The village looked more like a rural suburb. Sam didn't have much patience to scour it for an empty and safe house. He ran over some zombies that were zoning there and parked the car in front of the front door. He got out of the car and ran to the door of the house.
"Is there anyone there?" Sam punched the front door in a subtle way. "Is there anyone there?" He screamed again.
As no one answered, Sam sought to enter the house, but it was locked. A group of zombies began to run toward us. We shouted for Sam to go back to the car, but he insisted on trying to open that shitty door. Quinn took a pistol and shot the zombie group. The problem was that Quinn had two left hands when we talk about skills to shoot, and that if the bullet didn't reach precisely on the creature's head, it would not affect it at all. Blaine took the truck and ran over the zombie group to give Sam another minute. I just screamed, finding everything very useless, until someone or something inside began to knock on the door. The house was locked with zombies inside.
Good thing Sam couldn't break that shit. Sam ran into the car and we had to get out of there quickly because some of the zombies persisted in chasing us, despite the diversion of attention made by the boys in the truck.
"I don't think this village has some future." I said apprehensive. We had more half an hour of sun, and I don't know if sleeping inside the cars would be a good idea.
We advanced a little more in the village, turned the corner out of the main avenue, and found another block of houses. Sam parked in front of another random house, without choosing too much, and tried again the same not very smart strategy.
"Hey! Is there anyone here?"
Since Sam got no answers, he opened the door, which this time wasn't locked. He and Blaine entered with weapons in hand and made a round of just five minutes. We didn't hear gunshots, which was a sign of the house being possibly clean of reapers and zombies. Sam made us signal to get in. We left the cars and took the opportunity to take some of the boxes: one of food, one of equipment and the medicine one. While the boys worked to lock the doors and windows with cables. I took the opportunity to better inspect the house. One thing that was very clear: that place, possibly the whole neighborhood, had already been looted. There was nothing there. Neither weapons, nor food, nor cleaning material. There was barely furniture. The house was completely clean.
We heard beats through the outer walls, doors and windows by intensity and constancy, it looked more like the group of zombies that followed us there. Because of this, the boys worked faster to ensure the safety of the house. After we closed everything on the ground floor, Tina rolled the toolbox to get the flashlight. So we could see right in the middle of the pitch that was closed.
"Are everyone alive?" I asked the others.
"Apparently." Blaine answered.
Sam started to laugh. I don't know why Sam began to laugh almost hysterically, I just know it was contagious.
"Dude, why are you laughing?" Joe asked confused.
"Whatnot. I have not the foggiest idea." Looked like Sam lost his mind.
"This is very pathetic. We spent all these days going from village to village, doing exactly the same shit, collecting stuffs just to losing everything. We are a failure in this survival bid!" Quinn fired to laugh.
"And Santana and Mike exploded a fucking gas tank. That was the dumbest idea ever." Tina fired to laugh even more.
"Are you kidding? I was going to bake Marshmellows in that shit!" I said. "What about Mike? He took us directly to the militia? And they tried to kill us all!" I started to laugh at his face.
"Lucky Rachel saw Faroeste films as well." Brittany complemented brilliantly.
"And that girl Tess told us to be silent at any cost... and we broke her house, and we're practically shouting while the zombies are out there trying to get in!" Blaine kept laughing. "We are very dumb!"
We laughed, until the moment passed and we were silent. The truth was that we had a laughter attack for the despair of the situation. Just over two weeks ago, we were comfortably on an island, living with stored industrialized food, grains and fish, as well as some vegetables. So, I lost Abuela, my mother and, in a way, my uncle and my cousin. We also lost Kurt, Daniel, Finn, Burt, Carole, Father Hugo. Losses, losses and more losses.
Tina took the flashlight focused on a fireplace in the room.
"Can you put fire on it? We are almost two days without eating anything. We need to put something in the stomach right now or let's start to get too weak."
