Apocalypse Asunder

by David Rogers

  “Is he okay?”

  “Oh sure.” Byron shrugged.

  “Aren’t you going to . . . you know?” she asked, waving vaguely at the house.

  “Nope.” Carlo shook his head. “We’ve tried before, believe me, but that’s about the only time he gets really difficult to deal with; if you interfere with him in any way.”

  “He’s not doing anything though.”

  “Actually, he’s doing his favorite thing.” Arcelia said sadly.

  Jessica couldn’t figure that one out. “Um . . .I thought drinking was his favorite thing.”

  “No, that’s just what he does to pass the time.” Byron explained. “What he likes to do is go over how he got here.”

  “So he sings his song.” Carlo nodded.

  Jessica listened, but Jared was singing for himself and not his audience, and she wasn’t exactly close to where the drunk lay. But she caught a few wisps of what he was singing in his semi-conscious state. She didn’t recognize it.

  “What song?”

  “We haven’t been able to figure out if he made it up or if it was an actual song before all hell broke loose, but it sure does fit him.” Arcelia said.

  Jessica listened again. Something about a truck that didn’t run and a dog that didn’t hunt. She frowned; her tastes ran more to what the radio called classic rock, though she branched out musically into some pop on occasion. What she could hear reminded her of a country song . . .

  “Seriously?” she asked as she realized what it was.

  “Yeah, seriously.” Byron nodded. “We’ve all had things rough since it got bad, but Jared drew just about every short straw there was. Lost everything, even his dog.”

  “Everything?”

  “The whole kit and caboodle.” Byron said. “Wife turned and tried to eat him, house and business destroyed in the fires and chaos as half the town got hungry, truck totaled by someone who hit him, best friend killed by a zombie, and then somewhere in there his dog ran off.”

  “We think he misses the dog the most.” Carlo said helpfully.

  Jessica shook her head. She didn’t blame the man, Jared, for being . . . for reacting poorly if he’d been through everything they were saying he had. But even for all of that, she couldn’t fathom just . . . giving up like he apparently had.

  “And he’s going to be okay out here on the porch?”

  “Probably.” Arcelia shrugged. “We’re not kidding about what happens if you bother him.”

  “Yeah, he gets mean then.” Byron put in.

  “But, if he’s out cold like this, he’s dead when a zombie wanders by.”

  Now Carlo shrugged. “So far he’s been okay. Mostly because there aren’t too many zombies around here. But also he doesn’t seem to fully pass out. If anything touches him or something, he wakes up.”

  “He managed to kill one zombie about a month ago.” Byron explained at Jessica’s skeptical look. “We came by and he was on the porch like this. A good bit drunker, actually, come to think of it.”

  “Drunker?”

  “Yeah. Anyway, there was a zombie on the ground. Looked like it managed to get up on the porch, but then went back down over the railing and hit head first. Broke its neck, couldn’t do more than gnash its teeth at us when we went down to check.”

  “So he’s just going to sleep out here?”

  “Pretty much.” Arcelia nodded. “He seems to alternate between his front and back porches, but that might just be because he keeps his booze inside and tends to keep going in the same direction as he staggers by after grabbing more bottles.”

  Jessica shook her head sadly. Byron raised both hands and let them drop back to his sides as if he were helpless. “It’s his decision. Who are we to interfere?”

  “Especially since, drunk or not, he can punch like a mule.” Carlo added.

  “Anyway, that’s Jared the Happy Drunk. He is . . . was . . . a hunting and fishing guide. Used to hire out to tourists and other guide outfits, knows all sorts of things about where to hunt and fish, how to prepare and maintain the equipment and the procedures and the boats. And he says there’s nothing he can’t do with either a knife or an airboat.” Arcelia said. “What about you and your girl there . . . you two okay?”

  “We’re okay.” Jessica said, kicking herself mentally for letting her conversational guard fall somewhat.

