by David Rogers
The televisions had been rearranged too. One had been left in the ‘TV’ room, and both game consoles wired up to it for the kids to all share. Darryl knew that meant there was probably going to be even more fighting than would have been normal, but that wasn’t his concern. Low did car stereo installations, though he would insist to anyone who wasn’t talking over him he was a ‘mobile electronics technician’. Whatever his actual title was, he knew how to deal with cables and stuff.
After Low was finished, the result was a pair of televisions each in the lounge and pool room, wired into the satellite dish’s feed and also spliced into the big sound system that normally ran off the stereo. The box that controlled the satellite lived in the lounge now, so all anyone in the pool room could do was either ignore or turn off the televisions, or walk across the hall to get the channel changed. Darryl didn’t think that would matter all that much.
Right now there seemed to be two main divisions as to ‘what to do’ among the Dogz. The first were becoming news junkies, hanging off everything the televisions were saying and showing. The second seemed to not want to know any details. This second group wasn’t disputing anything, or telling anyone they shouldn’t pay attention to what was happening; they just didn’t seem to want to immerse themselves in the information stream.
Darryl had sort of, initially, been in the second group by default. But after what he’d had to do, what he’d seen, he was now firmly a convert to the first group. Knowing was better than waiting to find out the hard way. Even if it was uncomfortable being clued in on the details.
As he made to move towards the bar side of the room, where the televisions were, he heard Bobo calling to him. He glanced around again, this time actually paying attention rather than just looking past people, and saw Bobo sitting on a couch in the middle of the far wall. He seemed to be holding a meeting, judging by the lawn chairs that had been setup in front of the couch in a small circle.
“What up?” Darryl asked as he wove around people sitting on sleeping bags on the floor, including a ten person poker game that was being played with spare change as chips.
“Grab a seat bro.” Bobo said. “Low, get the fuck up and let DJ sit down.”
“Why he get the seat?” Low whined, but he was getting up.
“’Cause he been doing shit an you been chilling.” Big Chief pointed out.
“Tank, come on over here.” Bobo said, ignoring the cross talk. “Chrome–”
“Yeah, I know.” Chrome said, vacating the lawn chair and pointing Tank to it as the big biker wandered over with a can of soda in his hand.
Darryl looked around. There were some other people who were clearly paying attention to the group with Bobo, but those who had seats seemed to be the ones Bobo wanted to talk with. He was sandwiched on the couch between Bobo on one side, and Mr. Soul on the other. In the chairs before the couch were Tank, Jody, Shooter, Big Chief, and Vivian.
“Alright, so it time to go over stuff and see where we at.” Bobo said as Tank settled carefully into the chair, taking his time about it. Darryl didn’t blame him; the chair looked woefully inadequate to supporting Tank’s bulk. The chair creaked a little, but fortunately nothing more dramatic happened as the biker sat down in it.
“We here.” Shooter said, gesturing around.
“Yeah we is.” Bobo said. “And we need to get a little more organized if we gonna stay here.”
“Fuck man, what else we got to do?” Big Chief asked, looking a little pained. “I mean, we done cleaned out a bunch of the best stores that be close.”
“Naw, this ain’t so much about supplies right now.” Bobo said calmly, though he looked at Jody. “We good on supplies now, right?”
Jody glanced down at a notepad in her lap, then nodded once, though her mouth was set in a firm line that Darryl recognized as stress. “We good for now, I think.”
“How long we got on what in the basement?”
She flipped pages in the notepad, frowned, then finally shrugged. “I’ve been too busy to do much real figuring, just quick doodles and that kinda thing. But if everyone cooperates, probably five or six weeks before we down to the bare basics.”
“What’s that mean, cooperate?” Vivian asked.
Jody shrugged. “All the men need to stop eating like pigs.”
“Hey, we been hungry.” Big Chief said, displaying a frown of his own.
“Yeah, it ain’t like you can work all day and not eat.” Tank put in.
“I ain’t saying y’all ain’t working.” Jody shot back, sounding annoyed. “But if we gotta stay in here, it’ll help a lot if people get used to better portion controls.”
