All That I See - 02 (11 page)

“
He was my favorite teacher.
Let’s drive out there today and tell him.”

“Okay,” I nodded and watc
hed the chickens.

She stuck her hand under my face. It was full of the
chicken
feed.

She grinned, “These are seeds, aren’t they?”

“
Well
,
yeah
” I said, “But the corn in there has been cracked, so—“

“No,” she said. “I’m talking about these little round ones.”

“I don’t know what they are or if they’re safe for humans to eat.”

“It’
s millet,” she said. “There’s an
article in one of your magazines about millet. It has recipes and everything. It’s supposed to be really good for you.”

I held out my hand and she poured the grain in.

“I think those other ones might be wheat,” she said.

I turned and looked into the truck. We had
a lot of animal feed back there. Some of it was pellets, but a lot of it was straight grain.
I thought we could eat the corn if we had to, but I hadn’t really considered using it as seed.

“Good,” I said. “It looks like we’ll be set on grain, but we still need to find more vegetable seeds.”

Sara hopped down off th
e truck, and the chickens ran
away.

“Let me find some paper to write a note for t
he Somervilles then we can go.”

CHAPTER 12

We followed Ben Parks’ directions, and drove out to the house with the green mailbox. On the way, we passed a fenced-in field. There were several cows in the distance, huddled together around a big oak tree. Nearer, was a dead cow. Five zombies were hunched over it feeding on the carcass. Sara slowed the vehicle then stopped. There were seven other partial carcasses spaced out around the pasture. One of the creatures looked up from his meal and stared at us.

“I wish they all would die,” Sara said.

The creature stood and looked at us more intently. I wondered how much actual thought was going on in its head.

“We should come back later when we have more weapons and take care of those before they kill the rest of those cows,” I said.

Sara nodded and drove on.
I followed Ben Parks’ instructions: east to the stop sign, make a right, first house on the left, number seventy-one on a green mailbox. I was surprised I remembered.

The driveway was blocked by a wrought iron gate and flanked by a stone fence about three feet high which was topped with another three or four feet of wrought iron fencing that ran across the front of the property. The sides and back of the property were enclosed in an old barbed wire fence that had an additional three feet of welded wire around the bottom. The fence was old and the strands of wire had been swallowed up in places by the twisted trunks of Bois D’Arc trees. The whole place was surrounded by pasture.

It was a large house, more than a century old, and it was made from the same stone as the fence. The materials weren’t local. This part of Kentucky doesn’t have big stones like that, being mostly clay. Factoring in the size of the house, the age, and the fact that the stone had been imported, I could assume the original owner had been wealthy. This had probably been the central home place for a large farm. Things like that got the history buff in me intrigued, but I shouldn’t have been wasting time thinking about stuff like that.

I got out and went up to the gate. The front door opened and Ron came out on the porch with a rifle in his hands. When he saw that it was us, he waved.

“The gate isn’t locked,” he yelled out to us, “Just make sure you close it behind you!”

I swung the gate open, and Sara pulled the Crown Victoria inside. After I’d shut and latched the gate, we drove up to the house.

Ron stepped off the porch and greeted us.

“Good morning,” he said. “Did your friends come back?”

The front door opened, and Ben stepped out.

“You two change your minds?” he asked.

“Nicholas and Judy aren’t back yet, but we needed to go out for some things, and we thought we stop by.”

“Glad you did,” Ben smiled. “Come on in and meet the rest.”

Inside, we were introduced to Mr. McAllister, a frail man with a blanket over his legs. He nodded to us from a recliner, but didn’t speak. Molly came out of the kitchen, and little Adam hid behind her. He looked like he might have been around three.

“He’s shy around strangers,” Molly said, smiling and shaking my hand. She was a plain, but pleasant-looking, woman in her forties. She had red hair pulled back in a ponytail.

“Molly is making some food,” Ben said. “Are you hungry?”

“No,” I said. “We had some of the cereal you gave us.”

The house was old. The ceilings were high, and the rooms were small. It was
in
need of repair. I noticed a ladder, drop cloth, and several gallons of paint in the corner.

“This was my great-grandfather’s place,” Ron said. “I started trying to restore it back in January, but the virus happened….” He shrugged.

“Have you had any trouble out here?” I asked.

“We did early on,” Ben said. “But they never managed to get into the interior of the property.”

“Any problems with survivors?” I asked.

“No,” Ben said. “Not here. A guy shot at us at Wal-Mart about three weeks ago, but he got away, and we never saw him again.”

“There are some survivors a couple of roads over,” Ron said. “They haven’t been too friendly either. I guess everyone is scared, and they don’t want to take the chance. They shoot first.”

“The reason we stopped by is we want to take you up on your offer to go in together,” Sara said.

“Yeah,” I added, “or at least work together. We plan to get a garden started soon, and we were going out today to look for seeds.”

“A garden?” Ben said. “What for?”

“For food,” I said. I thought I sounded like a smartass stating what I thought was the obvious.

“There’s food everywhere,” Ron said.

“But what about when it runs out or goes bad?” I said.

“It’s only a matter of time before these thing
s
die,” Ben said. “I figure they’ll resume food shipments from out west when they know it is safe to come back in. It might not be right away, but it shouldn’t take more than a year, two at most, and really I doubt it will be more than a couple of months. We have enough canned goods around to keep us fed until then. Besides, Ron and I sent our families to Oklahoma to stay with my sister.”

