The Reanimates (Book 3): The Escape (3 page)

The first order of business was to decide what streets we would use as the border of our town. With Trent and I in the cab, and Tyreese and Lucas standing up in the bed of our pickup to find a better view of our surroundings, we drove around to get our bearings. We made several loops around this small place to best figure out where we would have the easiest time building. We stopped the truck after our sixth run around and talked about the best places to mark.

Highway 89, named Elliot in this town, was the main road through town, and Cooper ran parallel to it on the east side of the town. We planned on keeping the main highway intact and accessible via gates, but we also wanted to leave other routes around our town open for travel if we didn't feel secure letting others into our safe zone. When we came to the intersection where Elliot and Cooper crossed one another, Trent stopped the truck and climbed out of the driver's side door. He opened the extended cab door behind him and started to rummage through a few bags that were tossed in the back until he found a can of day glow pink spray paint. He shook the can as he walked to the spot in the road, the small glass marble that agitated the paint clanking loudly in the cylinder. He bent over, and with a snake like hiss of paint, marked the place where they would build a guard house to direct people through the town or to the alternate route of Cooper.

Trent came back to the truck, pulled the shift lever into drive with a clunk, and slowly took off down Elliot. When we found Shannon St, Trent painted a pair of double lines across Elliot to mark where the walls would go. We drove forward, and at First St, he marked the road once again. Elliot was where the life of the town was, and it was on the north end that we saw there were the most opportunities for starting over again. We also realized that this was where many people were probably still at since this was where the medical center was, as well as the bar, the fire department, and the mercantile. They actually had a mercantile. I wondered, with a smirk, if the Olsens from Little House on the Prairie worked there.

From First St, we located Cooper and painted our double lines, then doubled back until First ended at Hannaford. At Hannaford we would take the wall west along Lewis until it met Ordway where we would go south some more. We would have to take the wall off the road here, mostly to preserve housing areas, but not by a whole lot. We all agreed that not one of us would want to see a wall on their street when they walked out the front door.

There was a small school on the southwest side of town that I wanted to make sure was inside our walls so we could use it as a multipurpose building, even if we didn't use it as an actual school. We would be able to use some of the classrooms as storage rooms for the farming we planned on doing there. Next to the school, there was a football field that I could see crops going into nicely. Tanya and Kristen were going to be in love.

From Ordway, we took the wall plans east to School Street and cut across empty space until we hit Shannon. From there, we went east until we were where we started at Elliot. From there, we connected the loop to Cooper by using a dirt road that sat between two large homes. It seemed to be a lot of driving around, but the trip odometer on the truck when we traced the intended wall route said that we were only going to be securing one and a half miles worth of perimeter. This made me excited. I could wrap my mind around that. Now that we had our plan worked out on where we were going to live, we had to make the area worth living in; we had to make sure that the houses were empty. I wasn't worried about the living anymore, with how many times we drove up and down the streets, if this hadn't been a ghost town, someone would have stepped out to challenge us by then.

We started on the southwest side of town, next to the school. Even though we were all certain the houses had no more living people in them, we still made ourselves known at the front door by knocking and calling out for people. There was always that chance that some little old lady was hiding out in her home, too frightened to come to the door. We knocked, listened, and opened the door, being extra careful to not wake the dead with a lot of excess noise. Some doors were locked, and one of the group would shimmy through an open window, almost always a bathroom window. Whoever went in hurried to the front door, and unlocked it, and we went through the house. Sometimes those of us waiting outside heard shots fired before the door was opened, but usually there was nothing. Most of the time, when we found a zombie, it was trapped in a bedroom behind a closed door. It was like they were bit, felt like crap, and went to bed where they died and reanimated. Something as complex as a door knob was a perfect barrier, as impenetrable as Fort Knox.