Darryl looked around as he pulled his smokes out. Big Chief leaned forward and snagged an ashtray off the side table next to Bobo, handing it to Darryl without comment. Darryl gave him a brief nod as he lit up a cigarette and balanced the ashtray on his knee carefully.
“That fine.” Bobo said to Jody. “Ain’t no reason to put people on starvation rations just yet, but we can hold the eats down to something reasonable. But there gonna be a little more work to do tomorrow.”
“What else is there?” Tank asked.
“Bathroom.” Vivian said, looking unhappy.
“What? We got a bathroom.” Darryl said, exhaling straight up out of deference to Mr. Soul.
“Yeah.” Vivian replied. “One. And there’s like a hundred people here. Shit, more. I don’t remember the count, but there a lot.”
“Oh.” Darryl said, suddenly abashed. “Yeah, that bad.” he muttered.
Bobo nodded. “Yeah, it bad. So tomorrow we gonna dig out some latrines in the back yard.”
“Latrines?” Shooter asked. “For real.”
“For real.” Bobo confirmed, his tone unamused. “The water might not hold out, and even if it do, we can’t keep living out of the one bathroom. Especially if we need it for showers and stuff.”
“Right.” Vivian said. “Showers we can schedule. They gonna be mostly cold ones, but it better than wandering around dirty all the time. And the damn bathroom smell bad from being constantly in use anyway, so we might as well use some outhouses.”
“Well, I know a few things about how to help with that.” Bobo said, though he grimaced. “But yeah, they gonna smell some. That’s why they going in the back.”
“Shit.” Big Chief muttered.
Bobo grinned at him. “Exactly right.”
“What we gonna do if the water get cut off?” Darryl asked, as the thought occurred to him.
Bobo grinned again, though this time it was more grimace than grin. And there was a hint of approval in his eyes as he looked at Darryl. “Yeah, that’ll be interesting. Especially if we get trapped in here by a horde or something.”
“We all the way out here.” Shooter said, making a jerking motion with his hand. “This ain’t Atlanta. Most of the zombies is in Atlanta.”
“So?” Tank asked.
“So, we ain’t gonna get trapped.” Shooter said.
“Maybe, maybe not.” Bobo shrugged. “We’ll figure shit out as it happens. But my main emergency plan if the water stop is the lake.”
“Fuck, like that clean?” Big Chief said, making a face.
“It clean enough. Especially if we boil whatever we gonna drink or cook with. Plus if it comes to it, we can build a water filter. It mean finding some other stuff, like a whole bunch of sand, plus we gonna have to do a whole mess of digging, but I know how to do it.”
Darryl wondered about that, but he reminded himself Bobo had been an Army engineer for a long time. He supposed the Army, of all people, had put some thought into how to maintain drinkable water sources.
“I more worried about the power.” Big Chief said.
“Well, you ought not be.” Jody said, not quite snapping, but with an edge of sharpness. “If we only get to pick one, pick water.”
“You can’t drink out of no electrical socket.” Mr. Soul said.
Big Chief scowled. “What we gonna do withou
t power?”
“Manage, same as we gonna do with anything else that happen.” Bobo shrugged.
“But how we gonna find out what going on?” Big Chief protested, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the televisions. “I mean, they gonna be bombing the fucking city tomorrow. What if they do something like that again, and we out somewhere that about to be blown up? What then?”
“Bro, we ain’t gonna need nothing out of Atlanta.” Darryl said, trying to pitch his voice in a reasonable tone. “It too far for any sort of good looting.”
“Yeah, what about Athens?” Big Chief demanded. “That ain’t so far from here, and the teevee say it all sorts of fucked up with zombies too.”
“Worry about the shit you can do something about.” Bobo said, sounding a bit annoyed.
Big Chief opened his mouth, but Mr. Soul spoke first. “Ain’t nothing gonna happen that we can’t handle. The Lord never puts you on a path you can’t walk if you try.”
