“Did we not walk this section?” Chef asked as he held on to the hammer instead of putting it back in the tool box.
Short Order answered, “I took down Jeff myself when we cleared this section. We came through here and pushed these doors to check them before we went upstairs and found him.”
“It must have been weakened and they got through sometime later,” Doc said.
“No one is doing the perimeter checks anymore,” Short Order pointed out.
Everyone stood and stared at each other for a while longer.
We searched the buildings over again and didn’t find any more open doors or walking corpses. We pushed on the exterior doors extra hard this time. We skipped lunch. There were plenty of the regular, lying-in-their-own-blood-on-the-floor kind of bodies. Many were our people lying fresh and slowly becoming less fresh. Many others were long decayed, weathered, hardened, and malignantly preserved shells that had found their way in from the elements.
We showered before dinner and then searched the buildings again before bedtime. I slept in my own room that night, but locked the door and dragged my dresser in front of it. It left deep scratches across my floor. The drawers were filled with stuff I never wore, but had kept anyway. I thought about clearing some of it out, but realized that would make the dresser lighter.
***
The next morning we made pancakes after each smelling the milk and deciding to go for it. Chef was the most sensitive to turning foods, but he was choking back his usual preferences.
We heard a noise. It was in the mess hall. Doc walked the zombie back out of the room with the end of his pole and sent it down the stairs without the top of its skull. It was one of the old, outside shells, but it left a good bit of dark fluid along the stairs as it tumbled down.
Doc scrubbed down his hands again before he joined us. He ran his wet fingers through his hair smoothing it back flat in place as he sat down.
We ate our pancakes and then spent two hours emptying the dead freezers and refrigerators of all the spoiling food. We were going to have to do the same with the pantry soon.
We spent that day and the next walking the buildings, but we didn’t find any more walking bodies or open, exterior doors. The ones still lying around were starting to stink in the closed halls and rooms.
“It’s too big,” Chef said at the end of the second day. “We can’t clear the whole place and keep the entire Complex secure. We’ll have to lock down one area.”
“Building 3 makes the most sense,” Short Order said.
Building three had the kitchen and our rooms. It also had a garage. There were two passages that connected out to the other sides of the Complex. We could block those off and that’s what we did the next day. It took most of the day and we were exhausted. We just heated up a few vegetables from cans and added salt. We weren’t the cooks anymore; we were just feeding ourselves.
I moved my stuff into one on the panic rooms permanently. I left most of what was in my dresser in my old room and never went back for it.
Doc finally tapped me on the shoulder before our canned dinner that day. He was holding a folded sheet of plastic. He pointed to the back hall. I sighed and we put on the long, rubber gloves before we went. The putrid gasses escaped as we shifted it up onto the sheet. Its flesh tore open into large gashes as we settled it back down. Bits of organ and green bile spilled out as it shifted to the side, but it was caught by the plastic. The creature’s teeth were bared behind curled, retracted lips.
It was tough maneuvering the narrow space without stepping in the broad pool of black blood. It made no sense to me that this stuff was still wet after being in this dead body possibly for years. Every zombie could be a new surprise.
We folded the plastic over and Doc applied the duct tape like he was performing a task as ordinary as brushing his own teeth. We hauled the load easily enough through the back hall and out one of the windows.
The hard part was scrubbing up the spill from the pool in the floor. There were foot prints leading out from it. I hoped it was one of the cooks and I hoped they were cleaning their shoes.
I didn’t eat much for dinner that night.
“We need to do the funerals soon, if we plan to do them at all,” Short Order said.
“I vote we don’t,” Doc said flatly.
Chef took a deep breath and said, “We need to. They were our people.”
“They are still in the halls of the other buildings, if you want to see them,” Doc said.
“Come on, John, we’re doing our best here,” Short Order snapped.
Doc made a zipping motion across his lips. The other two looked at each other and shook their heads.
Chef said, “We’ll say a few words on the roof tomorrow morning and put them all to rest.”
