In a full day of work, Ron and Sal were able to frame up walls around the holes where the ramps used to be. It was decided that building a floor across the holes would be far more difficult and use more materials. Instead they painted plywood flat black and nailed it to prebuilt frames they erected on the edge of the holes. It was solid, and when you looked up at the holes you saw nothing, especially at night. They did the same to the stairwells and, at Jeff’s insistence, the elevator shafts. It was a long day. Every person worked hard, and they had their fortress a lot more secure for it. They hadn’t seen Jeff all day, but they had learned to trust him and looked forward to whatever he had to unveil.
Right before dark, Jeff showed up. Everyone was eating and drinking. They were looking for dry clothes, as they had been sweating all day and were drying their bodies off with their dirty clothes. Mary and Donna ducked behind a large pillar to change. Mary was reticent to remove her turtleneck.
“May as well get it over with,” she said. “Wearing this turtleneck is grueling, and I have no more reason to hide.” She pulled it off, and Donna gasped.
Ron heard the gasp and called to her, “Don, you OK?”
Sal found a dry T-shirt and pulled it over his head. When his face emerged, he was smiling, “You call your wife Don?”
“Oh hush.” Ron threw his dirty shirt at Sal.
Donna had her hand to her mouth and looked horrified. She was crying. Mary’s body was covered in bruises. Handprints were visible on her forearms. Her stomach and ribs had bruising. Her neck was a mess of bruises and red marks from what appeared to be a belt. She spread her arms and turned around.
“At least there’s no scarring, right. Well, not physically anyway. But these marks and bruises will be gone soon, and then all traces of that bastard will be out of my life.”
“I am so sorry.” Donna was offering her a clean shirt.
“No,” Mary said. “I want the guys to see this too. I want them to understand why I don’t care what happed to his body, why I killed him.” She pulled her pants off too, and her legs were likewise bruised. She stepped out from behind the thick pillar in her bra and panties.
“Forgive me for making you uncomfortable, but I wanted you to see this.” She spread her arms and spun. “I don’t want to have to hide it. It will be gone soon, and I want you to understand why I killed Bill. I don’t want you to think less of me.”
The men were silent, pained looks on their faces. They nodded and looked away. She stepped back behind the pillar. They both felt a great deal of guilt too. She had a remarkable body, despite the ugly bruises, and their evolved human minds had to fight desperately to keep the grunting cavemen from coming out.
“Well, that’s out of the way. I did not want to wear that damn turtleneck a minute more. Give me that tube top.” Mary turned around, popped her bra off, and slid the tube top on. It was too small, stained, and a very ugly shade of lime green.
“I love it!” She was beaming as she modeled the tube top for Donna. She picked up a pair of cutoff jeans and pulled them on. “I will have to change soon, but this feels so nice.”
Ron was looking down, talking to his feet, knowing Sal could hear. “I feel like shit. Had I known, I would have killed him myself.” Tears were running down his face.
“No one knew, apparently. How could you have?”
Jeff came from around a wall he had erected using PVC pipes and a black plastic tarp. His work area was about forty feet away from the living room and was starting to be called Jeff’s room. The booth was about halfway between his room and the living room.
Donna saw him first as she was coming from around the pillar with Mary. “Jeff?”
Everyone looked up. He was approaching them in shower shoes and a bathrobe, and his head was wrapped in a towel. He had a huge smile plastered across his face. They were all so hot, sweaty, and dirty that a freshly showered person grabbed their interest.
Sal stopped looking for more clean clothes and straightened up. “Did you find a water tap?” Mary passed him, and he kept his eyes straight ahead. Hot blonde? What hot blonde? The caveman was going crazy, trying to communicate how vitally important it was that Sal look at the pretty thing.
As Donna passed Ron, she whispered to him sideways, “Mister, you better keep your damn eyes on me.”
