by J. Rudolph
As soon as the ground was thawed enough to start planting, the entire town was drafted to the garden crew and we were out in full force. All of the women put in time ripping out that field, turning the dirt, making organized rows, while the men worked on the canal, and before long, we turned the dead grass into something that would keep our bellies full. When the last seed packet went into the ground and things resembled something like a life we were going to be living, it struck me that we didn't even look like ourselves anymore. We were a well-organized team, and now that we were all living in our own spaces, the bickering that was going on in Idaho had stopped. We all learned more and more tricks to being self-sufficient out here, and all the traces of being city slickers seemed to slip away.
For now, we still depended on our foraging runs, and I wondered how long it was going to take to not need to go poking around vacant areas around us, because I really looked forward to not needing to do the vulture routine. There was a lot to be said for continuing to do the runs though, there were still so many resources out there, including things we didn't expect. It was during one of these scavenging runs that we discovered the home of a shut in. He must have fallen early after threshold hit, because he had an abundance of untouched supplies coming out of everywhere and a neat unexpected little treasure, a Ham radio with a large antenna array. His corpse lead us right to the radio, and I can only assume that given the mountain of blood pressure and cholesterol prescription pills and the way the corpse was forever frozen with his right hand over his chest, that he had died of a heart attack before he had a chance to use everything he had squirreled away. At least they would be put to good use. We loaded his supplies, and with an almost boyish glee on Trent's face, the radio and antenna.
On the way back, I heard Trent go on and on about how much he had wanted to own a Ham radio and that he studied to for his license, but couldn't make it past the Morse code requirement when he was younger. No such requirement existed now, and there was no governing body that was going to kick him off the airwaves for not being able to tap out some cryptic message. He couldn't wait to turn that post office across the street from our house into a radio station, and barely managed to work through unloading all the food at the mercantile. As soon as that last can was off the truck he took the truck to the post office and began to unpack the equipment and set up his new toy. I stayed behind to stock the shelves of the store so I would be out of his way as he transformed a dead letter building into a communication station.
While I continued to stock shelves, I had the opportunity to admire the work that was going into this building. I loved our store. It was a silly little thing, not much more than a thrift store with a pantry, but it was ours. We took everything out of all the houses and put it up 'for sale' there. When a kid was outgrowing something, the old stuff was dropped off there, clean and ready to use, and the next size up was gathered. We opened our store up to Jack's group as well, and were surprised to find that they decided to set up something similar in their town that our people were welcome to use as well. We never had a whole lot to trade between our groups, but at least they were different things and it kept our supplies fresh.
The time I spent making house visits to Clyde's Park were less frequent as people began to trust me more. We welcomed them into our town and clinic any time they needed me. At first there was the rare patient, and people waited until there was a rip roaring infection from something as simple as a puncture wound before they called for help and I had to race over there. Now, there was a more steady stream of people coming to me and the infections were much less serious. It kept Trisha and me busy during the day, but it paid well in food variety and other seed packets. I felt like we were something out of Little House on the Prairie as I took chickens as payment for a family of sick people, but at night, I went home feeling like I made a difference and was thrilled that our chicken coop was getting almost crowded; a full coop meant that we would be able to kill a couple off and make a special dinner over at the café for everyone.
Our groups continued to blend together in social settings. We had our new friends over for dinner, and it was nice being able to meet people that weren't a part of our group. I noticed DaWayne was taken by one of the girls from Clyde's Park, a pretty little thing named Shayla. Shayla was this petite girl that stood no more than five feet tall, and she bore a striking resemblance to a fairy, down to her blonde pixie haircut and her large blue eyes. She had just turned eighteen-years-old, and she was the kindest girl that I had met in a while. It was cute to see her next to this big teddy bear of a man that held her close under his arm. I think he was immediately taken with her, and not because she was one of the first girls that we came across in the right age group that he wasn't related to. I wondered if the zombie apocalypse happened just to make these two meet each other, and tried to imagine another path that would have led these two together if it hadn't happened.
As promised, Terri brought us over a female goat that was old enough to mate with our Jeffrey. I felt like a mom on the eve of a kid's prom date when they first met. We named her Jane, and it didn't take long for her to become pregnant. I was so excited as her stomach began to swell. About 5 months later, poor Jane was acting like she hated life. I grabbed the walkie and called up Terri to ask her if she knew what was going on. She laughed at me, and said I was going to have a grand-goat, and that she was on her way over.
Goat births are a messy, messy ordeal. We were in the shed with her as the baby was beginning to crown. Terri wrinkled her nose and studied the way the hoofs came out.
"Good thing you called, you've got yourself a breech." I looked at Terri in wide-eyed horror. I had never even considered the possibility of a breech goat. She took off her flannel top shirt and squatted next to Jane, patting her on her back. She murmured her reassurances to our uncomfortable goat and reached inside of her, expertly pulling out the kid. Baby goats kinda look like a drowned rat crossbred with a dog, if you ask me, but Jane seemed to love her. Mother and kid bonded quickly, and she was very attentive to her newborn.