Darryl dragged on his smoke, keeping his mouth shut. He believed in God, but he wasn’t so sure about the whole ‘leave it up to the Lord’ line of thinking. As far as he was concerned, God expected them to figure things out for themselves. If it wasn’t supposed to be that way, wouldn’t God do a lot more talking so they’d know to obey him?
“Mr. Soul.” Big Chief said, sounding pained, but Bobo spoke up this time.
“Enough. If the power go out, we gonna deal with it. We got them generators in the barn, and a decent amount of fuel for them too.”
“Yeah, but if that happens, we gonna need to save it for keeping the refrigerators powered.” Jody pointed out.
“So we can watch teevee then.” Big Chief said, sounding smug.
“No.” Jody said.
“Why not?”
“Because we probably only need to run the generators like twice a day to keep the refrigerators cold enough for it to be safe.” Vivian said.
“Right.” Jody nodded. “So long as you don’t go opening and closing the doors, a fridge keep itself cold a good long while after the power goes out. That’ll let us stretch the gas out.”
Big Chief took out a pack of Newports and lit one up, sitting back with a somewhat sullen look on his face.
“Like I said, we gonna take on any problems as they come.” Bobo said, clearly making an effort to keep his voice calm. “Some shit we can plan for, other shit we probably be a little more surprised by, but all we can do is all we can do. And one thing we can plan for is our guarding.”
“What about it?” Shooter asked.
Bobo gestured vaguely around. Darryl glanced across the room automatically, but when the older biker spoke again he realized Bobo meant to indicate the outside, not the room. “We might want to think about a little training with the weapons, just so Dogz ain’t up there fooling around with the guns instead of shooting if something happens.”
Shooter and Darryl frowned almost in unison. Jody and Tank, who were sitting on the far ends of the chair half-circle and thus were in a good position to see both men, looked surprised at their united reaction.
“What’s wrong?” Jody asked, while Tank sort of chuckled into his can of soda as he took a sip, trying to cover his laughter.
Shooter looked at Darryl, who just shrugged and made a ‘go on’ motion with his hand. Nodding, Shooter shifted his gaze to Bobo. “We ain’t really got a whole lot of ammo.”
“But there’s a big stack of ammo boxes in the barn.” Jody protested. “And you done moved some in here behind the bar, and put some more downstairs in the basement, and there even some you done put up on the roof.”
“Yeah, but that ain’t as much as you thinking.” Shooter said, after another look at Darryl to make sure he didn’t want to handle the answer. Darryl was starting to wonder about Shooter’s reaction, but he just stubbed out his cigarette and tapped a fresh one out, keeping quiet while Shooter kept explaining.
“Thing is, we got like fifty, maybe sixty guys who just now handling guns for real for the first time.”
“There some women with guns too.” Vivian pointed out.
“Yeah, but ain’t none of them done volunteered for guard duty.” Tank said abruptly.
Vivian opened her mouth, then closed it and shrugged. Shooter waited a moment, then went on. “There a lot of pistol ammo, yeah, but not so much for the long guns. Not as much as you thinking. And if we go trying to train Dogz into good shots, it’ll use up a lot of what we got.”
“You kidding, right?” Jody said, still clearly not believing him.
Darryl leaned forward as he snapped his Zippo closed. “No. Me and Shooter go to the range together sometime. You can go through two or three boxes pretty quick, even if you just shooting pistol like we do. And trust me, that ain’t enough to make someone a good shot.”
“Right.” Shooter said. “And, like I said, there more pistol than rifle and shotgun ammo. We can let everyone fire off a few rounds from a rifle, a few more from a shotgun, and like a mag for their pistol, but we ought to be thinking about saving the rest for something dangerous.”
Bobo spoke up as Jody started to speak. “Now that they got me thinking about it, they probably right. At least, it matching what I remember from the Army. We didn’t shoot all that much in basic, and even the infantry guys didn’t shoot that much more than support fuckheads like me. And they wasn’t all that good at shooting neither.”
“Yeah.” Shooter said, sounding unhappy. “I mean, we got enough people here that there probably at least a couple who is good at it. We can try to figure out who they is when we run through the little bit of training we can do, but we either gonna have to get into a lot of fighting, or get a lot more ammo, to do some learning.”