Sam searched one of the rooms and returned with two drawers. He trampled the piece of furniture and threw the pieces into the fireplace, to then bathe them with a little alcohol and crossed a matchstick. The fire lit almost immediately, providing better light inside the house. Brittany and Tina checked that there was running water, but the pressure was failing. They also found a single pan that had left behind. They placed the pan in the fire with water and instant noodles. Ten minutes later, each one of us had a small shell of that pasta in the few containers we had. I took a plastic mug and ate my share, then it was Brittany's turn to get the same mug and eat the unhealthy pasta with high concentration of sodium. At least everyone would sleep with a warm stomach. Once that house had no more mattresses, we settled on what was possible. The cold was increasingly squeezing with the winter approach, and in a hurry to get into that house, we left our best coats in the cars. We didn't have another alternative but face the cold night by feeding the fireplace with broke furniture and trying to find some comfort on the cold floor.
Tina took the medicine box, and began to put the ointment on the burn wounds on Mike's leg. It looked already much better. Mike said he felt discomfort and some pain in his leg, but at least he could already firm his foot on the floor. I had already recovering the strength of my arm, despite my shoulder still hurts a lot.
"We need to think about winter." Mike warned. "We can't keep jumping from village to village, from house to house. We won't be so lucky forever."
"I think this village was already discard." Sam lamented. "Maybe we can be lucky in a bigger city. The zombies are a problem, but if we make that trick with the car, we can get a better home and more resources. I also think that zombies can be a natural protection if we think well."
"Sorry, but this is not a good plan, Sam." Mike signaled us to hear the atmosphere. In addition to the noise of the crack of the bonfire in the end, there was the sound of the zombies hitting the house, trying to break in. "Today the house can resist the pushes and beats of them. But zombies will do this every day, and it can make this structure end up in a few weeks. It's risky."
Mike had an important point. That an ordinary home was made to help thermal insulation, but it's material was fragile compared to a masonry construction.
"If it were only the zombies, it would be a lot of easier, because they lose strength and agility over time." I observed. "Reapers don't. They are agile and strong."
"And maybe they are a little smarter according to Tess." Quinn pointed out.
"Tess was right in one thing." Rachel continued the conversation. "If we don't learn to shut up, there will be no house to hold a horde of reapers."
"We need to hunt." Blaine let out his classic phrase. "Or fishing."
"Again, Blaine?" Quinn complained. "Do you have to say this right now? Do you think this is our major problem?"
"I'm serious. We need to hunt or fish precisely because of winter. If we don't have a food with a little more fat, we will have problems. Think about it: we have weapons, equipment and we are next to a forest."
"So tomorrow we can better explore this village. I bet there are people around, because everything here has already been looted." I said.
"I don't know. Maybe it's not worth staying." Mike was worried.
Our conversation was interrupted by a crash. Tina took the flashlight and directed the light to the place of the origin of the noise. It was terrified to see those zombies, reapers, or the two together bursting one of the windows and huddling to enter the house. At that moment, no one cared to classify the threat. Rachel began to shoot the creatures. I forgot my sore shoulder and started to shoot too. We, desperately and uncoordinatedly, were covering Rachel's back until we managed to went up stairs to take refuge in one of the rooms. We closed the door of a bedroom and the boys started to hold it while me and Quinn dragged the dressing table to embarrass the door. This allowed Brittany, Joe and Tina to have time to knock down the wardrobe to help block as well. It was close… too close for my liking.
"There are a lot of them." Sam said urgently, holding the furniture in place. "I don't know if the door will hold them."
The reapers made horrible sounds, a howling of shivering their hair. I thought that was the moment, that horde of zombies and reapers would devour us.
"We can get down the window." Quinn warned. "We can get down and run into the cars."
"Good thing the keys are in my pocket." Sam said as he was strength to contain the door. "Santana?"
"I got it!"
I took the keys from the cars in the pocket of Sam's jacket. The reapers were on one side of the house, entering in the window, and if we came out silently on the other side, maybe we could be successful.
"Keep talking loudly." I said to the boys.
