The Dead Don't Bleed: Part 2, The Aftermath (3 page)

Probably the one thing above and beyond food, toiletries and something to keep them entertai
ned while in isolation was news. They needed to try and find out what was happening elsewhere in the world. They had spent a great deal of time discussing how rescue operations could even now be well underway and that they would be overlooked if they remained in hiding deep in the park. Kyle had been their best source of information on that front. As a Fairfax county police officer he had been dealing with the outbreak from the government’s point of view longer than any of them and had been privy to information about how at least the local county authorities had been handling things. Unfortunately none of the news that he brought to the table was very good. He had gone into detail about his department’s efforts to deal with the growing problem and how none of them really truly understood the depth and scope of the outbreak until it was too late. The news about how his own department and their primary fire station had been completely overrun with all personnel slaughtered, was not well received. If the police had been that caught off guard and so easily outmatched, it was a good bet that other departments across the country had met with a similar fate. He had no idea what wide scale efforts may have been in place on the federal level, the loss of his police station and the radio relay station at the firehouse had limited his communication abilities to only the local area.

They
spent some time that morning discussing their options and Garrett had been the first one to offer to make a run in search of medication and supplies. His plan for that initial excursion was to hit a neighborhood close to the park entrance. He felt confident that he would be able to find ample supplies and medications stored in the homes of some the wealthy suburbanites living nearby.

"Just you? No way man, I'm coming along
." Calvin fired off as Garrett outlined his plan to make a supply run.

Garrett had figured that his good friend would volunteer to join him,
and he was grateful that he had. It was not a run he relished making on his own. He simply nodded at Calvin in reply.

"Garrett, I want to go to. I know I may not be very useful to either of you, but I know a little about medicines and might be able to help you find what we need." Miranda added.

Calvin looked at Garrett and said with a shrug, "She's got a good point there. No telling what kind of meds we are going to stumble on and inside a home they probably won’t be lined up on nice neat labeled shelves like a pharmacy."

Garrett was reluctant to take her but he had to agree with Calvin that she had a good point. Neither of them knew exactly what it was they were looking for and if they ended up coming back with a just a pile of birth control pills and Viagra, that wasn't going to help Kimberly much. His reluctance to bring her came only partially from knowing that there was a good chance she would end up slowing them down. If they did get into a jam with the undead, he didn't think she would be much help in a fight. But other than that he had also grown quite fond of her in the short time they had all spent together in the small ranger station. With nothing more than a lot of time on their hands they had talked a great deal and grown to know a lot of about
each other’s lives. He found it funny that in a normal situation, meeting her in a club or out at dinner somewhere, he would have never discussed half of the things that he had no problem telling her now. Thrust into an apocalyptic event together somehow made him feel much more at ease with opening up to her about many things in his own life. She must have also felt the same way because some of the things she had shared with him were personal enough in nature that he was sure they were not topics she would have normally poured out to someone who wasn't much more than a stranger.

"Alright Miranda.
Kind of hard to argue with that logic." He reached out to the small table next to the door and pulled one of the handguns they had arranged there. "Do you think you can handle one of these?" She took the pistol from him and experimented with the weight of it, held it in her outstretched hands and gazed through the sights down the barrel.

"I have never fired a gun before, but I am a quick learner. Show me what I need to do." She replied with a smile.

Garrett took her a little ways out in front of the house and showed her some of the basics with dry firing the pistol, loading it, clearing a jam and how to sight correctly on a target. He kept it as simple as possible, any situation they came upon that required her to use it would be one where they would be trying to get out of as quickly as they had gotten into it. He hoped that she wouldn't have to pull the trigger even once, but it was best that all of them understood at least the basics of how to use their firearms.

Feeling confident that they were as ready as they could be and seeing no reason to put it off any longer, Garrett led the way back down the trail to where he had left his truck parked alongside Kyle's police cruiser. Both
he and Calvin were carrying AK's, they had left their other two handguns behind for Kyle and Shellie. Kyle only had a little over a magazine and a half left for his M4 and about that same amount of ammo for his own pistol. Having proved herself to be efficient with the shotgun from Kyle's patrol car, Shellie was still hanging onto it, but was in the same situation with only a handful of shells remaining. If they ran into a jam at least the extra handguns spare ammo.

