by Rich Baker
“The Sims have no problem with that,” Danielle says from the sink where she’s washing dishes.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Robert asks.
“Nothing,” she replies. “Maybe that came out more sarcastic sounding than I intended. All I meant was that when we were getting shot at, you three were quick, I mean, like lightning quick, to start shooting back. If the Sims are with you, I don’t think you need to worry about defending yourselves.”
Robert and Annie glare at her as she turns her back to them and continues to wash the dishes.
The walkie-talkie on the table crackles and Andy’s voice materializes in the basement.
“Guys, I just heard gunshots. I’m trying to see where they’re coming from but I haven’t seen anything so far.”
Annie grabs the walkie and presses the talk button. “We’ll be right up.”
Annie, Robert, Kyle, and Ben grab their rifles and shoulder bags with their extra ammo and walkie-talkies in them and head into the tunnel.
“I’ll just be here, cleaning the dishes, doing women’s work,” Danielle says to the air after the others leave.
“There, over by that orange house, in the field!” Kyle exclaims as he looks through his binoculars.
The others move their binoculars and rifle scopes to look in the area he just pointed out. A woman walks through the field. She’s naked and covered in blood and the black ooze of the zombies. In her left hand is a pistol. As she walks, zombies get near her and hesitate, and when they do, she raises the pistol and shoots them. She’s dropped a half dozen so far.
“What the hell is she doing? Is she committing suicide by zed?” Robert asks.
“Why is she naked? That makes no sense,” Andy says.
“We have to help her,” Annie says. “We can’t just let her die out there.”
“We don’t know what her deal is, or if she even wants help,” Robert says. “And we’d be putting our lives at risk for someone who we don’t even know.”
“She didn’t take her clothes off and cover herself in blood and gore on a lark, Robert. Something horrible has happened to her, and she needs our help.” Annie looks at Kyle, expecting him to speak up. He realizes that they’re all waiting for him to make a decision.
“Okay,” he says, “I’ll get one of the carts and go after her. Robert, can you and Annie get over to the house across the street and cover me from the front windows?”
“Yes,” Annie says when Robert hesitates. She looks at him with icy eyes. “She could be someone’s sister, Robert. I know you’d want someone to help Steph or me right?”
He nods in submission and the Sims head down to the ground floor. Kyle grabs a blanket off the bed, then turns to Ben and Andy and motions for them to follow him as they head down to the garage.
“You two get in the other cart. Once I’ve left, and those two are in position, you guys take the other cart and try to draw some of the zeds away from my path back to the house. Lead them back to the green space and cut back through the alley. Let them keep within forty or fifty yards until you turn into the green space, then leave them in the dust. Got it?”
“Got it, Dad,” Ben says.
Kyle presses the push-to-talk button on the mic for his walkie. “Natalie? Danielle? Marc?”
He rounds the corner from the stairs into the kitchen and heads for the garage door. Natalie finally answers.
“Yeah?” she says.
“Bring the walkie and get to the garage ASAFP. We need you on door detail.”
“On my way!” she replies.
In the garage, Ben uses his flashlight to find the light that Marc has rigged to his solar grid and turns it on. The three men check their weapons, ensuring they’re loaded and ready. Kyle puts the blanket he grabbed in the basket behind the seat.
Natalie opens the door, peers into the garage, then descends the two steps to the concrete floor.
“Thanks, Nat,” Andy says. “Just raise the door when we tell you and pull it shut as soon as we’re out, okay?”
“Yep, got it,” she replies.
The walkies crackle. “Guys,” Annie says. “We’re in position. The alley’s clear as soon as you want to go. She’s drawing quite a crowd, so sooner is better.”
Kyle nods at Natalie. “Go,” he says.
She grabs the handle and pulls the door up, and Kyle presses the pedal to the floor, and gets the cart up to its maximum speed of fifteen miles per hour, with Ben and Andy following behind him. He cuts through the vacant lots, hops the curb, crosses the street and slows down enough to jump the curb on the other side of the street without hurting the wheels or suspension on the golf cart. As he heads for the woman, he veers to the right to stay out of Annie and Robert’s line of fire. He sees zombies dropping in the field and a half second later he hears the muffled whump of one of the suppressed AR15s. He glances back when he hears whistling and sees Ben and Andy on the bike path that borders the big field. They’re whistling at the zombies, drawing several of them toward them. As the number of zombies grows, they pull forward, stop and fire into the horde, then pull forward another hundred feet and fire a few more shots. They’ve got the majority of the zombies from the street and first thirty or forty feet of the field. More are coming from the west, putting their escape route in danger.
Kyle pulls up next to the naked woman. The slide is locked back on her pistol, and she’s looking around at the zombies that continue to fall dead.
“Am I doing that?” she asks.
“Ma’am, you need to come with me!” Kyle says.
“Who are you?” she asks.
“My name is Kyle. Come with me now, while we can still get away!”
“Kyle Reese? Like in the Terminator? My husband would love that! But you’re supposed to say ‘come with me if you want to live.’”
“If that makes it better, then yes, like in the Terminator. Come with me if you want to live!”