“But…” I started but didn’t know what to say.

“Don’t’ you know?” Sara said. “The rest of the world is like Clayfield. It’s all infected.”

Ron and Ben gave each other concerned looks.

“You must be mistaken,” Ron said.

“It’s true,” I said.

“How can you know this?” Molly said, stepping forward. “You don’t know that for sure.”

I shrugged, “I’m sorry. I suppose there is a possibility that there i
s a safe place
somewhere, but I got on the internet, and—“

“When was this?” Molly asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe three or four days after it hit Clayfield. They said it had crossed the river. I tried to call my mom in St. Louis and--”

“It might not mean what you think it means,” Ben said shaking his head. “We’re sticking to our plan. We’ll probably come back after the government gets things running again.”

Molly turned and went back into the kitchen.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We didn’t mean to upset you, but—“

“We have to have hope,” Ben interrupted again, sounding perturbed.

“Okay,” I said. “But Sara and I are still planning on growing some food. I hope you are right, and we don’t need it.”

Ben looked back and forth between me and Sara then he called out to Molly. She returned to the room.

“Why don’t you and Adam give Sara a tour of the house.”

Molly looked a little confused by the request, but nodded and motioned for Sara to join her.

When they’d gone into the other room, Ben came in close to me.

“What are you doing with her?”

“What?” I said.

“Are you…
taking advantage of her?”

“Sara? No.”

“She’s just a girl, you know,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, you are obviously having sex with her.”

I laughed, a little taken aback.

“That’s none of your business,” I said. “I understand that she was just a girl when she was in your class, but—“

“How old are you?” he said. “You’ve got to be at least fifteen years older than her. I’m guessing more.”

I decided to try to stop it by putting his mind at ease. It would be the truth, after all. I held up my hand and stepped in closer to him.

“The answer is ‘no’ to all of it,” I said. “But you need to realize that she isn’t the high school kid that you used to know. She and I have gotten…close the past couple of weeks. I do care for her quite a bit.”

His brow furrowed as he considered what I said, but I think he’d already made up his mind about me. I glanced over at Ron, but he didn’t seem to like being there any more than I at that moment. Finally, Ben nodded.

“I don’t mean any offense,” he said. “But I do plan to talk with her about it.”

“Do whatever you need to do,” I said. “It’s not like I’m holding her against her will.”

He wa
lked away, and I shook my head.

“Unbelievable,” I said.

“Ben is a good guy,” Ron said. “Don’t let it bother you.”

“Does he have a thing for Sara or something?”

“No way,” Ron said. “Ben has a family. He’s straight-laced when it comes to that kind of thing. He just tends to get a little too involved in the lives of his students in an overprotective kind of way, but he’s a good guy.”

“I would think that would be a bad thing—being that involved,” I said.

Ron shrugged, “Most of those kids don’t have much guidance at home. He’s kind of a father figure for them. Come on, and I’ll show you around the place.”

He took me through the house and talked about the renovations that he’d been making. He was very excited about all the improvements he had planned for the house, as though they would eventually happen. I wasn’t really interested. It seemed pointless. We were coming down the stairs when Molly met us on her way up.

“We have sick down by the gate,” she said. “Ben has gone out to have a look.”

Old Mr. McAllister was out of his recliner and standing at the front window looking out.

Ron grabbed his rifle from next to the fireplace, and the two of us went out onto the porch. Ben was on his way down to the road with a shotgun. Sara was standing by our car looking out after him. Down at the end of the driveway, on the other side of the gate, were two zombies. They were just standing at the gate watching Ben approach.

“Let’s go check it out,” Ron said.

We headed out after him. When we got to Sara she grabbed my arm.

“It’s my fault, isn’t it?” she said. “They haven’t had any out this way in days, and two show up after we do.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We’re going to check it out; do you want to walk down with us?”

“Mr. Parks told me to stay here.”

“You can come with us if you want; you
are
a grown woman.”
I said that more for my sake than hers. After my conversation with Ben, I was reminded that Sara’s age was an issue, and not just for me. Of course, it didn’t really matter what Ben thought, but it had brought up in my own mind that I wasn’t okay with it. It wasn’t the age
difference
so much as her particular age. Had we both been a little older, I wouldn’t have thought about it the same way, but she was still so close to high school.

I looked into her eyes—beautiful green eyes—and it suddenly hit me that she
really
was a grown woman, more mature at nineteen than most pre-Canton B women were at thirty. Even though I’d been telling myself all along that this was so, I hadn’t really believed it until then.

“If it’s my fault, then more will be coming,” she said.

“Even if it is because of you, it won’t be your fault,” I said.

She looked unconvinced. I cupped her smudged face in my hands and kissed her. Time seemed to stop along with my heart. I pulled away and looked at her more closely than I had before. It was as if I was seeing her for the first time. A faint smile twitched at the corners of her mouth, but her eyes were shining.

I looked over and Ron was staring at us. He rai
sed his empty hand and grinned,
“Dude,” he said, “It ain’t none of my business.”

Then we heard the shotgun blast.
We all looked out toward the road. One of the zombies stumbled backwards and fell. Ben Parks turned the shotgun on the second creature and fired.