Day Eighteen

When I wake up, the television is off. It was on when I fell asleep, tuned to CNN, which has been broadcasting public service announcements along with coverage of “the health crisis” that pretty much sounds a lot like the public service announcements.  Last night, there were intermittent test patterns as well.

It’s been two days since I lost the girls, the two longest days of my life. The house is empty and the silence is deafening. There have been no visitors, no undead to deal with. The phone hasn’t rung. I haven’t been off the couch other than to take a leak in forty eight hours.

I reach for the remote and hit the power button. Nothing. I tell myself it’s the batteries as I roll myself off the couch and onto the floor. The clock on the microwave is out. I flip the wall switch to the light in the family room. Nothing. The power is out. I’ve been silently dreading the day when electricity would cease to flow through the wires of the house. It’s today. 

I’m off the couch. My face is still sore but I can breathe, at least a little. The headache is gone, thank God, and although I’m scared shitless to sneeze, I can at least pretend I’m not still all fucked up. I stand staring into the refrigerator for a few seconds until it dawns on me that the light is out and I’m letting all the precious cold air escape into the kitchen. I slam the door shut and something inside clatters and falls. I’m not hungry, anyway.

I sniff at my armpits and realize I smell like a homeless guy. Outside, it’s raining, so I strip off my clothes in the sunroom and swing the back door open, spreading out the shirt, underwear and jeans on the brick patio to wash. I let the warm drops of rain cascade over my skin, working it in the creases and crevices until I feel at least a bit clean. I repeat the process for good measure. For my hair, I stand beneath the eaves of the sunroom roof and let the water pour over my head until I feel little gritty nobs in my hair and realize the rain is washing tiny little pebbles from the shingles away. I’m afraid of what I’ll find when I twist the faucet on the hose so I lay down flat on the pool deck and lower my head over the side and work the chemically enhanced water over my scalp. It burns a little and for a moment I wonder if it will make my hair fall out.

Who gives a shit, right?

  I peel my dripping clothes from the patio and drape the pants and shirt over the backs of a couple of the black metal chairs that complete the little patio set Mandy was so intent on buying from Lowes. When the sun comes out, they’ll dry all stiff and crunchy, but they’ll be somewhat clean. There’s a little blood spatter on the front of the shirt. I have no clue where it’s from. It could be mine, or it could be someone else’s. It’s kind of amusing; there’s blood on my clothes and I don’t know – and don’t care – whose it is.

I look over into the yard and notice water pooling in the muddy depressions where my girls lie sleeping. I choke back a sob and for some reason I wonder if their fingers are moving and twitching under all that dirt and mud. I hope they aren’t.

There’s moaning from the street and I work my way slowly to the fence in time to see two Walkers and a cat shambling across the intersection towards the high school. One is a man and one looks like a teenage girl. She’s dressed in black boots and a mini skirt, and she has no top on. The man is also shirtless and has a huge chunk of flesh missing from his lower back, exposing the bright white of his ribs and spine. They’re moving away from the house. Good for them. Good for me.

Inside, I towel off and dress in another pair of jeans and another tee shirt. I’ve put off  fortifying the house properly for too many days. It’s time to get started.

In the basement, I pull sheets of plywood from the storage beneath the stairs. I wish like crazy I’d done this while there was power, but I didn’t. A little sweat equity won’t raise the property values, but I grab a hack saw off the tool rack and use my four foot level to pencil a straight line across the middle of one of the boards and start cutting. It takes for fucking ever. When I’m done, I have two relatively square four foot by four foot pieces of plywood. Rinse and repeat on the second sheet and I have enough boarding to cover the windows in the living room.

I’m a little bit proud of myself for fully charging not one but both battery packs for my cordless drill. Upstairs, I use decking screws to fix the panels over each of the windows. They don’t quite fit, so I center them vertically, leaving six or so inches open at the top and at the bottom. This is good, I tell myself; I’ll be able to see out of the bottom without whatever is trying to see through the plywood seeing me. Bliss.

Back in the basement, I round up an armload of four inch flowing boards and use them to cover the windows at the back of the house, learning from the last job and leaving a little bit of space open at the bottom. The screws are three inches long; the wood will break before the screws give way. I hope.

The sunroom presents a bit of a problem; it’s a fucking sunroom, meaning there are too many windows and not enough walls. It’s all inside the fence, so for now I’m not too concerned. If the Walkers start getting stronger and breaking shit down, then I’ll have a bit of a problem on my hands.

I get the idea to create myself an escape hatch from the basement. I suppose in the event the house is overrun by the walking dead I’ll need some way to get myself the hell out. There’s a large window that we hid behind a bookcase, and it sits about three feet below ground level. It was intended as a fire escape, so I figure it will work just as nicely as a safe route out of the house if I’m trying to keep myself from being eaten. I dig through my junk can; it’s not a junk can to me, but to most other people it’s just a collection of pack-ratted shit that I never saw fit to throw in the trash can. And a good thing, too, because I find two screen door hinges. After rigging together a door from more of the flooring panels, I screw the hinges in and then mount the trap door to the studding above the window. It swings easily, and I use a hook and eye clasp to fix it in place. It won’t hold well if I wind up with some steroid-using Walker kicking at it, but first he’d have to find the basement window. It’s surrounded by a half circle of aluminum with mounts of ivy growing over the top. I’ll be OK.

With the house secure, or at least as secure as I know how to make it, it’s time to work on securing me. I suppose if I’m going to be spending any time at all outside, I will need to have some protection from undead teeth and fingernails.

