Zombie Fallout 2 (34 page)

Unbeknownst to me I had somehow levitated down into the kitchen. Carol looked up from some delicious smelling stew she was preparing.

I obeyed. Not that standing anymore was becoming much of an option. Drool landed on my blue boxer shorts. “Ah not frightie mighties!”

I pointed to my knee, just since my short jaunt down into the kitchen my knee had grown nearly half again what I had started with. So much so that the ace bandage was nearly stretched to its capacity.

“Talbot!” Tracy said alarmed. “What the fuck?”

I don’t remember much about the walk out of the kitchen and onto the most comfortable couch I have ever had the pleasure of laying down on, except for a lot of finger pointing and laughing. Most of that coming from BT and he was more drugged up than I was.

CHAPTER 23

I didn’t have a clue how long I slept. When I finally awoke it wasn’t to the easy, peaceful, content feeling one arises to after a deep and satisfying sleep. There was no exaggerated stretch as I alit from the bed and casually scratched my nuts. Oh come on, that’s the first thing after the body unfolding, that every guy does when they get out of bed. Don’t ask me why, maybe it’s an evolutionary legacy, probably to wipe away prehistoric mites. Anyway back to the story, the distinctive sound of a gunshot prohibits one from the normal routine. I stood up as rapidly as my vertigo-addled brain would allow. Who knew we were in the midst of a 7.0 earthquake. I braced myself against the couch until the worst of the shakes had subsided. I took no small pleasure in the fact that the pain in my knee had subsided to something I could live with, if not entirely like.

I still pushed off with my right leg though. No sense in tempting the fates. BT stirred on his resting place but did not awaken. Had I imagined the whole thing? I heard nothing else. The only thing that gave me pause was that a single gunshot these days was rarer than a virgin Catholic schoolgirl. It was approaching dawn. I could tell by the murky light filtering through the windows but no one was up that I could tell. There was no sense of alarm, no commotion, no damn bacon cooking, ooh that sounded good. I had finally managed to gingerly walk my way up to the hallway that led to the front door, when a fully winter weather bundled Carol came in toting her shotgun.

She didn’t seem particularly startled to see me standing there. “You know you’re still in your underwear right?” She asked me.

Reflexively, I looked down slightly more embarrassed this time than the last.

She laughed. “Don’t worry about it, want some coffee?” She stooped over and placed her shotgun next to the door, in a holder that seemed perfectly tailored to that specific job. She looked up to see me watching her. “Did I wake you? She asked.

I had a sarcastic comment all lined up but then I thankfully remembered she was my mother-in-law and wisely thought better of unloosing my dumb-ass comment on the world.

“Oh those first few days were tough. I was too scared to sleep. However, even fear will only go so far. More than once I woke up to one of those things at the door or the window. Damn near sent my ticker into overdrive. I can’t tell you how many times I just wanted to shoot through the door or the window. Good thing the practical side of me took over. I don’t have the materials to fix what I would have destroyed.”

“What the hell did you do?” I asked alarmed.

“I opened the window up and then killed them.” She said as naturally as if she had opened a window to let an apple pie cool on the windowsill.

“Well I rigged an alarm. I went out about a fifty or so feet from the house and set wooden stakes into the ground, every twenty feet or so in a circle around the house. Then I screwed an eye hook in each one, about waist high.” She said as she held her hand roughly at her belt line. “Then I threaded rope through all of them. Then finally I brought a rope all the way up to the house and attached it to a bell. Damn thing was worse than an alarm clock. Couldn’t hit snooze, if you get my meaning.”

“After Tommy’s message, I took down the part that led to the house and the barn. I didn’t want you to run it over mistakenly. Just because I can do hard work doesn’t mean I want to repeat it and a good portion of what is still up is under snow. Last night after our little talk in the kitchen... ”

She laughed again. “No I’ll get over it. So after you went to sleep,” She emphasized ‘sleep’ “I re-strung the alarm”. Didn’t expect to get company but I didn’t want to make any unexpected guests feel welcome.”

“Was there just the one then?” I asked her.

She looked hard at me. “You must have been sleeping pretty heavily. There were three. Travis and Jen took care of them all. They’re still out there making sure no more are coming. I wanted to get my old bones inside and by the fire. Now that I’ve got help I’m not too proud to use it.”

“Three?”

“And by the looks of them they look like they’ve traveled a ways.”

I bet they had! Fucking Eliza, I was going to slit her throat personally. I momentarily thought about heading outside, but garbed like I was, my manhood would shrivel to half its size and that I could not stomach or afford.

“I brought some clothes down for you, figured you’d want to go out as soon as you got up and the less stairs you climb right now the better.”

I heard Jen and Travis come inside. It would have been hard not too, as loud as they were stomping the excess snow off their boots. I had just finished pulling on my third sweater and met them in the hallway. Jen’s color was nearly the shade of the material she was liberally shedding in the mudroom.

“Is that bacon?” Travis said happily as he headed into the kitchen.

I noticed that Jen waited patiently until Travis was out of earshot before she spoke.

“I won’t swear it Mike, the damage was just too great, but I’d bet money those people, I mean zombies.” She shook her head. “Were from Little Turtle.”

“You know what I meant.”
“Yeah I know what you meant. I just want to choose not to believe it.”

“Figured as much. I’d sort of hoped that maybe this was the place where we could finally stop and plant some roots. It feels so right here. Cold sure, but the energy seems so strong. I guess maybe I thought this might be some sort of hallowed ground. Crazy right?”

“No I don’t think so. We all want somewhere that we don’t constantly have to feel like it could be our last minute. I love this place too but it’s not the most easily defendable.”

“Wow, I think you may have been around me too long. My crazy is starting to rub off.”

“Not necessarily a bad thing Talbot, now let’s get some of that bacon. I’m starving.”

Tommy was already sitting at the table, strips of bacon hanging out of both his hands. His broad smile dappled with the fried goodness. “Morfning Mftr. T!”

There was one way in to the kitchen and I had been standing in the hallway that led in. I would have bet a mountain of Kit-Kats that the boy had not stepped into that hallway to get past me. “How’d you get here Tommy?”

“I walked.” He smiled again.

I was looking for more than the literal explanation. Tommy looked down at his hands, seemingly more concerned from which hand he was going to take his next bite from than answering me.

Travis and Carol were not going to be of any help. They were both at the stove. Carol was showing Travis how to make an omelet. Although I could tell from his posture he was more intent on eating said omelet than on learning how to make it. Maybe I would have pressed the issue, most likely not, but the rest of the family chose that time to come in. Tommy’s eyes twinkled at mine.

Breakfast was phenomenal. Farm fresh everything. I knew processed, and artificially preserved foods were a necessary evil of our society. Oh but what we had given up when we had moved off of our family farms and into the denizens of depravity, that would be cities, in non-sarcasm speak. Then it all came rushing back to me why we moved away, as I cleaned out the pens and fed the animals that had so graciously allowed us to gain sustenance from them. I enviously eyed the dairy cow. She had seemed completely at ease when I had first entered the animal enclosure but each subsequent time that I stopped to stare longingly at her, she more and more sensed the predatory nature of my visits.