That was news to me. “You called?”
“Yeah I didn’t think I got through, I must have tried a couple of hundred times. I was on my last bar of battery when it finally rang on your side.”
“When?!” I asked incredulously.
“Damn, must have been yesterday morning,” he answered.
“When I went to the armory,” I finished more to myself than him.
“When…when I saw the boys across the street I thought the cavalry had shown up. When I realized you weren’t with them I wanted them to leave, I really did. But I also wanted to live. I wanted to be able to protect Erin. You know how that is, right? Trying to protect a loved one I mean,” he said as he looked up at me from his beer.
I nodded in agreement. I know that feeling all too well, and I also knew how it felt to feel as if you had failed. I couldn’t blame my friend for wanting to get help. I was pissed my kids thought it would be a good idea to go and get him though. He stood up and swayed back a bit. He was looking for a hug, which I was all too willing to give. I told him I loved him and that he should go sleep it off, not so much because he was drunk but because I wanted him to stop drinking my damn beers. Paul felt absolved as he stumbled to the couch. A small smile spread across his lips as he pulled the blanket up to his chin and fell into a relaxed sleep uninterrupted by the interminable pounding of dead flesh against his abode.
I finished my beer and another three as I pondered what would happen when the zombies did break through our defenses. That they would break through was never in doubt as far as I was concerned. How I was going to be prepared for it was another matter. I had no desire to be trapped in my unfinished attic waiting to starve or freeze to death while a bunch of pus-mongers roamed freely through my house. I had a couple of ideas I wanted to immediately implement but the loud boisterous snoring of Henry reminded me that perhaps now wasn’t the time to be doing home alterations. There was one thing I could do though as I went back upstairs and grabbed my jacket, flashlight, crowbar and rifle. It was kind of nice falling asleep fully dressed, it made getting ready a lot quicker proposition. The cold nearly snapped me out of my mild inebriation. What it actually did though was a much more pleasant sensation of awakening me fully while letting me keep my burgeoning buzz. Maybe there was an angle I could exploit here if the world ever returned to normal. “Drink Arctic Blast Beer, Be Fully Awake When You Say Something Inappropriate!” I could have a guy give a wide-eyed thumbs up as he grins to the camera after having received a slap from an attractive young lady. “Arctic Blast – When You Need To Know When You’ve Said Something Stupid! Remember Every Offending Remark! Every Hilarious Antic! Every I Love You Man!”
So, maybe the world wasn’t ready for Arctic Blast Beer, a cold detonation with every twist top!
CHAPTER 17
Journal Entry - 15
I knew where I wanted to go, I just didn’t know if it’d be worth it. It seemed like a considerable amount of preparation to walk a measly fifteen feet. Almost directly straight out from my front door in the middle of my lawn was a storm drain, I know what you’re thinking, oh how convenient! Well it wasn’t when I was throwing the football around with my boys, I had once had to go to my doctor because I had hyper-extended my knee on the damn thing. Who puts a storm drain on a lawn? I had never opened it or seen it opened in the time that I lived here. After some serious prying I was finally able to force the frost to yield its prize. The cover came up with a loud bang. I had a momentary glimmer of guilt and even stopped to look around and see if anyone had noticed my transgression. There would be no 9-1-1 call tonight. The top thudded to the side, the sound deadened by the frost in the air. I took out my flashlight and shone around in the hole for all the good it was going to do. If I had looked closer on the day that I tripped I would have realized it wasn’t a storm drain, I guess I just always assumed, but we know about that idiom. It was an electrical conduit. That made much more sense being in the front lawn. The problem was that it was no more than twenty-four inches around and most of that space was taken up with, wait for it, wait…yup, you guessed it, electrical cabling. All right, so much for exit strategy Plan A. The more I looked down that hole the more trapped I felt. We weren’t so much holding the zombies out as we were keeping ourselves in. Hell, we were like cattle all penned up awaiting our slaughter. I could not escape the truth of that phrase.
If I had not let the stupid higher reasoning overrule my gut feelings I would have packed everyone up and left that night. Oh how I wish that was how it had played out.
I went back into the house, grabbed another beer and sat with Paul in the living room. He didn’t say much as he was still asleep. I sat in the dark. I was in a brooding mood. Complacency meant death. My mind was feverishly coming up with and summarily dismissing possible escape plans. I had some viable ideas for defense and I would employ those later in the morning, but I could not for the life of me come up with a foolproof plan for evacuation WHEN the time came.
Tracy awoke me some hours later. I had fallen asleep in the chair still clutching my half drunken beer. I hadn’t spilled any but I still hadn’t finished it and with the thing now being body temperature warm and my mouth tasting like burnt cheese, that wasn’t going to happen, party foul be damned!
Paul was in the kitchen getting a glass of water as I walked in and dumped the remains of my beer into the sink.
“I see nothing’s changed since college,” Paul said with a small laugh.