I was surprised how taken I was with this little guy. He was the size of a puppy, and an active little thing. I loved watching him bounce around the grass and play. I giggled when he wandered too far from his mom and started to cry, and Jane would always holler back until he found her, and vice versa. I never realized how talkative goats were. We, of course, went the cheesy route and named him Billy the Kid, and incorporated the name into a history lesson for the kids.
This was life now, and it was almost easy to forget that there was still a whole apocalypse going on. We were reminded of this every once in a while with sharp cracks of the rifle being fired. We still had to be prepared for the zombies and they came in odd waves. We would go a few weeks without seeing one, and we would fall into this sense of security that we were fine, until suddenly, a wave of several dozen would come in. We would warn Clyde's Park about the swarm that was passing through and they would do the same for us whenever possible.
Drew was becoming a very good hunter, better than I would have expected for a twelve year old. If nothing else, the waves of zombies were awesome for target practice. We trained him on both the gun and the compound bow, and he seemed to prefer to use the bow. His aim was exceptional and I was proud of him. I was surprised to find that Abigail was also very good at zombie patrol. They were both growing up so quickly. She definitely was a far cry from that six, almost seven year old that she was when this all started. At nine, she was a great deal more mature than most people were in their late teens. She became this quiet person who could just be still for a while, and she could sit almost like she was in deep meditation with the wind blowing in her hair. She could also be this firecracker of personality that could outrun the fastest of the other kids and keep going, make sarcastic comments, or entertain everyone with overly animated stories.
It was still my first instinct to want to put these kids in a safe room and board them up. I saw these little people up on the wall,
and my eyes had the capacity to still tear up instantly. These were children, and while I only gave birth to one of them, these were my children, and I wanted to keep them safe and protected in a china box. These kids were my reason that I kept going, and here they were, standing in the breeze with bows and arrows, playing a macabre game of Cowboys and Indians, but in real life. Seeing them both so calm and so serene in the middle of this made me want to die a little. These guys were babies. My babies, and they were fighting for their lives, for everyone's lives up on the wall, and this was their normal.
I walked over to them and put my arm around Drew before drawing Abigail in my embrace. I stood there in silence with my arms around them both and we remained there watching the swarm of dead people moaning and beating on the steel containers in a dub-step off-beat rhythm. I wanted to hold them together forever, but I had to let them go and let them be who they were turning into, guardians of our home, and let them be the flowers that were supposed to bloom in the worst conditions. These two were my orchids. With one last squeeze I stepped back and asked them how they were doing.
"Today, we are shooting the brown haired ones. Yesterday it was red hair, but that got boring with all the blood. I have five that were knocked out, so far," Abigail proclaimed proudly. "I would have had more, but my sight on my arrow must be messed up or something. A couple went whizzing by their heads, and that was annoying."
"She's pretty good, Mom. She was closer than I would have been at nine. Heck, I wasn't even shooting at nine." Drew wore a soft smile on his face as he looked at Abigail blush slightly.
I squatted down to their level, and picked up an unused bow, pulled an arrow of the quiver, and started to shoot the brown haired zombies alongside with them. It wasn't the most traditional game to play with kids, shooting just one type of zombie, but I had to admit that it was somewhat entertaining.
Every time the bodies grew thick, turning into a carpet of corpses that the other zombies would step on, we would make a lot of noise and draw them to a different portion of the wall. Once all the zombies were distracted, someone would come behind them and set fire to the bodies. It still was amazing how easy they burned, cord wood of death, and the flames burned around the containers that were holding them back. The smell of burning death seemed to mask our own human smells and we noticed at times that herds in the distance would change course when the smell of dinner was veiled. Invariably, there was a zombie that wandered over to the fire and stepped inside of the flame to see if there was some fresh meat waiting to be devoured. Whoever was standing nearby would shoot that flaming zombie before it wandered off into the woods and set Montana on fire.
Their lack of self-preservation still amazed me. They would step into the flames of hell if they thought there was a snack involved. They would continue walking even as they burned. They didn't seem to care for water much though; they would wade about knee deep before they changed their mind and stopped. I wondered why they would be fine to go into fire but stop at a little water. It couldn't be the sense of smell confusing them, the zombie death burn would have covered more odors than a bunch of water would, but this was what they did.
Zombie pyre did have a perk. For a few days, the other zombies wouldn't go back to where the smoldering remains of their infected brethren were, as long as they weren't in pursuit. In bad swarms it took several days to make a complete circle around the walls, but it was nice when they wandered past after the burn. It reminded me of that chalk that had pesticide in it that was supposed to keep the ants away. It worked for a while- it always wore off, but that time you had off from the ant situation was great. This was what corpse burn was like, a rotting gross smell that kept away the zombies.
