by Mike Sutton
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Amy wasn’t entirely sure how long it had been since the power had gone out for good. It felt like weeks, but it was probably only a mere handful of days. Since then she had been living in a strange almost old fashioned manner, being awake from dawn to a little past dusk, like the farmers of old. The only thing she was sure of in recent days was that frontier living did not mesh well with a modern apartment in a modern city. This and that darkness was frightening when monsters were walking around outside your home.
Life had fallen into a pattern once again. Eat, sleep, play games and talk. They spent countless hours playing board and card games. When it was light enough outside they even read some of the books that they had scavenged from one of the apartments on the second floor. All in all it wasn’t too unpleasant, at least when she kept her mind off of the outside world. Crayson was turning out to be both interesting and funny, he did wonders for her spirits, telling stories and jokes. He kept her from sinking into a deep depression from which she never might be able to escape. She was glad to have him around, sitting alone in the dark would have been maddening.
To speak of the devil, Crayson had fallen asleep on her couch, again. They both had succumbed to weariness early as they tried to pass the night, waiting and playing board games. Monopoly was really dull after all the property was acquired and only two people were playing. Even when you did it in a lighthearted manner, though she had yet to accept playing a game of strip Monopoly, there were still only so many times you could laugh at the same jokes before the laughter started to sound hollow.
The first rays of rosy fingered dawn were just beginning to filter through her kitchen window, casting shadows and lighting up her stained glass ornaments, as she sat and thought. It was strange, in the past she was never really a morning person, but here she stood for the last several days enjoying the watching the sunrise. She had found that the she had intensely missed that simple pleasure on the grey dreary morning after that big storm rolled through.
She held a pretend cup of coffee in her hand. It was just a mug of water really, since both gas for cooking and the coffee itself were becoming so scarce. Even water was beginning to become a problem. Still she held her imaginary coffee as she watched the rising sun. She loved sunrises and sunsets. Even before the world had changed she had loved them, but she cherished them now. It was comforting to know that some things never changed, no matter how bad life seemed to get. If there was proof that God did exist it could be easily found in the beauty of sunsets, those and the wondrous nature of beer.
It numbed her mind when she thought about how much life had changed in the last couple of weeks, unfortunately she could often make herself think of little else, so she spent a good deal of time in a daze. What she could think about scared her. They were running short on fuel and water was getting low. She and Crayson had searched the entire building several times, hoping to find more water. Food was fairly easy to come by for the time, everyone had at least some canned good stocked in their kitchens, very few people in their building had any bottled water. Amy heaved a sigh and went back to watching the sunrise. It would be harder to enjoy in the days to come with the specter of venturing out into the world floating so near.
It was well after sunrise when Crayson finally rejoined the world of consciousness. Amy was sitting in her chair and gazing out the window as he began to stir from the safety of his dreams. Or maybe it was the prison of his dreams. She could hear him shift around as he began to return, he had spent the last couple of hours tossing in his sleep and mumbling, if the nightmare was as bad as it sounded, maybe his dreams were no safer than the waking world.
After a few moments of shifting about, Crayson finally roused himself. Rubbing his eyes as he sat up in the couch. He ran through his morning routine checklist of places than needed to be scratched before he could safely get up and face the world. It was a strange thing about the man, he seemed to scratch the same places, in order, every morning. Or at least he had as long as they had been living together. It had been years since she had had a roommate, and many months since she had had a boyfriend, it left her used to living alone, but longing for companionship. She didn’t realize any of this until Crayson had de facto moved in.
She wasn’t sure how it happened, but from the first day he just never left. She smiled to herself as she thought about him. She liked him well enough, but she still didn’t feel that he would make anything more than a good friend. She might one day come to love him, but she doubted if she would ever fall in love with him, he just didn’t have that quality about him that drove her mad with desire. Very few men had ever done so. Still she was overjoyed to have him around. The man had a cheerful disposition, he was nearly always smiling. His constantly positive outlook made her feel as it everything might just turn out ok in the end, even if life sucked in the meantime.
Several hours of the morning had passed before Crayson finally awoke. Amy was in her chair working on a crossword puzzle from a book that they had found in one of their neighbors apartments. Looking around groggily, he smiled when he saw her. He pushed himself up into a sitting position and proceeded to scratch himself until he was content and itch free. Crayson got up and dressed himself before stumbling out into the kitchen for some food on which to break his fast.
“How much water we got left?”
She tried to remember. Supplies were getting lower by the day. They had been far too lavish in their spending of the meager amount of water that they had gathered before the pipes all finally went dry. They had both been surprised how fast the water had disappeared. “Not much, only a couple of gallons I think.”
“We won’t be able to survive much longer on that.” Amy shook her head. They would need to get a new supply of water long before they needed to scavenge more food. The problem was that they had been all through the building and they were unable to find any. Crayson had suggested that they use the water in the toilets, but she told him that she would sooner leave than resort to that. Just the thought made her feel a little nauseous again.
“Ok, lets go then.” She said barely above a whisper. “But where?”
Crayson leaned against the doorframe, scratching his cheek and staring at the floor as he thought. It seemed that he had spent so much energy trying to figure out how to get her to go somewhere else, that he hadn’t yet thought through where they would go if they did leave. Finally he looked back up at her and said “The Megamart is the safest place I can think of right now.”
“The Megamart? A store? Why would that be safe?”
“Well, it’s pretty easy to lock up to keep those things out, plus it has food and water as well as all sorts of other things we might need. Guns, ammunition, clothing, lawn furniture.”
“Lawn furniture?”
“Aye, who knows when we might need to sit out and sun our pale flesh. Especially you, you look like a ghost.” He smiled at her annoyed expression, and went on “but that doesn’t matter, all that really counts right now is surviving, and I believe that the Megamart is the place to go.”
“Ok, I guess that makes sense.” Amy looked around her apartment, at a lifetime’s worth of collected treasures. “What should we take with us?”
The expression on Crayson’s face told her that he thought through what they should bring along with them, and the list was brief. “Some food, water, that shotgun we found up in 4b…”
They had found an ancient looking gun that Crayson had told her was a old double barreled ten gauge shotgun. It didn’t really matter much to her since they couldn’t find any bullets for it anywhere else in the apartment, she had forgotten about the stupid thing until he mentioned it again. “But we don’t have any bullets for the gun!”
“Not yet, but they do have them at the Megamart. We also will need a couple of blunt objects that are easy to swing until we can get our hands on some ammo for the shotgun.” Amy nodded again before getting to her f
eet and heading for the kitchen.
“I’ll get the food and water together, you take care of the rest.”
“Um, one more thing.” Crayson hadn’t moved, he was still leaning against the wall and looking at her.
“What else?”
“I don’t have a car. We’ll need one to get to the Megamart.”
“Mrs. Francisco has…had a little car. We can get the keys from her apartment.”
“Sounds like a plan. I’ll go find them.”
It took less than twenty minutes to get everything together and load it into Mrs. Francisco’s little car. They ran into a couple of the corpse creatures, but the golf clubs that they had brought along made quick, if messy, work of them.
The streets were largely empty. The saw a few of the dead wandering here and there, but apart from that it was like a ghost town. She groaned at her own poor choice of phrases. A ghost town populated by the walking dead.
