Deathly Contagious (35 page)

We closed the doors behind us and went around the curved railing into the next room: A huge game room with a plasma TV mounted on the wall, bookcases filled with books and board games and tons of toys. Lucas was a lucky boy indeed. There was another bedroom with its own bathroom and large closet to check out before we reached the amazing master bedroom.

We temporarily forgot we were looking for zombies as our eyes feasted over the four post, king sized bed. The entire room was decorated in very pleasing earth tones. The pale blue and brown comforter and matching, fluffy pillows on the bed begged me to lay down on them.  The dresser was just as grand as the bed and was made of out of beautiful, hand carved wood. What must have been expensive porcelain figurines of horses adorned the top.

Beyond the bed was a sitting room, with equally regal armchairs angled between another beautiful piece of woodwork. A coffee cup had been left on top of a folded up newspaper; its contents long evaporated. I moved it and picked up the paper.

“October 23
^rd
,” I read the date out loud. “I think that’s about the same time the virus hit Indy.”

“Sounds about right,” Hayden agreed and pushed open the bathroom door. We both longed to take a long, hot bath in the Jacuzzi tub. We quickly checked the closet and went down the stairs with Hayden insisting he went first.

I held my flashlight in one hand and rested my other on top, holding my gun. We stood in an elaborately decorated foyer. I shined the light around.

“This way?” Hayden asked and motioned to the front door. I nodded and followed him into one of the most impressive living rooms I’d ever been in. Even though our only source of light was the flashlight, I knew a fancy home living magazine would have loved to come in here and snap pictures.

I wondered if Lucas was allowed to play on the pristine white carpet or sit on the antique Victorian styled furniture. Dust covered a grand piano.

Through the living room, we went into an equally ridiculously decorated dining room. Seriously? I thought as I looked around at the china that was set on the table. Did these people invite royalty over?

We inspected the kitchen, utility room, family room, bathrooms and the den before we went into the four car garage. A Lexus SUV was parked on the spot nearest the door. My light wasn’t enough to descry what the other two cars were. Hayden lifted the garage door open, spilling blinding light in.

“How is it?” Brock asked. I blinked when I looked at him, my eyes still adjusting to the light.

“Safe, I think,” Hayden answered. “We didn’t look in the basement yet.”

Rider looked at the cars. There was one more Lexus and a sporty Audi. “I’m really curious to how people could afford to live like this, especially in the Depression.”

Wade huffed. “Me too. It’s not fair.”

“Tell me about it,” I agreed, recalling Aunt Jenny’s cramped apartment. Surprisingly, I felt a little pang of homesickness. Not for the small and crappy apartment, but for family. I hated not knowing what happened to Aunt Jenny and my grandpa.  

I shook myself back to the here and now. I offered to keep watch while the guys went into the basement. Hayden, of course, stayed with me. After ten minutes, the guys came back up telling us that the most exciting thing they found was a theater room that we couldn’t use.

Rider found the keys to the three cars in the garage. With our remaining daylight, we moved all three into the yard and siphoned gas from the Audi and the car. Hayden thought it would be a good idea to take the SUV but Ivan didn’t like the idea of two of us being in a car with no means of communication; we only had two walkie talkies.

Settling on deciding later, we parked our cars in the garage and shut the door. I went around the house in search of candles. Ivan and Brock worked on starting a fire in the living and family room fireplaces with wood they had brought in from a neatly stacked woodpile out on the back, covered veranda. Hayden went through the pantry for anything useful and Wade and Rider brought in our stuff.  

I closed the doors to the den and dining room; there was nothing in there we’d need. I set the whole ten candles I was able to find on the kitchen counter and got a box of matches out of my bag.

“That’s better,” Hayden said when the flames flickered and danced over the kitchen. He had a nice pile started on the island counter. There were numerous cans of beans, vegetables and fruit, two bags of organic potato chips, one bag of popcorn, a dozen cans of soup, a jar of pickles, chips, salsa, several boxes of cornbread, cake, and brownie mixes, and an unopened bottle of spray butter. “Do you think we need salad dressing?”