The noise coming from inside the room was a strategy we needed to use, so that the rest could go down silently through the window. I was the first one. There was roof below the window of that room, which made it easy to get off to the floor. I imagine if that room was occupied by a teenager, how many times boyfriends or girlfriends climbed to sneak there, or how many times did the teenager go down the window to go to the parties without their parent's knowledge? There was a lattice for climbing plants that ended up functioning as a ladder. With the route made safely, Quinn followed me, and then came Rachel, Brittany and Tina. I hold up my fingers silently, and in my signal we five ran to the SUV. Only the opening and closing of the doors made some reapers run toward us and hit against the car. I was in the driver's seat and I had to calm down a second while the girls were visibly terrified. Tina was hysterical, and Quinn had to slap her face so she could stop screaming wildly.
I turned on the car, the headlights and started to honk like crazy. This, at the very least, would divide the attention of those monsters. It was scary how they threw themselves against the car. I started driving with some difficulty, I had to do evasive maneuvers to overthrow those who were holding against the body of the car. I ran over some and turned around the streets nearby waiting for the boys. I don't know how long I did it, but suddenly a truck passed us at all speed. Which was a necessity since not all boys fit in a simple cabin and could not afford to wait for the creatures, like us. I accelerated the car too and started accompanying them. When we left the village, we realized that this was just a rural neighborhood of a small town, and what was worse: there were blocked streets. Obviously, that was intentional, but we didn't have time to rationalize those barriers because there were reapers and zombies from all sides, and the boys on the truck didn't have the luxury of stopping.
The barriers made us circumven the city and forced us to take the path of the main highway, which was partially blocked. The pickup truck, which was always in front of us, become uncontrolled and I brake institively, seeing, later, the boys braking, almost falling the car, so that someone, I think it was Blaine, was thrown out along with with some of our boxes.
"San, I think it's a nails barrier on the floor." Quinn said.
I engaged the reverse gear and looked for a point to get around the barrier and rescue the boys, while Blaine entered the cabin with the boys who were pledged inside. That was very well planned by the people that must be there in the city, because I had no favorable point to get around nearby, and there was danger everywhere. I turned the car, honked like crazy and attracted those beasts over us. I took the route back to the city, got around a street and accelerated against the Horde. My headlights were broken, the wind windows cracked, and I no longer had the external mirrors. When we returned to the same point, the boys had cleaned the nail track.
"GET IN!" I ordered them.
"Let's drive with the pierced tires until is possible." Mike came up with another idea.
The boys followed us slowly and we drove out of that city until we passed it five or six kilometers from the highway to the tire rubber completely. The metal wheel in contact with the asphalt generated a shrill sound that could make our situation worse, so the boys stopped. We took advantage of the moment of stillness and they got out of the car to talk to us.
"It's obvious that there are people in that city." Blaine said holding his arm and he was bleeding a little, obviously he was injured when he was thrown from the truck. "Mike thinks you should go ahead and seek help. Finn taught Sam to make a direct call, and you can try to find another car later. Then you come back to pick us up."
"This is a horrible idea." I complained. "In addition, if there are people in that city, who guarantees you that a group of them won't capture or even kill those behind?"
"We need to protect what was left." Blaine insisted.
"No, we need to protect our lives." Rachel said firmly.
Blaine looked back worried. The reapers who pursued us began to approach.
"Brittany, Tina and Blaine. Get rid of these boxes."
"Are you mad?" Quinn protested.
"We have to put four more people inside. Either are the boxes or the boys. You choose."
Blaine ran and threw some boxes on the floor and entered the trunk. I advanced the car to where the truck was.
"GET IN." Rachel said when she lower her glass.
"Not without our things." Mike insisted.
"Dude, pay attention, or you try to survive with a bunch of reapers trying to break the car, or you run away with us." I was tired of it. I was tired of collecting and losing things.
