Free Get Off My L@wn - A Zombie Novel by Perry Kivolowitz

want that arrow back. We don’t have that many.”
    Before I could say anything she turned to me.
    “There wasn’t supposed to be anything in the
grass, Doug. You said the trails went all the way through.” Ruth Ann drilled
her eyes into mine, they were puffy but I hadn’t seen her cry.
    “I know. I’m sorry. I played back all of last
night. After we fell asleep one went in right behind another. The second one
tripped on something, I saw it go down. The one in front continued on out of
the grass making the trail look all the way through.”
    “When we were in the car I didn’t look at them,
I concentrated on staying moving and staying on the road. Today, today was
different. There was no color in its skin. Their eyes are filmy like they had
cataracts. There’s no soul inside Doug. There’s no person in there. They… They’re
monsters. They really are… monsters.”
    “It’s OK honey. We’ll be OK.”
    “Doug?”
    Our faces were inches from each other’s, I
nodded.
    “You have to learn to shoot better. You have to
be able to cover me with more than a tablet.”
    “Yes dear.”

 
    R uth Ann took some antihistamines to help her
sleep. She went to the living room to the couches. We didn’t want to be too far
away from each other. We believed our house to be a fortress, but it didn’t
matter. We needed to stay close to each other tonight.
    I sat in the kitchen, angry that I had let Ruth
Ann wander into a potentially lethal situation practically in our own front
yard. I grabbed a pencil and pad and started thinking about what stuff I had
and how I could apply it.
    It occurred to me that, like it or not, our home
is situated in a battlefield. While we had more surveillance capability than
most homes, we needed to be able to see further out at night. It also occurred
to me that there were no neighbors to complain and nobody to complain to if we
started shaping the battlefield more in our favor.
    Hell, if we could loot our neighbor’s homes – I
mean borrow from our neighbors, why couldn’t we use their homes to help keep us
safe?
    Just before midnight, the police scanner stopped
on an FRS channel and burped out some static. FRS is the Family Radio Service.
These little, often cheap, handheld radios used to be available everywhere. The
police scanner covers a lot of bands and stops only when it gets a strong
enough signal. Unfortunately, that could be anywhere in a transmission,
including its end.
    The scanner is programmed to dwell on a
frequency for a few seconds when it finds a signal on the assumption that
someone would quickly respond. Someone did. I heard a crackly “OK” and then
another burp of static. I turned off the scanning feature and stayed on this
one FRS frequency but I heard nothing else until I went to bed.
    Somewhere within a small number of miles of
here, at least two people were alive. Since I heard nothing else for as long as
I listened, I assume they were passing through. Still, it was nice to know we
weren’t alone for a few minutes at least.

 
    O n Saturday (Day 31), Ruth Ann was up before me
as usual. The events of yesterday seemed forgotten. The last of our coffee sat
waiting for me on the table. As I reached for it, I reflected for a moment
about how I was sad to see the coffee run out. I knew that millions maybe
billions had already died and would continue to die of hunger, thirst disease,
and the undead.
    I wondered how a person could be empathic on a
conceptual level and entirely self-absorbed about what’s right in front them. I
know I’m not the first to observe this. Didn’t Stalin say “One death is a
tragedy; one million is a statistic”? I wonder what Uncle Joe would say about billions.
    “I saw deer wandering through at sunup,” she
said.
    “Really? Turkeys the other night and deer this
morning? Yet we didn’t see any livestock when we went to town. I wonder which
it is, do the dead eat animals or not?”
    “I don’t know but I do know how long one