Rotten (18 page)

We looked around and didn’t see anything moving, and although the smell around the house was bad, it hadn’t deepened in intensity.  We glanced at each other and moved to the front door. 

The petite redhead opened the door.  “Hurry up,” she said.  “Sarah is never wrong and that’s why none of them have gotten close to the house.”  She shut the door behind us and set a thick piece of wood into slots on either side of the door, locking us in.  “Where?”  She turned to the younger girl who pointed to the back of the house. 

Rebekah ran to the kitchen, peered out the window over the sink, and then moved to the back door, removing a two by four from the specially made slots on either side of the door.  “I see it, it’s just coming over the rise.  It’s not in range yet.” 

I looked out the window into their yard where at least a dozen chickens scratched and pecked at the ground.  The yard was large, fenced in six-foot chain link, and backed up to a pasture, and on the other side of the fence I counted four bodies.  Out in the pasture a zombie dragging one leg and moving in a strange, twisted limp was topping the hill and headed in our direction.

“I wish I could hit them way out there, but I waste bullets, not to mention most times I shoot another appears soon after, I think they hear it,” Rebekah said, lifting the rifle to her shoulder.

“Hang on,” Moonshine said.  “Let me get it.”  

They changed places, and a couple seconds later the shot rang out and I watched the body fall in the field.  I glanced over and saw Sarah standing in the corner of the kitchen, pressed against the wall.  “How do you know they’re coming?” 

She shrugged.  “I just feel it.  There’s another one, Bekah.”

“Same place?”

“Yeah, it’s almost here.”

I glanced back out the window, watching the field, and just as the girl said would happen, another appeared. 

“I got it,” Moonshine said.  He waited until it got into range and then fired, the body falling close to the other one. 

We waited a minute before speaking again, all eyes on Sarah.  “Is that it?” Rebekah finally said.

“For now.”  Sarah pulled away from the wall.  “We should go with them, Bekah.  The monsters are just going to keep coming here.” 

Rebekah sighed and looked us over again.  I could tell she was torn between her fear of the zombies and her distrust of us.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” Rotten said.  “And having Sarah’s talent of knowing they are coming could be very helpful to us all.” 

“She may not be able to tell at your place, this is her home, she’s lived here all her life, maybe it just works here.”  Rebekah shut the back door.

“Either way, you’ll both be better off with us, I imagine you don’t get much sleep with just the two of you alone and trying to keep watch.”  Princess leaned against the counter. 

“We’ll have to take the animals, we won’t go without the animals.” Rebekah picked up the fat orange tabby that had been trapped behind the opened door.  “And we need the chickens for food, we’re getting between six and eight eggs a day.” 

“I’m sick of eggs,” Sarah said.  “We’ve been eating nothing but eggs, tomatoes, pickles, and oatmeal for a week.” 

“If you’re running out of food you definitely need to come with us, we have plenty,” I said. 

“Okay.”  Rebekah nodded her head, stepped out of the room, and returned with the cat in a crate.  “Sarah, go pack your clothes.  Y’all are going to have to help me with the chickens, we can put them in that cage you have on the truck.” 

We followed her into the yard and Moonshine backed the truck up to the gate.  It took us a while to get the chickens in the cage, but we finally managed it and Moonshine shut the bed of the truck. 

While we had been gathering chickens, Sarah had been piling things around the cat crate by the front door.  “I packed your stuff, Bekah, the rest of the food, and all that medicine we took from the Jacob’s house.” 

“What kind of medicine?” Highland picked up a couple gallon sized plastic bags from the pile, inside were pill bottles and papers. 

“Just about everything,” Rebekah said.  “I looked them up in the PDR mom found at a thrift store and wrote down what they were used for, Mr. Jacob had cancer, and Mrs. Jacob was a hypochondriac.”

“Antibiotics?” Highland dropped the bags back in the box where he found them.

“Yeah, a few different kinds, and lots of pain medicine.  I took everything they had because you never know when you might need it.  Our parents didn’t take medicine if they could help it so all we had here was an old bottle of aspirin that smelled like vinegar.” 

“I also packed all our art supplies since you’re an artist, Princess.”  Sarah smiled.

“Thank you, Sarah, that was very sweet of you.”  Princess grinned and Sarah blushed. 

After we packed up their belongings, including boxes of home school supplies and books, Rebekah and Sarah climbed in the back seat of the Jeep with me.  On the drive back they introduced themselves formally.  Rebekah and Sarah Connelly were thirteen and six, and they’d lived in the area forever.  They were both home schooled and had never attended a public school, and we were warned not to assume that made them weird, dumb, and backwoods snake handling Jesus freaks, they weren’t.  “I get so sick of the stereotypes,” Rebekah said and rolled her eyes.

Their father worked at the dairy and their mom stayed home and took care of everything else.  The dairy was on the other side of the pasture that backed up to their yard and that was where all those zombies in the field were coming from, they were their father’s friends and co-workers.  “I knew every one of them, most worked with the cows, moving them field to field to graze, and checking the field for bitter weed and other plants that will make the milk taste bad.  And every one of them have been over to the house before, today was Mr. Pollard and Suzanne Hampton.  Suzanne used to walk over at lunch to have coffee with my mom and we rent the house from Mr. Pollard and he owns the dairy.  I don’t know why it took them so long to come, the others came Monday – Jose, George, Miguel, and Skeeter.”  Rebekah shook her head.  “I don’t know his real name.”