  “We’ve got twenty-seven people out on the lake with us. Room for another dozen or so without too much crowding, if you’re interested.”

  “We’re waiting on someone.” Jessica said, temporizing an excuse. She wasn’t ready to move in with strangers yet, regardless of how nice they seemed. Especially if it involved being on a boat out in the middle of what was probably one of the biggest lakes in the world. Candice wasn’t a strong swimmer, and regardless, fleeing over water struck her as a lot slower – and more problematic – than having access to ground.

  “Family? Friend?”

  “Yes.” she said purposefully declining to explain further.

  Byron nodded. “Well, the offer’s open. We come by every second or third day, usually, to have a word with Jared here. Wouldn’t be a problem to check on you at the same time.”

  “We should be fine.” Jessica said, picking her tone and words carefully. “I don’t mean to sound unfriendly . . . but we’ve had some . . . problems with people. It’s going to take some time to get over it and get used to folks again.”

  Byron looked a little puzzled by her response, Carlo nodded, and Arcelia seemed to take something much darker from the statement than Jessica had really meant. The other woman’s face showed concern and some anger, but she nodded as well after a few moments.

  “You’ll be okay here honey.” Arcelia said while her two male companions glanced at her. “Like we said, this area hasn’t seen a lot of problems since the initial wave of outbreaks. Jared never leaves his porches, and we haven’t seen any signs of trouble on our supply runs.”

  “Good.”

  “Just so you know, it’s probably best if you stick to this side of the lake. And, personally, I’d be careful about going far enough west to get too close to Fort Myers.”

  “What happened to the east?” Jessica asked.

  Byron took over as Arcelia’s face showed some painful darkness of her own. “East coast of the state is one big stretch of settlement, more or less; and was at the densest from here south. Lots of outbreak problems along that way. And in the first week there was an attempt to set up a refugee camp in Indiantown, a few miles east of the lake. It . . . ”

  “They had some problems after a few days.” Carlo said as Byron’s account faltered. “Short version of the story is, east of Okeechobee, be ready for a lot of zombie problems.”

  “They don’t get over this way?”

  “Not that we’ve seen. There are still people moving around the coast out there, and they seem to pull a lot of zombie attention down on themselves.”

  “There’s no . . . the refugee camp was the last bit of organized help?” Jessica asked after a moment.

  “Last gasp until what was left of the state tried to pull things together in Ocala. Guess you already know how that worked out.”

  “Yeah.” she nodded.

  “Anyway, we’ll be by a couple times a week. If you need to talk to us, keep an eye on the house docks or I guess leave a note or something that we’ll notice.”

  “Thanks. Stay safe.”

  “Same to you.”

  The trio nodded and waved at her, then headed back through the house. Jared remained where he was, singing softly in his drunken delirious state. Jessica watched them all reappear on the back stairs, head down to the dock, then wave again as they boarded the motorboat and cast off. As the vessel reversed away from the shore, Jessica shifted the truck into reverse and looked over her shoulder.

  “They seem nice.” Candice observed.

  “We’ll see. Let’s hope they are.”

  “What if they’re not?”

  “T
hat’s why I’m going to see about doing something with the stairs and the ladders.” Jessica explained.

  “What about the other man?”

  Jessica shook her head. “What about him?”

  “He’s funny.”

  “He is funny.” Jessica agreed. “Crazy might be closer to the truth, but who am I to say he can’t drink himself to death . . . be it by bottle or zombies?”

  “Is he nice?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “That’s a lot of seeing.” Candice remarked.

  Jessica fixed her daughter with an amused look as she pulled the truck into the ‘yard’ in front of their house. “What else do you think we’re going to do while we live here?”

  Chapter Fourteen – Now it feels like home

  “Mom, where’s the other big pot?”

  Jessica looked up from the cans she was adding to the rows lined up on the pantry’s shelves, fixing the girl at the door with a decent dose of ‘mom’ stare. “Did you check the back porch next to the fire pit?”

