by Greg Dragon
Of course, that was because of the illegal pot farm he had inside, completely outfitted with grow lights and hydroponic tanks. Like most things Conner got interested in, the illegal grow patch had failed, and the garage was now empty except for an old mower and some yard tools.
Janet went back to the list, waiting while Conner parked the truck inside the garage and burst through the kitchen door. She’d finished going through most of the items in the spiral inventory notebook by the time he began yelling for her.
Setting the notebook down on top of a bin marked “MRE”, Janet went into the kitchen. She stood just inside the door, left arm pressed across her stomach, listing towards the side with the bruised kidney.
“There you are. What were you doing, something I ain’t supposed to see?” Connor sneered at her, his usual expression. It was better than the furious one, but not by much.
“I was checking the supplies,” Janet said, keeping her voice low.
Connor snorted. “Making yourself useful, for a change. Color me shock-and-awed.”
Janet ignored the jibe. He’d said worse. “You saw the news reports, if you’re home this early. Do you think it’s for real?”
“Hell, yeah. I told ya the zombie apocalypse was coming. You thought you knew better, but as usual, you ain’t all that smart as you think.”
Janet just stood there. She kept her expression neutral, fearful of setting Connor off into one of his cruel phases.
Connor fidgeted for a moment, staring at the reports still scrolling across the television screen before he opened the refrigerator and took out a beer. He busied himself with looking for a bottle opener in the drawer next to the sink, making a big show of popping the top into the stained porcelain basin. Finally, he turned to her and leaned back onto the counter.
“Yeah. I do think it’s real. I think we’re in the shitter for sure, so I told the boss where to shove it and hit the door running. I grabbed a few things on the way out, so if this turns out to be nothing, I’ll be looking for a job.”
Janet didn’t dare show how upsetting this was. If Connor thought for a minute she thought he’d fucked up, bloody piss was going to be only a tiny part of her hurt.
“Like, what things?” Maybe if she kept him occupied with the story, he’d ignore her for a while longer. Long enough to get through the night, at least.
“The keys to the warehouse, and to a couple of the trucks.”
Oh, god. He’d likely end up in prison, rather than unemployed. Those keys were zealously guarded; every employee with a set had to sign them in and out daily. The owner of the food distribution center where Connor worked was insanely suspicious of workers stealing food and other items from the warehouse.
“What do you think we should do now?” Janet finally asked. “The news people said FEMA is already setting up safe zones in most cities, trying to get ahead of this—whatever it is.”
Connor snorted. “Ain’t going to no camp. I figure we should hole up here, wait for a few days to see how it all goes down. Then, if it works out like I think it will, we’ll head out of town, hit the hunting shacks up in the mountains.
“We can swing by the warehouse, pick out a truck loaded up with all the stuff we’ll need for a while. I’ll drive it, and you take my truck. Between what that will carry and a full tractor-trailer, we won’t be hurting for anything for a long while. Maybe long enough for the stupid government to get its head out its ass and fix things.”
Connor finished up the beer and set the bottle behind him on the counter. He didn’t bother righting it when it fell over with a harsh tinkle. He never did. That was her job, and he wasn’t about to do anything he considered “women’s work”. Janet was used to it, and the action didn’t even make a blip in her head as she worked through this latest bump in her very rough life.
The last thing she needed was to be caught up in a medical situation the government couldn’t seem to wrap their heads around. There had been chatter about bird flu, radiation from that place in Japan, and the latest fall out from some wonder drug all the Hollywood people were getting high on for the past few weeks, but the last thing she’d expected was for anything to come of it.
To be honest, she hadn’t really paid that much attention to any of the news, or the gossip her coworkers filled their time with. Her problems were entirely domestic, and all her energy went to work, home and plans to finally leave Connor behind for good.
Now, with whatever it was that was causing all the terror filling the airwaves, Janet realized that all her planning had been for nothing. The secret stash of money, the furtive explorations into traveling anywhere Connor wouldn’t find her. All of it had been washed away by the certainty that her best bet to survive this was with Connor.
Connor of the guns and ammo—which until today she’d firmly believed would be used on her. Connor with his food and other supplies, the extensive camping gear, and the map to an abandoned hunting camp firmly in his head, and nowhere else.
She’d snooped around, looking at property maps and old surveys, and never found any indication of where that precious camp might be. Sometimes she even doubted it existed at all, that it was just something Conner talked about to sound like a smart prepper.
Probably the smartest thing he could have done was keep the location to the camp from her, because if she had more than the vaguest idea where it was, she would use one of his guns and put one of those precious bullets between his eyes.
If she were perfectly honest with herself, Janet knew she should shoot him anyway, and take her chances with the zombies. It was the only sure way to get away from him, as she knew from bitter experience.
The last time she’d tried to run for it, he’d hunted her down within a week. She’d spent the next month in the hospital, recovering from an “accident”. Connor’s story, which she’d overheard the nurses whispering about shortly after she woke from three days in a coma, was that she’d been standing in front of his truck when the brakes failed.