“Even the tag above his pocket on his work shirt says Skeeter,” Sarah explained.

“The morning after the earthquake my parents went to town to get groceries, we all felt the earthquake, and Daddy had walked over to the dairy to check on things and said everything was fine.  So Saturday morning, like every other Saturday morning they went to town to do some shopping, Mom started calling it her date night because it was the only thing they did alone together.”  She smiled.  “Anyway they didn’t come back.  I called the cell phone a bunch of times, but no one ever answered.  Then I couldn’t get a signal out anymore.  I wondered if Arlington washed away when the dam broke, but that didn’t make any sense because the dam is down river.  Then I saw on the news that they weren’t letting people in or out of town, so I figured that they got caught up in that and would be home soon. 

“There were no cars passing, but around noon on Sunday I saw some people walk by and knew something was wrong.  They weren’t people anymore and it was obvious, but right before they passed Sarah got real scared, said there were monsters coming.  I got pretty mad at her because I was already scared and worried about our parents.  We’d never spent a night alone before, so the last thing I wanted to think about was monsters, but then they passed by and she was right.  I got out Daddy’s rifle and the binoculars, and really looked at them and knew they were zombies, I’d seen the movies.  Then I got on the Internet and saw the videos of all the attacks everywhere and knew we were in real trouble. 

“We secured the house as well as we could, but then realized we didn’t have a lot of food.  We lived paycheck to paycheck, mom grew a garden every year and canned, but mostly just tomatoes and pickles, and we had some chickens.  But Saturday was grocery day and that didn’t happen.  Anyway, Sarah got that bad feeling again, and a few minutes later a zombie walked by, this time the rooster crowed and caught its attention and it came in the yard.”  She paused.

“She shot it,” Sarah supplied.  “And then the feeling got real bad and the Jacob’s came down the road.  Mrs. Jacobs came by often to talk to mom about all her diseases and Rebekah had to shoot them, too.” 

“So we spent Sunday night alone again, Sarah had the bad feeling a couple times, but the deadheads just walked by each time.  And Monday morning our parents came home.  Sarah got the feeling and then I saw them coming, I recognized Daddy’s jacket through the binoculars because we gave it to him last Christmas, other than that they sure didn’t look like themselves.”  Rebekah’s eyes filled with tears.  “Anyway,” she wiped her cheeks, “the guys from the dairy came that day, too.” 

Mrs. Williams hugged the girls when she met them, and simply said, “Welcome,” and when she smiled I could see the doubt leaving Rebekah’s face.  We stood around the truck and looked at the chickens, the best I knew not one of us had ever been around a chicken except for maybe Moonshine.  “They need a place to lay and water,” Mrs. Williams said.  “We’ll have to use the shed.”

“Yes, Ma’am, I think if you just leave the door open they’ll go in after dark, at least that’s where they roost at home, but they’ll crap all over the place so I wouldn’t leave anything too valuable in there.” Rebekah stared at the shed and looked far older than thirteen to me, and I knew the change had come in the last days. 

“They eat bugs all day, it’s a little gross, but we can eat bugs, too.  It’s not bad for us, I read about it.  I can read,” Sarah said, looking from the chickens to the house and back to us.

“Good to know, Sarah,” Princess said. 

Sarah moved closer to Princess and I smiled when I saw Princess wrap her arm across the girl’s shoulders.  It was rare to see Princess with her guard down and strangely enough I’d seen it more in the last days than in all the years I had known her.

Highland cleared his throat and looked at the girls.  “We’re going to have to talk about the roosters.  Today they crowed before the zombies, the deadheads, came and Rebekah, you said that at least once a deadhead came into the yard because a rooster crowed.”  He smiled nervously at the redhead, clearly uncomfortable.

“Yes, I know.  I’ve been thinking about killing them, but I was hoping one of the hens would get broody,” she explained.

“What is broody?  I know nothing about chickens.”  Princess looked down at Sarah.

“It means she wants to sit on her eggs and make babies,” Sarah explained.

“We’ll need more chickens and if we kill the roosters that’s not going to happen,” Rebekah said.  “We used to have a chicken dinner at least once a month, usually when money was short.  I’ve never done it myself, but Daddy made us both watch him do it because he said it was important that we know how to take care of ourselves.  We helped mom pluck the feathers, too.” 

Sarah nodded and turned up her nose.  “It’s stinky work.” 

“Let’s get the shed cleaned out, the chickens watered, and get the girls settled and fed before we make any decisions to cook the roosters,” Mrs. Williams decided.  “They are going to need a bed so I was thinking we could take one from one of the cabins around here.” 

“No, problem.”  Highland opened the back of the Jeep and we got to work. 

When Moonshine and Rotten returned with the bed, they also brought along some additional chairs to go around the table, and by the time we sat down at dinner, a bed had been set up into the loft, the chickens were locked up in the shed, and the girls were fitting in as though they had always been a part of our family.  And then Rebekah told the group her story, concluding with the fact that she believed the deadheads still remembered part of their lives. 

“We noticed that in the city,” Rotten said.  “How many have you noticed passing your house?”

“A few everyday, going one way or another.  Yesterday there was just one and we went to the Jacob’s house.” 

“We went like five times,” Sarah said.  “We didn’t have a truck because Daddy took it to town.” 

“It was three times,” Rebekah corrected.