Joe ran down and got into our car, staying in the back seat with blaine. Sam got in the front seat standing along with Rachel. Mike was the last in part by reluctantly because of the slowness of the fatigued and his injured body. Blaine and Joe helped him into the car and I started to drive again. Another minute of delay and the first reapers would reach us. I drove in silence. Everyone was exhausted to tell the truth. We saw a sign pointing to a city called Logan. We didn't want to go to a city again. We didn't want more zombies throwing over a car that already was badly damaged. So we took the first deviation to a secondary road.
We ended up on a farm, which had a vast open field of land that was prepared, but was never sown. We saw a bunch of reapers transiting the field and I immediately thought of Tess information about some of these creatures were migrating to the forests, while zombies remained in cities. This bunch of reapers approached the car and I prepared to turn on the ignition, but something else caught the attention of those creatures, and we got rid of this one. Then it started to snow. It was a slight precipitation, but enough to make me very apprehensive, because we didn't know if we would have a warm place to spend the colder days of winter.
"Where are we?" Brittany said softly, it seemed that she was afraid to speak normally.
"On a farm around a city called Logan." It was the greatest accuracy I could have to answer my girlfriend.
"Wes lives here... or lived." Blaine said.
"Who?"
"Don't you remember Wes? He was a Warbler. He was that half-philipino guy."
No one remembered Wes. And what was the point to know that a guy called Wes lived in that city? Did it mean he would invite us to have a cup of tea one day? The day finally began to dawn. We all got out of the car to lengthen us and do the needs. Any shrub served as a bathroom. Tina and Brittany checked the few boxes that left us. We had the weapons, the ammunition, a rice bag, two cans of oil and two salt packs. We also had two backpacks with two sleeping bags and some personal hygiene items. Four days earlier, we had a huge pantry, clothes, cleaning materials, fuel. This escape and constant losses since we left the island was proof that if nomadic life was possible in the apocalypse, we were doing everything completely wrong. We decided to follow a gravel road between farms. We drove on this road for about 15 minutes into de woods and it ended at a cell phone signal relay tower. We got out of the car because the frustration was big enough to complain while we were all compressed inside.
"This is so frustrating!" Rachel was sad and tired like everyone else.
"There's nothing here." Sam kicked the car tire.
"We can go back on the same road and try another one." I suggested.
We all got back in the car, our gasoline was almost in the reserve tank, but I believed that if we arrived enough near the city, we could take fuel from abandoned cars. Maybe the boys could get a better car for us. Sam sat behind the wheel and tried to turn on the car. Nothing happened. He insisted a few times until Blaine asked him to stop trying. They raised the car's hood and checked the mechanical part. I don't know exactly what was wrong, but I can imagine that the conditions could be difficult after so many beats.
"I don't know if what happened was just that, but the engine oil level is terribly low." Sam showed us the indicator.
"Did the compartment broke?" Blaine speculated.
"It's quite possible."
We were hopeless and we had two alternatives: or stay there, or explore the area. There was not much back on the road, but we could reach the highway to the city. That's why we started a heated debate. As we fought, Brittany took the plastic bottle of water and walked through the forest. She said she was hearing a river noise, and she had to get water to cook the rice if we wanted to put something inside the stomach that day. Tina accompanied her while I was too frustrated to move. I was tired of arguing, and I was also tired of losing. I got in the car, closed the door and shrunk my legs to put my feet on the seat. Honestly, I was lost. Not because of the place. But I felt completely lost, without hope in general. Rachel seemed to feel the same because she got into the car and sat on the driver's seat. We were silent for a long time, while the others decided my destiny, since I no longer had the strength to argue my points of view.
"If I knew, I would have stayed with Burt and Carole." Rachel vented and I laughed a little.
"Would you have the courage to live with Sara knowing she killed Finn?"
Rachel was silent for a moment, so she sighed and dried up a tear that escaped.
"This is weird. We buried Finn yesterday morning, but my feeling is that it happened a month ago."
"The amount of almost death situations we spent in the last 24 hours have made time go faster.
"That's truth." Rachel dried another tear. "This is very strange. Sometimes I have difficulty remembering what the world was like before the terrorist attacks and this damn virus."
