September 1, 2010
Slowly and carefully, Shane and Sophia have investigated and cleared all eight properties on his road. He got lucky that the only two houses with recognizable neighbors were ones he didn't know well. Wherever the missing ones are, he hopes they fared better than the quarry group did, but he doubts it.
More importantly, the five walkers put down give Sophia more experience with putting them down quietly. He's hoping to find a suppressor for her Walther at some point, but in the meantime, she's gotten over any squeamishness about walkers. Even better, she's really good at tripping the damn things to even the playing field.
Today, since his chest feels a little closer to healed and not like the scabbing will shred if he flexes and lifts anything heavier than his rifle, they're going to start clearing the supplies out of the neighborhood. Knowing Gloria's house will be a gold mine for food and she has a truck they'll need, they start there.
Sophia ties off the boat and waits patiently for him when he studies the water around the dock.
"Fee. See the snake sunning on the bank over there?"
She tenses, but nods. "Good snake or bad snake?"
"Just a snake, kiddo, but if you're asking if he's venomous, he isn't. Most of the time, you don't want to get close enough to tell, cos then they're scared. But see the stripes on his mouth, like little tattoos?"
"Yeah."
"Means he's a water snake, not a cottonmouth. They tend to be a bit ornery when you get too close, and the bite hurts, but they aren't venomous."
"And the venomous one?"
"Looks like he's off to rob a store, with black eye bands like a mask, but we shouldn't see any cottonmouths this far north. We've got copperheads, timber rattlers, and pygmy rattlers here, which is why I told you to always wear good boots and denim pants. It won't always stop a bite, but it helps compared to shorts and sandals."
"If we get bit, what do we do?"
"With no hospital for antivenom, probably take a lot of pain meds and wait it out, if it's a copperhead. That's possible, just painful as hell. Buddy in college got bit and didn't get antivenom, but it was painful as hell and took weeks to heal."
"And if it's a rattler?"
"Same thing, but I don't know how much worse it would be. They're definitely more dangerous than the copperheads." He's just glad they're too far north for coral snakes. "We'll stop by the ranger's house the next time we head to town. See if he's got some snake pamphlets."
Sophia watches the water snake intently for a little while, and he lets her. No sense in her being scared of snakes when most she encounters will be these fat bastards trying to gorge on fish while it's warm. When they start walking on the dock, the snake finally darts off, its big body moving into the water and off toward the creek.
"It's kind of pretty," she says.
"Yeah, suppose it is."
They head up the hill and find everything undisturbed, aside from obvious forays by birds into the garden. When they step inside the house, Sophia sets down her backpack on the table and surveys the room.
"Are we just going to take the food?"
"We'll start with the food, since we know we can use that. Then extra linens, cleaning supplies, and so on. Stuff we can't just go to the store for." Come winter, they may need the extra bedding, especially.
"I'll start in the basement. She had flattened boxes down there I can use."
With the door locked and the neighborhood reasonably remote and deserted, Shane heads upstairs. Gloria was taller than Sophia, but some of her work clothes might adapt, and the girl might be due a growth spurt. He packs those away in a rolling suitcase, wishing the boots were the right size to give the girl an extra pair.
In the jewelry box, he finds the key to the basic gun cabinet Gloria kept downstairs and pockets it. She didn't hunt, but he knows she had at least a shotgun and a .22 for pest control. The other three upstairs bedrooms are dusty and haven't been lived in for years, so he returns downstairs.
Sophia's already got two boxes of glass mason jars filled with food upstairs. He grabs the truck keys from their place on the counter, glad Gloria didn't keep them in her purse like a lot of women. The GMC is old enough he could probably hotwire it, but he doesn't want to.
The truck starts up and has over half a tank, plenty for what they'll be using it for. He cuts the engine and heads back inside to load as Sophia packs. It takes them two hours to load everything useful, which includes a variety of kitchen utensils he doesn't own, a big pressure canner along with a couple of Gloria's canning books, and all the unused supplies for the canner.
