. He suggested I go talk to Lucas since he had a stone at least, and maybe there was something that he could tell me about sharpening stuff. Trent was still studying the blade edge when Lucas came through the door.

"I found it!" Lucas announced when he came through the door with much exuberance.

"Found what, exactly?" Trent skeptically asked.

"The propane tank," Lucas retorted, "I found an almost full propane tank in the shed next to the house. Lines look like they are in good shape and are still connected to the house. Looks like Tom had shut it off before he took the exit. I want to turn it back on, but I don't want people in the house when I do, just in case."

Kyle entered the room tossing a baseball up and down as he walked. "Why?" he asked, "You gonna blow up the place?"

Lucas laughed and answered, "No, little man. I don't plan on it. Just a little precaution." He turned to me and Trent and said, "Oh, and I found the water source while you were gone. There's a well powered by a windmill."

We all gathered in the yard as Lucas fiddled with stuff in the shed. He came out with a grin, and walked into the house. He stopped in the mud room and messed with the hot water heater, then went to the kitchen. A few minutes later he came out with a huge smile. "Stove works. Looks like the water heater is going too, though that will take a bit to prove."

Cheers rang out. We felt like we hit a jackpot of high living with the idea of cooking on a stove and having a hot shower. It would definitely be easy to over do these modern day conveniences so we would have to be mindful to not waste the precious resource of fuel. We made shower schedules and made sure the message had gone out about the 3 minute shower rule was understood by everyone.