I looked over at Ann. She was staring at the water dripping off me. It took me a second to realize she wasn’t in awe of my hot body.
“Yep, it’s cold but you can take a shower.”
She immediately began gathering up shower supplies and yelling at everybody else they needed to get in the showers as well before this miracle ended. She especially wanted Reeves and Ginny to get in and try to get the cold water on their burns. Reeves looked bad. His face was probably going to scar. Ginny was peeling already and Ann still looked an angry shade of red but Reeves was the one who needed to be submerged face first into an ice bath for a few hours.
I had noticed solar panels on the roof as I was walking around. I reached out and flipped the light switch to the on position in the room. Nothing. I went in search of the garage and the breaker box. Entering the large four or five car garage I found a couple of off-road golf carts and some motorbikes. There was also a battered looking Toyota Pickup parked inside. That was about all I could make out based on the light filtering in through the windows on the garage doors. I pulled out my iPhone. Trying to remember the last time I had charged it.
I turned the phone on and fumbled to turn the flashlight on. An irrational fear gripped me that when I turned the light on, I’d see a row of Zombies standing there staring at me. I got the light turned on, heartbeat speeding up a bit, I shined it around and did not see any drooling, bloody mouths lunging for me. Once I had confirmed I was not going to die in the next few seconds, I shone the light around the garage until I found the breaker box. I went over and started flicking all the breakers to the on position. The light in the garage turned on.
Sweet.
I was going to be a hero. I opened the door to walk down the hall and Ann came running at me in a towel, gave me a huge hug, wet hair slapping me in the face, then turned around and ran back for the bathroom.
Thomas joined me in the hallway.
“This is badass dude. Glad you figured it out. I found an Xbox and a PlayStation with like, a zillion games, I’m pretty much good here until the sun runs out of power to shove into the outlets down here. Sweet setup too. Even has a gaming chair. Rich people were so much better than us.”
I laughed and said I totally agreed with him. He wandered off to check out the gaming system. I told him to make sure he kept the volume down, he told me there was a couple pairs of $300 wireless headsets so noise would not be an issue.
I went back to trying to absorb the fact that a wet Ann had just given me a big hug wearing just a towel. Had that actually happened or had I been daydreaming? If it had been a daydream it definitely topped the idea of turning on a flashlight and seeing the hard-red eyes of a row of demons staring at me. I went in to the master bedroom to see what all had been accomplished while I wandered the house playing god.
A bunch of crap had been drug in and piled up in the room. It was comfortable looking crap which was nice. There was plenty of room for the large pile. In addition to the oversized bedroom, there was a sitting area and a bathroom about the size of my old apartment. We were up on the second floor with a large balcony as well.
I went out on the balcony and saw that there was even a ladder leading up to a sunning deck on the roof. That would make an excellent look out post. I figured we probably needed to have two people awake and on watch at all times to keep this place safe. Considering there was only a total of five of us, keeping watch could wind up being a pretty arduous task. We’d need to drag an umbrella or a tarp or something up to the deck as well if we expected any of our forest fire fried people to be sitting up there in the sun anytime soon.
I’d have the other person patrol the house. It was a big house with a lot of entry spots. If we weren’t vigilant we’d end up dead. Even out here in the middle of nowhere, it would only be a matter of time before Zombies started showing up. Zombies weren’t all we had to worry about either.
We were only a few exits from Spartanburg which looked like a decent sized city on the map. That meant there were more than likely survivors wandering around somewhere. They could be decent people like us or they could be more along the lines of the shoot first, rape next convicts we had ran into when we escaped from the big warehouse store back in Florida. I didn’t trust anyone at this point.
Food and water.
We had shelter. What we needed after that was food and water. I searched the house but it had not been stocked up when the disaster hit. The pantry was full of canned staples like beans and green beans but there wasn’t a ton of it. My practiced eye estimated about two to three weeks’ worth of food. Water was fine. Water came magically out of the tap just by turning it on. Crazy, right?
I turned out lights as I headed back to the master bedroom. No reason to advertise our presence any more than we needed to. When I got back to the bedroom everyone was sitting around. Freshly showered and in clean clothes it looked like a different group of people. Reeves was already asleep. He had ended up in the sitting room on the oversized leather recliner. He had a wet cloth covering one side of his face. The fact that he was sleeping already caused me to look over at Ann, she smiled and rattled a mostly empty pill bottle around.
“Ok. I’ve walked around and think I have some things for us to get organized around and start working on.”
Ginny held up a finger in the give me one minute gesture. She disappeared into the master and came back with another wet washcloth. She gingerly swapped the one out on Reeves face and then came over and sat back down. She made the ‘ok get back to talking ‘gesture.