"Gloria must have been preparing for the summer harvest," he remarks as he eyes the truck cab, now filled except for the driver's seat with plastic wrapped packages of mason jars. Since Sophia is going to take the boat home, he figures they might as well use all the space.
"Is that why she had buckets of sugar?"
"Probably. Pretty sure the jam recipes use a lot. She wasn't much into altering them for sugar content. She sold them along with the veggies."
They both eye the chest freezer in the garage with trepidation, but Sophia has her hands on her hips in a way he's already learned means she's thinking something over.
"We could use that, right?"
"Probably. Need the trailer from next door though cos getting it up on the truck isn't something I would attempt without two healthy grown men." It's a much larger model of chest freezer, compared to his mid-size one.
She sighs and reaches for a package of trash bags on the shelf and shakes one out. Amazingly, there isn't as terrible a smell as he expects when she opens it.
"Huh. Seems she kept everything in plastic." The meat wrapped in freezer paper like Shane stores what he hunts would put off a much fouler odor. But Gloria's meat seems to be all shrink wrapped, either from the butcher shop in town or with her Food Saver that's still in the kitchen.
"I'm not complaining." Sophia plunges in, dumping packages of spoiled meat into the trash bag.
He reaches for one of the plastic tupperware types of containers and dumps the defrosted peas into the trash. "Might as well wash these and reuse them."
It doesn't take long to clear things out, and they leave the two trash bags in the barrel out back. He doesn't want to leave Sophia alone long enough to hook up the trailer, so they stick with the original plan for now. He watches her climb in the boat from the top of the hill, before jogging back to the truck.
Shane backs the truck up to the stairs. He can see Sophia coming up from the dock, looking proud of herself for the solo trip.
"See any more snakes?"
"No. Just a couple of turtles on that one sunken tree by the next dock up. Can we go fishing later?"
He's created a bit of a monster, teaching the girl to fish. They started at the dock, but from the first eating sized catfish Sophia reeled in, she loves fishing. He figures after being lost and hungry, she sees the skill as something far more important than just a hobby.
"Sure. You gonna get tired of fish for supper eventually, though."
"Can always freeze it if I do, right?"
"That we can do."
Shane studies the area under the house, considering the big freezer. It won't fit in either storeroom, because they're just wide enough for things like his own smaller freezer and the reel mower. But he doesn't figure the shaded area is much different than the garage it's in now, so he'll just have to build a platform for it to keep it above the known water line, like his has.
That issue solved, he turns to helping Sophia unload the truck. Just clearing the food left behind in the neighborhood will keep him and Sophia fed a good long while, especially if they keep fishing and he can get some hunting in. Maybe even the whole winter.
Once GMC is back on the road, Shane puts it in park and grins at Sophia. "Want to drive?"
Even though he told her he would teach her, she looks surprised. "Really?"
"Said I would teach you, didn't I?" She grins and nods. "Learn to drive these old standards and automatics will be a breeze, least as long as the gas holds out."
Less than a year on that, for the diesel. The rest will probably be bad by winter, which reminds him he should start treating what they're collecting.
"I'll show you first. Down to the end of the road, then let you drive us back." It'll take the long stretch after the curve to hit third, anyway.
Once he's sure she's paying attention, he shows her the gear shift. "This is an old three on the tree. Column shifter, not a floor shifter like the Bug. Biggest thing is to make sure you're sitting still when you shift into first so you don't grind the gears.
"It's an H pattern. First is down and to you. Away and up is second. Away and down is third. Reverse is toward you and down. Got that?"
Sophia repeats the gears, nodding.
"If you've seen movies where they shift gears fast, forget all that with these older vehicles. Slow and steady on the shifter and the clutch." He demonstrates, putting the truck in first gear and easing forward.
She watches avidly as he gets to second by the curve and downshifts back. They make third in time to slow back down for the stop sign.
"You get the idea?"
"I think so." Shane hops out of the driver's seat. "Slide over and I'll come around."