She raises her empty pistol at a zombie closing in on them and pulls the trigger. Kyle draws his pistol, leans over fires twice, hitting the creature in the neck and the temple. It collapses.
“See?” she says. “I keep killing them with my mind.”
Kyle grabs the blanket, runs around the back of the cart and throws it around the woman. He pushes her toward the cart, shoving her onto the seat when they get close enough. He turns and fires at three zombies who are within a dozen feet of him, dropping all three. He runs to the driver’s side, pulls the woman close, and hits the gas.
He looks for Ben and Andy, but they have already rounded the corner into the green space, and there’s a steady flow of zombies in their direction, though more of them are diverting toward Kyle now.
He hears the AR-15s whumping as he crosses the street. He looks up and sees Robert shooting into the horde coming from the direction of the green space, while Annie shoots over his head at the zombies pursuing him. Once he hits the middle of the street, they both pull back from the windows and disappear.
He jumps the curb onto the sidewalk and heads across the vacant lots. He hears Robert’s voice in his earpiece.
“Natalie, get the door up! Everyone is coming in hot!”
The garage door opens as Kyle crosses the alley and flies up the driveway into the garage. He locks the brake and jumps out immediately, getting his rifle unslung and ready to shoot.
“Watch her!” he shouts at Natalie, who goes to the bewildered woman still sitting in the golf cart. Kyle takes a knee, breathes out long and deliberately, and starts shooting at zombies. He’s pleased that his first four shots all result in zombies dropping, their forward momentum pitching them into the dirt of the empty lot. Several of the undead behind them trip on their dead bodies.
Annie and Robert are over the fence of the house across the alley, running to the garage. Annie stays to her right, out of Kyle’s firing line, and at the base of the driveway she turns and helps him shoot at the incoming horde.
“Get into the garage and get the door down!
” Andy says over the walkie-talkie. “We’re going to the house where we got the golf carts the other day. We’ll lead them away from our houses.”
They all retreat into the garage and Robert pulls the door down. A few seconds later they hear the whir of the electric motor on the cart as it passes the garage, and the tires crunching on the pavement as the cart stops. They hear the slides racking on Ben and Andy’s guns, then Andy calling out “follow us, you stupid, smelly fucks!” Again they hear the whirring of the electric motor as the cart pulls away.
Dozens of shuffling feet pass by the garage as the hordes pursue the two boys.
“Well, that was fun,” Robert says. “Whadda ya say we never do that again?”
Eight
“How is she?” Kyle asks.
Natalie glances at the bedroom door, which they’ve left half open.
“She’s good…at least physically. She’s…”
Danielle interrupts Natalie. “She’s cracked her Liberty Bell,” she says.
Natalie throws a sideways glance at Danielle. “What she’s saying in a tactless way is that she’s not exactly…in this reality at the moment. She thinks you’re Kyle Reese from The Terminator. She kept talking about how her husband was a huge fan of those movies, except for the fourth one. Then she’d start crying and say it was a shame he couldn’t meet you.”
“What happened to her? How did she end up like that?” Kyle asks.
“She didn’t tell us the whole story,” Danielle says, her tone more subdued. “She and her family were hiding out, and someone attacked them. Everyone is dead, and I think she was raped, but I can’t say for certain. She kept derailing her story with talk of the Terminator and that stupid Adam Sandler movie, Little Nicky.”
Kyle thinks for a minute, then says “But no bites? No scratches? Physically she’s good?”
“Well, the horde didn’t get their hands – or teeth - on her. We’d have seen the signs by now if they did,” Natalie says. “But she’s bruised. She’s definitely been in a fight recently.”
“And she’s asleep now?”
“Yes,” Natalie confirms. “At least I think so. We’re giving her some space.”
“Okay. Thanks, both of you, for cleaning her up and getting her dressed. It’s lucky she’s about the same size as Elaine.”
Danielle looks confused. “Who’s Elaine?” she asks.
“The lady that lived here!” Natalie says with more than a trace of annoyance. “She was at Ben’s house on the first day? Looking all apocalypse-chic?”
Danielle scowls at Natalie. “I do not need attitude from you too!”
She pushes past Natalie and glares at Kyle as she heads into the tunnel without saying anything else.
Kyle watches her go with a puzzled look on his face, then turns his gaze back to Natalie.
“Ok, what gives? More issues with Keith?” he asks.
“She’s dealing with a lot,” Natalie starts to say, then corrects herself. “What am I saying? Like we’re all not going through a lot? She’s just not dealing with it well. Keith breaks up with her for Stephenie. I mean who does that when the world’s ending? Bad timing much? But then there’s all these zombies or zeds or whatever we’re calling them, keeping us stuck indoors, and she has no idea if her family is alive. Then Keith is always either making out with Stephenie, or they’re doing sign language with each other, which is like, really rude when you think about because it’s like they’re talking behind her back but right in front of her. Do you know what I mean?”
She pauses long enough for Kyle to say “Um, I guess so,” and then she continues.