Ron was a little too enthusiastic when he replied, “Hey, gorgeous, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Not looking back, Donna raised her right arm and extended her middle finger. She turned and smiled; that was how they played. He was smiling too. Ron’s caveman was very happy with the pretty thing already in his cave, and a little afraid of her too. The cave could become a terrible place if the cavewoman wasn’t happy.
“A tap? No way. This is much better!” Jeff smiled but said no more.
“Oh, I can’t wait to hear about this.” Ron started walking toward him. “Come on, tell us what you did this time.”
“OK, follow me.” Jeff took them to the other side of the black plastic wall, which was actually a booth. Duct tape held the plastic on tightly. Several plastic hoses led into the top of the booth from the roof of the garage.
“Who would like a hot shower?”
“Did you say a hot shower?” Donna pushed past him and into the booth. Jeff stopped her.
“Wait, sorry, let me show you around. The water gets really hot, so be careful.”
“How is this possible?” Ron was looking at the booth with awe.
“Easy, really.” Jeff showed them the propane tanks and water heater he’d carted up to the roof.
“By my calculations, this setup will heat a shitload of water. This is a seventy-five-gallon tank, and I even got a tank blanket for it. I also have some water filtration stuff, so we can drink the water. This will last until the waterworks fail. I have no idea how long that will take.”
There was an actual showerhead. Jeff had even erected a shelf with towels, soap, and shampoo. Donna squealed, and both she and Mary hugged him tight. Mary went first, demurring until Donna made it clear the offer was good for five seconds. They all took showers one after the other. It was the best evening they’d had in a long while. With the added security and the hot showers, they slept much sounder.
Ron couldn’t help but worry about the bikers. For all he knew, they were hundreds of miles away, but then maybe they were watching him right now. That was the problem with doing things like that, you made enemies and ended up looking over your shoulder all the time. That was no way to live. In addition, these weren’t people he wanted as enemies. He still had no solution for the problem.
He had good reason to be nervous. Although Banjo wasn’t watching him, he wasn’t hundreds of miles away either. But he was close and thinking about Ron. There was not much else in the world to entertain a badass racist biker these days, so the nameless coon who trashed their rides was a top priority. He’d seen the van, how it was stuck at the hole, filled with supplies from the home improvement store. Later, he passed in the truck with his new brothers, and the van was gone. He slowed and could see the van parked in the garage on the bottom floor. He swore he saw silhouettes of people too. Once Titty City was officially up and running, Banjo would come back with his four brothers. The five of them would swoop in like death itself, tearing whatever citizens were there limb from limb.
31.
“I don’t think you’re ever leaving this roof,” Cooper said, head back and eyes closed.
“You said it would be brutal.” Ana was flat on her back, catching her breath.
“You guys suck.” Lisa was flat out too, panting. “Way to make a girl feel good about herself.”
Cooper, Ana, and Lisa were all covered in sweat. It had taken a tremendous effort to get Lisa on the roof, starting with a cinderblock, stepping up onto a bench, then to the hood of the ambulance, up to the roof of the cab, then onto the vehicle itself (a rest), then from the roof of the vehicle to the cinderblock again, and the bench, and finally to the hardest part, up the remaining few feet and onto the roof of the building.
They had decided that they needed to get the girls to a very safe place so Cooper could move quicker and find his sister. He’d decided the roof was to be the place, since he might be gone for a while and it was the only place he could think of that was safe from humans, dead and alive. Ana demonstrated that she could get through a vent and into the secure building below if she needed to. They also decided that the girls would wait ten days, and if Cooper didn’t return, they would be on their own and would have to decide what to do at that point.
He spent a few hours picking through nearby office buildings, mostly to find supplies but also to look for any inhabitants. There were no corpses around. Given the state the world had been in when everything ended, it made sense no one would be around work places. He found food, water, and canned beverages, and went back to get Ana to help him carry stuff. They collected an assortment of things like sofa cushions, blankets, toilet paper, a stack of magazines, and more. He was going to leave the girls here for days, maybe a week or more, and wanted them to be comfortable.
