by Howard, Bob
A walk-in pantry turned out to be a major find. It was well stocked with canned foods and boxes of dry goods. Now he just had to find a way to cook it without power and without the fumes from the stove killing them. He took a quick peek through the curtains at the front of the house and saw several infected dead moving across the yards of neighboring homes. He thought it was a little odd that they were moving in the opposite direction as the night before, but you never knew what the infected would be drawn toward. It could be something as simple as the wind blowing a piece of paper down the street.
He almost missed the second closet in the kitchen because he never would have expected to find two in the same kitchen. He wasn’t used to the kind of luxury this family had known, and judging by some of the other homes in the area, they had not been among the most affluent. They were just rich enough to live at the edge of the neighborhood.
The second closet looked like a Bass Pro Shop. Shelves of camping, fishing, and hunting gear were neatly arranged from front to back. It only took a moment to locate the Coleman stove fuel. Hampton knew it wasn’t a good idea to use a fuel burning stove inside a house, but this house was so big that opening a window a couple of inches should be enough. There was another thing he had learned about the infected dead, and that was they weren’t really drawn to smells, just noise. A lot of outdoor cooking would have been interrupted if they were drawn to smells.
As soon as Hampton located the instant coffee, he started looking for the emergency water supply. He noticed that most of the gear in the Bass Pro closet looked new and unused. Either the guy who lived in the house was interested in camping, or he had stocked up for an emergency. Either way, he would have bottled water. He found a case of distilled water in the closet with the canned goods then picked a window that faced the backyard as the place to vent the stove. He looked at his watch to see how long it would take for the smell of coffee to wake Colleen, and as he expected, it was under a minute.
He saw her head appear near the floor of the second floor sitting area. She must have crawled to the edge so she could see him below. Her hair was messed up, and she was wrinkling her nose. He put one finger to his lips and then pointed at the open window. She nodded in understanding and pulled herself to an upright position using the railing that ran across the landing. He motioned that she could stay there, and he would bring the coffee to her. Colleen grinned and pointed at the bathroom.
He was waiting for her when she came out of the bathroom, and she gratefully accepted the hot coffee. When he handed it to her, she leaned closer and surprised him with a small kiss on the cheek.
“Thank you,” she said in a low voice. Then she smiled and added, “Do I have to call you by your last name?”
Hampton was caught off guard by both the kiss and the question. He wasn’t sure if he had done something else good, or if it was just the coffee.
He kept his voice low just out of caution, but it seemed more like a moment to use a soft voice. He thought he could stare at her green eyes forever.
“Chris. My first name is Chris,” he whispered.
She held out her hand so he could shake it, and he asked, “Is it too soon for me to ask your last name?”
She smiled to show she liked playing this little courting game and said, “O’Connor, but it’s too soon for me you give you my phone number. How long has it been since you’ve had a girlfriend, Chris?”
That question really caught him off guard. He didn’t realize it was that obvious. He had only been in a couple of relationships, and only one of them had mattered. When it fell apart, he was left with a bunch of hurt feelings and even more confusion. From that time on, he just didn’t get close to anyone again.
“Pleased to meet you, Ms. O’Connor.”
He shook her hand and made what he considered a smooth recovery, but she didn’t let go of his hand when he thought the handshake was over. She also held his eyes with her own.
He finally gave in and said, “It’s been a while. I haven’t really had a girlfriend for a long time now.”
Colleen saw that it was a sore spot with him and knew when to let it go, but to help him past the moment she whispered, “Well, you’ve got one now, so don’t think about ditching me.”
Despite everything that was going on outside in the world, Hampton felt good for the first time in almost a year. He was deathly afraid of something happening to Colleen even before he knew her last name. Now he was going to be worried sick all the time.
“Where did you find the coffee?”
“There’s a big pantry and a supply closet, believe it or not. I think there may be guns somewhere around here, too. The closet was full of unused survival gear. Either the guy who lived here had time to go shopping when the infection hit the news, or he was planning on doing some serious camping. He may also have been one of those people who just had to have lots of toys, but he kept them in their boxes.”
“Guns would be in a den, but you can bet they would be in a gun cabinet. That means a key would be hidden somewhere in the den where the kids wouldn’t be able to find it. Let’s go, Chris. We need to search this place and then figure out what we’re going to do next. We could stay here for a bit, but it’s nothing we could call permanent.”
The den turned out to be a very nicely furnished room at the top of a narrow set of stairs. It felt like they were going up into a tower because the stairs made a turn and disappeared at a closed door. It was unlocked, and Hampton opened the door slowly in case there would be another resident waiting for a victim.
The room was well lit by large windows that gave an almost panoramic view of the neighborhood and the lake. At the same time it was high enough above the street that the infected couldn’t see if anyone was watching. The room was obviously a man’s study, complete with the desk, executive chair, and richly polished wooden book shelves. There was a wet bar in one corner, and Hampton studied the labels on a row of bottles.
