Get Off My L@wn - A Zombie Novel (8 page)

R
uth Ann took some antihistamines to help her
sleep. She went to the living room to the couches. We didn’t want to be too far
away from each other. We believed our house to be a fortress, but it didn’t
matter. We needed to stay close to each other tonight.

I sat in the kitchen, angry that I had let Ruth
Ann wander into a potentially lethal situation practically in our own front
yard. I grabbed a pencil and pad and started thinking about what stuff I had
and how I could apply it.

It occurred to me that, like it or not, our home
is situated in a battlefield. While we had more surveillance capability than
most homes, we needed to be able to see further out at night. It also occurred
to me that there were no neighbors to complain and nobody to complain to if we
started shaping the battlefield more in our favor.

Hell, if we could loot our neighbor’s homes – I
mean borrow from our neighbors, why couldn’t we use their homes to help keep us
safe?

Just before midnight, the police scanner stopped
on an FRS channel and burped out some static. FRS is the Family Radio Service.
These little, often cheap, handheld radios used to be available everywhere. The
police scanner covers a lot of bands and stops only when it gets a strong
enough signal. Unfortunately, that could be anywhere in a transmission,
including its end.

The scanner is programmed to dwell on a
frequency for a few seconds when it finds a signal on the assumption that
someone would quickly respond. Someone did. I heard a crackly “OK” and then
another burp of static. I turned off the scanning feature and stayed on this
one FRS frequency but I heard nothing else until I went to bed.

Somewhere within a small number of miles of
here, at least two people were alive. Since I heard nothing else for as long as
I listened, I assume they were passing through. Still, it was nice to know we
weren’t alone for a few minutes at least.

O
n Saturday (Day 31), Ruth Ann was up before me
as usual. The events of yesterday seemed forgotten. The last of our coffee sat
waiting for me on the table. As I reached for it, I reflected for a moment
about how I was sad to see the coffee run out. I knew that millions maybe
billions had already died and would continue to die of hunger, thirst disease,
and the undead.

I wondered how a person could be empathic on a
conceptual level and entirely self-absorbed about what’s right in front them. I
know I’m not the first to observe this. Didn’t Stalin say “One death is a
tragedy; one million is a statistic”? I wonder what Uncle Joe would say about billions.

“I saw deer wandering through at sunup,” she
said.

“Really? Turkeys the other night and deer this
morning? Yet we didn’t see any livestock when we went to town. I wonder which
it is, do the dead eat animals or not?”

“I don’t know but I do know how long one deer
will feed us. We should take one if we can.”

“You know how I just love to get up that early.”

“You like to eat, right?”

“OK – we’ll do it but only if there aren’t any
walkers around.”

“Duh!”

Assuming no unwanted pedestrians tonight, we
agreed we’d be ready to hunt tomorrow morning.

I told Ruth Ann about hearing a signal on an FRS
band last night. She perked up.

“We don’t have any kind of transmitter do we?”

“No. I ordered FRS radios from Amazon for that
last delivery. They didn’t make it. So, right, we have no way of initiating
contact with anybody.”

Some days back I had connected up one of the
Raspberry Pi’s to function as a local email server. We used the WIFI portion of
our phones to buzz each other via email. That would do us little good trying to
reach out to anyone else.

“We need some radios,” she said.

“When do you think we should do it?”

“Do what?”

“Go to the building supply warehouse. They’ll
have that there and more.”

“Yeah, and how many zombies? They were right
outside the house Doug. We’re not exactly a SWAT team that can go into a dark
warehouse complex and come out alive. Put radios down on the “wants” list.”

I did not dare mention that it was her idea to
seek out radios in the first place.

Our list of “wants” wasn’t terribly long but it
wasn’t empty either. Fortunately, the list of “needs” remained blank for now.
That’ll change, I thought to myself. I’d put coffee on the “needs” list or even
on a “must have” list if we had one. As it was, Ruth Ann rolled her eyes at me
when I put coffee on the “wants” list.

“I want more arrows,” Ruth Ann said while
looking at nothing in particular. “If the dead are close enough for a bow shot,
we might be in bad shape if we fire a gun.”

“I bought four boxes of them. They came in that
last UPS truck.”

“You bought the small boxes, six to a box. Plus
I don’t have as many broad heads as I’d like. You didn’t buy any of those.”

“Who would have thought you could buy an arrow
that didn’t come with an arrow head?” I said defensively. “Flynn up the street
bow hunted. They’re long gone. I don’t think they’ll mind if we “borrowed” some.”