“Ok. Thomas had his arm re-broken like three days ago and I’m constantly on the edge of back spasms with a broken rib and one good eye. The bad thing is, I think me and him are probably the healthiest people at the moment. The food situation here is Ok but nothing to keep us here for more than a couple of weeks. I’m hoping that’s enough for us rack up some R&R and get feeling better. I’m thinking the house is big enough where we need one or two people on patrol and standing watch at all times. One person at night and two during the day. There’s a sun deck we should be able to see all around from up top. It’s probably only super useful during the day. Thomas and I will be awake and on watch for the next twelve hours while you all try to recuperate from driving through that Smokey mountain hell.”
Ann held up her hand. I smiled and called on her.
“On the upper deck. If you can see a good distance from up there then people can see you from a good distance when you’re up there. I say we avid it unless whoever is going to go up there wants to spend the whole time laying on their stomach under a blanket or something to avoid being seen.”
Made sense. I told her I’d try and figure out a way for one of us to be up there and have that visibility without being visible. We’d probably have to sneak someone up there in early morning to avoid being seen. I made a mental note to look in the garage to see if we could find something.
Since the upper deck idea had been shot down Thomas mentioned maybe we only needed one person on watch this first shift. I nodded and him and Ginny disappeared into the media room to play video games and unwind a bit.
Ann crawled into the big master bed. She had on some silk PJs she had dug out of one of the closets here. The huge bed dwarfed her. She sank in with her head resting on one of the thick silk covered pillows.
“Have fun walking around the house! Wake me up when whatever is coming to kill us is less than two minutes away.”
I rubbed my face hard with my hand and started a long day of walking around the house.
Entry 25: Checking In
Everybody in the house was sound asleep, except me. I just wanted to be sound asleep. Preferably in that ridiculous master bed, next to the equally ridiculous Ann in those silk PJs. I checked in on Thomas and Ginny. They were both sitting in the overstuffed gaming chairs, both of them had the headphones on and they were both fast asleep. I looked at the screen of the TV and saw they had loaded up and were playing a game where you ran around the country side k
illing Zombies. Seriously?
I left them snoozing in the game room and continued my tour of the house. I paused at the dead Zombie in the second living room. Family room? Den? Not sure what you called it, since I’d never lived in a house with more than one common entertaining type area. There was a sticky pool of congealing blood on the floor. I looked at the couch and the impressions of the things body was very clearly defined. He’d been laying there for a long time. Brought the question back up as to how long these things could live without food or water or shelter. The virus must bring your metabolism almost to a complete halt and make your digestive system efficient as hell.
He’d been laying in the same spot for almost a year, without food or water and never having produced any waste whatsoever as far as I could tell. I wasn’t trying to sniff the guy’s ass or anything but I’d be willing to bet about all I would have smelled while he was living was the remnants of the skid marks made before becoming zombiefied. Now that I’d smashed in his skull and left him to rot on the floor of a room I couldn’t name all his organs had finally let go. There just wasn’t anything left to let go.
I wrapped him up in a comforter I pulled out of a linen closet that was full of extra bedding. Not knowing what else to do with the body, I decided to dump him in the pool. It was close and no one was trying to jump in that pool anytime soon anyway. What I did not want do was leave the rotting corpse in the house with us. On top of hygiene and sanitation issues, it was just creepy. We may be fairly used to death and gore at this point but I like to think we hadn’t become immune to it completely. Dead people were still freaky.
I wrapped him up in the comforter and drug him out to the pool. I tried dragging the comforter through the blood to absorb it. Comforters are not super absorbent. I ended up smearing blood all over the place. Leaving a trail from the ‘room that shall not be named’ out to the pool. I rolled the guys body into the pool as quietly as I could, then threw the comforter in after him and went to find a mop to try and clean up the blood trail.
I found all kinds of cleaning supplies in the butler’s closet. I don’t know if butlers closet is a real thing or not but it seemed to fit the space I found. It was full of cleaning supplies and men’s suits. I turned on the sink, and filled up the mop bucket and got to work. When I was done with that chore I wheeled the whole bucket into the pool and let it sink. The bucket leaving a pink trial through the water as it descended down out of site.
I was cognizant the entire time that I was responsible for keeping an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. Nothing had registered as out of the ordinary thus far. I was hoping our distance from the road and isolation from other houses would help us stay hidden for as long as it took us to eat every can of food these people had left in their pantry. My goal for this place was for everyone to get some much-needed rest. It seemed to be a vicious cycle with us. We’d find a place to rest, get chased out, get our asses handed to us, then find a place to rest again.
Motion is life. Staying in one place too long just wasn’t going to ever be an option. I was wondering if even my parents isolated cabin, at the top of the winding mountain road, would be able to be Zombie proofed well enough to be more than a temporary shelter. How long could we keep moving though? It was wearing on all of us. I was currently taking shallow breaths to avoid the pain of deep breaths with a broken rib. I had one good eye. My back needed an MRI. I was popping pain pills and antibiotics like they were skittles and I was the one currently considered to be in the best shape to stand the first watch!