I was reminded the hard way that not all of the victims were adults, when I opened a bedroom door in one house and came face to face with a young blonde haired girl, not more than eight-years-old. She was still in her pajamas, a pink tank top and polka-dotted pants, and half starved. Her cheek bones jutted out at high angles, her collar bones were prominent, and her arms were skeletal, covered with gray, cracked, leathery skin. She lifted her arms towards me; her bony hands trembled in anticipation. I pulled my long blade from its sheath, choosing to listen to the soft whoosh of metal against leather over the little girl's moans. I lifted the knife high above my head and pushed it through the top of her skull, and the momentum of the swing sunk to the middle of her head and stopped right between her cloudy, sunken eyes. The sound of the sinking blade was similar to the crunch and slurp of a watermelon being dropped on the ground. The little girl sunk to her knees and my blade pulled out of her head with a squelch sound. Her blood was seeping out of the large wound as the carpet wicked it up and spread it out. I sighed. I forced myself to think about how much of a pain in the ass it was going to be to turn this room into a place someone would sleep in. I hated cleaning up zombie blood. It stained like nothing else in this world and had the most rancid odor.

I once left a chunk of ground beef thawing in the sink one morning and went to the store. There was a wildfire burning in the hills close by and the wind shifted, driving it towards my complex. They evacuated my neighborhood and wouldn't let anyone go into the threatened area. It was three days before we could come home. When I opened the door and stepped inside, I thought that I was going to be killed by the smell. The pound and a half of rotting cow smell was embedded in all of the fabrics, including the carpet, the sofas, and the curtains, and I swear in the paint as well. It was days before I didn't want to puke when I walked in the door. That noxious odor was roses compared to the room this little girl was trapped in. I opened the bedroom windows to start the airing out process, but it was going to be a while before the room was acceptable. Definitely the carpet was going to have to be removed.

"I've got a couple of suicides here," Lucas called from the master bedroom. "From the smell of things, they've been here a while."

"I found their kid," I called back. "Turned a while ago, as well."

Trent came into the hallway. "Rest of the house is clear." He surveyed the room behind me and saw the dead mini zombie, then stuck his head in the bedroom behind Lucas. "I'll go get the truck. We'll finish the houses on this street, there are only a couple of more to go, but my brain and nose can't wrap itself around more than that."

I nodded. "Good thing this street only has 14 houses on it. How many have we done? Feels like we must have done a thousand."

Tyreese chuckled. "Hon, we've only done nine. I suggest you start stretching out those muscles, we have a long way to go."

I rolled my eyes dramatically. "On a plus, there have only been a few run-ins. It worries me though, that we haven't seen that many. Didn't that population sign say that there were over 200 people that lived here? We've only run into a dozen or so."

The guys shrugged their shoulders. It didn't make sense to them either.

Trent cleared his throat. "Maybe they evacuated? I don't know. Maybe they gathered together someplace and are stuck there as zombies, and we just haven't been to the right space yet."

"No use standing around speculating on what we haven't seen yet. Let's get going on what needs to be done." Tyreese wore an expression of someone who was trying to keep focused on the here and now and not allow the future to overwhelm him. It was an excellent example, and I intended to follow it. I went back to the mini zombie, I never said kid zombie anymore, it made me too sad and made the work almost unbearable, and it helped me remember that they were just as dangerous as their full sized counterparts. Tyreese picked up the corpse of the woman while Trent and Lucas carried out the man. We tossed the bodies in the back of the truck, along with the others, like piles of wood. We kept working on the street, content in knowing that if nothing else we had these 14 homes to move into, and we felt like we were on top of the world.

The sun was low in the sky when we finished the last house on Ordway. We drove back to the safe house, but detoured on the way along a dirt path where we piled up the corpses. When we were done with all the buildings, we were going to have to burn the bodies, but we didn't want to do it now. The plan of a single bonfire would make it so we didn't have to smell the God awful smell of cooked decay on more than one occasion and we could better conceal our location from the alive if we weren't sending up frequent smoke signals.

When we pulled into the driveway of the safe house, the sun was just a ribbon of light in the west. Stars were coming out, just a few at first, then many more. The sky was swept in a fuzz, millions of stars from galaxies away saying hello. In the distance, we heard the gurgle of the creek. We closed the door to the house and lit a small fire in the fireplace. By the gentle glow of the fire we ate canned stew and had peaches after.