Garrett's plan was to locate a prospective neighborhood while still in the truck, they would then park several blocks away from any houses they wanted to check out and go the rest of the way on foot. He knew that the sound of the trucks engine was likely to attract attention and his hope was that by circling the neighborhood first and then parking a distance from their destination they would be able to draw off any zombies that happened to be hanging around near the houses they wanted to hit.
He was guessing that the zombies would find the truck and once they discovered it was empty they would simply move on to something more interesting. If they returned to the truck and found it to still be swarmed by the undead they would have to leave it behind and make their way back to the ranger’s station on foot. If they had to run for it, they would have to drop whatever they had scavenged and all they would have ended up doing was losing his truck in the process if not one or more of their lives as well. It was a gamble, he knew that, but the alternative of hunkering down and just watching Kimberly die was almost as bad.

The approaching light of a new day meant that Doug could finally grab a couple hours of restless sleep. Ever since it had started he had been reluctant to allow his wife or their neighbor’s fourteen year old son to stand guard during the hours of darkness. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason when the zombies would come, night or day didn't matter to them. If they were searching for prey they would come. It was at night that he felt most vulnerable, other than the careless manner that they moved, knocking into things and making lots of noise, not to mention the chilling moans they would utter when on the trail of their next meal, they had the advantage at night when they were able to approach in the darkness getting close enough to the house that running would only ensure they were caught.

Douglas Webb and his wife Emily had been hiding in the basement of their upscale Great Falls home for the last three days, they had watched as many of their own neighbors, friend and family had fallen victim to the virus and turned into the hideous and terrifying creatures and turned on their own flesh and blood. As a successful plastic surgeon, Doug had built a practice that allowed him and his wife to enjoy some of the finer things in life, among them was the opportunity to live in a zip code that brought along a certain degree of prestige with it. His office was located in Silver Spring, Maryland, not far from Holy Cross hospital where he performed most surgeries that his line of work required. He would have personally preferred to live closer to his office in one of the upper middle class neighborhoods within a short drive to the hospital, but then again he really had little say in how his money was actually spent.

Emily came from a middle class family in the Sterling, Virginia area. They had met five years earlier when her sister had come to see Doug about having some reconstructive work done following a car crash that left some ugly scaring on her face. It had been a tough case that required multiple surgeries and many hours spent with the family in consultation. During that time he had come to know Emily and had actually worked up the courage following one meeting to ask her to remain behind when the rest of the family left. When it came to his work he was all business and he was highly regarded as one of the best in the business. However, when it came to his personal life and in particular any type of social life, he was a bumbling amateur whose last date had been four years earlier and that had not worked out very well. He had summoned to courage to ask her out to dinner and had been exceptionally surprised when she not only accepted his request for a date but sensing his discomfort in making the request, even offered up a location and time to meet at the restaurant. That first date had gone very well and before the evening was over Doug thought that Emily could be the one and that is exactly what she ended up being. Four months after their first date they were married, two weeks after that, he realized what a mistake he had made. He should have seen it coming from that first day when he bumbled his way through asking her out, she had taken control of things at that point telling him what time and where they would be going. He just didn't see until later how that should have told him what an absolute control freak she really was. Caught up in their whirlwind romance and the rapid progression it took, he had agreed to sign a prenuptial agreement and allowed her total control of their finances before he realized what he was doing.

He realized the trap he had fallen into shortly after they returned from a week long honeymoon cruise, the last time in their marriage that he had actually been happy. With control over his finances and a prenuptial agreement tucked safely away in a safety deposit box somewhere, she dropped the hammer on him. He was ordered, not asked or gently prodded, directly told by his new wife, that he was to fire the office manager at his office. A very effective and nice older woman who Doug had worked well with for a number of years. He was to fire her and immediately hire Emily's sister as her replacement at a much higher salary. That incident was quickly followed by a house hunting adventure. She knew in advance of their marriage exactly where she wanted to live, the type of neighborhood and house she wanted to live in as well as a long list of country clubs, social groups and community fund raising excursions that she insisted in being prominently associated with. He caved in to each and every demand, not out of love for his new wife, but out of genuine fear from the woman and her family.