I peeked in on Reeves and Ann. Reeves had not moved off his chair. I went in and carefully swapped out his facecloth with another one. He didn’t even pause in his snoring while I did that. I stopped to look down at Ann and was there for about a second when she opened up her eyes.
“How long have you been standing there you fruit loop? Keep it moving, nothing to see here…”
I went out on the balcony and looked up at the sundeck. I went back in the house and grabbed a sheet and a pillow and went back out to the ladder. Mindful of everyone’s admonition that climbing the thing would show everyone within eyesight that the house was occupied, I went up quickly with the sheet covering my body. I really hoped no one saw me climbing up covered in a sheet. I was thinking it would break up my outline if anyone looked this way. They’d just think a giant cotton ball or maybe the Casper the ghost was climbing up the ladder instead of a person. Made perfect sense to me before I spent time actually thinking about it.
Getting to the sundeck, I quickly lay the pillow down and squatted down on it. Keeping the sheet wrapped around me, I took a look at the 360-degree view of the woods and houses around us. It was probably a few thousand yards to the closest neighbors. It looked like the neighbors had a nice sized complex going for them as well. Must have been nice.
Looking towards the interstate I did not see anything super exciting. When I looked South West, I could easily make out the smoke still billowing into the air. That’s a problem I had not considered. That fire could come straight at us with a simple change in the direction of the wind. We needed to keep an eye out as that could cut short our stay at Green Pool Manor. I didn’t want anything to do with being close to that inferno again.
I lay there for a while. Periodically moving around and staring at different locations. The smoke seemed to stay where it was on the horizon and the wind gusts where going towards the smoke instead of towards us so we should be good there. Not that I really had any clue how that worked or how fires moved.
Rolling around reminded me I had the Sat phone shoved in my pocket. I debated on waiting to get a consensus on whether we should check in or not. Boredom and curiosity eventually won out. I pulled the sat phone out and turned it on. Planning on sending a quick update on the fire and letting them know we had made it through. As I saw the information scrolling across the screen, I completely forgot about updating them on the forest fire. It looked like they had much bigger issues to deal with.
I scrolled through the text messages again and then slid over to the ladder and went down with the sheet wrapped tightly around me.
Entry 26: Great, Something Else Trying to Kill Us
I made it down to the balcony and slid the glass door open quietly. I snuck into the Master Suite. Feeling guilty about having gone up on the deck and having turned on the sat phone. Both items we’d discussed and decided not to do. Of course, I would have to try and be sneaky with the phone when it turned out there was info on it I needed to tell everybody. Every other time we’d turned the damn thing on had pretty much been an exercise in futility. Messages popping up saying everything still sucked.
I went and sat down in the bed next to Ann. She rolled over and pulled me down for a kiss. Sensing something weird was going on, she opened her eyes and asked me what was up? When I didn’t say anything, she asked why I was wrapped in a sheet? Rather than try to explain why I was wrapped up in a sheet I went ahead and handed her the sat phone so she could see the messages on it. She focused in on the message for a minute and then gasped.
“Really, like enough damage hasn’t already been done? All those kids. We were almost there. I really thought about taking Thomas there to get his arm fixed and get some X-Rays.”
The phone sat on the bed. The top message reading, “Do not attempt to travel to Charleston. Charleston base destroyed by hostiles. Destroyed by nuclear tactical weapon. City is hot with radiation and radiation can spread outwards. Do not attempt to go to Charleston. Please report any contact with militaristic foreign nationals.”
I ignored the button that would send our coordinates to the Kings Bay base and sent a brief message stating the fire had destroyed Columbia and was still raging out of control. I did not expect to receive a reply. As I was reaching to press the button to power the phone down, another message popped up.
“Great to hear from you! Be careful out there, looks like our friends from across the pond want to press the fight. Avoid them best you can and stay safe. --
Lt Wilson.”
I handed the phone to Ann. She nodded appreciatively, then firmly pressed the power button to kill the phone. We both sat in the bed, holding one another. What a waste. Whoever had blown up the base in Charleston had taken out the largest collection of non-infected humans that we knew of. They had been our best chance at starting over. There were children there. Whoever it was, my money was on the N Koreans, they had started this mess with bio-weapons and now were finishing it off with nuclear weapons. Part of me thought the bombing of Charleston must be justified to them, since we had destroyed their whole country. The other 99% of me just wanted the chance to take a solid swing at them.
Ann rubbed my head while I sat there seething with anger. I leaned back in that big bed and the next thing I knew Reeves was shaking me awake. It was dark in the house, although the bathroom light was on with the door cracked to provide us with some visibility.
“How you feeling? Where’s Ann?” His face looked bad, even in the dim light cast over us from the bathroom. The blisters were everywhere on the left side of his face. Large blisters were surrounded by clusters of smaller blisters. What a mess.
“Fantastic.” Reeves choked out, then pointed to the hallway and said, “Ann, Patrolling.”
Zournal: Book 3: Scorched Earth Page 14