 I grab my ski jacket from the clothes rack in the closet and put it on. From the shelf above the washer, I pull down a new roll of duct tape and start wrapping it around and around the arms, making certain to leave gaps at the shoulders and elbows so I can retain at least some semblance of mobility. I look at myself in the mirror next to the dryer and I see a half-assed astronaut looking back at me, silver and orange and utterly fucking ridiculous. I’m not in it for the fashion. The duct tape will keep teeth from getting through the nylon and minus forty degree-rated filling.

I drag my old, worn Harley boots from one of the storage bins, glad I didn’t let Mandy sell them in last summer’s garage sale. I hate garage sales. Who other than a sadistic money-hungry miser could stand arguing over a fucking quarter for a torn paperback? And what kind of idiot would pay five bucks for a VHS copy of Titanic? Idiots. Idiots and Mexicans. The Mexicans will buy anything.

In another bin, I rummage until I find my elbow guards from my two week roller blading stint. I could roller blade with the best of them, but stopping was another story. A torn rotator cuff takes a lot of fun out of the sport. My bike helmet is in the bin, and I haul that out as well. I’ll look ridiculous, but I’ll be safe.

My upper body is pretty well covered, and I intend the pun. I start thinking about my legs; old Levis probably won’t make the cut. Another pun, and I chuckle to myself.  I don’t have anything for my legs, and for a minute or two I just stand there, imagining myself wearing hockey goalie pads. Idiot.

Well, shit.

I make the decision to scout next door for some shin guards. The Pinarskis’ kid played soccer in high school. It’s worth a shot, and what else have I got going today? I dress myself in battle gear and lumber up the basement stairs, through the kitchen into the garage. It’s musty and hot out here. Through the frosted glass windows, I can see there’s nothing in the driveway and no Walkers in the front yard. I grab a pry bar from the corner by the garage door and slip my hands into a pair or worn leather work gloves I’d left lying on the work bench. There are a couple packets of seeds there and it strikes me as pretty fucked up just how hard we’d worked in the yard, the flowers and the shrubs and the mulch and the cultured stone, and how none of it made one shred of difference now. Nobody gives a shit about their yards these days.

I check the drawer in the workbench for the key and make sure the door to the kitchen is locked. It is.

I press the button on the door and nothing happens. I punch it again and remember the power is out, so I grab the pull cord and release the latch and lift the door by hand. It’s quiet and smooth and I wonder to myself why the hell it’s so fucking loud when it’s pulled up by electricity. I lift the door to halfway and crouch down as I pass out into the open air.It’s still cloudy, but the rain has stopped. It’s humid and I’m already getting hot in my undead-killer outfit.

There are no people outside, and it’s quiet except for the birds. The birds never seem to shut up.

I make my way across the street and cross the sidewalk towards the Pinarski’s place. There are two blackened smudges in the front lawn and I try hard not to look for pieces of bone and clothing, but I can’t help it. They’re there, little blackened hunks of, well, people, scattered in the grass. The lawn is getting tall again.

The front door is unlocked and I slip into the house. There are muddy footprints tracked across the carpet and little cakes of dirt leading down the hallway into the kitchen. I follow them, and find the cabinets thrown open and spice bottles and packets of instant gravy strewn over the tiles on the floor. A box of rice that must have been dropped sits on its side on the counter, little maggoty white flecks scattered in a two foot wide swath. Sanjay has been here, that fuck. Anybody else would have had the common sense to save the goddamned rice. The rest of the cupboards are pretty much bare, some flour and sugar and a few boxes of pasta. I slip off my gloves and scoop as much of the rice as I can gather back into the box, and gather up the flour and sugar and boxes of macaroni. I love pasta. I load up my arms and carry the food to the front door, pile it neatly on the floor and head up the stairs.

Ricky Pinarski’s room is at the top of the stairs on the left. It’s empty and dark, the curtains drawn up tightly. Ricky is away at college in Indiana on a baseball scholarship. His room is a typical teenaged boy’s room, posters of Metallica and Green Day tacked to the walls and shelves covered with baseball and soccer trophies above a small, neat desk. In the closet, I dig through piles of clothing and enough sneakers to fill a shoe store until I find a green and gold duffel bag with the high school logo on it. Gators. Inside, I find a gold mine; soccer cleats, shin guards (jackpot), a small baggie of weed (another jackpot) and a stash of Hustlers. The crumpled jock strap and cup can stay; I leave the rest in the duffel and head back downstairs, load the food into the bag and close the door behind me, but not before grabbing a set of keys from the little hook on the wall and locking the place up.

I look left, and then right. Nothing. With the duffel over my shoulder, I take my time crossing the street and crouch under the door. The garage is clean, just the cars and tools and all the stuff I won’t likely need again in the near future. Or maybe at all, ever.

With the garage door silently down and locked with the slide bolt, I’m at least somewhat safely sealed off from the decomposing outside world.   I tug off my gear and unload the duffel, replacing the food and weed and Hustlers with my duct taped jacket, gloves, helmet and the shin guards. The food belongs in the cabinets, not on the counter, I remember Mandy telling me, so I carefully stock away the pasta, the used up rice and the bags of flour and sugar.

The bag of weed is staring at me from the island in the middle of the kitchen. I stare back. There’s a little magnetic note pad stuck to the side of the refrigerator, and I tear off half a sheet os paper and sprinkle some of the pot into the center, carefully rolling a joint. It’s not thin like good rolling paper, but it works. I find myself smiling at how easily the muscle memory returns, my fingers twirling the joint at each end until it’s tight. There are some matches in the spice cupboard, and I light up and inhale deeply, immediately coughing my lungs out. It makes my nose hurt like hell, but the coughing stops and I pull another drag from the joint and hold it for a ten count before letting an impossibly huge plume of smoke escape from my lips. Two more, and my head is light and I’m seeing little specs of light dancing in front of my eyes. I lick my fingers and pinch out the joint.

Oh, look. Somebody brought Hustlers.