Free Loose Ends: A Zombie Novel by Jay Wilburn Page B

people had moved out and the dead had moved into the neighborhoods. We found what we could and stayed inside at night until we got to the park and the deadly standoff.
    We also took three hour shifts through the night standing guard while the others slept or tried to sleep. Each of us had an off night every fourth night. That was the plan anyway. We usually had two or more people up at a time and got less than six hours sleep a night. We napped during the day after a mid day meal with someone sitting up on guard in the truck.
    We tried to find houses with working fireplaces or patios where we could cook dinner before sundown. The problem was that houses with chimneys tended to start rotting around the flashing as the tar or glues began to give way and allowed rain to seep under the shingles. If there was a hole in the roof, the walls and floors were done. Most buildings were like walking on wet cardboard inside and it was almost worse than just being outside in the woods.
    Almost worse.
    Walking into the dark ruins I always tried to turn on a light switch out of reflex. I was used to generator power in the buildings at the Complex. The others had the opposite problem. They had walked through the Complex forgetting that the light switches worked from all their years of being outside without power.
    Short Order would joke with me about it. He would walk through the other rooms of our abandoned houses pretending to try every switch.
    He would say, “Hey, maybe this one. No, I guess this bulb needs changing too, Mutt. Could you check the junk draw, please, for a 60-watt soft light, so I can read?”
    Sometimes our feet went right through the rotten floor boards and we just hoped there were no zombies in the crawl spaces. Sometimes the zombies were in closets or hanging from ropes by their necks where people tried to kill themselves after being bitten. People hanged themselves in garages and closets a lot. Sometimes a room of the house was full of them and we had to back out slowly or sometimes quickly.
    We made due with whatever we could find.
    In a day, we would cover between ten and twenty-five miles typically. We stopped in the middle of the day to rest. We started looking for a place to stop for the night about mid afternoon not terribly long after we left our lunch site. We had to start looking early so that we had time to find something. We could stop for lunch anywhere, but we needed somewhere secure, secluded, and sight-lined for evening, night, and morning. We had to stop in time to finish cooking before dark so we could black out in hopes that our smoke during the day wasn’t enough to attract trouble. If zombies sniffed us out from inside, we needed to be able to get to the truck quickly. We needed more than one viable exit route.
    We avoided using guns except in dire escapes or afternoon hunting. We could shoot an animal, load it up quickly, and drive away before the zombies honed in on our location. This worked well until the day we killed the deer. We could drive far enough away to avoid the trouble we had caused. Then, we could cut and prep the meat at our evening stop for whoever was cooking. We didn’t always catch something and if it was big like a deer, we usually couldn’t eat it all for dinner and breakfast. Some was wasted, but we weren’t answering to anyone and it saved our supplies.
    It did bother the chefs. They didn’t like to waste food. They also felt like they were disrespecting the life of the animal. Since they didn’t believe in God, I’m not sure about who they were worried. If we didn’t kill it, the zombies would eventually.
    Most structures were not built with all these needs in mind. Most structures had not survived the abandonment of the living for all these years. It was tough to stay in badly preserved shelter until morning light and it was tough to leave a precious find while eating a leisurely breakfast in comfort. We managed both as we moved mostly north through the ruins of the