Every muscle burned from killing zombies and moving dead bodies. I felt it more now that the feeling of hunger was satisfied. I would have traded my left eye for a jar of some menthol laden muscle rub. Trent sat behind me and started to rub my shoulders. I sighed with appreciation for his hands, every once in a while, his hands found a knot. I felt a pop as the bundle of muscle slipped under the pressure of his thumb, and while it hurt to have the knot manipulated, it felt better than letting it be. I leaned into him, and groaned gratefully that he was there; not just as my magical back massager, but as my best friend and love of my life. We all sat in the room together, comfortable in the silence. The log snapped and popped in the fireplace, the fire danced, leaving shifting shadows on the wall behind us. We felt drowsy watching the lights, and decided to call it a night. We unrolled the sleeping bags in the living room after we pushed the furniture away. Despite the discomfort we all felt, no one wanted to sleep on the couches, almost like the ghosts of the past residents of this house would come out and haunt us.

Sleep found us quickly, but my dreams were fitful, and that mini zombie I took care of earlier wandered into my dreamscape. I ran to save her over and over, and each time I reached her, she screamed and withered from a little girl into the mini zombie that I had to end over and over again. I woke with tears on my face. I saw that there was no light coming through the windows so I scooted my sleeping bag closer to Trent and curled into him. He freed his arms and wrapped them around me, and I fell back asleep in his arms.

Fishing Around

A couple of hours later, the sky was pink with pre-dawn light and birds started to sing in the trees. We stirred with the sounds, and after a moment, we decided that we should wash up and begin to work on the clearing project. God knew that there was more than enough work to be done. We opened the door and were greeted with fresh and cold morning air. We walked down to the creek to clean up and fill our water bottles. The creek was deeper than I expected. In the low light, the water looked inky-black as it moved swiftly, and at the same time, snake-like as it carved its way through the trees. Occasional dashes of silver streaked by, like little lightning bolts. It took me a minute, seeing how I was a city girl from southern California, but it finally dawned on me that the flashes were fish.

"Did anyone see fishing gear in the house?" I asked the others. It was clear by the way they were watching the water with soft expressions of awe that they too, had seen the flashes. Trent nodded.

"In the garage there were a few rods with reels," he replied. I could see a sparkle in his eyes when he answered. I wondered if he was thinking of those days as a young child from Idaho, when he went fishing all the time. His lips were curling up in the corners, slowly, like he was almost afraid to smile in the wake of everything that had happened. After a few seconds, he seemed to abandon those reservations, and smiled openly. This had the potential to be a big win for us, and we learned to take the wins when they came. Wins had been hard to come by in the last year and a half.

I ran back up to the house and dashed through the halls to reach the door that lead to the garage from the house. I swung the door open, stepped off of the raised foundation, and landed on the concrete garage floor. On the wall next to the door, there was a rack for the rods with an assortment of poles hung from it. The rack was handmade and garishly painted with the words, 'Daddy went fishing!' I grabbed a mid-length pole with an uncomplicated looking reel mounted on it. It would be ready to use with a click of a button on the bottom of the reel. I was grateful that the reel was already loaded with line so we didn't have to waste time loading it. There was a green and white worn tackle box sitting below the assorted poles, so I opened it to verify it was fishing supplies. There was an array of bait jars and hooks, as well as a bunch of other stuff that I couldn’t identify. I closed it back up and latched it before grabbing the handle, and I quickly rejoined the group with my prizes in my hands that I lifted above my head, to appreciative looks from the guys.

"Man, I haven't had fish in a while. That'd be awesome for breakfast." Tyreese chuckled. Trent shifted through the box and found a three-pronged hook on a lead line, still new in the package. He attached the hook to the line on the pole, and chose bait from a nearly empty jar.

"My best guess is this stuff works. If it didn't, he'd have stopped using it." Trent remarked as he held the open jar of rather stinky mud colored bait. Made sense to me. Trent pinched off a small chunk of the bait and pressed it on the hook. He added a floating ball to the line, and then cast the line in the water. The rest of us busied ourselves filling the water containers while he babysat the pole. It didn't take long before the red and white float dipped under the water and the reel whirled as something took the bait and swam off. Trent jerked the rod up quickly but smoothly, and started to run the reel in. After a lifetime of waiting, and with more suspense than any movie, Trent pulled a good sized fish from the water. We cheered. He reset the hook and cast into the water again. I couldn't help but to throw my arms around him in absolute joy.

