November 16, 2003
The RV travels around a bend in the road slowly. I had embarrassingly asked Pete to slow his driving down because I was feeling sick. I felt awful to bother, but it was either he slow down, or I get puke all over the carpet of his precious RV.
We're on course to hit a small town. The goal of our escapade is to gather winter supplies and baby supplies before the weather turns and I get too far along. Martha had found a map of the area, which showed a town nearby. It seems tiny, but it at least appears to have several houses and a grocery store. It's as good as it gets.
"Okay, let's go over the plan again," Nick begins his run-over of the plan for the fourth time today. "Luke, Pete, and I will go to the grocery, while Mom and Bea will start checking houses. But remember to check all of the rooms carefully before looking for supplies, and if there's ever more than five lurkers just leave and meet back up with us. And-"
I walk toward him, but the RV makes a sharp turn that sends me crashing into his chest. He grabs my shoulders and steadies me. "Nick, we got it. We will be fine." I look toward the others for support, and they provide reassuring nods.
The RV slows until it eventually jerks to a complete stop when Pete puts it in park. The poor thing is getting old, and everyone knows it. No one has brought up what we'll do when it completely fails us, and I don't want to be the one to address the elephant in the room. All I hope is that this vehicle lasts us for many months to come.
"So just remember-" Nick says, as I'm the last one out the door.
I place my hand on his chest. "We will be safe. I promise."
We split up to go our different ways. Nick, Luke, and Pete head toward the grocery store, while Martha and I head toward the row of houses. It's a small town. There's only a small grocery, a pharmacy, and no more than twenty houses. It's quiet here; too quiet for my liking. It worries me that there's something or someone lurking and waiting for the right time to attack. I just try to hope that this town fell early and everyone made it out alive.
The guys are still trying to find a way into the grocery store that doesn't involve smashing the glass door open. Martha and I place ourselves in front of the first house. I try to enter through the front door first. The handle successfully turns, but the door barely budges. I push against it with all my might, but it's apparent that something is blocking the door from the other side. Travelling around the house, I try the back door, only to find it bolted securely.
"Maybe we'll have better luck with the next house," Martha suggests.
"Wait, I think I can fit through there," I say, pointing to a cracked window that I just noticed.
"Nick would kill me if I let you go through there by yourself," she says.
I shrug. "What Nick doesn't know won't hurt him."
I climb atop a storage bin pressed against the side of the house. I sit on it and slide my butt across until I can stick my feet through the window's opening. I slide myself into the house feet first, while Martha nervously watches. I'm fortunate enough that I'm even still able to do something like this. In a few months I'll be too far along to do anything of the sort.
Inside I find the place to be trashed, like someone through a raging party months ago and never bothered to clean anything up. Either that or someone was rummaging through the place in a rush. Worst of all is the putrid smell, which nearly causes me to lose my lunch.
"How is it in there?" Martha calls from outside.
"Disgusting, and I regret my decision to come in here," I grimace. "But I'm gonna look around to see if there's anything useful so that this wasn't entirely a waste of time."
"Please be careful in there!" Martha advises.
I step around the overturned coffee table and avoid the shredded magazines strewn about. Entering the kitchen I discover the cause of the smell to be two rotting bodies propped against the cabinets. Their faces gaunt and devoid of all life, configured as if they were crying or screaming when they put a bullet in their brains. Their dark blood is painted across the cabinets like a melancholic painting. A rat scurries away from gnawing on their greying flesh as I enter. I can't tell if they were bit or if they just couldn't handle the world anymore, but it pains me to see people like this, even though I didn't know them. The worst part is I don't think they've been dead too terribly long, maybe a few weeks at most.
Most of the cabinets are either open and torn apart or covered in blood or brain matter. There's only two that remain closed, so I decide to open them. The first one only has plates and cups that are useless to us, but the second one contains several boxes of cereal, several of which are unopened. I take the unopened ones and hope that they aren't stale yet, but I'm thankful for any meal at this point.
Before I exit the kitchen, something internally is pulling me back. I look back to the bodies that used to belong to belong to two souls. "I'm sorry that this happened to you, but we need this food," I say with a sigh, as if I need to apologize and they can hear me.
I put the food I collected by the window I came in through, and I announce to Martha that I am going to check the upstairs quickly. I walk up the stairs quietly with my knife at the ready, just in case anything is lurking. While the stairs creak beneath me, I hear something scurrying on the floor above. Once at the top, I turn the corner abruptly, ready to attack.
Two dozen sets of eyes stare at my frozen body. Instead of finding a lurker, I found something unlike anything I've ever seen before. In the hallway in front of me is an entire colony of raccoons surrounded by nests of trash and food scraps.
"Sorry to disturb you all," I tell the little creatures. "You must have been who made that mess downstairs."