“This would be hell to defend because all someone would need to do is set fire to it, and we would be trapped up here,” said Hampton, “but it would make a great watch tower for a short time.”
“Here’s what we came for,” said Colleen. She was standing in front of a cabinet that had a row of hunting rifles on the other side of the glass.
“Can we break the glass without anything outside hearing it?” she asked.
As soon as she said it she knew it wasn’t going to be hard to find the key. The climb to the man-cave was too far for someone not to have a hidden key. Hampton had grinned at her when she asked, and she turned red. Hampton thought blushing was cute.
Since he was almost a foot taller than her, Hampton started running his hand along the top of every cabinet and sill. He came up empty so he checked through the desk and under the drawers. It occurred to him that he didn’t like being too close to the open windows even if it wasn’t likely that he would be spotted by the infected dead, but he thought it would be a good idea to slowly close the curtains. It was when he reached for the top edge of the curtains that he saw the key hanging neatly from the mount that held the curtain rod. He took a quick peek through the window to be sure the coast was clear then retrieved the key.
The rifles turned out to be nothing special compared to what they already had, but the supply of ammunition that matched their rifles was something they desperately needed. The bonus was a drawer full of hand guns and spare clips.
Colleen knew her weapons and how to handle them. Hampton watched with appreciation as she checked each gun before sitting them on the desk. She pulled back the slides, checked the chambers, and checked the safety on each one. She did one dry fire with each to see if they worked, then laid them facing away from her and Hampton on the desk. She was safety conscious as well as a good shot.
She caught him again. He didn’t even know she was looking at him because she was handling the guns so efficiently. Without turning her head she asked, “Do you like what you see?”
It was funny to Hampton, but
he suddenly realized he had met someone a lot like her before. When the four survivors had met with him on the bridge outside Georgetown, one of them had been a fiery little brunette who seemed to have one of the men off balance the whole time. She teased him in a good-natured way that made Hampton think she liked him. It dawned on him that maybe Colleen was teasing him because she liked him.
Hampton gave her a small dose of her own medicine when he said, “Of course I do. Is there anyone who doesn’t like a brand new Glock?”
She kept inspecting the weapon without looking at him, but she couldn’t stop the smile that spread across her face. Her quick response showed she was a master at dishing out the full dose of medicine.
“Maybe I’ll let you handle it later so you can see if it’s to your liking,” she said.
He had to laugh, but he knew she was going to be more than a match for him, so he started packing the ammunition into a carrying case with a long shoulder strap. It looked like it was a laptop bag, but it worked well for the boxes of ammunition. There was a closet that had a couple of gym bags on a shelf. He emptied the contents onto the floor and then began filling them with everything that wouldn’t fit in the laptop case. They needed all three bags by the time they had taken everything they wanted.
There was one other item in the closet that caught Hampton’s eye. It was a decent sized telescope with a tall tripod. The view from the windows in the man-cave was already pretty good, but with the telescope the previous owner of the house would have been able to keep a close eye on his neighbors. Probably a little more than his neighbors would have liked.
Hampton carried the telescope out and set it up by the window. He was careful to stay back far enough from the glass to be sure nothing spotted his motion, and the sun didn’t reflect from the lens. He adjusted the eyepiece and was amazed at the quality of the view.
“This will come in handy when we figure out what we’re going to do. We can at least come up here and check the amount of activity first.”
No sooner had he said it than he saw what they had done by choosing to escape to this particular neighborhood. They had the high ground and the window afforded a large view, so he was able to see all the way across the lake to the opposite side in all directions. He was not happy to find they were in a neighborhood that had water on three sides. The only side not bordered by water was where they had come from the night before, and he had no urge to go back that way any time soon.
“I think we’re going to need a plan that includes a boat,” he said. “In the meantime, I’m getting hungry.”
“Well, now that we have everything we really need from here,” said Colleen, “let’s see what we can find that’s worth cooking in that pantry.”
They hauled everything down the narrow stairs and dumped the bags in the sitting area at the top of the stairs. They would be spending more time there than downstairs as they made plans for their escape from the area.
When they got to the kitchen, they spent a couple of minutes taking glimpses from windows all around the first floor. There were a few of the infected wandering around, but since the commotion on the interstate had died down on the previous evening, the infected had stopped flocking to that area.
There was plenty of light for cooking, so it didn’t take long for them to put together a decent meal. Spam was never going to replace steak, but it sure tasted good when you were hungry. They boiled some pasta, mixed in a can of peas, and then stirred in diced chunks of pan fried Spam. Since hot water was something they had learned not to waste, Colleen used the water they had used to boil the pasta to cook a box of Stove Top Stuffing. They had plenty of starches in the meal, but it was definitely filling. They hadn’t eaten as well in the last couple of weeks at the football stadium, and judging by the amount of food in the pantry, they could eat well for a few months if they wanted to.
