Zombie Rules (16 page)

             
No. I did not go after her. She had obviously lost her mind, and all of the screaming was going to attract zombies. Or whatever you wanted to call them. I moved on to another subdivision a couple of miles away. As one may expect, I was extra cautious with the first house. There was another old woman in this one as well. She did not run out screaming though, she sat there at her kitchen table looking at me. She was obviously infected, but made no effort to stand or chase me. She merely snarled at me when I entered the kitchen. I dispatched her with a quick headshot and carefully cleared the rest of the house.

             
I cleared almost twenty houses before noon. I did not run into any other live people, but did encounter eight more zombies of various types. Quite a few homes had stinking, rotting corpses. One house had a family of four that were all infected. I gave the front door a little knock and was shortly rewarded with moaning and scratching on the door. Nice, I thought. I kicked open the door and put three of them down with head shots. I was feeling smug with my skills, until the family’s little girl crawled out from under a bed and tried to bite my ankle. It was a good thing I was wearing heavy boots. If I had my running shoes on, I would have been bitten. I stomped on her head until it made squishing noises and she stopped moving.

             
After the first hour, and constantly repeating my congenial greeting, I became bored. My salutation soon went from friendly verbiage to, “Any zombie cocksuckers in there?” I guess it was fortunate I did not have any human contact. They would have thought I was the one who was crazy.

             
Breaking into a residential house was actually quite easy. I had a set of skeleton keys which were used in most residential door locks and used a technique called lock bumping. Rick showed me a video tutorial on the Internet. It only took a couple of minutes and was relatively quiet. If it did not work, I had one of those long pry bars firemen used. It could usually snap the door right open. No wonder there were so many burglaries back in the day. On those occasions where I encountered security doors, I broke out a window. If the windows were barred, I hooked up the winch from the truck and pulled the bars down, or moved on to another home. If I activated an alarm, I moved on to another neighborhood.

             
After encountering several zombies, I came to realize they were quite predictable. They heard a noise, smelled something, saw movement, they responded to it. They did not sneak up on you or lay in wait to ambush you. They did not have the mental faculties for it. Along the same line of thought, they were incapable of planning or coordinating a mass attack. They merely responded to stimuli and the rest was instinctive. Consequently, they did not seem to need sleep, nor did they feel pain, anguish, or fear. They moaned, wandered aimlessly, bumped into stuff, or sat there and stunk to high heaven until something caused them to act. A zombie form of Weber’s law, if you will.

             
What did it mean in common terms? Zombies were easy to spot and easy to kill. But, one had to be vigilant, or else you would become zombie food. There was a zombie law in here somewhere. I would have to think on it. Nah, zombies weren’t a problem unless you happened upon a group of them and did not have an escape route or enough ammunition.

             
Humans, live humans, they were the potential problem. I had no illusions about all humans being good hearted people. Someone might see me and kill me for what I had. Someone might believe I was a threat and shoot me in a perceived act of self-defense. I was hoping my act of announcing my presence before entering someone’s house might negate any hostile act, but hell you just never knew. They might be just like the woman in Lennox Village, crazier than an outhouse rat. Those were the ones that will hide in a closet just waiting to blow your head off. I had to be careful or I’d end up dead.

             
I took a break and looked over my newly acquired property. The pickings were slim, but not altogether bereft of goodies. I took an inventory with my notepad:

Some gently used clothes that fit me.
Fresh bed linens. A set of Ruffoni brand copper cooking pots. Very nice. They would replace the Goodwill rejects that I currently had.

Over a dozen Tupperware bowls. They were one of those items in which you could find a thousand and one uses for. Containers were essential for hunter-gatherer societies. They were like weapons and tools, you could never have enough. A couple of boxes of Kleenex, several half used rolls of toilet paper, and several used tubes of toothpaste.

A box of nine millimeter bullets. I had no nine millimeter guns. Rick hated that size, only women shot nines, he would say. I took them for trade purposes. Some assorted food items, including an unopened bag of coffee beans, four boxes of rice, a dozen boxes of Jell-O, two boxes of powdered milk, and an unopened box of Mexicana Cal which was good for nixtamalization. Several used boxes of laundry detergent. Almost every house had either powdered or liquid in various levels. I guess when people decided to bug out to wherever they were going to, a used container of detergent was useless in their minds. Along that line I also found a few half empty bottles of bleach. Two five gallon gas cans. These I suspect were also going to be a rare find. And finally, I scored a major coup in the last house I checked. Three cases of an expensive brand of dog food! The boys would be happy.

             
I found many other small items and dutifully jotted them down on my inventory list. Yeah, I know, I’m the only one around, no need to write out a list that was already in my head, but old habits die hard. I finished the list and reviewed it twice. It was definitely turning out to be a successful day.

             
I also noted some houses which were closer to Old Hickory Boulevard had already been searched. Several had windows broken out, along with other assorted acts of vandalism. This particular subdivision stopped at a dead end street. Three of the houses at the end had burned. Upon closer inspection, I determined a car had crashed into the front door of one of the houses. I surmised the wreck caused the fire, and it spread to the other houses. I wondered what had happened. Was the driver trying to escape from somebody? Had they been attacked?

             
I pointed this out to my companion. “We got some survivors out here that aren’t so nice. We’ve got to be careful.” Moe wagged his tail appreciatively. He was a good listener. He never once interrupted me or flipped me the bird. Oh, he occasionally farted, but Rick farted a lot as well, so I was used to it.

             
I stood and stretched. It was good getting out and moving around. Only now did I realize being cooped up at the farm all by myself was causing me to sink into a deep depression. I needed to get out more often.