They blink at me in response.
"Bye-bye," I say, turning and descending the stairs slowly so I don't scare them any further. I grab the cereal boxes and shimmy out the window with a smile on my face. It's not often any more that you see something that makes you smile.
Martha and I make our way to the second house, which has the back door standing wide open. Inside we find a few lurkers that we take out easily. There's not anything inside for us to take. Whoever lived there previously must've taken pretty much anything of use with them when they left.
"Third time's a charm?" Martha asks, twisting open the doorknob of the third house. It opens with no complications. Inside is in much better condition than the previous two houses.
Martha and I silently communicate that we must search the house for any possible threats before collecting supplies. Martha heads upstairs, her gun at the ready. I opt for searching downstairs with my knife drawn. The living room is open and leaves no space for anything to be hiding, with the kitchen being the same way. I creep down the hallway and pull open a door to check for lurkers. It turns out to be the bathroom, which is devoid of danger- both alive and undead. I repeat with both of the bedrooms, making sure to check the closets as well, and I find the same result in each place. I meet Martha at the bottom of the stairs, who tells me that she too found no lurkers in the house.
"Downstairs seems to have some useful stuff," I say.
"Just wait until you see upstairs," Martha says, gently grabbing my hand and leading me up the carpeted steps, my feet accidentally leaving a muddy footprint on the previously spotless carpet. She pulls me into the first bedroom, and my jaw drops.
The room obviously used to belong to a young child, proven by the whimsical paintings dotting the walls. The bed against the wall is one meant for a young child, so whoever the room belonged to was no longer a baby when things turned South.
"Look." Martha moves to the corner of the room where a mound of trash bags lie. She grasps one in her hands and pulls the opening wide so I can see its contents. Inside, my eyes find baby clothes galore.
"These bags are filled with clothes from newborn sizes all the way up to toddler sizes. They must've been ready for a garage sale. There's toys, books… and look at this." She hands me a box, which I take.
Inside I find cloth items that at first I can't recognize, but soon I realize what they are. "Cloth diapers?" I ask.
"Yep," Martha says. "These will be a godsend, since we can't just run and buy disposable diapers at the store. And look at the tags- still brand new."
I smile. "They'll be a bitch to clean though."
She smiles back. "I can't deny that."
I look around the rest of the room for more supplies, but I find most of the drawers to be empty. I wander down the hall to the other rooms to find the same thing, every drawer has something missing from it. Picture frames are absent from places on the wall that obviously used to be covered.
"Whoever used to live here, they made it out alive at least," I tell Martha as I come through the doorway of the child's bedroom.
She stops folding the shirt in her hands. "I sure hope so. What makes you think that?"
"Most of the important stuff is all gone, plus there's a bunch of picture frames missing. No sign of blood either. I don't know where these people are, but they definitely made it out."
We silently fold clothes and gather supplies throughout the house until I speak up again, "Thank you by the way, for getting Luke to change his mind. I know it was you."
"I'm not your mom, but I spent enough time around her to know what she would want. There's no need to thank me." She gives me a bright smile. "Now come on, I think we have everything we can carry right now. We can come back for more later."
Nick, Luke, and Pete are outside by the RV, surrounded by boxes stacked in high columns. Nick jogs up to me when he sees me, a grin on his face. "How'd your scavenging go?"
"We found just about everything we could possibly need." I gesture to the bags and boxes Martha and I are dragging behind us.
"How about we leave the heavy lifting to them, and you and I go investigate that pharmacy over there?" Nick asks me.
I glance between the pharmacy down the street and the others who are breaking their backs loading supplies into the RV. "Sure."
His hand finds mine in our short stroll to the pharmacy. At the doors he drops my hand. "Let me go in and check things over before you come in." I try to object, but he gives me a look that makes me comply.
The door is locked from the inside, so he climbs in through a broken window. I grit my teeth as he avoids the jagged pieces of glass. He disappears and reappears a few moments later when he opens the front door for me. "It's safe."
This place has been scavenged before. It's mostly empty, but I find a container of baby formula in one of the aisles. I take it, just in case we ever need it. I try to hand it to Nick in the hopes that he will put it in his backpack, but he looks at me with a furrowed brow. "I thought you were going to breastfeed?"
"I am, but just take it… in case something ever happens to me," I say nonchalantly, trying to turn back to the shelf to see if there is anything else of use.
"Don't say shit like that. We don't need it 'cause nothing's ever going to happen." He turns away and stomps off to another part of the store. Maybe I should've worded it another way, but I didn't think it was that big of a deal. I manage to shove the container in my already-full backpack.
"Ready?" He asks, standing by the door and biting his thumb nail.
A glass bottle in one of the aisles glints in the sunlight, effectively catching my eye. "Hold on, there's something I need to check first."