"Know what we should do for the future? We should put a net across the creek. We could make the holes large enough to let little fish through but small enough to keep in the big ones." Lucas commented, with a spark in his eyes over the idea. Hunger had a way of bringing out creative solutions. "Of course, we'd better not leave it up all the time. There may be people that live downstream that have been relying on the fish, and if we stopped the flow of food with our net, I can see some very unhappy neighbors knocking on our door." I chuckled as I visualized angry villagers with torches and pitchforks as they marched to our safe house doors.

Trent pulled three more fish from the water in a really short time. A year and a half of people not interfering with the wildlife population was working in our favor. For breakfast, we cooked the fish in the fireplace over an open flame. It was the most delicious thing I had put in my mouth in a long time, and it was gone too fast. I hoped that we would have many more of these breakfasts in the future. I hoped that Drew would enjoy sitting creek-side with his dad as he learned how to fish. I hoped for a future, and the swelling emotions in my chest felt awesome.

We sat for a moment longer in front of the warm fire before we geared up to go back to clearing houses. I held on to the hope that this was the right idea; that we were moving to something real, not just another safe house while we waited for something more. I wanted this to be our last pipe dream. This had to work. It had to.

Before we took on the houses, we decided we needed to clear out the school. There was a possibility that the town had set up the school as a rally point. We needed to face what was there. As it turned out, the school was completely empty. The doors were chained shut, but with a snip of the bolt covers, the doors sailed open. We were a little concerned that this was a morgue or maybe a place that zombies were trapped in, but there was nothing; just classrooms that were cleared out for the upcoming summer vacation. Chairs were piled on desks so summer maintenance could come through to clean the rooms for the next batch of ready learners. That, at least, was a pleasant discovery.

There were more vacant houses on the next street over from yesterday's grouping. More of these houses looked like people left in a hurry. Scattered cans of food were in kitchens that must have fallen out of people's arms. Medical supplies were stripped from medicine cabinets. I had to wonder what happened. I let my over-active imagination take over, and could envision that a horde of zombies swept through the town and the houses on the edge must have fallen first. I could see the residents of the houses on the inside of town evacuating in a panic. I wondered if the people that lived on the inside of town heard their neighbors screaming when they left. I wondered how far they were able to run. How many of them got away? Did any of them escape?

Fish. It was time to think about fish. And water. Thinking about how much better things were going to be was a better use of my time, and needed to stay in the front of my head. I made myself think about the playground and the auto shop, and best of all, in how much less work we were facing with every vacant house we came across.

Despite the many houses we came across that were empty, there were houses that weren't. Some of the houses were just suicides. The thought of labeling these bodies as 'just suicides' made me feel like I was a sick person for being dismissive over a dead person, or even worse, that maybe I was a terrible person for being grateful that the bodies were all the way dead. It made sense if you thought about it, why one would prefer a suicide to a zombie if you had to encounter a previous resident. Suicides didn't stand up and try to eat you, suicides just decomposed like normal. Even still, it was a life that ended in deep emotional pain, and I shouldn't feel grateful that it was easier to deal with, but I did.

We cleared the streets faster than the day before, since there were fewer zombies to deal with, and found ourselves closer to the heart of the town as we continued methodically going house by house, street by street. We finished with the bulk of the residential areas by the end of the day, and decided to call it a night and pick up the clearing project the next day. Like a bunch of kids, we wanted to go fishing. It was all we could talk about as we worked, and everyone had a fish story to tell. My favorite fishing story was a toss between going deep sea fishing and the stocked trout pond where I once took Trent where the fish would gobble bait-less hooks. Trent talked about going fishing in Idaho when he was a kid. Tyreese talked about going fishing off of a pier in the ocean and how the sea gulls stalked the area, waiting for a free meal whenever someone dropped their bait or gutted the fish that were caught.

We spent the last wisp of daylight sitting on the creek bank with poles in our hands. In one of the houses we found a box of canned colas that we put in the water to become cooler, and after a bit, the cans were chilled enough to be pleasant to drink, even if they did have a somewhat stale flavor. For a moment, we were feeling like normal people who were living in the old days. I had a flash of guilt for enjoying myself when the rest of the group was still at the Idaho house. I quieted that nagging thought by reminding myself that it wouldn't be long before the rest would be joining us.

