John turned to Mel and asked, "What for?"
Mel answered thoughtfully, "We've been at this day after day for years. These day trips get longer and longer. We are going to have to face the fact that we are going out farther and farther. We can no longersecure entrances to the highway in a days time and make the trip back and forth. If we had smaller baseson either side of our main base, we could cut down on the trips and save gas."
"Makes sense," John answered. "I suppose we could build a base on either side about halfway from home and the farthest point out. Base is getting crowded anyway. Going to have to have more volunteers and we are going to have to put it to a vote."
"Sounds like a plan, " said Mel.
"What about Steven?" John asked.
"I don't know. I just might bring him with us." Mel answered. Steven was now 18 years old. An old 18. He had been forced to grow up very fast with losing his father and mother. He had been trained to fight. They trained all the children to fight.
With that the car fell silent. It seems like these days all their conversations ended this way. A comfortable silence after all they had to say had been said. It gave them time to focus on what Had to be done. Shortly after they got to their destination. All the cars stopped in a line end to end on the end closest to home. They got out of their vehicles grabbed their weapons and got to work. There seemed to be more and more zombies the further they went out. They were getting closer to a big city.
They shot the closest ones first and slowly advanced until all the lose zombies were down. They took them all down without incident. It was slow going. You can't expect to go into battle and expect to get it over with fast. In order to save as much ammo as possible they needed to wait for as many of the dead to come to them as possible and put them down before moving forward.
They moved to the closest cars and checked them. Mel and John got to a car that had a zombie inside. John walked up to the door and looked in the window. The zombie clawed at the window teeth gnashing. Mel came up and stood a few steps back. John had his hand on the door handle. Mel counted to three gun raised and pointed at the zombie. John opened the door and Mel fired hitting the zombie square between the eyes.
John cringed " These things are starting to smell."
Mel shrugged, "What do you expect, they're dead." They heard more shots from the other teams. They pressed on. Stopping to fire when they got to more walkers. This was sweep day, they go through and kill everything that moves that shouldn't then move as many cars as possible to keep zombies from getting in that would make reinforcing the area the next day a tougher job than necessary.
When they were halfway to the other side, Mel heard a scream. She looked in the direction of the Scream and saw Stephanie holding her wrist which was bleeding as Frank was hitting a zombie with a baseball bat and shouting profanities. Stephanie quickly wrapped her wrist up and said, "I'm okay," over and over again. Frank turned to her and shouted, "Pull it together honey, we still got work to do." She shook her head coming back to reality and got back to task.
Mel looked at John who gave her a knowing look and they got back to work. She was going to turn, they all knew it. She was going die and turn. It was different for everyone how long it took. When they were on the job it was best to keep injured working for as long as possible. The partner would take care of them when the time came if they died while they were still working. In a few cases people just wanted to end it, when they couldn't cope but most knew that their giving up right away could mean the deaths of more people.
There were no more casualties that day. Stephanie made it until the zombies were all dead and then asked frank to do the task. They moved as many cars as possible and headed back home for the night.
When they asked for a meeting which would be held first thing in the morning. With that Mel finally laid down to rest.