“Won’t hurt to take it,” I told him, carefully carrying a candle over to set down on an empty spot on the shelf in the pantry. “It can be used to flavor food. Just make sure it’s not expired; we need food poisoning like we need a hole in the head.”

“Right,” he said and handed me the bottles to add to the pile. We finished going through the pantry, moved the candle to the counter and each took two candles to distribute throughout the house. We set two on the table by the stairs.  We put a candle on a dresser in each of the four bedrooms since it would soon be dark upstairs too, one in the upstairs hallway and kept the remaining candles in the kitchen so we could use the light to see our food and make dinner.

After eating more soup, potato chips and a can of tuna, the six of us crowded around the coffee table in the family room to a play a game of cards. I laid out our wet clothes to dry and sat with my back to the fireplace and unbraid my hair, surprised at how long it had gotten since October. I no doubt had a horrendous amount of split ends. When wet, my hair appeared jet black. Really, it was a dark espresso color and I had always liked my natural color. It was the only good thing my father had given me.  

“When the world is fixed, I’m coming back here,” Brock said and dealt the cards. “This house is sweet!”

“If the world is fixed,” Rider spat bitterly.

“What do you think it will be like?” Wade asked. “When there aren’t any more zombies, I mean.”

“It’ll be weird,” Ivan laughed. “And empty.”

“Who will be in charge?” Rider questioned.

“I assumed we would be,” Hayden admitted. “At least with our group. We’d keep it running like how we do. I’m banking on everyone being able to go off and do their own thing while still working together as a community.”

“You have more faith in people that I do,” I told Hayden. “Once it’s safe, I want to go back to my farm in Kentucky and not have to worry about taking care of anyone but myself and a few friends.”

“How would you get food?” Ivan asked.

I shrugged one shoulder. “Farm and hunt. It wouldn’t be fun but people did it before, right?”

“What about technology?” Rider continued to raise questions. “Do you think we’ll have to start all over?”

“Not completely,” Hayden answered. “We still have the knowledge, just not the tools or the manpower to work complex things like airports, oil rigs, and cable companies. And I think some things—like cable—are nice but are not needed to live. We’ll have to go without, like we are now.”

“It’ll be weird,” I said with a slight laugh. “When kids are born into this world we’ll be telling them stories about what 3D TVs, air conditioning, and the internet were.”

“And we’ll have to tell them about the zombie virus,” Brock added. “What will we tell them when they asked how it started? We have no idea?”

“It had to be an accident,” Ivan speculated. “Like in a cheesy science fiction movie where someone dropped a vial in a lab, releasing the virus to the unsuspecting public.”

“Yea,” Wade agreed. “Or a science experiment gone wrong. Maybe doctors were trying to cure cancer and created cells that couldn’t die or something but they didn’t expect the virus to…to mutate and create zombies.”

I leaned my head back and shook out my hair to let heat get to the bottom layers. I hated sleeping on wet hair; it just annoyed me. We played another game of Rummy, talked some more and decided to call it a night.

We were unsure if having someone stay downstairs and keep watch was worth it since no one could see a damn thing through the boarded up windows. It was unanimous that we’d all feel safer with an alert pair of ears to listen for a herd.

In sets of three again, Hayden, Brock, and I took the first watch. We sat in the family room again, eating pre-popped popcorn and talking. After three hours, I was feeling very full and very bored. My eyes were heavy and I knew I could easily fall asleep. Knowing I needed to do something to stay awake, I took my flashlight and crept up the stairs and into the game room.

I came back down with a stack of board games. The rest of our time spent playing Loaded Questions went by quickly but I was still a tad bit excited when it was our turn to sleep. Yawning, I let Hayden pull me to my feet. Warm from sitting by the fire, I had removed my sweatshirt. The air upstairs wasn’t cold, but it still made goosebumps breakout on my arms.

I took off my boots and got under the covers of the grand bed in the master bedroom. Hayden did the same and got in next to me. I was so tired and comfortable that I fell asleep quickly and didn’t wake up until Ivan woke us up six hours later.

We got dressed, blew out the candles, ate breakfast and loaded up what we’d need for our day filled with searching. We paid close attention to the roads we took so we’d be able to easily get back to our mansion of a safe house.