I wasn’t awake enough to catch the barb.
Paul moved on. “So what’s the plan for today?” he asked.
“Ass,” I said to him. I had finally caught his meaning.
Now it was his turn to be lost. “Don’t get me wrong buddy, I’m always up for a good time, but I’m not sure this is the right time,” he answered.
At first I didn’t garner his meaning. It was going to be a long day if we were always one sentence apart in our communications. I stopped for a second and thought about restarting the whole conversation. It just didn’t seem like the prudent thing to do. I started on a whole new subject instead.
“Well, Alex is going to be using about every able bodied person he can find to begin setting up defenses.”
Paul looked perplexed, so I explained everything that had happened the previous day with the assembly of zombies.
Paul didn’t look overly concerned but he was a master of disguising his true feelings. That’s why I never played poker with him. I had every intention of bringing Paul, the boys and myself to go help Alex, but first I was going to need a few hours to take care of some things at the house. My wife blanched at a few of my suggestions and made me alter a few of the more, well ‘altering’ ideas. First things first, I had Travis go scrounge me up a couple of ladders. I would have sent Justin too, except that he was still extremely weak from his ordeal. I needed a couple of ladders, lightweight and strong. Two of the longest that he could find should suit my purposes just fine. I grabbed some food supplies and extra water and placed them in my Jeep. I then got Brendon to follow me in his truck outside the complex. When we came back ten minutes later on foot, the guard looked like he wanted to ask us what we were doing, but he just shook his head and let us in. The next thing I did couldn’t have been a bigger waste of a half hour of my life unless I had watched What Not To Wear on HGTV. I reinforced the gate in my backyard to the point where a charging rhino couldn’t have busted through. I didn’t nearly get the return on investment that I had hoped for. I’d like to think that I noticed a hole in my defenses but at this point I was much too busy patting myself on the back.
The next thing I did had my wife ranting throughout the house that I had completely lost my mind. I don’t know, I thought it was one of the coolest ideas I had come up with. I was under the complete false sense of security that my house was now impregnable. Yeah right, but that is the ultimate beauty of being paranoid, I mean prepared, there’s always something more you can do. Tracy was pissed that I was about to devalue our
home. I honestly couldn’t understand where she was coming from. First off I didn’t think we would be retiring here and second, REALLY? Resale value? Who’s gonna buy? I don’t think there is a zombie family down the street looking for an extra bedroom. I could be wrong, as I usually am with Tracy, but I didn’t think so. So I went ahead with my plan and in the midst of it I think Tracy went to the clubhouse to see if there was any rum for her coke.
I went halfway down the basement steps and looking up, I cut away most of the drywall above my head exposing the stairs that led to the second story. I then went back up the basement stairs and then onto the second floor risers. I cut away the carpet and pad. (It was old anyway, at least that’s what I told Tracy as I tried to calm her.) With a five-pound hammer and crowbar I removed four treads and four risers effectively leaving a four-foot by three-foot wide gaping wound in the middle of the stairs. All the noise had brought Nicole out from her shower prematurely. Her face had a look of bewilderment on it as she looked down at me and then at what remained of the stairs.
“Does Mom know?” She asked with concern in her eyes. “You know she’s going to kill you?” she answered when I didn’t respond immediately.
Nicole was privy to some of my more insane (or inane) ideas. Mostly her mom was able to get me to rein in the horses before they roamed too far away from the stable but not always. There was that one time in Canada when the Royal Mounted Police were involved. It almost became an international incident, but that’s ancient history, I was never charged.
“I know what I’m doing,” I answered huffily, a little ticked that she had the audacity to rain on my parade.
Now that I looked at my handiwork, I realized that I did sort of forget that this was still a functioning household. I couldn’t expect everyone to have to jump over this gap. If someone woke in the middle of the night and forgot, they’d find themselves in the basement in a heartbeat. I went and snagged my circular saw and proceeded to flatten out the stringers. Those are the supports that hold the tread and the risers. They go up and across in the same fashion as the stairs. They are basically the frame and the stairs are the shelving. So I just took the saw and cut off four triangles on each side, effectively making the stringers flat. The next thing I needed I didn’t have. I sent Travis out on his second scavenging trip. I hoped to hell Tracy was having a difficult time finding some rum, if she came home now with this giant perforation on her stairs my only hope was going to be getting on the other side of the hole and hoping she wouldn’t be able to bridge the gap. Thank God the boy beat his mother home. I would have taken him for ice cream if I had the time and there was any ice cream anywhere. He didn’t find exactly what I requested but under such a short gun, beggars couldn’t be choosers. What he brought was a piece of countertop from one of the abandoned units. It was about 6 feet by 2-1/2 feet. I trimmed a foot off the bottom, then turned it over so the Formica top was now on the bottom. Then I attached four 2-1/2 inch lengths of 2 inch by 2 inch wood slats onto the counter bottom so there would be some sort of foothold. Obviously this would never pass a home inspection but I honestly didn’t think that was my biggest concern.