"Are you talking about that time you were an arrogant jealous diva that tried to turn all your competitors into stone like Medusa, especially me and Mercedes Jones?"
"I didn't try..." Rachel smiled. "I just wanted to be the best. And our group had many talents. You, Mercedes, Kurt, Blaine, I... "
"What about Tina, Britt, Quinn, Sam?"
"They have always been great in the chorus."
"What about Finn?"
"He was good, but not Broadway good."
I laughed out loud! It was great to see old Rachel Berry for at least a moment.
"Well, it looks like you remembered very fast from your past life."
"Do you think about them? The other guys that stayed in Lima?"
"Hardly."
"What do you think that happened? Do you think they can be alive?"
"I think Artie died. How would a wheelchair guy survive this? I have no idea what happened to the others. I like to think they're out there."
"Do you really think so?"
"You never know."
"I also like to think that my parents are alive."
Rachel always told she was with Finn when Burt Hummel ran home saying they should put everything they could inside the car: food, clothes, everything that was useful in less than 15 minutes. That she was practically pushed into the car by Finn and Kurt. Rachel called her parents to do the same when Burt was already on the road on their way to the lake. As far as I know, Rachel's parents never left Lima.
Suddenly we saw Tina leaving the forest and coming toward us. My heart almost went out of my mouth because I didn't see Brittany with her, and I started suffering in anticipation if something had happened with my girlfriend.
"You won't believe what we found out!" Tina said excited.
"A cabin in the woods?" Quinn speculated.
"No, much better! Come. Brittany is there. It's only 20 minutes of walking."
Twenty minutes? I didn't even realize that Tina and Brittany had been out for over an hour. We took our weapons and followed Tina.
"We found a stream, and Brittany decided to cross it because she wanted to explore a little bit." Tina told us. "A few minutes latter, Britt returned to the stream, where I was, and said she found something shinning in the forest, that maybe could be a UFO's probe. I went after her, because you know how Brittany is, and when we got to such a strange brightness, we saw it was a piece of mirror."
"Are you dragging us by the forest because of a piece of mirror?" Quinn complained.
"When we took the piece of mirror, we saw a grid on the floor and a strange thing that looked like a submarine view. It also had brown pipes attached to the floor, which I could hardly see. Come on, you will only believe seeing."
We arrived at the stream with just 15 minutes of walking, and Tina directed us to a small range in the forest about 300 meters from the wather. She pointed to the structures. The pipes were very close to the floor. They were two, distant from each other for a few meters, and they had bars to protect them from the accumulation of leaves. The thing that looked like a submarine piece was a brown pipe that looked like a submarine periscope.
Then we saw two arms waving to us. Two long arms of Brittany. I walked to her and when I realized I was actually on the roof of something, and just below my feet Brittany was smiling at me. I went down the small ravine and came across a door placed between a concrete portal, as if someone had closed a cave or something.
"We found the door closed, but she wasn't locked." Brittany explained. "I thought it was a reaper shelter, or someone very crazy. But there are just a lot of spider web and durst inside."
Brittany opened the door. It was heavy, made of metal, with lock inside and an extra iron bar. There was a small opening in it, like a window of a few centimeters, enough to see who is outside. This window had a broken glass, and only one piece was left of it. After the door there is a small platform, followed by seven steps down. The floor was polished cement. It was brown with soil and full of leaves. There were drains on the floor, indicated that there was a system of water and sewage right under our feet. The ceiling indicated a ventilation system, but I could only feel it was air chain that came out of breathing pipes. It had this room with the periscope right in the middle of it. There is a wood oven, and a gas stove right next door, and I thought the top of the chimney should also be close to the floor just above our heads. There were cupboards on the walls, especially next to the oven. When we open them, we come across stuffs we needed: jams, pickles, oil cans, vinegar, salt and two vodka bottles. There were also lamps, batteries, flashlight, a package of bar soap, matchboxes, candles, two dishes, two glasses, two pans and a frying pan. This was definitely built for a couple.