Hampton handed Colleen a glass of brandy when they were done eating. She eyed it suspiciously and said she didn’t know if they should drink it. He thought she meant they wouldn’t be as sharp after drinking, but what she really meant was that they could get used to having too much of a good thing, and they needed to be thinking about moving on.
“I know what you mean,” he said. “This place has a lot to offer, but it’s not safe. If the infected hear us, they will eventually find a way to get in, and even if they don’t, we won’t have a way to get out.”
“There’s one other thing we can’t forget,” she said. “There’s always the possibility of other survivors trying to use this house. Since it’s right by the edge of the interstate, it’s a likely candidate just as it was for us.”
“I think we should search the whole house for things we can use, lay up for a day of two, then start working our way from house to house until we find one that has a boat tied up where we can get to it in a hurry,” he said.
“Sounds reasonable, but tell me something, Chris. Don’t you think a lot of people headed for the water when this started?”
He nodded and took a sip of the brandy. It was warm going down, and it calmed his nerves a bit. Something he didn’t know he needed to do.
“When the infection started to spread, every talking head on the news said stay home. Then they all started saying don’t go to the hospital if you get bitten. Then they started saying don’t stay home with a family member who’s been bitten. People didn’t know what to do.”
He didn’t even notice that he was doing a lot of gesturing with both of his hands. At some point in time he had set his brandy on the floor where they had been eating. Colleen reached over and caught one of his hands in hers.
“Hey, Chris, slow down, You’re a little more mad about this than before. What’s happening?”
At first he didn’t know what she meant, but then it started to sink in. Up until yesterday he had been part of everything that happened around him, but he had not been a part of it with someone else. He had always been a member of the group, a major player on the team, but he didn’t have an attachment. Now, there was Colleen. She was a living, breathing extension of him. He felt like he wouldn’t survive if something happened to her.
She saw the change in his expression and the way he tried not to look at her, and she understood.
“Chris, when this all started I had a boyfriend. Actually, he was more than that. We were supposed to get married. I was at home when I saw the first reports on the news, and I tried to call him on his cell. He didn’t answer because he was with another woman. I got a call from a friend who said they had seen them together. He showed up a few hours later with a huge bite on his side and another on his arm. I wouldn’t let him in. He cried, begged, screamed, and tried to break down the door. He made so much noise that a crowd of the infected came right up on the porch to get him. I listened to them rip him apart.”
Hampton listened without interrupting, but he didn’t really see how that was something related to him. He heard the reports, but Georgetown had somehow stayed outside of the problem. Somehow the infection hadn’t arrived the same way as it had everywhere else, and even if it had, there wasn’t anyone at home to protect. He lived by himself and only had to be wary of his neighbors. For a passing moment he wondered how his former girlfriend had made out, but he let the thought go as quickly as it had arrived.
Colleen went on, “You didn’t have to let go of what you used to be, Chris. You didn’t have to tell someone they couldn’t come in, so you were spared what you’re going through now. You’re afraid it will be me out on that porch, and you don’t know how you will face it. That cheating jerk did me a favor by getting me mad enough so I would be able to ignore his screams, but he was still someone I had cared about, and I was faced with the decision at the start. I doubt it will make it easier for me if it happens again.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way, does it?” he asked.
“No, it doesn’t. We can cover each other’s backs, and if the time comes that one of us is out on the porch screaming to get in, the other one shoul
d end the screaming quickly. Now that we know the price for being weak and opening the door, we need to protect ourselves.”
Hampton shook his head and said, “That’s not what I meant. We can promise that if one of us goes down, both will go down. Commitment will keep us alive longer than self-preservation, and it will give us a reason to stay alive.”
Colleen didn’t cry easily, but for the first time since she listened to those screams on her front porch, her eyes filled with tears that began to spill down her cheeks. That time she had cried in anger and misery, but this time she was crying from relief. She was relieved that she could care so much about someone again.
They held each other for a long time, both enjoying the comfort they needed. Colleen whispered, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. When was the last time you took a bath?”
They spent the day searching the huge house. It was really much bigger than they had even realized. Neither wanted to let the other be alone for more than a minute, and they enjoyed the attention they gave each other.
At first they started carrying things up to the designated safe zone in the sitting room, but they gradually realized they were finding far too many useful things in the rooms. They settled on taking inventory and a plan to review the list once they were done. More than once they talked about returning to the house in the future to collect something they couldn’t carry, but the goal was to get out of the area permanently.
By nightfall they had narrowed the list down to a couple of oversized backpacks and the bags full of weapons, and they decided to do something about that bath.
******
The following morning was just the beginning of another day, but it felt different to Hampton. He had no more reason to think life was going to get any easier than it had been for almost a year, but having Colleen with him made everything feel worth the effort. When they woke up together, they didn’t say much. They just smiled affectionately and began getting ready to go.