He stayed with them one more day, so he could rest and make sure they had what they needed. He hated leaving them, was worried about them, but he had to get to his sister. He grew increasingly worried about her. That night, they were all quiet as they ate and tried to go to sleep early. Later, after Lisa was softly snoring, Ana came over to Cooper and lay down in front of him. She faced away so they could spoon and went to sleep. The next morning she was up and trying to act like nothing had happened, but he saw how she kept looking over at him and smiling.
Finally he was ready to go. He kissed both girls goodbye on the cheeks. As he was climbing off the roof, Ana grabbed him and gave him a long, passionate kiss. Lisa giggled and walked away. Ana was tearing up when she whispered to him, “I didn’t want to let you know how I felt. I was scared you wouldn’t feel the same way. But I am terrified I may never see you again.”
“I feel the same, and I will come back.” He smiled and looked at her face for a moment. “Bye.”
He dropped onto the roof of the ambulance and to the ground. He drove the beast over to a warehouse and backed it in. He latched the warehouse door from the inside and crawled out a high window. It was still cold and dewy from the previous night, but the sun was coming up over the trees. He hoped he made good time today.
§
Even though he was passing through more populated areas, he was moving freely down the medians of wide streets. He was able to avoid the apartment complexes and housing developments where he knew most of the dead to be. Many times he saw large clumps of the dead well before he reached them. They always clumped together, often getting themselves jammed by the hundreds into spaces with only one way in or out. They stunk, which sometimes announced their presence. They were pretty quiet individually, but in groups they made a racket.
It was easy to get too comfortable just walking along, as there would be long stretches of silence, streets free of the dead. Cooper had to remind himself that it was easy to turn a corner and find himself looking at hundreds or thousands of the dead packed into a hidden spot. When they were packed in, they tended to sway together and create a rippling wave pattern like wind over a field of long grass.
Moving cautiously was tiring. Cooper had to constantly look around, pause to look and listen, and often take the long way around instead of the direct path. He hadn’t eaten or slept as much as he would have liked. Food was scarce, and Ana had surprised him last night. He thought she was beautiful but didn’t want to make a move on her, as that would appear totally douchey given the circumstances. He was glad she’d moved on him, and he’d been up most of the night just enjoying how it felt to hold her small curvaceous body against his.
He came to another overpass. The street he was on crossed over a wide highway, not the 101 but one of the many others that crisscrossed and cut through the city. The highway was filled with cars stretching as far as the eye could see. Thousands of bodies covered the ground around the cars and were in the vehicles and even on them. Every surface was pocked or punctured by thousands of bullet holes. The vehicles were hunks of shredded metal, jagged teeth of glass in dark window holes, and mostly blackened by fires long burnt out. Using the scope, Cooper examined the scene for a while and didn’t see any movement.
As the sun dropped lower to the west, he came to an office park. He loved office parks because they tended to be empty. No one had been at work in the last few days, especially if they were infected, and now it seemed the living didn’t think the buildings offered anything useful for survival. But Cooper knew that in the offices were tons of sealed snack foods, drinks, toilet paper, and first-aid kits. He kept walking until he came out the other side of the park to another highway, and on the other side another office park. He walked on, using the control tower of the airport to navigate.
32.
By the time Cooper was looking at the control tower, Tug was back on the road and driving. He was drinking, running down the dead for fun, and using backstreets as best he could to avoid the larger, thicker groups of corpses. The way was pretty clear, as the bikers drew the dead away from the side streets and to the highway. He wasn’t sure what he was doing anymore. He thought of giving up and going home, but he didn’t have a home anymore. Maybe he would find a mansion and move in. He stopped at one point, broke into a gas station, and filled a few bags with candy and snack foods. And he took more beer. He ate, felt sick to his stomach, and ate some more.