Fortunes & Failures - 03 (41 page)

Finally, the colonel emerged.  He waved the group over and ushered them on board.  Everybody was required to sign the list so that each could be called back one at a time and checked to ensure they were clean.  Chad noticed a few scowls as he walked up the aisle when his name was eventually called. Everybody checked out clean.  Chad didn’t know about the others…but he
 
felt
 
dirty.

Late that afternoon, a sign came into view.  “Yosemite Village Just Ahead.”  A small cheer erupted from everybody.  It died right around the time the first zombie stumbled out from between two buildings.

* * * * *

16

Geek Delivery

“Somebody needs a bath,” Aleah said, waving her hand in front of her face.

“Yeah?” Kevin asked, making a dramatic showing of sniffing each armpit.  “Or maybe…” he looked up with a devious leer.

“Don’t you dare!”

“C’mon, baby,” Kevin pled, trying his hardest not to laugh.

“Kevin David Dreon!” Aleah held both hands out in front of herself, slowly backing up and out through the main entry doors that were propped open to allow the cool autumn breeze of the day to blow through the large building.  It possessed a very crypt-like nastiness that everybody was anxious to be rid of.

“Aleah Christina Brock!” Kevin replied in a mocking impersonation of Aleah.  He faked a stagger, trying to look like he’d tripped.

Aleah bit and lunged for him with a little shriek.  That was when Kevin sprung.  Turning his fall into a tackle, he wrapped his arms around the coverall-clad blonde, immediately appreciating how curvy she was.

“You evil man!” Aleah brought up her fists and pounded on Kevin’s chest.  Her mouth was silenced with his and all protests vanished as she returned his kiss.

Resting his forehead against hers, Kevin looked into her astonishingly blue eyes.  He couldn’t help but marvel for a moment.  Aleah was simply the most beautiful woman he’d ever known.  He felt a tinge of something in the back of his mind trying to ruin the moment by reminding him that, in the ‘old world’ he would’ve never had a chance with somebody like Aleah.

“What’s wrong?” Aleah’s hand touched Kevin’s cheek.

“Nothin’,” he replied, swatting away at the dark cloud trying to settle over his happiness.

“Don’t lie to me, something is wrong.  It’s written all over your face.”

“Kevin, there are a lot of things I may think about you. Stupid is not likely to ever be one of them.”

“I can’t help it.  Sometimes when I look at you,” he began, occasionally stumbling awkwardly over the words.  Then, it came in a rush.  “You’re so gorgeous.  I mean, I’d have bikini posters of you on my wall…  You’d never be caught dead with a guy like me if it weren’t for all this crap.  And sometimes the reality of that hits me and I worry that, one day, we’ll find this group and some buff jock-type will scoop you up.”

He stared down at the ground while he spoke, scared at the look he might find in her eyes.  Thinking it was one thing, but seeing that confirmation in her eyes was something else entirely.

“Okay,” Aleah sighed, “I take my previous statement back…you actually can be stupid.” She took his face in her hands and Kevin could feel the callouses from all the hard work she’d done alongside him the past few days.  He looked into her eyes, dreading what he would see.  “Do you know what I was doing when this nightmare began?”

“Flying home or something?” Kevin shrugged.

“And planning my wedding.” Aleah stepped back and reached in her back pocket.  She produced a laminated photo that had seen better days and shoved it at Kevin.

He reluctantly accepted the photo, then blinked.  If a Hollywood casting agent were looking to fill a role in the modern remake of
 
Revenge of the Nerds
, this guy was a guaranteed lock. And there he was, complete with glasses with lenses so thick that the man’s eyes looked gigantic, like an anime character.  He was laughing at something, but he had both arms wrapped around Aleah’s waist.  His chin was resting on her shoulder and she was reaching back, cupping his cheek with her hand.

“His name was Daniel Wormdahl and he was probably the smartest guy I ever knew.  The first day we met was in molecular physics…he was correcting the instructor.” Aleah smiled, obviously remembering.  “I paid the guy sitting beside him twenty bucks to trade seats.”

“I don’t—”

“Understand?” Aleah cut him off.  Tears were brimming over in her eyes.  “Why is it that when people see me, they have such a hard time believing that I have no interest in brain dead jocks or meatheads that spend more time in front of a mirror than Narcissus?”

“I’m sorry,” Kevin muttered, feeling incredibly foolish as well as clueless about what to do.

“Why is it, that, even with the world dead, we can’t get past the same stupidity that filled our lives? Why does everything have to try and fit itself into the same molds as before despite the fact that there were gigantic and obvious flaws?”

They stood there for a moment, Aleah’s sniffles the only sound.  Then, Kevin stepped close to her, wrapping his arms around her waist.  He kissed her on each check, then drew back and looked her in the eyes.  “I’m sorry.  And I appreciate you sharing something so personal with me.” A big grin crept across his face.

“What?” Aleah sniffed, scrubbing the tears away from her face with the sleeves of her sweatshirt.

“You are a geek groupie,” Kevin sing-songed.