Flynn’s house is the one north of the Boetche’s.
By now I was completely untroubled by any notion of a double standard. We had
killed looters. Now borrowing a few things from absent neighbors seemed quite
reasonable.

“Given how useful a bow is, don’t you think he
would have taken his?”

“No, they packed a few suitcases and got out on
the first day of evacuations. Their kid needs medication. They weren’t going to
rough it.”

We decided a trip to Flynn’s house would be in
order.

I brought up what I was thinking about the night
before. We could use our neighbors’ empty homes to extend our own safety.

“Let’s try nailing one of those spare IR
emitters up on Boetche’s roof as a start. The infrared lights on our cameras
don’t reach too far. If we place an IR light source on their roof, we will be
able to see all the way to their house. Their south side faces us so that
little solar phone charger I bought last year can trickle charge batteries
during the day and it’ll shine all night.”

“You can leave that sort of thing outside?”

“I have no idea. Can you spare a Tupperware
container?”

“No… you can have a Rubbermaid”

I explained to Ruth Ann the holes I needed to
get current from the little solar panel to a battery pack and out again to feed
the IR emitter. We used some silicone caulk to seal the holes.

Before we headed out to the Flynn’s, Ruth Ann
went up to the roof to tend the garden. I topped off the water vessels in the
house by running the pump. It didn’t take very long to refill the bathtubs (one
for gardening water, the other for a sequence of washing us, cleaning and a
final reuse for flushing) and one of our collapsible five gallon containers
(for drinking). I joined Ruth Ann on the roof. I gently swept a thin film of
dust off the solar panels then checked their connections and mountings. While
doing that I looked around for where I might put a WIFI access point to extend
our range outside the house.

Ruth Ann and I took a good look at the Boetche’s
house and agreed that the top of their garage would be the best place to put
the IR emitter. Unlike our garage which was tucked under our master bedroom,
the Boetche’s garage was semidetached. We’d need only a one story ladder which
we already had.

For a while we looked at Flynn’s house through
our binoculars. There was a tree line beyond his house and a lot of space which
we could not see. The house looked untouched. There was no reason to think
otherwise. The group of creatures that passed through the other day left only
the two stragglers Ruth Ann had killed so far as we could see.

We decided to visit Flynn’s house first before
putting up the IR emitter. We’d been close to Boetche’s already and knew what
we could see from our house was still clear. We decided we’d go alongside the
Boetche’s house and peek around front. This would give us a look up their
street towards Flynn’s at what we couldn’t see from here.

We took along a crowbar and some duct tape to
help with getting inside Flynn’s. We armed ourselves as we did the day before
with the exception of Ruth Ann’s hatchet, which was still where she dropped it.
We folded up a plastic garbage bag and put it into a backpack along with
flashlights and some nitrile gloves. On the way back from Flynn’s we planned to
retrieve the hatchet and arrow left between our house and the Boetche’s.

We made it to Boetche’s house without incident.
I got a look at the monsters Ruth Ann had dispatched the previous day.
Continuing past them quickly was the only thing that saved me from retching
from the sight and smell. We hugged the side of the house and stopped to regain
our breath. We listened. Hearing nothing we inched to the front corner of the
house. Peaking around, we could see the front of Flynn’s house to the north.
All was quiet. We stayed there to watch and listen for ten minutes anyway. This
sort of slow movement with stops for watching and listening (and sniffing) was
recommended in several of the zombie apocalypse survival guides we read. This
advice was spot on.

We went back around the rear of the Boetche’s
house to head over to the Flynn’s through their backyards. Staying in both
house’s backyards minimized the time we’d be exposed to ground we hadn’t
watched closely over the past month.

We reached the edge of the tall wild grass
opening up to the Flynn house. Their raised deck was ahead of us, entering
their second floor. The Flynn’s stored their grill and other fair weather
equipment under the deck.

I motioned to Ruth Ann to pause. We crouched
down and watched. Something was swaying in the breeze in the shadows under of
the deck. Except just then there was no breeze. Ruth Ann readied her bow. We
crept closer.

      We could see it now. What had apparently
been a woman in a smart bloodstained suit rocked slowly back and forth shifting
her weight from leg to leg. She had immense ugly slashes across what may once
have been an attractive face. It appeared her throat had been ripped out. We
heard it rasp, forcing air into its chest in an effort to bellow at us. As it
started in our direction it tried to snarl but all that came out was hiss. Ruth
Ann put her projectile through the thing’s forehead at its hairline. The force
of the impact snapped the top of the creature’s skull clean off. It staggered
but didn’t stop. It closed the distance between us quickly again putting to a
lie the claim our zombies were “slow.” Ruth Ann notched another arrow and
loosed it through the creature’s gaping mouth. It dropped.