To finish off my wonderful contraption I anchored two large eyehooks on either side of the end of the countertop that would be facing the top of the stairs. I then anchored two equally large eyehooks at the top of the stairs, one as close to the wall as possible and the other as close to the railing as possible. The next thing was to tie it off. I needed to run rope from the ‘new’ stairs to the eye hooks at the top. I would like to say I knew how to tie these fancy quick release knots that would take a mere snap of the fingers to release but that wasn’t the case. After my fourth granny knot on each side I figured prudence was the best course of action for the day. I got my fifth and last eyehook and made sure that I found a stud in the wall as I anchored it. I then took a length of rope and tied a utility knife to the eyehook. So if needed, one would only need to get the knife and cut both ends of the rope releasing the ‘faux’ stairs. Now that I was almost done there was only one thing left to do, try the stairs. The stairs seemed a lot sturdier ‘in theory.’
“Hey Trav!” I yelled.
Travis came up from the basement where he and Tommy had been wrestling with Henry, who had gotten a whiff of Tommy’s secret stash of Pop-Tarts and was hell-bent on getting away with his prize.
“Yeah Dad?” Travis asked as he appeared at the bottom of the stairs.
He’s young, if anything happens he’d heal faster. “Aw shit.” I mumbled to myself. Guilt got the better of me. “I want you to stand there and get help if anything happens to me.”
Travis looked at me like I was nuts until I pointed at my makeshift stair sled. This wouldn’t be the first emergency room visit Travis had to make with his father. Travis even had the presence of mind to step off the landing and into the foyer in case I went tobogganing. I white-knuckled the handrail as I placed my first foot down on the makeshift tread. Not so bad, it was when I placed my second foot onto the ‘stairs’ that the swaying began. With the combination of being secured only by rope, and three inches of play on each side, I had successfully made the first in-home carnival ride. Travis laughed as my face turned the same shade as my knuckles. This was going to take some serious getting used to. Nicole had come to the top of the stairs just in time to view the festivities.
“Do you remember Canada?” she asked straight-faced, and again turned her back to finish whatever she had been doing. Her point was made. Tracy hadn’t talked to me for over a month after that, this might even rival that momentous mark. As I reached the bottom rung of my contraption it slid over to the right. I had a death grip on the handrail, to the right I had a six-inch wide clear as day view of the basement stairs and they loomed ominously from this vantage point. This wasn’t going to work. If someone had to walk up or down the stairs carrying anything that required the use of one hand this stairway was going to become a major spillway. I thought long and hard as I pondered my fall below, should I just put the thing back together? At that point I just might have. The problem, however, was that I had cut the stringer and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out a way to put that back together again, at least not correctly. Humpty-Dumpty had nothing on me. There had to be a way to stabilize this moving nightmare. The whole point of this trapdoor was that it was a quick release mechanism. I designed it (Okay so ‘design’ might be a little strong) to keep unfriendlies downstairs if the need ever arose. This was not going to be worth it though if everybody alive was nursing broken bones.
I ended up attaching wood to both sides and after some serious pep talking to myself I braved another walk on the wild slide. Most of the play was gone so the swaying was kept to a minimum. At one point I even let go of the handrail; I was feeling a little saucy. Still, I didn’t want anybody on this thing unless they were completely aware of their surroundings. My next bold move was to place duct tape over both light switches, the one at the foot and the head of the stairs, to keep them on twenty-four seven. This also wasn’t going to win me any brownie points with the wife but at least I’d be able to see her coming when she went to push me down the stairs. I got Travis and quickly departed the scene of my crime. It would be for the best if I wasn’t there when Tracy decided to kill me.
Work around the wall was frenetic to say the least. Whatever Jed and Alex had told the workforce to incite them had done its job all too well. Alex had decided that it would be wise to begin the project on the shorter gate sides. His reasoning being that the zombies would look for the natural openings. He had split up his workforce into two equal parts and sent them on their tasks. He was constantly driving from end to end to supervise the progress. The idea was simple enough to implement and ingenious in its design. The problem was materials. Ideally 1 inch thick metal plating (roughly 4 feet by 8 feet) attached to the wall, braced with train track thick metal support beams welded to another footer plate with 1 foot spikes driven into the ground was the optimum set up. The strengthening pyl
ons were spaced 8 feet apart from each other. Alex had only enough of the metal plating and supports to alternate with the less strong wooden supports and only on the sides with the gates. The long walls that were on the west and east sides were all going to be supported by 1 inch thick plywood and 4 by 4’s, still a formidable defense but not nearly as imposing looking as its metal cousins. Propping the RV was proving difficult; if even a modicum of pressure was applied the roof began to buckle. This troubled Alex but with time short and work to be done, this was a problem he would have to work out later.