"Tomorrow's got potential for being a huge pain in the ass, you know that, right?" Tyreese asked quietly. I turned to look at Ty, resting my cheek on my hand as I faced him.

"Yeah. It probably will." I gave him a weak half smile. "It's nothing that we haven't dealt with before, I know, but it never does make it any easier, does it?"

Lucas sighed. "Part of me wants to put a wall around the rest of it and call it a done deal, just seal that area off brick by brick. It's not as though there are more zombies than we have ever seen, though in our drive-by tour of the area, I did see several stuck in the medical building through the windows. We are likely to make a lot of noise going in the buildings and when we do, if there are any locals wandering in the area, they are sure to hear the ruckus, and if they hear the ruckus, they are going to come and see what's for dinner."

"Well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, now won't we?" Trent said, heaviness hung on every word. "This is our best chance, the best shot ever. If we don't take this right here, right now, we are saying that we are fine living like rats in a nest in Idaho. We are bumper to bumper in that house and I don't know about you, but I am tired of living like that. I want a chance at being able to feel normal, to live in a house with my wife and son, and have neighbors like you guys, but go home at the end of the day instead of just to another room. I want to be able to breathe again and walk down the street to a café and grab a coffee. I want to set up a workshop and go to work again making things. I want for my mom to be able to bake stuff that we grew in a nice large space so there is more of it. I want for your wife, Ty, to be able to have the ultimate garden. I want these fruit trees that people planted in their back yards to be a part of something that sustains the group. I want there to be reasons to keep going, because I am so tired of this little life we have been living. I am tired of drawing straws and hoping to be able to get past the wood plank fence. I want for all of the kids to go to sleep safe in their beds and not hear the sounds of the incessant moans from the dead carried on the wind. I don't want to hear the sounds of them scraping their fingernails against the fence. When we take the town entirely, we will be able to have all those things." Trent exhaled forcefully, and looked exasperated.

"Whoa, buddy, soliloquy much?" Lucas laughed. "I'm not saying we shouldn't do this. If I was, I wouldn't be here at all. What I am saying is that we shouldn't take this lightly. We are about to open a can of worms here, and I want to keep our heads in the game of how real this is. We have had it easy these last two days. Each threat was contained behind doors and each threat was manageable with our knives, quietly. Sure, when we start to work on the town's heart, most of those will be contained as well, but what about those that turned and were too dumb to wander off? What about the numbers we might run into where we need our guns? What if those that did wander off come back? We've made some noises over the last couple of days, what about those that heard our sounds? Who knows how far those noises were carried on the wind now that the world has gone silent? We're sitting here fishing while the sun goes down, like we are in denial over the threat just down the road. I just think we need to take a moment and recognize the reality of what we are about to be facing. We are going to have to be more careful than we have been in a long time. I worry that we have become lazy, complacent in our dealing with the dead. Tomorrow has the potential of being very, very dangerous, or we would have started there, wouldn't we? We plan on using the heart of the town as our central operations area, but we started on the edges. Why? Because we knew that the outskirts was a safer route. We haven't dealt with any of the gathering buildings except the school, even though we see that there are a ton of those types of buildings there. It's not a picnic, clearing these things out. It's definitely not safe. That's where our brains need to be, on the seriousness of this all."

When Lucas finished his speech we sat without a word. The only sounds in the now night were of crickets chirping and the babbling of the creek. We took a few minutes for everything to sink in.

"Let's turn in. I'm hungry and tired." Lucas said with a sigh. We all murmured our agreements. I stood up slowly, dusting the dirt and leaves off of my backside, and began to collect the fishing gear I had been using. We fished four more cans of cola from the cold creek and left the remaining cans in the water to keep them cool for the next day. We had several fish as a reward for our efforts, and they would make for an excellent dinner and if we paid attention, breakfast as well.

We went to bed with our heads and bellies full. Trent's speech intertwined with the concerns that Lucas voiced. I realized that we had become a bit arrogant in our dealing with the zombies in this town. A whack here, a squish there, all being done behind doors that were opened and closed in a controlled setting. We knew that there would be more zombies in town and when we opened the doors, they would spill out all around us. It was definitely nothing to take lightly.