ALL THAT I SEE
__________
THE KING OF CLAYFIED
BOOK TWO
BY SHANE GREGORY
© Shane Gregory
www.brainofshane.com
CHAPTER 1
On the first day of spring, Sara and I were in the sunroom examining our shallow trays of dirt. A man stood outside the window looking at us, but we ignored him. He’d been out there for days, and he was alone. His clothes were shabby, and he was dripping wet from the rain. He had no nose, just a dark, jagged hole in his face.
“Here’s one!” Sara said, excitedly.
I peered over her shoulder. There was a tiny sprig of green poking out of the dirt. Soon, it would grow into a pepper plant.
“Another one!” she said, pointing to a second tray.
It made me smile to see her so excited about our new babies. I always got excited over seedlings, too, but I rarely ever expressed my excitement openly.
“Good,’ I said. “If all of the seeds we planted germinate, we should have twelve tomato plants and ten bell pepper plants.”
“That’s good, right?” she asked.
“It’s better than nothing,” I said. “We’ll need to go seed hunting soon. These leftover packets I had from last year aren’t going to be enough to feed us.”
“But you have several partial packets.”
This was true. I had a few spinach seeds, some carrot seeds, some squash and Swiss chard, and an unopened packet of cucumber seeds, but they wouldn’t be enough. I wanted to have enough to put away for the winter. I didn’t want to deplete our food stores too quickly.
“I was hoping we could stay in a while longer,” Sara said. “Give them more time to die off.”
When she said this, she nodded toward the man outside. I glanced up at him, not wanting to stare too long at his gray, nose-less face.
“It’s been over a month since Canton B,” I said. “The infected don’t seem to be going anywhere.”
We hadn’t left the house in more than a week. We’d found a place that was relatively safe and comfortable, and we’d been content just to hole up and lick our wounds (figuratively speaking, of course).
The house was on the edge of Clayfield and sat on a little quarter acre lot. The whole property was surrounded by a tall wooden fence in the front and a chain link fence in the back. It had a gas stove in the kitchen and gas logs in the living room and in the back porch/sunroom. We’d had running water, too, until two days prior when the water turned brown then stopped completely.
When the man made his first appearance we were alarmed, thinking he’d climbed the fence, and we wondered what that might mean. But when no others showed up, we presumed he must have been inside when we closed the gate. We spent an afternoon discussing where he might have been hiding, but then forgot the matter.
This house wouldn’t be our permanent residence. We’d have to find a new place when it was time to plant a garden and when we ran out of water. We still had most of our stuff loaded in the school bus and on the hay truck outside. If we needed to, we could leave right away.
I’d gotten started on our garden the day after we’d moved in. We wouldn’t actually plant a garden until after the last frost, but we had to start our tomato and pepper seedlings early and indoors.
Sara poured some water on the seed flats then gave me a quick hug and a peck on the cheek before heading back into the kitchen. She was an affectionate young woman, especially so since Jen had gone, but I hadn’t been able to return her affection. She was undaunted, being open with me about her feelings, but not putting any pressure on me to reciprocate. She knew I was still upset over Jen’s absence. She also knew I’d get over it eventually. I was never that wise or patient at her age.
Sometimes I questioned my hesitance when it came to Sara. If it had just been a matter of physical attraction, there would be no hesitance. I was attracted to her plenty. But she wanted more than that, and she was a good person. I couldn’t take advantage of her like that even though my body wanted to. My conscience had been one of the things that had survived the end of the world.
She made better decisions than Jen, she was prettier than Jen, and she was far nicer than Jen. It might have been the age difference. She was only 19, soon to be 20, and that did bother me a little. Really, though, my resistance came down to this: she wasn’t Jen.
I looked out at our nose-less visitor. He’d wondered over to the fence and was just standing there staring at nothing at all. I followed Sara into the kitchen. She met me with a steaming cup of coffee.
She smiled as she put it in my hands, and looking at her, I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t completely smitten with her. I just couldn’t get Jen out of my head. Jen was still out there, and I was scared as hell I’d run into her again.
I put on my rain coat and took the .30-06 upstairs to one of the bedrooms. Just outside the bedroom window was a steel television antenna tower. It was narrow, and bolted to the house. It was constructed in such a way that I could climb it like a ladder. There was still an antenna mounted on the top, but I don’t think the homeowners had used it in a while, because there was a small satellite dish attached to it, too.
I opened the window and climbed out onto the tower. It was wet and slippery from the rain, but I was careful. I didn’t have far to climb anyway; I was going up on the roof. It was uncomfortably steep, but the black asphalt shingles gave me enough traction to reach the peak. Once there, I walked over to the chimney and sat on top of it.
Sara and I had been coming up here every day since we arrived more than two weeks prior. We had a good view of the surroundings, and we liked to keep tabs on any infected people in the area. We didn’t want to be taken by surprise. So far as we knew, the only one that was aware of us was Spite Face (Sara’s clever moniker for Mr. No Nose). Even so, we were still diligent about checking every morning and evening for any changes in activity.