“Let’s not go hoping for trouble.” Mr. Soul said, his voice stern. “That ain’t right.”
“No, it ain’t.” Bobo said. “And we can’t go hoping we’ll find a lot more ammo either. So I guess we gotta take it more careful than I was thinking.”
Darryl turned his head. “Thinking, like how?”
Bobo shrugged. “I was thinking about how many people we needed to have up on guard, and was hoping we might maybe get it down to like two or three. But now, listening to y’all and thinking about it a bit, maybe we ought to go the other way and put up seven or eight.”
Darryl caught Shooter looking at him again. He tapped the end of his cigarette into the ashtray on his knee, took a drag off it, then finally shrugged when he realized everyone was waiting for him or Shooter to speak up. And Shooter was apparently waiting for him to do the talking. He considered for a few more seconds, then exhaled his lungful of smoke.
“Tomorrow then, after we dig them latrines you talking about. We set some targets or something up, and me and Shooter will run all the guards through a little shooting.” Darryl said, tapping his cigarette again. “We try to see who better at it than the rest, and then maybe we can split up the good ones so there at least one or two good ones on the roof all the time.”
Bobo sighed. “I guess we ought to hope we got some shooters in here with us.”
Shooter grinned. “There only one Shooter here.”
“Fuck, you know what I mean bro.” Bobo said a little impatiently. Shooter nodded, his expression almost immediately more contrite than mischievous. “Anyway, that need to happen so we know how many gonna be on a guard shift.”
“Why don’t we just go get some more ammo then?” Jody asked. “If that the problem . . . I mean, hell. This Georgia, ain’t it? We got rednecks with guns all over the damn place around here, don’t we?”
“Yeah, there is.” Shooter said.
“And that why I want to hold everyone in for at least the next few days.” Bobo said. “I think we done snuck around some before anyone else really got to noticing how bad shit is. Now that they gonna blow Atlanta up, and the fucking President gone, and shit like that . . . word’s out.”
“Yeah, it’ll probably be pretty wild everywhere for the next little while.” Tank said abruptly. �
��Last night we was lucky we didn’t get into any fights.”
Darryl nodded slowly, thinking about the men with the expensive pistols at the Kroger. If they’d had more people with them, more people who shared their tastes and familiarities with high quality guns . . . that could have been a lot uglier.
“Why don’t we just find a gun store?” Jody persisted.
Both Darryl and Shooter shook their heads again. Darryl gestured at Shooter again when the other man looked at him, ready to defer once more.
“Gun stores is common targets for break ins and thefts.” Shooter explained. “And they all run by some guy, or a guy and his family.”
“So? Everyone busy with zombies and stuff.”
“Right.” Shooter said. “But see, where we been looting, it’s all been big corporate stores. Them people that work there, they don’t give a fuck about the store. Especially if zombies wandering around eating people. But them gun store guys .. .” Shooter trailed off for a moment.
“They probably all holed up in the stores by now.” Darryl said. “Them stores is their life, plus now that the world ending and shit, they gonna be even more crazy about guns and shit than they was before. We probably end up getting into a big ass shoot out if we try to get into one.”
“Plus they ain’t the easiest places to get into.” Shooter pointed out. “I used to work in one a while ago, just on weekends so I’d get a discount on stuff. Now insurance and laws is tougher now than they was then, so it probably worse now, but even back then he had himself a brick building with Lexan windows.”
“What’s Lexan?” Vivian wanted to know.
Darryl grinned. “Lexan is tough shit.”
“That don’t help me none DJ.” Vivian said primly.
Shooter laughed. “He right. Lexan is bulletproof glass, though it ain’t glass, it plastic. It tough as hell. You ain’t gonna just walk up and break it. Sometimes there used to be shell casings on the sidewalk outside the store, in the mornings, where some fool had tried to shoot out the ‘windows’” Shooter made little quote marks in the air with his fingers, still laughing. “Just wasted ammo, and left behind stuff for the cops to identify him by when he done something else stupider later and they catch him.”
