I stood before the front door and considered my options. I looked at all points of entry into the house. Shadows shot out from my body. Almost every one of them was safe, except the option of a running, diving, barrel roll through the front plate glass window. That ended up with me unconscious on the ground, probably with a concussion. Eventually I decided on walking up and opening the unlocked front door.
“Don’t go overlooking the obvious.” I said as I opened the old creaky farmhouse screen door, and turned the knob.
Inside the house was very dim. Most of the blinds were closed. The old Victorian furniture was all neatly arranged, nothing upset or overturned. There hadn’t been a struggle in this part of the house.
I checked my watch; it was 9:28 pm. I had work to do, and not much time to do it. The first order of business was to find the keys to the truck. I walked straight back to the kitchen, and found a peg-board full of key rings. I recognized some, from my work on the farm. I took every set, including a Ford key on a Culpeper Ford dealership key ring and headed for the attached garage. Inside was a beautiful, almost brand new, pearl white fully loaded F250 four-wheel drive pickup truck. I clicked the remote on the key ring and the doors unlocked.
“Oh, fuck yeah! Daddy’s got a new truck!” I slid in the driver’s seat, feeling the cool leather; it still had that new car smell. After starting the truck, I hit the garage door opener, but nothing happened. Feeling like a dumbass, I got out, pulled the string to disengage the automatic door opener and rolled the door up.
I pulled the truck out of the two stall garage, and parked it on the driveway. I removed the keys, and scoured the glove compartment and center console. Inside the console, I found a pen and some scrap paper, and hastily wrote a note. Keys on the seat, note folded over the steering wheel, I hopped out and ran around the back of the farm house to the tractor barn. Inside there, I dropped a John Deere Key on the second step leading up to the cab of the massive combine, and stuck a Kubota key inside the door of the plow tractor.
Next, I trotted over to the knoll and lay down. Through Sammie’s scope I could see the school. There were at least two hundred and fifty people inside the football field, and I counted fifteen zombies around the outside. The principal had moved his office to this side of the building while I was attending school so he could watch football games from his window. I searched three windows with my scope before I found the right one. It appeared to be empty. Over the next several minutes I surveyed the entire building facing the stadium, and saw no sign of the living in the building.
“Stupid zombies,” I muttered as I grabbed my tool bag and took off for a small creek bed running through the field. I had five of my pipe bombs left from the Potomac Bridge, plus one with parachutes. I stepped off every ten feet and laid a bomb covering a fifty-foot section, keeping the last parachute bomb for an emergency. Next, I ran electric fence wire to each of them, and rolled the wire up to the solar battery terminal on top of the hill where I’d be. The wire laid down in the long grass, and other than a few of my tracks, was pretty hard to tell anyone had been through there. The grass on top of the knoll was taller than I was when I laid down. I mashed a few feet down in front of me, and then made an area off to the right. I pulled up a bunch of grass and stuck it in a pile trying to hide myself. I laid out the other treasures from my bag, leaving only the magazines and bullets for the Sigs and checked my watch. “Ten-fifteen. I have forty-five minutes until the cavalry arrives. It’s time to do work.” I said aloud.
The trees along the edge of the field gave me some cover as I approached the school. As I walked, I switched to what I now call my ‘aura view’, and tried to suppress my aura. I wish this stuff came with a manual, I thought to myself as I managed not to shrink it, but more like turning it clear. As soon as I stopped concentrating, it turned back to blue-purple.
At the edge of the tree line, I stopped and surveyed the situation. It had quickly become my habit to contemplate my options. The first zombie was roughly a hundred and fifty feet away. I focused on the option of running a direct line to him, and hitting him in the head with the kukri. If I did that, he alerted the zombies in the stands. Instead, I tried a throat chop, which silenced him, and moved on to the next zombie. To my surprise, another shadow shot out from the first. Wondering how far I could push this, I made decision after decision testing and pushing my abilities. Some of them ending in my death, but when that happened, I backed up a step and made a different choice. It took me nearly twenty minutes of choreography, but repeated the dance until I had it perfectly fixed in my mind. I knew that after the third zombie, who I had to hit once in the chest and once across the face, I had to spin right. Spinning left caught my foot on a stone. There were shadows all over the school yard. They all slowly solidified. As I started to move, following the first one, the forward decision lines stayed, guiding me through an intricate dance that was about to unfold.
25. The Dance
I ran straight towards the first zombie. Exactly on cue, he looked down the field to the left of us and never saw me coming. I was three steps away when he heard me, but I took his throat out with one level swipe. The curved machete blade multiplied the force of my swing; I almost completely severed his head. My first shadow line disappeared, and I followed the next fifteen steps and into a barrel roll, which brought me up face to face with the next zombie, right as he turned towards me. I drove both blades up through his chin as I popped up in front of him, the tips exiting the top of his head.
The next step was a tricky one; it had taken me at least a hundred tries to work it out. Leaving the swords buried in his skull, I dove at his face, flipping over him, which exerted enough force on the handles of the weapons to split his face and extract them from his head. As I came up from that roll, I hit my back on a rock. I knew that was going to hurt, but I didn’t think it was going to be as bad as it was. I nearly lost my breath, causing me to stumble off of my path. The instant I left my path, the entire sequence of shadows disappeared. I remembered that I had to hit this one across the chest, followed by a slash to the face. I sent out that decision, and saw my shadow get caught by the throat. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
I considered pausing where I was. I considered running every direction, no matter which way I went, the stumble off my perfect path led to discovery. I charged the zombie, knowing he would go for my throat, at the last second I ducked, bringing one machete overhand into his chest and the other from the side into his gut hoping to take out both lungs. He screamed as I hit him, and I saw the nearest three zombies start running my way. One of them was fast.
I let go of both Kukri’s and rolled behind the corpse of the third. The alarm raised, I drew both guns and fired both barrels at the fastest zombie, hitting him half a dozen times in the chest and head. His momentum carried him into me, where he collapsed dead on top of me. As I fell backwards, I shot the two closest zombies, winging one in the cheek and hitting the other in the chin, causing his bottom jaw to vaporize, although I think I saw the entire bottom jaw fly off.