The week before, we’d noticed a large group two blocks to the north of our location and made the decision that day not to leave the house anymore until they had dispersed or until we absolutely had to. We hadn’t left the house much anyway, because we hadn’t needed to, but we did go on a couple of supply runs during the first few days, not out of necessity, but as a distraction. Over the next few days the group of infected grew. It was obvious they were interested in a particular house, but neither of us could determine if there was a survivor in there.
I put the rifle up to my shoulder and looked through the scope. The crowd had added to its numbers. There were both kinds of infected over there, but mostly it was those in the second stage.
The virus, Canton B, changed its victims in two stages. In the beginning, the infected suffered from a high fever and basically lost their minds. They became animal-like and violent. Pain had little effect on them, and they operated from their “lizard brain.” The second stage of the virus occurred after the victim’s death. We had not been able to determine if the virus itself was the direct cause of any deaths, but it was a possibility. Instead, most of the deaths occurred due to violence or accidents. In this second stage, the infected corpses became animated. They were still violent, mindless creatures, but even more so. Thankfully, the stage two individuals had even less dexterity, coordination, and speed than those in stage one.
I looked over the crowd, trying not to linger on the faces; I feared seeing people I knew. Then I examined the windows of the house. Every day, we’d scanned the house for any sign that someone might be inside. That day I got our answer. The blinds on one of the windows on the second floor were open. They had not been open before. I couldn’t see inside, and I could not see any movement or activity, but it was a sign that there was another survivor over there.
I watched the window for a few minutes, hoping for something then I checked out the rest of the area.
Back downstairs, I removed my wet coat, poured myself some more coffee and sat next to the gas logs in the living room. Sara was in there reading an article about gardening from one of my magazines.
“It says here that we can start squash indoors, too,” she said. “Did you know that?”
“There’s someone over at the house,” I said.
She put the magazine down in her lap.
“Did you see them?”
“No, but the blinds were up on one of the windows.”
“Are we going over there?” she said.
“Eventually, maybe,” I said. “I was thinking that maybe we could do something to signal whoever it is so they’ll know we’re here. Maybe we can communicate with them to see if they need help.”
“Well, unless the crowd has diminished since yesterday, they need help,” she replied.
I reluctantly nodded my agreement.
“I’d still prefer to signal them first,” I said. “They might not need our help right away. We might be able to stay here a few more days. If we go help them, we’ll probably have to relocate, and I’d like to rest a while longer.”
“Okay,” she said, lifting the magazine again. “But soon, I think we need to get to the dirty work.”
The “dirty work” to which Sara was referring was her plan to clear out the infected. We’d decided after losing Jen and Brian that we needed to go on the offensive. We’d given ourselves some time to recuperate, and now I was having second thoughts. It was easy for me to agree to the extermination of those things while under the influence of those raw emotions, but I’d softened. Plus, I’d been thinking about how big the job was going to be. At the time of the outbreak, there were more than seven billion people in the world. We wouldn’t be able to destroy them all, and even if we eradicated every one of them from Clayfield, others could wander into town. It would be a never-ending task.
“Yes,” I said with resignation. “I suppose we’ve taken it easy long enough.”
CHAPTER 2
I found a bright orange T-shirt in one of the closets upstairs and, feeding some rope through the sleeves, I made a flag out of it and tied it to the antenna outside. Hopefully that would get our neighbor’s attention when they looked out the window. With that done, I went back downstairs to make a sign.
The house was far enough away that I would need to make letters large so they could read them without magnification. So I painted the sign on a bed sheet, and I kept the message simple. I decided on “R U OK?”
“Looks good,” Sara said. “You should put a time on there so they’ll know to be at the window when we’re on the roof.”
“Good idea.”
At the bottom I painted “9 A.M.”
Then Sara and I climbed on the roof with our sign and some rope. We strung the rope from the TV antenna across the roof and tied it to a tree limb on the other side. Then, using the rope like a clothes line, we hung the sheet on it. I strained to see if there was any movement in the window, but it was difficult to tell from that distance without the scope. I was hoping that by that time they would have seen the flag.
“When we go back down, you might want to take the scope off the rifle,” Sara said. “We wouldn’t want them to think you were trying to shoot them when you looked over there tomorrow morning.”
That afternoon and evening, Sara and I got serious about our future plans. Now that we knew our move was imminent, we felt it was prudent to make all of our decisions beforehand so we wouldn’t have to do it under stress. We tried to think of every possible contingency for the next few days.
We would have to locate a permanent, or at least a seasonal, residence where we could plant a garden. We were going to need to set up a system for collecting clean water. We’d been talking about distributing supply caches and vehicles around town, and we felt that it was time to implement that as well. Then there was the matter of the “dirty work” which we would have to do while we did everything else. It was really all too much for only two people. We’d love to have others help us, but we’d been having trouble finding people we could trust or who would trust us.