Janet hadn’t bothered telling anyone the truth after that, because she could see how the nurses flirted with Connor. He was a handsome man, and perfectly charming when it suited him. It was how he’d caught her, much to her regret. Turning on that aw-shucks-ma’am, I’m just a good ol’ country boy act. It worked on women, and on most men.
“I hope you don’t think that playacting is going to get you out of cooking dinner, or anything else. I’m hungry and I’ve got a lot of work to do before the night’s done.”
Conner’s abrupt comment as he wandered past her on the way to the living room shook her out of her thoughts with a shudder. She just shook her head and moved towards the stove.
“Of course not. It’s not that bad, anyway.”
“Damn straight. Learn to behave right, and you wouldn’t have to get showed how so often,” Connor muttered.
Janet didn’t say a word, just took some hamburger out of the fridge. Hamburger steaks with some grilled onions, gravy and mashed potatoes would settle him down. Served with lots of creamed corn, it was his favorite meal and certain to settle him down for a few hours, at least.
* * *
By the time she was ready to call Connor in for dinner, her headache had returned with a vengeance, her back even sorer from all the lifting and carrying she’d done, and not helped at all by the constant volume of noise from the television. Between that and Connor’s muttering, cursing and grunting as he moved the storage bins around, Janet was ready to fall into bed and sleep for a couple of days.
She wasn’t going to get to do it, though, because Connor was worked up over the events of the day, and the lingering anger from the night before. Janet knew he was going to make her repeat their less-than-satisfying sex act, since she hadn’t pleased him well enough the night before.
With a sigh, she took a pill from the dwindling stash she had from her last “learning” session, which had left her with a cracked jaw she explained away as coming from tripping over the cat. Since Connor hated cats, and t
hey’d never had one, it was a total lie, and Janet knew the doctor hadn’t believed her. Only her pleading eyes and a soft hand on his had made him agree to not report the incident.
The last thing Janet needed was to have the police involved any more than they already had been. One beating had led to him being jailed for six months, and what followed that brief reprieve still gave her nightmares.
Janet caught a short cell phone video on the news before Connor turned the television off. The scroll bar said it had been taken as the phone’s owner was attacked and killed.
Her mind was still reeling from the stuff she’d been hearing about all evening, but flesh-eating undead zombies didn’t worry her nearly as much as her living man.
Chapter Two
“Son of a fucking bitch!”
The shout and subsequent crash as Ted rushed to tell Dara the latest news echoed through the small house. Down in the basement, Dara cursed as she dropped an entire box of 38 ammunition rounds. Now she’d have to get down on hands and knees and collect them all. With the current situation across the country, they couldn’t afford to miss a single one of the brass and lead cylinders, but it took more time than she wanted to spare.
“Dara!” Ted’s voice was rising to a screech as he came to a stop at the basement entrance. “Those fuckers just nuked New York! They bombed the whole fucking city. All of it.”
Dara closed her eyes. Typical of Ted to forget that Dara’s brother and sister-in-law lived in Queens, along with their two children. If what her husband had said was true—and it wasn’t unusual for him to totally misread things he heard or saw since the accident—then all hope of her remaining family getting out and joining them was gone.
Tears seeped between her lids. Dara let them fall while she stood shaking, surrounded by the dropped ammo. She couldn’t help the moan that escaped despite her best efforts to contain it.
“Dara?”
God damn it. Poor Ted. He couldn’t help it; nobody chooses to get hit head-on by a drunk driver going eighty miles and hour. She knew his problems weren’t his fault, but it put the burden of getting the two of them out of this shit hole of a town before the residents began eating each other squarely on her. She didn’t even have the hope now of having Jayvon for backup, nor of Emily’s nursing help, once they’d gotten back home.
“Yeah, Ted,” she called towards the stairs. “I heard you.”
She wondered if she should remind him about Jayvon and his family being nothing more now than irradiated dust blowing across the Northeast, but knew it would only upset him because he’d forgotten they lived in New York. Had lived there, despite knowing that it was going to be a pain to get out if things went bad.
Dara looked around at the scattered shells, and thought, fuck it. They could stay there another hour or so, while she got Ted calmed down and fed him some lunch. She needed to check the Internet, see for herself that Ted hadn’t screwed up such horrifying news, and New York was still there.
She wiped her cheeks, taking a tissue to blow her nose while she put on a calm face. She didn’t want to frighten Ted, because he would refuse to eat or take any of the meds that kept him on the slow path of improving health. Dara had to keep that steady train moving, until he was once again the man he used to be.
She had a feeling she was going to need him, the old, strong Ted, if things were really as bad as she feared.
* * *
It took two hours to finally get Ted situated in front of the television again. She had put on one of his favorite movies, a light comedy that he didn’t have to strain his brain to understand and enjoy. He’d eaten well, because by the time she’d gotten upstairs, composed and falsely chirpy, he had totally forgotten what he’d seen on the news.