Three hours were spent looking for the downtown area; it turned out it was so small we passed it more than once. Storefront windows were broken, cars had been burned and there was a charred pile of human remains in front of the one story courthouse.

We weren’t going to find any survivors here.

“We’re less than a hundred miles from Pittsburg,” I told Hayden, tracing the road with my finger. “I think we should at least get close to see what’s there.”

Hayden hesitated before he answered. “There’s plenty to look for here.”

“But Pittsburg is a big city and Fuller wanted us to check out the bigger cities,” I insisted. “I just don’t understand what the big deal is. If we find people, who cares where they came from?”

“We were given direct orders to
not
go to Pennsylvania,” he reminded me.

“I know, and that makes me want to go even more,” I admitted. “It’s just that we are so close. I’d hate to miss a chance to find something.” I leaned forward between the front seats. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” he answered. He ever so slightly looked at Brock, who, in return, ever so slightly shrugged.

We drove around for another hour and ran into a small town with over a dozen zombies staggering around. Almost all of them seemed in or at least close to being in the S3 stage. Hayden rolled down the windows and turned up the music.

Suddenly, he turned around to face me. “I’m gonna use your bow, ok?”

“Sure,” I said. “But I don’t think you’ll hit anything. You never finished training with it.”

“Teach me?” he asked with an innocent smile.

“Sure,” I said again. We killed all but the slowest gummies by shooting them with our guns. Hayden took the bow and held it out. “Relax your shoulder,” I instructed. “And drop your elbow a bit, it’s making you hold the arrow wrong.”

Hayden nodded, let out a breath and released the arrow which lodged in the gummy’s shoulder.

“Not bad, Underwood,” Ivan praised. “Aim for the head this time,” he teased. I gave Hayden another arrow; this time he got the neck, severing the S3’s spinal cord.

Hayden nodded with satisfaction at the fallen body. “I’ll get it on my first try next time,” he said with a grin.  He pulled the arrows out, wiped them off and stuffed them back in my quiver.

On foot, the six of us explored the little town. Everything seemed frozen in time; dishes with moldy food still sat on the tables inside the diner, the post office was still decorated for Halloween, business signs were still flipped to ‘open’, and cars were parked within the lines in parking lots.

Besides the birds chirping, it was quiet and creepy here. We siphoned gas from several parked cars to fill our tanks, got our lunch and sat at a picnic table in a small park.

“So,” I said to Ivan. “We’re pretty close to Pittsburg.”

“Hmm,” he said and took a bite of beef jerky.

“Don’t you want to go look?” I asked.

“Yea, I’m curious to what it’s like,” he admitted causing me to smile. “But we were told not to cross the border.”

I rolled my eyes. “No one would know.”

“Riss,” Hayden warned. “No.”

I sighed but gave up. I was supposed to be a better soldier, right? I didn’t bring it up any more while we ate the rest of our lunch. The storms must have brought in the warm weather. With the sun beating down on us, I quickly got hot. I walked to the truck and pulled my brown sweater over my head.

“Jesus, Riss, what happened?” Hayden exclaimed, startling me a bit.

“Huh?” I asked not having a freaking clue what he was talking about.

He stepped over. “You’re covered in bruises! How are you not feeling that?” He gently touched my side.

I winced slightly. “Oh, I sorta fell down some stairs in that parking garage and then a fat zombie landed on me.”

He put his hand over the bruise. “Does it hurt?”

“Only when you touch it,” I said and flinched. “I’ll be fine in a day or two; I always am.”

Hayden nodded. “Hopefully,” he yawned.

“Tired?” I asked as I pulled a tee shirt over my head.

“Yea, I had another nightmare,” he said bitterly.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“You seemed content. Just having you there was enough,” he said with a shy smile. I closed the truck door and walked with Hayden back to the others. Ivan was looking at the map. He tapped it with a pen and seemed to be thinking hard about something.

“I think we should go to the lake,” Ivan told us when Hayden and I sat down at the table. Ivan tapped the blue mass on the map that was marked as Lake Erie.  “That’s my best guess for finding people.”

“We won’t have time today,” Hayden said, looking at the afternoon sun.