“The very first thing we’ll need to do tomorrow is take care of Spite Face,” Sara said.
“I guess by ‘we’ you mean me,” I said.
“Well, yeah.”
It would have to be done quietly, so I’d have to get close to him. I hadn’t killed a zombie in almost two weeks.
“No time like the present,” I said.
I put on my raincoat and mask and went outside with a baseball bat while Sara watched from the upstairs window. She had a rifle, just in case I got into trouble. I wasn’t stupid enough to go outside without a gun; I had a .45 holstered on my hip. The guns were backups. The real work needed to be done with the bat.
I went out into the yard looking for him, but I didn’t see him right away. Sara tapped on the window. I looked up at her, and she pointed toward the corner of the yard. Spite Face was standing in the shadows behind a short evergreen. I went directly there. I saw no reason to sneak around. Spite Face saw me coming and shuffled out to meet me. His mouth opened and let out a dry, raspy sound.
We should have taken care of him days before, but we were both being lazy. He hadn’t really been hurting anything, but he would be a nuisance soon when we were loading the vehicles to leave.
I stopped and took a stance like I was in the batter’s box. A normal person, seeing me like this, would have gotten into a defensive posture, or at least raised their arms to protect themselves. Spite Face just kept shambling along. When he got close enough, I swung for the fences.
His face caved in around the bat, and everything north of his mouth sort of shifted upward. It wouldn’t be enough. I would have to make sure the brain was mush. I kept beating his head until was just a pulpy smear in the mud.
“I didn’t kill you,” I said to the foul-smelling corpse. “You were dead already.”
I don’t know why I said that, but it made me feel better.
“I need a bath.”
Sara must have read my mind, because she had a pot of water heating on the stove for my bath when I came back inside.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I think I deserve something special,” I said. “Let’s pull the cork on that expensive cabernet we picked up.”
I went into the bathroom and got the kerosene heater going. When I came out, Sara handed me the wine and the corkscrew.
“Want to join me?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “You know I only drink when I’ve been exposed.”
“Oh, come on,” I said.
“No,” she said. “Anyway, it would be a waste to drink it if I didn’t need to. What would happen if I needed it and it wasn’t there?”
“We have plenty of booze,” I said. “Besides, this is the good stuff. This here isn’t zombie medicine. This is strictly for recreational use. This is like liquid art.”
“Okay,” she said, “but only a small glass, and only with dinner.”
I grinned and stepped past her to the kitchen. I opened the bottle and sat it on the counter to breathe a bit while I took my bath. My water was boiling, so I took it off the stove and poured it in the tub. Then I poured an equal amount of unheated water in there. It was about an inch deep. I undressed and eased down into the tub.
“Ah yeah,” I said, sarcastically. “This is living.”
I got soaped up, paying special attention to any areas that might have been exposed to Spite Face’s splatter. Then Sara knocked on the door.
“I’m in the tub already,” I said. “What do you need?”
“Do you hear that?” she said.
I got as still as I could and listened.
“I don’t hear anything,” I said.
“It sounds like a siren or something,” she said.
I listened again. It was faint, but I heard it
.
“No,” I said. “It’s coyotes, I think.”
Sara was quiet for a moment.
“But we’re so close to town,” she said. “I didn’t think coyotes got this close to people.”
“What people?” I said.
The sound was getting louder. They were howling and yelping. It gave me shivers. They were very close, and it wasn’t even dark outside yet.
“They sound like the hounds of hell or something,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “They do sound creepy.”
There was another sound mixing in with them now—something similar to the lowing of cattle.
It was the moans and howls of the undead.
“I’m going out to see what’s up,” Sara said.
“Out?”
“On the roof,” she said.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll be right up.”
I heard her footsteps on the staircase, and I started rinsing away the soap. The noise outside had migrated past the house and had settled in at a location nearby.
I dried, put on some clean clothes, and stepped out of the bathroom. It was dusk, and it would be dark soon. I went to the living room and grabbed a pair of the night vision goggles that I’d taken from the Chinook helicopter.
The window was open in the bedroom upstairs and the sounds from outside were coming in clearer. I climbed out then up to the roof. Sara was seated on the chimney, silhouetted against the dim sky. She had the rifle to her shoulder, and she was looking in the direction of the house we’d been trying to signal. I ducked under our bed sheet sign and walked along the peak of the roof until I was next to her.
“What do you see?” I said.
“They’re not coyotes,” she said. “They’re dogs—lots of dogs.”
She handed me the rifle. I looked through the scope.
There were maybe ten dogs down there. They were family pets that had been forced to fend for themselves. Most of them were still wearing collars. There was a collie and a yellow lab and two beagles. The rest didn’t look to be any specific breed.
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