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

deer
will feed us. We should take one if we can.”
    “You know how I just love to get up that early.”
    “You like to eat, right?”
    “OK – we’ll do it but only if there aren’t any
walkers around.”
    “Duh!”
    Assuming no unwanted pedestrians tonight, we
agreed we’d be ready to hunt tomorrow morning.
    I told Ruth Ann about hearing a signal on an FRS
band last night. She perked up.
    “We don’t have any kind of transmitter do we?”
    “No. I ordered FRS radios from Amazon for that
last delivery. They didn’t make it. So, right, we have no way of initiating
contact with anybody.”
    Some days back I had connected up one of the
Raspberry Pi’s to function as a local email server. We used the WIFI portion of
our phones to buzz each other via email. That would do us little good trying to
reach out to anyone else.
    “We need some radios,” she said.
    “When do you think we should do it?”
    “Do what?”
    “Go to the building supply warehouse. They’ll
have that there and more.”
    “Yeah, and how many zombies? They were right
outside the house Doug. We’re not exactly a SWAT team that can go into a dark
warehouse complex and come out alive. Put radios down on the “wants” list.”
    I did not dare mention that it was her idea to
seek out radios in the first place.
    Our list of “wants” wasn’t terribly long but it
wasn’t empty either. Fortunately, the list of “needs” remained blank for now.
That’ll change, I thought to myself. I’d put coffee on the “needs” list or even
on a “must have” list if we had one. As it was, Ruth Ann rolled her eyes at me
when I put coffee on the “wants” list.
    “I want more arrows,” Ruth Ann said while
looking at nothing in particular. “If the dead are close enough for a bow shot,
we might be in bad shape if we fire a gun.”
    “I bought four boxes of them. They came in that
last UPS truck.”
    “You bought the small boxes, six to a box. Plus
I don’t have as many broad heads as I’d like. You didn’t buy any of those.”
    “Who would have thought you could buy an arrow
that didn’t come with an arrow head?” I said defensively. “Flynn up the street
bow hunted. They’re long gone. I don’t think they’ll mind if we “borrowed” some.”
    Flynn’s house is the one north of the Boetche’s.
By now I was completely untroubled by any notion of a double standard. We had
killed looters. Now borrowing a few things from absent neighbors seemed quite
reasonable.
    “Given how useful a bow is, don’t you think he
would have taken his?”
    “No, they packed a few suitcases and got out on
the first day of evacuations. Their kid needs medication. They weren’t going to
rough it.”
    We decided a trip to Flynn’s house would be in
order.
    I brought up what I was thinking about the night
before. We could use our neighbors’ empty homes to extend our own safety.
    “Let’s try nailing one of those spare IR
emitters up on Boetche’s roof as a start. The infrared lights on our cameras
don’t reach too far. If we place an IR light source on their roof, we will be
able to see all the way to their house. Their south side faces us so that
little solar phone charger I bought last year can trickle charge batteries
during the day and it’ll shine all night.”
    “You can leave that sort of thing outside?”
    “I have no idea. Can you spare a Tupperware
container?”
    “No… you can have a Rubbermaid”
    I explained to Ruth Ann the holes I needed to
get current from the little solar panel to a battery pack and out again to feed
the IR emitter. We used some silicone caulk to seal the holes.
    Before we headed out to the Flynn’s, Ruth Ann
went up to the roof to tend the garden. I topped off the water vessels in the
house by running the pump. It didn’t take very long to refill the bathtubs (one
for gardening water, the other for a sequence of washing us, cleaning and a
final reuse for flushing) and one of our collapsible five gallon