“Please, baby, please be quiet.” I whispered as I bounced Jake gently. “Sleepy time, daddy’s here.” I wondered if he had a nightmare about that horrible face trying to get through the back window of the car.
I looked out again and the man was closer, his head cocked to the side as if he was locking in on my home. Christ, if he started pounding on the doors he was going to attract more of them.
“Jakey, sleep honey, sleep.” I tried to sound as calm as possible, but an edge was getting into my voice. We’re so dead. I thought.
Jake finally quieted down to subdued whimpering and I snuck a look outside. As the dead man came within ten yards of the front of my house, out of the east came a kid on a bike, pedaling like the very demons of hell were on his tail. He swerved away from the corpse on the street and headed west, dodging an outstretched hand and groaning mouth. The corpse turned to follow the biker, completely losing interest in my house. I nearly fell over in relief.
That was interesting. They follow what they want until distracted, then they follow that. Might be useful to remember. I stayed at the window, looking out and managed to see what the kid on the bike was running from. A crowd of about twenty of those things came shambling down the street, in various states of decay and disrepair. Several had large amounts of blood down the front of their clothing, others were missing fingers and eyes and pieces of flesh. One particularly gruesome specimen had his lower jaw ripped off, and his tongue lolled around in the air under his face. Where were they all coming from? Why wasn’t the news reporting this? I had to resist the urge to run out and hose down the mob. I knew I would be overwhelmed and killed, and what would happen to Jake then? No, caution was better. Besides, I needed to think about reinforcing my windows.
Where was I going to find enough wood to build a barrier? I certainly was not going back to the home improvement store, and I sure wasn’t going to leave Jacob. What to do? I pondered this as I looked out my back window at the bike path that ran along the power line easement behind my house. The condominiums across the way looked peaceful enough, but part of me wondered what nightmares awaited in the halls. I hoped I would never have to find out. For a moment I considered my fence as a source of lumber, but dismissed that as foolish. I might need that seven-foot barrier if for nothing more than to be able to move unseen in my yard. I was never so glad that I insisted on reinforced support posts than I was right now.
My eyes fell on my porch, and all of a sudden I had a flash of inspiration. My porch was made of two by sixes of various lengths. All the wood I needed was right there. I just had to pull it up and bring it in. I ran downstairs and grabbed my drill, pausing to put the extra battery in the charger. Thankfully, I had made the deck with screws, so I just needed to back out the screws and pull the boards up. I figured I had only an hour before Jake woke up, so I needed to move quickly.
I brought my. 22 outside with me and slung it across my back. I needed to move all the stuff off the deck first, and do it quietly, since I wasn’t ready to withstand a siege. I moved the chairs to the fence, giving myself firing positions if I needed them. The back of my property dropped off four feet. The table I moved to the fence door, and jammed it into the ground. The door opened outward, and I needed to be able to block it if got pulled open. I hoped it never came to that, but then the dead seemed to be walking, so here we are.
As I went back to my porch to take off some boards, I was struck by how quiet it was. My house was in the landing pattern of the nearby airport, so there was usually a plane or three overhead. I listened to the wind and could faintly hear distant sounds: intermittent pops that I figured was gunfire, a groan or two, and the screeching of tires. I hoped all the noise would distract any infected from whatever noise I made.
The first few boards came off easily with no serious sound. I removed about three feet of boards and brought them into the house. The hard part was going to be cutting them, but I had hand saws for that. As I placed the boards in the house, I noticed the curtains move on my neighbor’s house. As I straightened up, the curtain was pulled aside and I saw my neighbor’s daughter Erica in the window. She waved at me and I waved back, happy to see another person in this crazy world. All of a sudden she was jerked back and the curtain was shoved forward. I hoped she was okay. I didn’t hear any screams, and so I figured it was just her parents trying not to attract attention to their house. They were just as scared as I was.
I went inside and heard some happy baby noises coming from upstairs. After I put the rifle back, I went up and found Jacob sitting up in his crib, playing with his blanket. He smiled a huge smile when he saw me, apparently no worse the wear for the experience we had over the afternoon. I picked him up and changed him, able for a brief second to forget the world and the crisis we seemed to be in. I took him downstairs to the basement, transferring his pack ‘n play. I went back upstairs and measured the windows, figuring on using the deck screws to fasten the boards to the window frames. I went back down and began cutting boards. For whatever reason, Jake thought this was fascinating, and smiled and laughed the whole time I was cutting boards.
I took him back upstairs, and brought up the boards I had cut. I figured only to cover the front windows at this time, since they were the weakest point of entry, and there were only two of them. The good news was there was a hedge in front of the windows, and my house was raised off the ground by several inches, so direct access was difficult. It could be done, but not easily. I decided to cover up the windows but leave the top six inches open to let in light and give me a firing opening. If I needed to close the whole thing, I could just drop the drapes. I was just attaching the last board when the phone rang. It was Ellie. “John?” “Hey, Babe!” I said, trying to sound cheerful, in spite of all that had happened today. “How are you doing?” She sounded like here was something seriously wrong. “I’m fine.” I said, moving over to where Jacob was. “Have you been watching the news?” Ellie asked. “Actually I’ve been a little busy.” I understated things, since I didn’t want her to worry.
Ellie sounded exhausted. “Just to let you know, whatever you hear on the news about this crisis being localized and that the government is handling things, is a flat out lie.”
I actually wasn’t so shocked by this, giving what I had been through. “What are you talking about?”
Ellie sighed and told me. “We have been working non-stop on infected people. They don’t go into comas, they die. They die and then they come back. The morgue is a nightmare, full of walking dead and they are trying to get out. Several patients who didn’t get transferred in time came back and attacked staff members. John, I watched my shift boss get eaten by two patients. Eaten!” Ellie sounded more panicked. “Jesus, God, what the hell?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I was quiet for a minute. I was having a hard enough time wrapping my head around the events of the day to really hear what Ellie was telling me. Ellie seemed to shake herself and asked me “Did you do what I asked, earlier?” I told her, yes, and I went into detail about my preparations, about where I had guns and ammo, and the boarding of the windows. “They’re that far south, are they?” Ellie asked. “What do you mean?”
Ellie sighed again. “We had a Chicago cop in here and he said the city was complete anarchy. Thousands of those things were in the streets, attacking anyone they saw, and transferring the virus. If they aren’t killed, eventually they become one of them. Sometimes it’s fast, sometimes it’s slow, and it all depends on the individual. The cop said they can only be killed by destroying the brain.”
“I know.” I said inadvertently.
Ellie paused. “How do you know?”
I told her about my little excursion, not leaving out any detail. I figured I would catch nine kinds of hell, but she just was quiet and then said, “Thank you for saving my baby.”