“Shot too high,” Ruth Ann whispered. We remained
crouched in the tall grass watching and listening for a few minutes. I had to
pee. We had used two arrows. On the way back we’d want to retrieve these too.

We left the grass and made our way to the deck
and up the stairs. We crouched at the sliding glass patio door and looked
inside. Nothing appeared to be amiss. Using the duct tape, I taped a circle
larger than the diameter of my fist and forearm near where the lock would be.
With Ruth Ann keeping watch behind us, I smashed the glass through the center
of the ring of tape using the pointy end of the crowbar. The outer glass broke
nicely but the inner glass, without a border reinforced by duct tape made a lot
of noise. Fortunately the intact outer glass muffled the sound to the outside
of the house. Anything inside would now be aware of us.

Again we waited and listened. Nothing stirred. I
gave a last look inside then reached in and undid the lock. I tried the door
but it moved only an inch before stopping with a thud. The Flynn’s had placed a
wooden strip in the door’s track to prevent what I was trying right now. Given
the additional reach advantage of a break in the glass it was easy enough to
flip the strip out of the track with the crowbar.

Upon opening the door, it chimed. Somewhere in
the house an alarm status panel started beeping. If I didn’t find the panel and
disarm the alarm it was likely that a claxon would sound. We had heard the
Flynn’s alarm before when they set it off accidentally. It was designed to draw
attention to the house, attention we did not want. If it was like our house’s
alarm system, I’d have less than 60 seconds to disarm it.

Since I didn’t know their codes, I would have to
find their alarm box and disconnect its battery backup. The power grid was gone
so the system must be running off its lead acid battery. I bolted into the
house to follow the sound. Ruth Ann raced up the deck stairs after me. Later,
in the most loving way possible, she chewed me out for running headlong into a
space we knew nothing about. I felt flush when I realized I could have been
running into the waiting arm or arms of the undead.

Fortunately, the Flynn’s house was truly vacant.
I followed the beeping to its source; an alarm panel placed just like ours next
to the door between the house and garage. But where was the battery? Unlike
Hollywood computer geeks I can’t just tap keys on the panel until I exclaim “I’m
in!”

Like our house the laundry room is right next to
the garage and, like our house, the alarm cabinet was in the laundry room
closet. I opened the cabinet and removed one battery lead. No more beeps. After
another moment’s thought, I took the whole battery.

We next secured the deck door behind us and
began our search of the house. We knew Flynn’s home office was in the basement.
That was our first guess as to where the bow and supplies would be found. This
time Ruth Ann took the lead armed with her carbine. I pointed the flashlight
from behind her. It would have been nice if we had a weapon mounted light. Put
that on the list of “needs.” Our caution proved unnecessary as the basement was
clear.

Flynn’s bow, a complicated and scary looking
compound thing, was mounted on the wall. Below it, mounted vertically was a
T-shaped contraption with a rifle stock. Flynn had a crossbow. All I knew about
crossbows is that they looked really cool and that a Pope had outlawed them in
the 12th century.

In the office closet we found three sealed boxes
of five crossbow bolts each and one open box missing two bolts. There were also
two boxes of a dozen carbon fiber arrows each and some supplies including more
than a dozen razor sharp broad heads. We had found what we came for.

We didn’t want to push our luck too much and
went back upstairs to head home. On the way we stopped in the kitchen and
pantry and found a supply of canned goods and non-perishables large enough to
warrant a future trip back even after filling our pack. There was a large jar
of instant coffee. I considered leaving it but only for a moment. Unlike before
the war, instant coffee was now better than no coffee.

Our backpack full, Ruth Ann made her way down
the deck’s stairs and covered me while I closed and flipped the lock on the
sliding door. Even with the hole in the door allowing ready access to the lock
we knew the dead lacked the thought to make use of it. They’d just go through
the door.

On our way back, Ruth Ann put on the nitrile
gloves and pulled the arrows she’d expended out from their resting places and
picked up her hatchet. It was disgusting but the woman I married was
remarkable. We arrived back at our house without event. We left the garbage bag
with the contaminated weapons out front. We brought the backpack in but didn’t
unpack it. Instead we set out with our ladder to the Boetche’s garage.

We had the IR illuminator to set up along with
its improvised power supply. I am sure we looked like idiots carrying a 10-foot
ladder with ourselves laden with bows and guns stopping from time to time to
look and listen. Fortunately there was no one there to snicker.

It was getting late. I was still on the roof
finishing orienting the illuminator towards our house. There was a low beating
noise; we froze.