  “No.”

  “There’s really only two places it should be, and that’s the other one.”

  “Okay.”

  Candice’s footsteps retreated, and Jessica returned to her organizing. In the week since moving in, Jessica had managed to fit in two scavenge runs that had yielded weeks of food. She was now reasonably convinced there was enough to see her and Candice through at least to the new year. And plenty of time to find more. The area she’d scouted seemed to have plenty of goods waiting to be found and brought back.

  The house was working out well. She and Candice rattled around in it like a pair of very small peas in an enormously huge pod, but it was about the safest thing she could envision short of an actual castle or perhaps a fallout bunker. The excess of room she didn’t mind all that much – she could think of any number of worse problems to have than too many places to put things – but it still sometimes left her a little nervous to think of how big the place was when Candice ran around inside it.

  But it was secure. It would take considerable doing for someone to get up here, and zombies had no chance. The stairs, front and back, had been demolished with several hours of sweaty, painful work with a hand saw and sledgehammer. The wood, most of it the planking that had formed the stair treads, she had pressed into service in other ways.

  For the ladder that served as the only entry up to the house, she’d borrowed a page from the houseboaters. On their next visit two days after she’d first met them, Byron had suggested she might want to consider the utility that winches would bring to her problem. That had gotten her thinking, and she’d chanced a very careful trip along the lake shore to investigate boats and docks.

  Most of what she saw was motor boats of some sort – ranging from jet skis to regular fishing boats to fancy speed boats – but there were a few sail boats as well. Not big ones, but that wasn’t important. She didn’t care much about any of the boats . . . but the sail boats had caused her to actually pay attention to how the lines that handled the sails were run.

  She’d never noticed anything specific about sailboats before; not even when they’d shown up in movies or television. But as she poked around the docks, she realized most of them used multiple pulley systems to control and manage the workload of paying out and hauling in the lines attached to the sails. It had taken her a few minutes to notice, as she worked to detach a winch, but she eventually figured out pulling the line through the pulleys was somehow easier – less work, requiring less strength – than just reaching up and pulling on it directly.

  Some of the sails were heavy, especially the big ones that stretched from deck to mast top. Yet the winch that controlled such a sail hauled it in with ease. Jessica didn’t fully understand how it worked, but that didn’t matter either. She’d taken the time to relieve two boats of most of their pulleys and winches, along with a fair amount of the rope that fed through them.

  At the house, she’d used the excess stair lumber, some screws, a lot of skull sweat along with a pair of smashed fingers and a shoulder that was sore for days afterward, to rig up a pulley system powered by a winch. And it worked.

  The extension ladder was lashed together so it stayed adjusted, without slipping and needing to be reset. Then it was connected to the rope that fed over and across the porch, to the pulley system and winches that Jessica had bolted to the house’s living room floor. It would have been better if the house had side porches, but no matter. Once it was up, the ladder could be slid completely inside the house so the door could be closed.

  Jessica could turn the winch one handed, moving the ladder all the way from ground level up to the porch; though she was sweating and ready for a rest by the time she got it up. Candice needed both hands, and about three times as long; but she could do it too. The winches and pulleys did all the work; the winch pulling on the rope that ran back and forth between the pulleys before stretching across the floor, porch, and to the top of the ladder.

  It was so successful she had rigged another one on the back porch, using it to power a bucket down to the water and back up to the porch. Candice could operate that as well, which had allowed that to be one of her chores; maintaining their water supply. Jessica had finally sat down and actually worked up a ‘to-do’ list of things that she wanted to take care of, and the winch-pulley gizmos worked so well she had ideas for rigging up at least two more.

  The first would be a cargo-lift for the front porch, so she didn’t have to keep carrying things up and down in a back pack, or by hand. That worked, but it necessitated a lot of trips that took time and left her with aching legs and often a sore back. The other one she wanted to use in one of the bathrooms.

