The Complex: (The Reanimates) (21 page)

             
I had planned to be watching from the roof as this happened, providing gun cover while up there. DaWayne joined his dad for the first time on a run on this outing. It should be a relatively safe run, if there was such a thing. The other guys who went were Daniel, Trent, and Joey. The five of them were fairly optimistic over their chances of making this a successful trip.

             
I lowered the drawbridge for them. Tyreese carefully drove over the bridge, still feeling that this whole bridge being safe thing is a novel idea. After they cleared it I ran the bridge back up with the car. This was truly an awesome method of making that bridge going up and down. It made things much easier. As soon as that bridge was back up and secured I ran back to the roof to watch the truck. I used binoculars to see where they were.

             
I watched them pull up to their first house. Their guns were drawn and ready to be used should they need to protect themselves. Tyreese opened the first gate, miraculously unlocked, and they moved in. Joey stood just outside the gate to keep an eye out for trouble. He had the crossbow in his hands this time to make any zombie kills as quiet as possible. They knew this trip was on borrowed time because they were running a car though a neighborhood as though they were an ice cream truck. It was only a matter of time, really, before zombies were chasing them down. They had successfully loaded their first three cans in very short order. I felt a surge of possibility in that moment that this was going to work.

             
The next house was just as flawless. three large cans waited in the side yard ready to be filled. Just like the first they emptied the contents of the cans, threw them into the pool, cleaned them up, rolled it out and loaded it up. I didn't even try to disguise my excitement at this point. There was only one more house to go.

             
It was one last house. I guess there must be some sort of law that says the last house was promised to have problems. The jinx started with the padlock that was in a place we couldn't see from our rooftop vantage point. They broke the gate down. It was just a wooden gate and with just the right amount of pressure the screws would pop right out of the hinges. A UCLA football scouted kid is just the right amount of pressure.

             
I could see that they were feeling really tense on this house. They moved like there was something not quite right but that was just right out of their reach to understand what it was. They moved a bit more quickly, wanting to be free from this house. They were loading the last can into the U-Haul when suddenly there was a large crash noise coming from one of the picture windows. It was then they saw it, the paper in the window next to the front door.

             
In the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, the CDC and the president urged those that felt ill or had been bitten to put a sign in the window of their home and to lock the doors. It was also suggested that they lock the doors and add something to make it a little tricky to get out that door if they converted. They were told to wait for help to collect them and to take them to a hospital for treatment. That was followed by so few people that it wasn't something that the guys even looked for. Besides, they had not planned on going inside anyway.

             
This house held a very hungry zombie. Before food showed up it hadn’t occurred to it to even try getting out the window but seeing food so close was the trigger it needed. It had taken a running jump and flew out that window, glass shards raining all around the zombie. It used to be a woman, I could tell. She must have just had a minor bite because despite being dead, she was in fairly good shape as compared to the other zombies. The summer heat had definitely messed with her decomposition factor and she looked kind of like a mummy from Egypt. She started to go after the guys.

             
They had just put the last can on the lift when she showed up. Trent ran up to the cab and jumped behind the wheel. The keys had been left in the ignition on the off chance that they may need to make a get away. The truck lit up on the first crank. The guys had jumped into the trailer and banged on the divider of the cab to let him know all were on board and to get the hell out of there. Tyreese was trying to get the last can on board but the lift was moving too slow. Joey shot the zombie right between the eyes with the crossbow and she went down.

             
There is something about the zombie moan that calls out to other zombies. DaWayne and Daniel were tying the cans into the trailer having located little tie hooks. They had gotten the other six cans secured right after they loaded at the other houses and were struggling to put the latest additions in securely. They got the two in and tied and were trying to wrestle in that last can. Trent had his hands full trying to drive through the zombie hoard. He hit several. The last one he hit though ended up under the wheel and it served as a speed bump. The can went flying off the lift and Tyreese almost went with it. Daniel and Joey were right there and grabbed him by the jacket pulling him back. For a couple seconds, the fate of Tyreese was uncertain. Trent hit the brakes and they all fell into the trailer.

             
They were finally on the way back and I screamed down to Jody to put the bridge down. She backed up the little car and the bridge went down quickly. It fell a little faster than it should have and hit the other side with a loud smack. I hoped against all hope that there was no damage from that fast drop. Alexus unlocked the gates after Jody yelled their combinations to her then ran the gate open just as they got to the bridge.

             
I breathed a sigh of relief as they went over the bridge safely and came in. Alexus shut the gate and relocked both bike chains and Jody drove the pull car forward to raise the bridge. The men were whooping it up. They were filled with adrenaline after that run and were cheering their success. They had gotten 480 gallons of wash water even with the loss of the last can.

             
Martha came over and looked at the cans. “These are not the 60 gallon cans guys. These are the 90. I thought that the 60's had been swapped out. My girlfriend had the 60's. Said they were dreadfully small and showed me the difference in design. These are them.”

             
A super loud cheer went out. 720 gallons of water was amazing. Each unit got a can full of water for their use, be it laundry, wash or toilet. Several of us topped off our tubs with the water so we could flush or wash. Erin found a can of spray paint and sprayed the apartment number that corresponded with the unit it belonged to.