“But then it’s like, I don’t know if my family is alive either, you know? Neither does Toni – who’s been SHOT, by the way – and neither does Andy. I think what’s also eating at her is on top of all that, Keith DOES have his dad here, and a new girlfriend and the rest of us are all paired off. And the Sims lost their family, but they have each other, and so she’s the only one who doesn’t have someone, so she’s the odd man out.”
Kyle doesn’t mention that not EVERYONE else is paired off – Marc’s wife passed away last year and Kyle has no idea if Naomi, Danny, and Elaine made it out of town and up to Danny’s haven in the mountains.
Natalie drops her voice to a conspiratorial whisper and leans in close to Kyle.
“The truth, Mr. Puckett, is that Toni and I don’t care for Danielle very much. She was going to graduate - well, I guess that doesn’t matter now, but anyway, she was going to leave and go back to California to find a job. She was going to break up with Keith after graduation, and all she’d been talking to us about until all this happened is how she couldn’t wait to get out of Colorado like she’s suddenly too good for us. She made us swear to keep it secret, so she could tell Keith in her own time, which I guess was going to be on her way to the airport the morning after graduation? How shitty is that? Anyway, now all this…well, the world is ending, and NOW she’s upset Keith has moved on? She was about to toss him to curb. It just rubs me the wrong way, and with all this other stuff going on, I don’t – WE don’t – need to be dealing with her shit too. Pardon my language.”
“That’s ok,” Kyle says, waving off her casual swear. “Listen, we’ll sort this stuff out somehow. I don’t know how, but we’ll figure it out.”
“You’re a good guy, Mr. Puckett, but you never had any daughters. This,” she waves in the direction Danielle went, “is not going to sort itself out. It’s going to come to a head, and there will be an explosion.”
“Noted,” he says.
Natalie takes her leave and heads to the other bedroom to see how Toni is getting along. Her shoulder has shown no signs of infection, and the sutures that Danny put in have come out. The wounds have healed, but she still can’t move her arm without a lot of pain, and that limits what she’s capable of doing. If she had to fight or protect herself from zombies, there’s no way she could do it right now.
Even if they could get her out of the city, according to Danny, there’s some fairly rigorous hiking to get to the entrance of his mountain property, and she’s in no shape for that yet. Kyle estimates it may be six weeks before she’s healed enough to make the trip.
That gets him thinking about supplies. It’s been three weeks since the zombies attacked. If it takes Toni three more weeks to get fit enough to get out of town, that means they’ll need food for eleven people - twelve, counting the woman sleeping in the next room – to last twenty-one days. Twenty-one days’ times three meals per day times twelve servings per meal means they need seven hundred and fifty servings of food, plus food for the road. That means a lot more scavenging. Danny’s water tank holds three thousand gallons of water, so that’s twelve gallons per person per day – but that includes showers, dish washing, and toilet flushing in addition to drinking. They’re going to have to ration water, particularly when it comes to the toilet. If it’s yellow, let it mellow, and all that.
He turns his attention to the map that Danny left them, and compares it to a larger fold-up map of Boulder County. He’s frowning at the roads, wondering which ones will be clear enough to be able to head into the mountains when he hears footsteps and the Sims girls emerge from the tunnel.
“Why is the tunnel door wide open?” Annie asks. “Someone could just walk right in.”
“They’d have to get past you first,” Kyle says. “I like those odds.”
Annie stares at him without responding.
“Danielle stormed off in a huff. I should have checked the door.”
Stephenie signs to Annie.
“No shit,” Annie says, then when she notices Kyle staring at them she says, “She said ‘why am I not surprised’ about Danielle leaving the door open.”
He changes the subject. “How are things topside?”
“The zeds have wandered off except for a few lurking in the alley,” Annie says. “Something always draws them away.”
She looks at Stephenie and continues. “We’ve been talking,
and we have a couple of thoughts that we want to run past you.”
He looks at them for a second and then starts folding up the map.
“Please, sit,” he says.
The girls lean their rifles against the wall and sit down opposite Kyle.
“So you know I was watching the attack from the upstairs window across the street. Several times I would have sworn that woman was a goner. Zeds got right up to her, in full attack mode, and they stopped. Each time it gave her time to get off another shot. It didn’t make any sense until you got her in the garage and we could smell her.”
“Smell her?” Kyle interrupts.
“Yes! That smell was hard to take. I mean, you can smell death and rot in the air, and that’s bad, and all, but I’d never been that close to whatever it is that passes for blood in those things,” Annie says.
“Tell him your idea,” Stephenie interjects. Kyle is still intrigued by the deaf girl. Despite her disability, she’s confident, capable and yes, good looking to boot, not that being deaf has anything to do with any of that. She doesn’t let her disability slow her down. He can see why Keith is smitten with her.
“I’m getting there,” Annie says.
“You’re getting there slowly,” Stephenie says aloud for Kyle’s benefit. “Come on, while we’re young!”
Annie shakes her head and turns her focus back to Kyle.
“Sorry, patience has never been her strong suit,” she says. “So, here’s our idea. We think we should capture one of these things, drain it, and use the goop to make a scent camouflage the way hunters do.”