  There was nothing wrong with the toilets; they still worked, and when flushed they dumped the water down the pipes to be carried away. It was just that the tanks, which was what powered flushes, didn’t refill. Jessica didn’t see any reason the tanks couldn’t be refilled by hand. The bathrooms were across the hall from each other, which put one of them on the back of the house. Its window was like everything else on the back; it overlooked and opened out onto the lake. Directly beneath it was water.

  It was just a matter of getting it up. Jessica figured the winch-pulley system would work there just as well as the other places.

  As she finished sorting through the pantry’s new additions, Candice came back into the kitchen. “Okay, water’s boiling.”

  “You filled it all the way?”

  “Yes.”

  “And poured it through the pitcher first?” Jessica pressed.

  “Yes mom.” Candice replied, clearly resisting a strong urge to roll her eyes.

  “Because boiling it just kills the germs. It doesn’t do anything about the other stuff in the water.”

  “I know. You’ve explained it four times.”

  Jessica grinned. “Okay sweetie, sorry. It’s just important.”

  “What are we going to do when the pitcher stops working?”

  “Well, there’s a couple of extra filters for it.” Jessica pointed out. “But I guess whenever it comes down to it, we’ll have to use a clean towel or something to separate out the grit and gunk.”

  “Why don’t we just do that now?”

  “Because the pitcher is easier at the moment.”

  Candice shrugged. “As long as zombies aren’t involved, everything’s easier.”

  “Good point.” Jessica agreed. “So, what do we want to tackle for dinner?”

  “The lines are empty. I just checked them.”

  “Shame. Well, no matter, we’ve got plenty to eat even without fresh fish.” This was another suggestion of Byron’s; setting fishing lines and checking them two or three times a day. So far it was working reasonably well. They didn’t pull in a lot of fish, but the one or two per day that had turned up so far did a lot to add fresh calories – ones that didn’t come out of a can or a box – to their diet. Cleaning and cutting up raw fish was a new skill, but Jessica was learning it
out of necessity.

  “Anything as long as it’s not beans.”

  “Hmm, no beans huh?”

  “Tired of beans if that’s okay.” Candice said a little uncomfortably.

  “Beans have protein.”

  “So do fish.” Candice pointed out. “And I’m taking the vitamins you found, so I’m getting all the stuff you say I need to stay healthy.”

  “Okay, no beans.” Jessica said, giving in with another grin. “What if we take a stab at bread?”

  “Can we make bread?”

  “You know, people ate for thousands of years before refrigerators and factories were invented.” Jessica said, rolling her eyes at Candice and keeping her tone slightly lightly amused.

  “I know!” the girl protested. “I mean, don’t we need eggs or milk or something to make bread?”

  “Not according to that cookbook I found yesterday.” Jessica walked over to the kitchen table and picked it up. She’d marked several pages by folding the corners back, so it didn’t take her but a moment to find the one for what the book called ‘Stove Top Flat Bread.’ “Says here the only odd thing we need is yeast, and it just so happens I came up with several packets of yeast. Flour, oil, salt, water . . . we’ve got everything.”

  “Okay, so we’ll make bread. What about the rest of dinner?”

  “Soup?” Jessica suggested. “Chicken and stars, or some of that clam chowder? Or there’s beef stew I guess.”

  “I don’t like the chowder as much as the other stuff.” Candice said, wrinkling her nose.

  “Okay, so let’s—” Jessica began, but she cut herself off when she heard her name being shouted. She stared at Candice for a moment, then her brain processed the call. It was coming from outside the house. From out in front of the house.

  “Is tha—” Candice began, but Jessica was in motion. Her feet pounding on the floor, she darted past her daughter and headed for the front door. She nearly tripped over the ladder on the floor, but managed to get to the door and lift the cross-beams she’d installed as a backup to the locks without killing herself or breaking something. The beams thumped down against the wall as she half-threw them aside, and she took two quick steps through the doorway after pulling the door open.