Doc pursed his lips, but didn’t say anything.
“Then, what?” Short Order asked.
Doc laughed. “Then what, what?”
Short began cracking his knuckles. Doc looked at Chef who shrugged. They didn’t say anything.
Short Order explained, “What do we do next? There are animals out in the fenced pastures. The chicken coops haven’t been tended.”
“Oh, damn it,” Chef said.
“They are probably dead by now and stink worse than the zombies,” Doc said. “Not for nothing, but the bodies in the other buildings aren’t going to hold their stink behind those half-assed barriers we built and the ones lying around outside aren’t going to walk away either … at least not anymore, no offense.”
“If the chickens aren’t dead yet, we’ll need to keep making feed,” Chef said.
“Can we keep up all the animals?” Short Order asked.
Doc said, “Then, there are the orchards and other crops. No one has watered the green houses either. They are probably full of wilted plants by now.”
“No,” Chef said, “there would be a terrarium effect going on for a while, but they’ll need to be tended soon. Man, we walked right past them dumping bodies and didn’t even think about them.”
“What do we do first?” Short Order asked.
Doc said, “We can’t keep up everything. The fuel operations kept the generators going. Do we want power and refrigeration back? I miss it.”
“Food has to be a priority,” Chef said. “We should check on the animals first.”
“Water is kind of important too,” Doc said.
“We haven’t used up much with just the four of us showering,” Short Order said.
Doc said, “The tanks and wells have to be tended. We may have to give up hauling it to the roof for heated showers and just focus on drinking water and cleaning. It may be whores’ baths from here on out.”
“We’ll start with checking on the animals and the water supply in the morning. If time permits, we’ll check the greenhouses after that. We’ll make a decision about what we save and what we let go,” Chef decided.
“Instead of the funeral or after it?” Doc asked.
No one spoke for a while.
Chef said, “We’ll say a few things on the roof after a dry breakfast and then we’ll deal with food and water.”
“Are we burning the bodies, or letting them rot?” Doc asked.
They are too close to the buildings, I thought.
I also started to wonder if there was anything in the other buildings that might prove to be a fire hazard. I didn’t know where to begin.
“We’ll discuss what’s next after we deal with food and water,” Chef said.
“God, I’m going to miss eggs, if the chickens are dead,” Short Order said.
“We still have canned food, if everything is lost,” Doc said, “And the preserves.”
“We should get the weapons out of the other buildings too,” Short Order said.
Chef nodded, “Funeral, food, and water tomorrow. We’ll prioritize the rest after that.”
We all moved into the panic room together the night before the funeral.
***
The next day we choked down oatmeal and went to the roof. Everyone looked at Chef and he looked down from their gaze.
Doc finally said, “Do we want to count this as a moment of silence? I mean the part before I started talking, that is.”
“No, we should say something,” Chef said.
There was another awkward moment of silence. Finally, Chef cleared his throat.
He said, “Oh, hell, there were so many people in this place that were so much better at this than we are. We just cooked the food. They hunted it, raised it, and did everything else that held this place together. Now they’re … all gone.”
There was more silence.
Chef spoke again, “God, I’m tired of saying goodbye to people without really saying goodbye.”
“You don’t have to try to make it right,” Short Order said. “What you’ve said is good enough of a goodbye for now.”
“Until when?” Chef asked.
“Until we’ve had time to grieve,” Doc said awkwardly.
“We don’t grieve,” Chef said. “We never have. We hint at the hell we all went through before we got here, but then we get busy with cooking. We cooked the night everyone died. No, that’s not right. We hid in closets for a couple days after everyone died or was taken and then we came out and cooked fancy dinners for ourselves.”
I looked down and started moving the gravel on the roof with my toe. I wondered why they put gravel on the roof.
Doc said, “There’s nothing good down this train of thought. Do we want to break down and start dying of survivor’s guilt when we need to be getting our shit together in a serious way?”