The aisle of interest has broken bottles littering the floor. There's not much left on the shelves, but sitting perfectly in the sunshine is one bottle, still intact. Grasping it, I read the label. It's a beer company I've never heard of; I assume it's a local company. I have no way of telling if it's good or not, but I stuff it in my backpack anyway. I look around dubiously, trying to make sure Nick didn't see it. I don't want to tempt him. My reasoning for grabbing it is my sorry excuse for a birthday present for Luke. Today is his birthday. I tried to tell him 'happy birthday' this morning, but he kind of brushed me off. Luke's birthday was always a huge deal growing up, so I think he might be sad to see a change of pace with his birthday. Luke and I are the only ones keeping track of the days, so the others have no idea that today is his birthday. My hope with this beer is that it cheers him up.
"Now I'm ready," I say with a smile while jogging up to Nick.
Back at the RV, the others are finished with loading the supplies. It's chilly outside, but the others are still glistening with sweat from the hard labor. I feel awful for making them do everything and offering no help, but I know they wouldn't have let me help anyway.
"We made out pretty well," Pete says from the steps, wiping his forehead with his forearm.
"We found so much fucking oatmeal, Bea. You wouldn't even believe it!" Luke exclaims.
"You know, there's tons of places we didn't get to search yet, and there's tons of houses here in good condition. Maybe we could stay here?" Nick offers.
Everyone seems to agree with him, but then I notice the horde of undead coming over the hill. How they found us, I have no idea. But they're here to ruin our day, like always. "You guys might wanna think twice about that idea," I joke.
"Goddammit…" Luke drawls exasperatedly. He throws his hands up in defeat.
The horde is still a considerable distance away, so none of us rush too much to get in the RV. The others climb aboard the RV first. Nick takes my backpack from me before I get in. As I'm putting my foot on the first step, a lurker comes out of nowhere. I desperately grab for my gun or knife, but I'm unable to get them out of their holsters. The lurker tumbles onto me, causing the two of us to hit the ground hard. It tries to sink its teeth into my face, but I can't let it. I grapple with the lurker, struggling with all of my strength to hold its body away from mine. It's a large lurker, and there's no way that I am going to be able to push it off completely, or reach for a weapon. All I can do is hold it off for as long as I can and hope that someone else can help me.
Suddenly, a gun fires, the bullet going into the ground a foot or two away from me. The unexpected noise nearly causes me to let the lurker get me, but luckily a bullet goes in its brain. Blood splashes on my cheek in the process. The lurker is pulled off of me by Nick, who is frantic.
"Oh my God, are you okay?! Nick asks, but is cut off by Pete yelling at him.
"Dammit, boy! You're about to be a father, you can't be missing shots like that. She could've died!" Pete scolds.
As the two of them argue and the horde grows closer and closer, I realize I have a sharp stabbing pain in my hand. Sticking out of the bottom of my palm is a nail. It must've gotten wedged in my skin when I fell. It's not in too deep, but I know better than to pull it out right away to avoid excess bleeding.
The horde is fast approaching so despite my pain, I yell out to the arguing uncle and nephew in front of me, "Come on! We gotta go!"
We board the RV in a hurry. Once Pete drives away in a hurry and everyone's heavy breathing has subsided, I break the silence. "Could someone help me out with this?" I hold up my hand to show the nail sticking out of it.
"Holy shit, Bea. I'm so sorry…" Nick says once he sees my hand. In embarrassment he storms into the bedroom and slams the door.
"Don't worry," Luke assures. "He'll come around. He's just embarrassed and upset that he fucked up."
I smile at him momentarily through the ache, but my smile drops the instant Martha pulls the nail out painstakingly slow. The second it leaves my hand, blood starts to drip down my wrist and forearm.
"It's not too deep," Martha says. "Plus you're lucky the nail wasn't rusty. You'll likely avoid infection. I can clean it up and stop the bleeding, and you'll be fine in no time."
Martha gives a look to Luke, that makes me think she wants me to be distracted while caring to my wound. Luke starts talking immediately, "First the snake bite, now this. We're gonna have to keep you on a tighter rope."
I try not to look as Martha cleans the wound, which hurts horribly. I try to distract myself, so I turn to Luke. "Get in my backpack. There's something in there for you."
He reaches into my backpack that's on the floor. He pulls out the beer with a smile. "I know it's not much, but it's for your birthday," I tell him.
"It's your birthday? Oh, Luke, I'm sorry. I had no idea!" Martha dabs at my wound with a medicated wipe.
"It's all good." Luke takes a sip of his beer and savors it. "It's good."
"Yeah, some birthday it is," I sarcastically say, nodding toward a dead body on the road that we pass by.
Martha pulls the bandage tight around my hand, while Luke nurses his drink. "I'm just happy to still be here," he says.