In Southern California we lived in a burn zone, and I used to think that the smell of wet burned grass was the most disgusting fire related smell that ever was. I was wrong. Fortunately if you're exposed to something long enough, the senses learn to tune things out.
When the zombies were gone for a while, we would go back into our normal routines, and for Trent, that was playing with the radio. Jack was also really excited about the radio. He remembered all the time his dad spent playing with his radio towards the end of his life. Jack confided in me that his dad died of pancreatic cancer, and the thing that made him happiest was seeing how far he could reach with his radio. He had talked with someone in New York, and always wanted to be able to connect with the space station.
I wondered how many other survivor pockets there were. We surely couldn't be the only ones, and certainly not the only ones with a radio. It had been two and a half years since threshold hit, and people had to be craving contact as much as our two groups were. After Jack assembled his dad's radio, he and Trent spent hours talking over the radio. The two of them would chat at night, trying to be that candle in the dark that maybe other people would find as they tuned their dials. It was during this late night chitchat session that they met a group in North Dakota. I could hear Trent hoot in triumph from across the street while Drew did his homework and I read more from a medical textbook I found in the clinic. We looked at each other in massive confusion, knowing that the sound that he made was not one of alarm, but thrown by the volume he made. We both jumped up from our spots and bolted out the front door over to the post office to see what would have inspired the noise.
We found Trent sitting at the radio like a little boy on Christmas morning. I heard the voice of another man talking to Jack and I asked Trent who it was. He giggled and said that there was a group somewhere in North Dakota that was fifty survivors strong. They called their settlement New Jasonville in honor of their first leader. They were doing alright, and even had a trade route with another settlement about a day’s travel away. They talked late into the night, long after Drew and I were so tired that we could hardly keep our eyes open and turned in for the night.
When my husband finally joined me in bed, he was giddy over his new contact, and he renewed his belief in the possibility of a whole new way of contacting people and getting even stronger. Every camp he learned of had a surplus of some items and a wish for another. One of the wishes was for ripe tomatoes, for instance, a thing that Louise seemed to have a knack for, as well as a need for fruit, while they had a surplus in cows. It seemed silly, tomatoes and plums for a cow, but after a couple of years, there are things you just miss.
They had arranged a meeting on the radio for a couple of days later to discuss wish lists and to see if there was any point in meeting for a trade session. If there was, they would arrange a meeting place so everyone was on neutral ground to do our swaps.
"It's happening, Cali, we're getting there." Trent draped his leg over mine and his arm across my chest. I surrendered to the safety that was him, and the love that I felt. I felt everything relax under the pressure of him and I sighed happily. I turned my head to look at my husband who was smiling a long lost smile of hope. I cupped my hand on his jawbone and tilted his head up so he was just inches away from my face, and kissed him on his soft lips. As we kissed I ran my fingers across the stubble on his face, feeling the rough whiskers under my fingertips. His hand that was already across my chest found its way to my shoulder, and he turned me to my side, so our bodies pressed together as we kissed, long, deep, yearning kisses that connected us both together in this web that was us.
I loved him more than words would ever say. I loved that feeling of complete surrender as we peeled off our clothes in the darkness. We twisted together under the blankets, hands roaming, urgently seeking the other out in a prayer that we were close to feeling the other completely, like a blind person desperately wanting to memorize every curve of the other. He flipped me on my back and was above me, hovering over me for a moment, savoring every second as the need for him was filling in me, until it was nearly unbearable. When he finally slipped into me I was in heaven, I was complete and I was whole. He was my missing puzzle piece, and I was his, and the pairing of us eased the pain of not being like this all the time. It was sweet, th
e surrender that I had given, and as we were together, waves of peace, love, rightness, and a side order of lust, ripped through us both.
When we were done, we stayed naked under our blankets, stayed wrapped tight in each other’s arms. I think I was crying a little when I fell asleep; tears of joy, relief, sadness, I don't know, they just were. I closed my eyes and felt his chest rise and fall gently in the rhythm of sleep. I focused on matching his breathing pattern and fell asleep myself; the last thought on my brain was that I didn’t ever want to wake up, because when I did, I knew that the bubble would burst and we were going to be faced with reality once more. I didn't like reality. I wanted to stay here in a collapsed blanket fort with Trent forever.
Swap Meet
It was set. We were going to start a trade loop in four weeks.
As expected, the biggest wish list item was medicine. We didn't have a lot of that, in fact we were getting really low on stuff like antibiotics and even stupid things like Tylenol. That one was mind boggling. How does one find themselves low on things like Tylenol? I figured there was going to be a crap ton of over the counter pain medications in every house, every store. I didn't know where the black hole was that held all the over the counter meds, but I dreamed sometimes that I would find the hidden cache like I was a pirate in search of gold. Yes, I had become that person; pills were worth more than gold.