His only real dealings with Emily's brood came from the time he had spent with them prepping her sister for surgery. He had drawn the conclusion that while they were not wealthy or well to do, they presented themselves as being from the upper end of the middle class. That impression was far from the truth he later learned. Her entire family was nothing but white trash, grifters and con artists. Once Emily had her hooks into his finances she opened the gates for the rest of her clan to share in her new found wealth. Before he knew it they had paid just over a million dollars for an estate in a well-established gated community deep in a wooded neighborhood of Great Falls and Emily's family had their own keys to the house at Emily's insistence and came and went as they pleased. It was not at all uncommon for Doug to finally make it home after a long day of work and fighting almost two hours of traffic to find Emily’s mother and her latest boyfriend already well into their fourth or fifth six pack of beer and camped out in his living room for the night. He had even had the unfortunate experience of walking into his own house one evening to find Emily's mother kneeling before one of these men in his kitchen and orally servicing him while the guy rummaged through his refrigerator helping himself to food and drink.

Doug was miserable in the marriage right from the start. Emily's entire demeanor towards him changed from the sweet and carrying girl she pretended to be when they were dating, to an outright miserable tyrant who made it clear that her feelings for him centered on his money much more than his heart. She allowed him to have sex with her only on rare occasions, and usually when she was drunk and could find no one else to take care of her needs. To add further insult to injury, within a year of their marriage she started packing on the pounds, not a few here and there but a truck load all at once. Doug had considered divorce more times that he could count. He had even confided his woes in a fellow doctor with an office next to his who he would sometimes meet for lunch and the occasional round of weekend golf, if Emily allowed it. His friend had hooked him up with a divorce lawyer and Doug had secretly gone in for a consultation. When Doug had presented the lawyer with a copy of the prenup he had signed, the man had read it, put it down and simply shook his head. That document amounted to giving Emily a license to do just about anything she wanted. She could screw a dozen men and a couple zoo animals in their living room with him watching if she cared to. If he tried to dissolve the marriage under any circumstance, she would walk away with more than half of his estate. The lawyer went on to explain that even though not expressly covered in the document, under Virginia law there was also a very good chance that she would also get the house and any legal bills she racked up taking it through the courts would likely become his responsibility as well. He had seen cases similar to what Doug was facing and if he tried going down the path of divorce, Emily would ruin him financially. Since his practice was also under his own name, there was even a chance that she would end up taking half of that as well and probably force him to shut the doors for good. He was basically a forty six year old successful plastic surgeon stuck in a marriage with a woman who he couldn't stand. He could see no way out, unless he wanted to start his entire life over as a penniless sheep herder in the mountains of Montana.

Considering how shitty his life had become in the last couple years he almost felt it was no small wonder that a zombie apocalypse would now crash down from the heavens on top of them to add even more misery in his life. The one concession that Emily had allowed him in some remodeling of their home was to design one third of the finished basement area as a secure storm shelter. That part of the country was known to suffer the occasional severe storm during the fall. Their house was on a two acre lot surrounded by tall trees that would easily crush through the roof if hit with a strong enough wind gust. His argument for the construction of a safe room was one of the few things that Emily gave into when it came to how the house was appointed or any of the dozens of projects Emily had commissioned for remodeling projects. While the threat of severe weather was a good selling point to have a portion of the basement turned into a mini fortress. His real motivation was to simply give him a place of solitude separate from Emily, her family and the never ending parade of friends that Emily and her sister enjoyed bringing over sometimes for days at a time. She spent little if any time in the basement of the house, usually only to grab something from their mini wine cellar under the stairway from the kitchen. This gave Doug the opportunity to have a private sanctuary where he could escape his wife.

The storm shelter untimely ended up saving both of their lives. Constructed in the same fashion as a safe room and built to withstand not only heavy damage to the structure above it, the walls and door were also designed to be chemical irritant resistant. This feature was recommended by designers of safe rooms to prevent attackers from using mace or other aerosol based irritants from flushing someone out from inside the room. In the case of the zombie outbreak this single feature prevented their body odor from escaping into the surrounding atmosphere and allowed them to remain hidden and undetected by the zombies stalking the streets of their neighborhood. When they had first discovered that their friends and neighbors were changing into the cannibalistic creatures it had been Doug's observation that they were able to easily track and locate their targets by smell. Knowing that the basement shelter was air tight he had managed to get Emily and himself into the shelter just before a large group of undead smashed into the back doors of their house. They had been chasing their neighbor’s son, Cameron, and his parents were leading the charge after the poor boy. Doug had to almost carry the teenager kicking and screaming into the shelter. For the first day and a half, the crowd of zombies that had chased Cameron into their home had maintained a constant vigil just on the outside of the steel reinforced shelter door. They could all hear the constant banging and scratching at the door that went on and on for endless hours until finally they eventually either gave up or found something else of interest to go after. On the two occasions that Doug had left the shelter to retrieve food and other supplies from upstairs, he had only been outside the shelter for a minute or two before they started coming back to the house for him.