There was an electrical system and a slightly old-looking refrigerator. There was nothing inside it. Next to the gas stove had a simple sink. We tested the plumbing and there was water. We thought the water could be captured from the river, or from a water tank we have not yet identified.
There was on another wall a huge map of the region, showing the city of Logan, and an X in the forest, which should be the exact position of the bunker. We were close to a stream that flowed into a river a little larger a little faster south of our position. There were some lakes nearby, and the distance to the city was 12 kilometers walking inside the forest. We still had no idea of walking time, but I used to run almost seven kilometers along with Brittany in Lima Park, surrounding the lake. We took three turns on it in 40 minutes, more or less, on a flat ground. I then imagine a walk of at least two hours inside the forest to go to the city.
There was a full size bed in the bunker, in a bedroom whose only partition was a step up with the living room. The bed had a dirty-looking mattress by dust, leaves and cobwebs. There were two internal doors in the bunker. One of them was a bathroom with a toilet and a shower. There were two respirator pipes just inside there. The sewage system should come out somewhere, and I just prayed that it wasn't in the stream, which appeared to have clean water. Probably no: it would be a lot of foolishness polluting a source of clean water. The second inner door gave access to a kind of deposit, with some logs of stored wood, some tools and what seemed to be a diesel generator and a car battery connected to the system. In all, the bunker should have something around 70 m².
"Is this owner here?" Joe asked the stupid question of the year.
"Will this owner come back someday?" Quinn corrected.
"I remember I once read a bunch of millionaires who had bought luxury bunkers to live at the slightest sign of the apocalypse." Tina commented.
"I don't know if this person was rich, but they definitely had some money. It's not luxurious, but it's good and seems to be quite solid." Mike said as he tested the switch. "The battery must have died."
"We can get the one in the car." Sam said.
"Yes, we can bring all our stuffs here." Mike smiled. "It will be horrible in the firsts days, but this is a perfect base. It's close to a city, but not so much. It's protected by the forest, it has good structure. And we will never have to fear invasion of reapers again. No creature of that would be able to break that door in."
Honestly, this was the best news after days of running these creatures. While Brittany, I, Tina and Blaine stayed in the bunker to start cleaning it, the others returned to the car to bring our stuffs, including the battery. We took all the day to clean and to tidy up. Brittany and Tina made rice and sliced some pickles, which were still good. The car battery generated energy, and we celebrate when the lamp lit. The problem was that the bunker was very cold, and maybe we could suffer in winter, so it was necessary to think about getting clothes, sleeping bags and more provisions to survive.
When the night arrived, we took some logs of wood and put them on the wood stove, so that would work as a heater. It snowed again, and we realized that despite all the noise we made, there were no reapers at our door. We speculated the reasons and mistakenly thought that that forest region had none. We would take some time to understand that Reapers didn't like the cold, but they were absurdly active on the hottest days.
The first night in a strange place is always the worst. Even with the first few nights of snow falling outside, we found that the wood-burning stove provided a bearable temperature inside. We drew straws to see who got the bed that first night. Joe and Brittany won the right to sleep on a mattress that night. Rachel and Tina won the right to use the sleeping bags. For the rest of us, we turned round on the cold, hard floor and stood by the wood-burning stove to warm ourselves.
It was awful! Even though I felt safe for the first time since we were forced to leave the island, I couldn't sleep because of the discomfort of the cold, hard floor.
"Carpet, sleeping bags, food, clothes..." Mike said quietly as we tried to at least nod off.
"What is it, Mike?" I asked.
"I'm making a list of what we have to look for in the city."
"Carpet?"
"If we have to sleep on the floor, let's at least sleep on a mat, because then we won't lose body temperature by lying directly on the floor. We won't be able to draw the bed every day!"
I hated that Mike thought he was our leader, but it was a fact that he thought like one. I wasn't going to get upset about it. Not at all! I was satisfied that we were all sleeping safely. That was all I cared about.