It was a blessing, of sorts, since it allowed Ted to stay pretty calm and accepting of his limitations. Of course, Dara was exhausted from having to be on call twenty four hours a day for whatever he needed, with only short breaks, and then the zombie apocalypse happened.
The goal of their years together—working so hard and spending nothing they absolutely didn’t have to on the house, the cars or themselves—was to have enough money to set themselves up someplace out of the city, away from the crazies, the drug lords and the cops who seemed to have forgotten they were supposed to protect the citizens, not kill them for no reason other than being black.
Two years earlier, they’d managed to scrape together enough money to buy a property high up in the surrounding mountains, an old hunting camp that had been abandoned for decades. Weekends and every other spare moment were spent getting the area set up for their eventual move.
And then the drunken high school kids had plowed into Ted’s old, rusty Escort, crushing it like a tin can in a giant’s fist. The first miracle came when Ted survived, with injuries the doctors said would heal, and the second came when the driver’s father, a prominent local attorney running for the state senate, had paid handsomely to avoid dragging his dead only son’s name through the courts.
With the money that didn’t need to be spent on Ted, Dara doubled down on fixing up their new homestead, adding to their food, water and other supplies. Once Ted’s rehabilitation was complete, they were going to sell their little house on the edge of town and move up into the hills.
It was just bad luck, Dara guessed, that something had gone horribly wrong somewhere in the world, and something very like a zombie plague had hit.
She shook her head as she gave a last pat on Ted’s shoulder and headed for the basement. She still had quite a bit of work left to get the last of the things they wanted to take with them sorted and brought upstairs before the end of the day. It was mostly stuff like old family pictures, the last of the ammo they kept in the house, and some odd and end knickknacks she’d been wanting to bring up to the camp. Stupid stuff, for the most part, but it was hers, and she wanted to take it with her.
Surprisingly, she was humming as she set to the tasks ahead of her. Crawling around on the dusty basement floor wasn’t what could be called the highlight of another busy day, but all in all, things could have been worse. Ted could be dead, or a vegetable in a home, after all. What she would have done in that case, she wasn’t sure. Could she have left him to the unmerciful world that was forming?
Probably not.
“I’d be right there, beside him like always,” she said, voice strong and confident of her choice. “Yep. I’d be there, right through this damned apocalypse, come what may.”
Dara shook her head at that thought, an image of her brandishing a walker at some animated corpse that threatened her man flashing behind her eyes. She could see how that ended, with the two of them bloody corpses, or worse, joining the other dead and setting out to infect their next victim.
It was like one of those TV shows they liked to watch, sitting snuggled up on the sagging old couch, feet up on the coffee table. They’d have popcorn and sodas at the ready while their eyes were fastened on the gruesome action on the big flat screen in the den.
It was funny, in a way, how they’d talked so much about how to defend themselves in such a situation, how they’d need a plan and a place to go. And now the time was upon them, and it wasn’t anything like they’d supposed. Ted wasn’t the strong, resilient man he had been six months before, and Dara wasn’t the meek little bank teller she’d been. Planning for disaster had strengthened her for when the bad times came; though for a long time she’d thought what happened to her husband had been the worse thing that could ever happen.
Except, it hadn’t been nearly the worse. If what she’d been watching on television, and reading far too much speculation about on the computer were true, things were going to really get bad. And it might never get any better.
Dara felt like the two of them had been playing at preparing for things. Even her brother, who was more serious about staying on top of things, had kidded her about the food, silver coins and weapons. His theory was that it was all for nothing, and one day they’d be sitting around a holi
day table, with their kids and grandkids, and joke about how much money they’d all spent for a day that never came.
“Well, the day is here, Brother,” Dara whispered, looking at an old photo of the two of them, when they were children and life had seemed like it would last forever. “It’s here, and you’re not. Even Ted isn’t really here, and maybe won’t be for a long time.”
Her chin rested on her chest as Dara cried for her lost family, especially for the two little ones who would never get the chance to grow up now. She let the tears flow freely, getting the pain out in the only place she had where Ted couldn’t roll up silently behind her and wonder why she was so upset, and ask her in that scared, little-boy voice if he’d been bad.
Ted retreated into a child-like state when he sensed the people around him were upset or sad. It was a lingering effect of the brain injury he’d suffered. He was getting better, but the last couple of days had been hard on both of them. He could sense that Dara was upset over something, though she’d hidden it well enough so far that he easily went along as she distracted him.
Finally, Dara got control of herself, dashing the tears away and sniffling. She’d forgotten to replace the tissue from earlier in the day, so she did something she’d never have allowed herself at any other time and swiped the sleeve of her blouse across her nose.
“And that’s the last time I am going to do that,” she said, looking down at the photograph. “I’m sorry you and Emily and the kids won’t be joining us, Jayvon. I’ll miss you always, and I hope you know that. But Ted needs me. He can’t take care of himself, and I can’t do it if I’m always crying.”