Even with the solid security door keeping them safe from the creatures on the outside he had put his foot down that they would never all be asleep at one time. Someone would always be awake and alert keeping an eye on the door. Emily had tried to fight him on that. She wanted no part in standing any kind of guard duty, but for the first time in their sham of a marriage he had stood his ground. It wasn't just their lives at stake, they had to think of Cameron as well. While that was not the most convincing argument to sway his loaf of a wife, it was one he was not willing to give an inch on and she had finally relented. He had to admit that with the apocalypse upon them he felt a sense of freedom from his wife. The prenup that had been hanging over his head for so long amounted for absolutely nothing anymore. If she wanted the house, cash, cars and other luxury items, she was more than welcome to them. She would just have to discuss with their rather hungry neighbors some of the ground rules about sharing the upper portions of the home. For the last day and a half Emily had really started getting on his nerves about an entirely different topic. She was actually concerned about her family and wanted Doug to find a way for them to leave the safety of the shelter and go to check on them. Of course the fact that they lived over an hour away across the river in Maryland on a normal day of driving just didn't seem to click with her. She had run her cell phone dead trying to call them over and over and with the power to the house finally failing late the prior afternoon, they had only the fuel left in their small generator to continue providing electricity. Doug had once again put his foot down hard on how their remaining bit of power was to be used. He would allow them a few hours with a single light in the evening and to run two small fans during the hottest part of the daytime. He would not let her recharge her phone only to run it dry a few hours later and insist on repeating the process over and over again. Even with that sparing level of generator use he was pretty sure they had only another day at best before it was lights out for good. Their cars in his driveway both had gas in the tanks and he had considered making a trip top side to siphon off a couple gallons to keep the generator running. He decided he would only do that in the most extreme circumstances. Stepping outside was sure to attract unwanted attention from the neighbors and he wasn’t sure that powering lights and a couple fans was really worth the risk.

The fuel and power situation was certainly one of their problems, the others he considered even more pressing. They had finished the last of their food and water the night before. Emily's family had visited at the start of the weekend just as the outbreak was starting to get rolling and they had stripped the cupboards bare. Doug had planned on making a run into town and do some shopping at the end of the weekend, but the epidemic rolled into the nightmare that it was well before he had that chance. Even the little that he was able to snatch from the kitchen on one of his trips upstairs had not lasted as long as he had intended. He had been adamant that they needed to stretch it for at least a couple days in the hope that rescue was on the way, but Emily was simply not satisfied with that idea. While she had agreed to the rationing idea to simply shut him up about it, it was a simple matter that he had to sleep sometime and when he did, she simply helped herself. His next dilemma was that he had no idea how to handle himself in any type of physical altercation. He had never been in a fight in his life and they had nothing in the form of weapons available to them even if he was able to use them. The best they could do would be to pick up some large kitchen knives or maybe some gardening tools from the garage, but even with such basic weapons for defense, he knew that none of them would last more than a minute if they came upon any of the zombies lurking around on the outside. It wasn't that he was a coward and unwilling to protect himself and Emily, despite his contempt for the woman she was his wife after all and a fellow human being on top of it, he just didn't know how to go about doing so. Physically he was not a formidable person by any means, he took pretty good care of himself but was never much for running or other exercise. Tipping the scales at a little over one hundred and fifty pounds, he doubted he would be much of an obstacle for one of the beasts if they managed to get their hands on him. To top it all off, the toilet in the small bathroom that had been installed in the safe room had now been rendered useless thanks to Emily. While Doug and Cameron had been subsisting on a starvation diet, Emily had managed to work up enough waste to clog the pipes in the toilet well above and beyond the ability of any earthly plunger to undue. Overnight the smell had started to creep throughout their small shelter and they were now faced with rapidly deteriorating living conditions.