             
We had hope. We were going to have a little more wiggle room where water was concerned.

Alexus woes

             
If only all our issues were as simple as getting water.

             
I had given Alexus watch duties to give Joey and Jody some time off to have a honeymoon. True it wasn't as though they had a ton of options on what they could do but they were excited that they were going to get together time. They had set to work on removing the kitchen wall. Jody and her kids were looking forward to more space. All three kids had shared the master bedroom and Jody had taken the small one. After the wall had been pulled out they got to reorganize. Jody moved in to Joey's bedroom, Abigail into the little room next to them. Liam moved into the small bedroom that was Jody's and Erin stayed in her room. When the baby was born it would stay in its parents room until it was older. Then they would move Abigail back in with Erin but that wouldn't be for a year or so. It. That word felt so foreign in my brain. Babies were girls or boys, thanks to ultrasound machines, not its. I started to drool over the idea of having an ultrasound machine, a ventilator, oooh a crash cart. There are just some things you are not going to find at a pharmacy.

             
Trent and I helped with all the moving of furniture and settling everyone in as no one really wanted Jody to do a lot of heavy lifting.

             
We didn't notice that food came up missing for a bit. Water too. We thought that we must have just used more with the wedding. We thought it to be an innocent miscount. It was easy to discount the first time. We must have done the count late, in the beginning of August. A month later though, in the beginning of September, when it was time to do count yet again we were short. It didn't make sense. The things that were missing were things that were odd. Mercedes had written down what we had when the count came up wrong last time so we knew exactly was missing this time. It was a few cans of spinach this time.
             

             
We had finally caught a rabbit that was making trouble in our garden just that day and we had planned on cooking it up with the spinach. The spinach was not a highly requested item so it shouldn't be missing. We wandered over to the water unit to find some of the gallon jugs were missing again as well. This was just strange. We asked around the complex to see if anyone knew anything or maybe had just grabbed it to feed their family with. We made sure we said no one was in trouble over it just that we needed to do inventory control. With each person I laughed and said it was making my OCD act up and everyone giggled back and said they didn't know anything.

             
I worried about this. "Trent," I said one night as we were in bed, "what if those marauders are breaking in?"

             
"I don't think that those guys would just take a couple things and leave everything else, right?" Trent reasoned. "It's probably someone like Anna who is worried that she'll be in trouble if she took something while Mercedes wasn't there. Just something simple like that. You know, baby?"

             
I thought hard about that. It made sense. Those guys from the gate weren't the type to just grab a couple cans here and there. They would take it all. "Am I being obsessive babe?"

             
"Yeah, a little bit. We'll keep an eye out of course but it's probably nothing." Trent said.

             
I turned over and went to sleep. I dreamed of people breaking in and zombies eating spinach, can and all.

             
For a few days Tesla had been incredibly agitated over something. She kept running down to the back wall and barked her self silly. We would try to redirect her, distract her but she had this almost obsession that there was something to bark at there. I climbed up on the roof to see what on earth it could be and didn’t see anything other than zombies in the wash. I heard movement of other zombies in the trench. It didn't really make sense but nothing ever did.

             
We took her home one night and she wasn't acting well. She stumbled around a lot, almost acting drunk. I wondered if she had gotten into something like antifreeze, though there was nothing on her fur that lent any proof to that effect. I'm not a vet, that’s for sure and I was not figuring out what was wrong with the dog.

             
During the night the dog had a seizure and died. I was worried that the dog somehow had been infected but she never was warm. Whatever she had gotten into killed her. Drew's heart was broken. It was a shared feeling all around the complex when we broke the news over breakfast. Most of the kids cried and so did some of the adults.

             
We buried Tesla in the garden cemetery. It was sad and quiet. Mercedes read “The Rainbow Bridge” and the kids said goodbye to the dog with heavy hearts. Alexus was on watch for the funeral which was nice of her as she never did bond with the dog. It made it so everyone who wanted to be there could be.

             
A couple days later Drew was looking really intense, bordering worried. He was clearly looking like there was something on his mind but when I asked him about it he said it was nothing. Drew was not a good liar. I loved that about him. "When you're ready to talk about it baby I'm here. I'll listen."

             
"OK, mom."

             
The next day, Drew was ready to talk. "I just wanted to see it happen one more time before I said anything."

             
I nodded my head to encourage him.

             
He took a deep breath then said, "Mom, Alexus does weird things." That caught my attention, my first thought was she had managed to find drugs here. "She keeps disappearing behind the shed in the garden, where the zombie that got Steven came from. She stays there for a few minutes then comes back. She doesn't see me see her. She usually looks around real quick, pulls a couple weeds then walks away. Then the other weird thing is when we're down by the wall playing paper airplanes she comes down with paper for us. She always pulls a sheet from the middle of the stack folds it up and tosses it. Mom, every time she does this the plane goes over the wall. She says she has rotten luck with these things flying right and Liam and Kyle think it's probably her design but mom, it always goes over. I watch how she builds it there is no reason for it to go over every time. I made one with her yesterday and she didn't know but I copied every fold she made. I told her we should have a race and I stood next to her and we both threw it at the same time. Mine went straight and hers went over the wall."