Different things make a person feel safe. A little boy feels safe in the embrace of his mother. An alcoholic feels safe in his drunken stupor. A soldier feels safe under the metal of his helmet. It's not so much the feeling of being safe, but rather the feeling of being in something familiar. When the alcoholic tasted alcohol for the first time, what was to say he liked it at first? No, he came to recognize the feeling of being drunk over time; the turning point is when he spent more time being influenced by the drink than by other things, thus being drunk became familiar, and not being drunk began to feel strange.
Familiarity, that's how we decided on staying in our neighbourhood. Other than that, by all statistical evidences it was safe. There were less than 500 people living here, it had only one entrance: a big, strong gate with guard posts (though I doubt we thought about manning those guard posts). Most of the people weren't at home due to work. It was secluded, it was safe.
We were able to find a place to stay: a nice big mansion with huge gates and high concrete walls. It had a spacious front lawn and enough rooms to be able to store enough supplies to feed a small army.
Susana knew immediately that the house had been vacated. She had to explain why.
"The garage fits two cars yet there's only one car. The clothes are gone and the pictures have been taken." She pointed out the fact that there were nails hammered onto the wall, and yet there were no picture frames hanging there.
"Pictures?" I asked.
"Yes, pictures. When a robber comes to your house they take your clothes, the TV, the computer and the nice couch. All they leave behind are the pictures because it has no real value. Pictures are worth a lot emotionally and nothing else."
We spent the whole day setting ourselves up in that house. I padlocked the gate with huge metal chains and an equally huge – almost comical – padlock I found in the garage that had this key which was nearly as heavy as my gun. Susana set up the supplies in the kitchen and took some clothes from the master bedroom for herself. After making sure there was no other way to get into the house, we started covering the windows to make sure no light got out. We plastered it with newspapers, boarded it up with two-by-fours and any means of making sure no light from inside the house got outside. Just in case the electricity went out we were able to find an old generator in the storage shed at the back of the house.
If you've used a generator to produce electricity before, then you'll know that generators tend to produce a hell of a lot of noise. Their eyesight can be deceived, their sense of smell can mislead them, but you cannot cheat them out of their sense of hearing.
It's been well established that being turned into one of them leaves you with nothing but your primal instincts. Their sense of sight detects movement, if they see the trees swaying to the wind; they will go after the trees. Their sense of smell detects anything that doesn't smell like death. Their sense of hearing makes them go after the sound of the wind. When you're making a lot of noise with a diesel engine generator, they are going to come after you.
We spent a week soundproofing the storage shed. It was already partly underground, which was helpful, but it was still going to generate a fair amount of noise. Susana remembered something she saw as a kid.
"I took violin lessons when I was a kid," Susana said as we stood in the shed contemplating on how to keep the noise inside. "It was a small place in the middle of a mall; there were only three rooms where you could practice in. They were all soundproofed with those paper egg cartons. Every inch of the room was covered. I once saw a kid in there banging wildly with drums and I wasn't able to hear anything until I was inches away from the door."
So that's what we did. Luckily for us, the rest of the neighbourhood seemed to be vacated. We were cautious; we didn't dare venture outside the gated community (the idea of closing the gates of the gated community didn't occur to us). We went from house to house, gathering supplies and looking for egg cartons. More than once we saw one of them, and more than once Susana was the one who took care of it.
"It's weird how many eggs people eat," I remarked as she was layering the storage shed with the egg cartons. She insisted that she be the one who soundproofs the room, as she was the one who's actually seen a room that's been soundproofed this way.
When she was finished she shoved me out of the shed, closed the door and started screaming – or at least I think she was screaming, I didn't hear it – inside the shed, which proved that the soundproofing was effective.
We basically agreed on a few things about what was happening (a lot of them based on reading fiction and watching films): (1) if a person was bitten, that person turns into one of them. (2) They can only be killed by shooting the head. (3) There is probably no cure.
That was as far ahead as we thought. We haven't seen a lot of them. We were living in a large gated community whose people would usually be at work during the day. We were able to find a dusty Glock in one of the rooms of the mansion – as well as "borrowing" a shotgun and a tiny .38 calibre revolver from the guard station nearby, along with being able to find boxes of ammunition. We didn't know what to do with them, I most of all wasn't very well versed in using firearms. Susana, however, seemed to be an expert. In our spare time if she wasn't reading a book from the vast personal library at the mansion, she was dismantling the guns. Why, I don't know. I assumed it was to clean them or inspect them or something.
We were able to siphon gasoline from the nearby cars and other generators in the other houses – you'd be surprised how many upper-class houses have working generators (blackouts aren't unheard of, even for luxurious neighbourhoods) – and from gas tanks they use for cooking. We didn't use the generator much, it was mostly for light at night, which was good as we used most of the gasoline for the cars (we had two cars) when we went around gathering supplies in the neighbourhood.
We still didn't dare go outside the gates. We were safe here, even if it was just the two of us. The walls surrounding the neighbourhood made us feel protected. Yes, we'd see one of them on occasion, but it wasn't something we couldn't handle, even though we didn't figure into the fact that shooting a gun attracted them.
Outside the gates seemed like a different story. We saw more and more of them walking around outside the gates. Luckily, they weren't smart enough to figure out that there were living beings inside the walls. We wanted to keep it that way.
Another week passed. We heard nothing of the outside world, and more and more of them were gathering outside the neighbourhood (the mansion we were staying in was at least three stories high that we were able to see outside the walls). A few days previously we saw a car streaking past the gate, running down anything in its way. It must have been reinforced somehow, like those buses in one of the zombie films I watched before everything went to hell. I'd always thought they were only real in movies and books. Human ingenuity must thrive when the world is going insane.
Our days were now controlled by routine. In the morning we would eat and then take the car out and then scavenge for supplies until sometime in the afternoon. Then we would rest for a few hours and then eat dinner (we only ate twice a day to save our supplies). They were disappearing. Susana's guess was that something was drawing them away, but we were still not anxious enough to venture outside the gates.
The only thing that made our routine different was the one week we spent burying the bodies we found (we counted 316 bodies). I say the word "we" loosely, as most of what Susana was doing was watching around with the shotgun.
It was a month since we've seen the last one up close. We could still see them gathering over the horizon, by the direction of where the state university was – where Susana studied. Susana theorized that people were holding out there. Chances are that was true, but we still didn't want to take any chances.
The lack of things to do got me and Susana talking a lot more. It was something I was dreading – and avoiding. If we started talking, we would start to become emotional. If we become emotional we become attached. Being emotional makes you act irrationally. Being attached just makes you stupid. It must be good that it's only us; if there were more of us it would have complicated things and it would have forced me to act irrationally a lot more. Luckily for me, it's just Susana.
What do you do, when you live in a large neighbourhood that contains only two living people? You can familiarize yourself with every inch of that neighbourhood, you can read every book but in the end you will need to familiarize yourself with something that is constantly changing: a person. There's only one other person in that neighbourhood besides you, which doesn't leave much room for choices.
That person becomes more familiar to you than every inch of that neighbourhood. That person – in my case, she – becomes more familiar to you than the thousands of pages from the hundreds of books you've read twenty times each.
I was becoming attached to Susana. For all I know, I needed her more than she needed me. Romance never entered my mind, but it was starting to become an option.