             
The last house I cleared before lunch had a bedroom which had obviously been once occupied by a couple of teenage girls. There were pictures of them in a cheerleading outfit and pom-poms fastened to each corner of the dresser mirror. They were two very cute twins. I went through their dresser drawers. It looked like most of their clothing was left behind. I wondered what had happened to them. Were they twin cheerleading zombies now? I opened one drawer and found a bunch of bras and panties. They were all very sexy looking. French cut or thongs, lacy, silky, various colors. I looked at the sizes. Very petite, but the bras were c-cups. Nice. I held up a pair of panties and felt the silky smoothness. I realized I was becoming aroused and had the sudden urge to masturbate with them. I looked at the picture again. They were blondes with pretty hazel eyes, cute little butts and nice muscular legs. They were wearing sweaters, which prevented me from assessing any opinion about their breasts. They reminded me of Macie. I thought about her too much. I muttered a curse and threw the panties back in the drawer.

             
I had almost gotten myself in a good mood, now I was getting depressed again. Over a woman, a woman who had hurt me deeply. It seemed like I’ve met a couple of those lately. I should have bent Julie over and diddled her brains out when I had the chance. Or Janet. No, scratch that idea, not Janet. If I had made a pass at her, Rick would have been hurt. The thought reminded me of something I needed to do. Anyway, I squashed any teenage urges and walked out in front of the house. It was a fairly large two story with white vinyl siding. I spray painted the standard FEMA symbol on the front door, and then affixed rule number three on the white siding in large block letters for everyone to see: RULE #3 THERE ARE NO RIGHTEOUS ZOMBIES! Z.

             
“That one’s for you Rick.” I said sadly. I admired my work for a minute then headed on to the next street.

             
Moe and I worked through a few more houses. The results were limited. Several of the houses had decomposing bodies. Those were the houses which had no food, but they still had their most prize possessions hidden. You know what I mean, expensive jewelry hidden in the freezer, guns stored in the attic with insulation piled on top of them. Sounds good, right? All I found were a couple of diamond necklaces and a twenty-two caliber revolver with a suppressor attached to the barrel. I thought the necklaces were basically worthless but took them on the chance I could use them for barter. The revolver could come in handy for quiet work, but I had no ammo for it.

             
About midday I had to take a break. I sat on the tailgate of my truck deeply inhaling the icy, but fresh air. The houses which were occupied with corpses and/or zombies reeked of putrescence. I tried clearing a house while wearing a mask, but it made me feel claustrophobic and restricted my peripheral vision, so I left it in the truck and suffered the stench. It was getting a bit nauseating.

             
In spite of the foul odor, I was hungry. I cleaned my hands and then got a couple of sandwiches out of the cooler. Moe whined and began giving me his poor pitiful starving dog expression. It worked, I gave him one, and the two of us ate in silence. Suddenly, Moe started growling. I praised him and then quickly shushed him. The zombie was down Old Hickory Boulevard a little over two hundred yards away. I was certain it had not seen me. It was shambling down the road with no particular destination in mind. I watched in halfhearted amusement, wondering how close he needed to be before he finally spotted us. Suddenly, the zombie made a beeline over to a car parked on the side of the road. He never stopped his shambling gate and literally bounced off of the car. Regaining his balance, he then started slapping and clawing at the windows. It was almost comical to watch if you ignored the fact any physical contact with him could be potentially lethal.

             
I retrieved my binoculars and looked him over. This one, a man, could have been in his twenties or his fifties. It was hard to tell. He had apparently sustained a harsh act of violence. It looked like one of his arms had been torn off. His stump consisted of torn flesh and jagged pieces of bone sticking out. There was no blood flowing out of his stump. Was it due to no circulation system? Or does zombie blood coagulate quickly? I did not know. His lips had rotted off, or maybe another zombie had chewed them off. The rest of him looked awful, advanced decomposition, tattered blood stained clothes, eyes almost rotted out. I wondered how it could still see, but apparently it could. It definitely saw something in the car.

             
I contemplated my options. Kill the zombie or drive on to another neighborhood? I needed more gas. The truck was down to a quarter of a tank. I did not want to take a chance of driving too far, not finding any, and running out before I got back home. There were plenty of cars around here I could siphon from. I had been experimenting with different siphoning methods. Most of them were laboriously slow. I ended up with a battery operated drill I rigged up to a small mechanical pump. I attached a three foot piece of garden hose connected to each end. Voila, I could stick one end into the gas tank, the other end into the truck’s tank. It was quiet and efficient. So, the decision was made. I would kill him and continue with the scavenging in this neighborhood.

I did not want to make a bunch of noise. After all, attracting more zombies would defeat the purpose. I still had not found a compound bow or crossbow, nor did I have any bullets for the newly acquired silenced revolver. It then occurred to me, I had brought a machete. It was in the bed of the truck.
Hmm. I quietly opened the door and put Moe inside. He would probably attack the zombie, and I did not know if he would become infected. Getting the machete, I started walking and approached as quietly as I could.

I got to within ten feet before he heard me. He turned and looked at me as if I were some type of apparition. Imagine a zombie with a decomposed face and rotting eyes looking frightened. It was so odd, I laughed. I then lunged forward with a sweeping arc of the machete.

              A skilled martial artist could have easily ducked or moved out of the way. But zombies aren’t martial artists. His head came off somewhat cleanly, fell to the ground, and was still rolling when the rest of the body collapsed.

             
I checked myself quickly for any harmful fluids which might have gotten on me, and retrieved my ever present bottle of waterless antibacterial soap. I cleaned the machete first and wiped it down in the snow before cleaning my hands and face. It reminded me back to when I killed Jasper. I had been splattered with blood from head to toe. If a police officer had stopped me, I would still be sitting in a jail cell. Whether or not I would have been alive, dead, or zombified was anybody’s guess. I guess I was lucky. I was still smiling at the thought when I peered in the car to see what had captivated this thing’s attention.