After a few false starts and frustration at timing the clutch release, she gets the coordination down. They take about a dozen trips up and down his road before he finally directs her to the Cooper place. He takes over driving again once they've unloaded and hooked up the lawn service trailer Vic Cooper used for his business.
"That thing's going to be real heavy, isn't it? Is it safe for you to lift?"
"Don't worry, Fee. Not aiming to pick it up. Weighs about two hundred pounds."
Shane grins at her as he bumps the casters with a boot and gives the unloaded freezer a push. It moves a good three feet and Sophia laughs.
"Help me put the ramps down again." They pull them in place, and it does take some effort to get the freezer up ramps designed for a lawnmower. Nothing they can't manage.
Sophia straps down the freezer under his directions with the straps he kept when they unloaded the lawn equipment. They probably don't need it for such a short trip, but better safe than sorry. She tosses the bag of empty, dirty freezer containers on the trailer too.
"C'mon, kiddo. We get this home and cleaned and I'll show you how to run the boat out on the river today."
With that promise dangling, she's grinning as she climbs in the passenger seat.
"Cat, you best be glad the girl likes you," Shane tells Lucius. The big tom just yawns as if he didn't just flick the piece of raw fish Shane tossed him into the water instead of eating it. "You fill up on what she gave you, or is it just me?"
Sophia is already up at the house, frying up the catfish they caught up by the old highway bridge on the river. Shane's finishing off the bass for the freezer.
For some unfathomable reason, Lucius is sitting on the dock watching him instead of following Sophia around like a cat-shaped shadow. He tosses another fishhead to the cat, just because he can, and returns to filleting the bass.
Now that he's not looking directly at Lucius, the damned cat grabs up the fish head and runs off up toward the house. "Crazy little asshole," Shane mutters, shaking his head.
By the time he takes the gut bucket out into the lake and dumps it to keep anything from coming to dig up the remains, the catfish is done.
"Can you mix up hush puppies?" Sophia's happier with the outdoor fryer and grill than Shane thinks he's ever been since he bought them. She's burned a couple of things, but they're not hurting for fresh veggies so practice is practice.
There's plenty of the small propane tanks all over the damn county they can collect up. Might as well save the house's propane for hot water while they can, and keep the house cooler too.
Once he's bagged the bass and put it in the freezer, he heads back with the small bowl of hush puppy batter. She's watching the slices of zucchini and eggplant intently, flipping them with tongs as he drops spoonfuls of batter into the hot oil.
"I'll be sad when we run out of oil," she says. "It'll spoil eventually, right, even if we collect jugs and bottles?"
"Think so. Goes rancid after a while. Guess we'll just learn to like grilled fish by then."
She flips her vegetables with tongs and sighs. Her mood seems a little off.
"You okay, sweetheart?"
Sophia shrugs. "It's just it seems like there's no one else left. How did we get lucky?"
"Might be others out there. We're a little out of the way here." He knows he's avoiding looking even for Rick's friend until he feels like he can deal with any threats. The man was friendly then. Might not be now.
"And if they don't come back here?"
No need to define who 'they' is.
"Then we keep figuring things out. Got food and water, even if we eventually lose power. Better off than the city."
"And if they come back but my mama isn't with them? She wasn't strong before, not like the other ladies." She drops slices of vegetables onto a plate. "What happens to me then?"
Ah, hell.
He hooks the basket with the hush puppies on the side of the fryer and cuts the fryer and grill both off.
"Fee? Look at me."
It takes her a minute, but she finally looks up from the food. Her bottom lip is trembling.
"It doesn't matter if your mama is with them or not. You've always got a place with me, kiddo."
She flings her arms around him, hugging tight enough it would have been painful a week ago and still isn't entirely comfortable. Shane hugs her back with more confidence he might be entitled to, but he's lost too much.
With what he's done, Rick and the others will fight him tooth and nail over keeping her guardianship. But his brother is already taking one child from him.
He doesn't get this one, too.