“Is that like a chubby chaser?” Aleah managed a smile, slapping Kevin’s chest playfully.

“The sunset,” Kevin said, bringing Aleah around beside him, his arm snuggled around her waist.  “It’s so incredible.  It doesn’t care that the world has gone to hell.”

Aleah rested her head against Kevin and sighed.  “I think this is the first sunset I’ve appreciated in months…I used to love them.”

Erin stared out the window as the sun began to vanish behind the low, rolling hills full of trees changing colors.  She watched Matt and Heather as they made their way back from someplace, both carrying an assortment of tools and weapons.  Matt was healing up and gaining his strength in noticeable leaps and bounds every day.

And here she sat.  Alone.  Upstairs.  Everyone was busy from sunrise to sunset.  Then, as it grew dark, they were tired and very poor company for a young girl who was starting to get more than a little stir crazy.  Why didn’t anybody want to keep her company?

Ow
, she thought, wincing.  There it was again.  Something very much like cramps kept happening.  In fact, it’d been getting worse the past hour.  She’d gone to the bathroom, but nothing happened.  She went to step away from the window when another cramp hit.  This time, it doubled her over.

Erin tried to cry out, but this one had taken her breath away.  Just as it felt like it was easing up, another one hit.  This time, a trickle of fluid ran down her thighs.  Erin managed a strangled scream; weak at first, but it grew in volume fast.



The frightened cry echoed throughout the enormous club house.  From every direction, the sound of running footsteps could be heard.  Kevin and Aleah met Shari and Peter at the stairs that led up to the offices being converted into living quarters.

Kevin was the fastest and led the way up the narrow staircase.  He reached the door just as another wail made the hair on his arms stand up.  Erin sounded terrified.  He threw open the door and froze.  Sitting bowlegged on the floor in a small puddle, pants down to her ankles, was Erin Bergman.  He had just enough time to realize that it was indeed a tiny head poking out between her thighs before he lost consciousness.

Peter caught him just enough to stop his fall, laid him aside, then stepped over him into the room.  Erin stared up at him, her face a mixture of fear, pain, and embarrassment.

“Shari, go get my kit, Aleah, grab the stack of sterile towels we put in the cabinet, then we’ll need some water boiled for the cleanup,” Peter barked.  “Oh, and tell Heather to come get Sleeping Beauty.”

Both women glanced at Erin, then nodded and ran off to take care of their assigned tasks.  Peter nudged Kevin the rest of the way out of the doorway and shut it.

“Okay, Erin,” he knelt beside the trembling girl, “let’s get this baby out, shall we?”



“Shari and Aleah are in there helping Peter,” Heather answered.

“Wow,” Kevin sighed, “there’s about to be a real baby here.  That’s—”

“Complicated?” Heather offered when Kevin seemed to freeze.

“Sure,” Kevin said with a shrug.  “But it’ll be amazing, too.”

“Look, I’m not trying to sound like a complete hater.” Heather learned against the wall and slid to a seated position beside Kevin.  “It’s just that…if we have to get moving in a hurry, or if we are hiding out and trying to be quiet…this makes things tougher.”

“All the more reason we need to get this place secure,” Kevin said.

“Speaking of that,” Matt spoke up,  “we pulled the three trucks in front of the main entry gates.”

Early in the day, Matt and Heather had snuck into the residential neighborhood just up the road.  There were five houses along the first road, each with vehicles in the driveway.  It had seemed strange until they noticed the enormous RV at the end of the street.  It had obviously swerved, probably to avoid a zombie, and crashed into the front of the house that sat at the head of the tee-intersection.

Matt had gone down to get a closer look and saw that the yard had been stomped down flat.  It looked as if there had been a lot of zombies here at some point.  The RV doors were open, and there was dried blood everywhere.  It was brown with age.  This had happened a long time ago. 

When they went back to the first house, it showed signs of a hasty evacuation; drawers were open, clothes thrown everywhere, cupboards had been picked clean.  While there had been so much taken, there was a lot in the way of tools and things like detergents and cleaning supplies.  Getting the gas-guzzling SUVs in the driveways started and driving them to the entrance to further bolster their defenses was a secondary benefit. Even though Kevin had built gates and put them up, nobody really felt good about it.  The wall of vehicles were another precaution that they’d weighed the dangers of noise versus safety.

Kevin pointed out that they hadn’t seen a zombie since they’d arrived and cleared the place out.  The vote was unanimous.  This place would be awesome…as long as they didn’t encounter any groups like Shaw and his men again.

“I thought that four of us were gonna make that trip?” Kevin asked after another horrendous groan and scream came from behind the door where Erin was now using an amazing strand of profanity.

“Heather was bored,” Matt shrugged.

“Did you tell anybody you were leaving?”

“Actually,” Heather spoke up, “we let Peter and Shari know.  We even asked where you and Aleah were.  You were up at the groundskeeper’s shack and Aleah was out at the north fence cutting back the brush.”

“Why didn’t you come and get us?”