“We’ve been through this before and we made the decision to survive. That’s how we all made it here, Chef,” Short Order said.
“Did we really decide it or did we just keep doing it, Shaw?” Chef asked.
Doc answered, “David, you can tear yourself up into a million little pieces of regret, but then we still have to get on to work today, so let’s get on with it. This is most of the reason I didn’t want to do this in the first place.”
“You don’t regret anything that happened to get you here to this point?” Chef asked.
“Do I have to listen to this shit from you now too?” Doc asked. “All due respect to the living, the dead, and the undead that were our friends, I’m tired of this. I had to listen to lectures from people that got into this Complex early on when you, me, and Short … and Mutt too for that matter were crawling the streets throwing in with all kinds of hell and evil bastards just to survive and get a scrap. I don’t need to feel guilty and full of loss to make that right. I knew what we had here without those self-righteous blowhards shoving it down my throat every time I breathed wrong. Was I supposed to wring my hands with sorrow three times a day to show how thankful I was that they let me have a pot to piss in without having to kill someone to do it? Don’t morph into one of them. I appreciate the magnitude of our losses here without tying them around my neck and casting myself into the sea with them. We needed a lot of things from them, but we don’t need another emotion police officer. Surviving in this world comes with a preset of loss and regret.”
“All these loose ends,” Short Order said.
Doc turned toward him, “What’s that?”
Chef answered, “That was on the jackets of those raiders … or something like it.”
There was another long silence. Doc looked out over the edge of the building at the bodies below and ran his hands through his hair.
Chef said, “Well, we said a mouthful. Let’s go check on the chickens.”
I started to walk.
Short Order said, “I don’t want to do this.”
Everyone stopped and looked back. He was still standing where he had been for the funeral near the edge of the roof. I thought he was going to jump.
“What do you want to do?” Doc asked.
“Not this,” Short said turning away toward the barren buildings beyond the Complex.
There were walkers wandering through the spaces in the streets below us. There always were. They were still active from all the commotion during and after the attacks. I tried not to look because I was sure some of our people were among them now.
“If you need some time, we can … I don’t know. Take some time with it, Shaw,” Chef said.
“We’ve had years and it hasn’t been enough,” Short Order said.
Doc cleared his throat, “Listen, Short, we got a little worked up here. Chef and I are fine. This was a tough one, but we will make things better than they are now. We’ll get by soon enough. You’ll see.”
Short Order turned back and said, “We’ll always get by until we don’t. I’m talking about hiding inside and … just surviving and pretending.”
Doc said, “Well, we’re about to get in a truck and ride out to the animals, so we’re not going to be hiding soon.”
“Do you really care about the chickens, Doc? Do we care about raising cattle to have a couple steaks every once and a while?” Short Order said.
“What are you getting at, Shaw?” Chef asked.
“Let’s just go,” Short Order said.
“Go where?” Doc asked.
“Go find somewhere else. We found here. There has to be other places like this that are still alive. We can find them and put in with them. We can help make sure they learn from these mistakes before the raiders come for them,” Short Order said. “If we can’t find anything, we can always come back here instead.”
“There are also some pretty shitty places out there too … not to mention about a hundred million zombies, give or take. Probably give now that I think about it,” Doc said.
“Doc,” Short Order’s teeth were gritted as he spoke without looking at us.
I was afraid.
Short continued. “The same way you don’t want to be lectured on how you should feel, I don’t care to be reminded about what’s out there like I don’t know. I know how bad the dead are and God knows I know how much worse the people can be. I want to see if there are other good people I can finish out my days with instead of huddling inside a corner of this slaughterhouse.”
No one said anything for a while. Short Order walked up and stood in our group near the stairs leading down into the empty building. We hoped it was empty.
Chef said, “We’d be giving up a lot to strike out on the road.”
“I don’t want to raise chickens,” Doc said.
I felt a wash of fear in that moment. I realized they were actually talking about walking out into the open land again. They were considering leaving the Complex. I think I actually started to shake a little.