“No, the other side! Put it on the other side!” I ground my teeth in frustration. After deciding I couldn’t handle Sarge leaving I’d thrown myself into work. Fortifying the Newagen Inn was the first order of business, and I thought I’d come up with something brilliant.
Ok, obviously it couldn’t be that brilliant if no one else understood it. So I waved my hands at the group of exhausted woman and Billy and pointed to the kitchen. Time for a break while I explained what we were doing and why. Again.
I picked up Annie from the portable playpen she’d been napping in and fixed a bottle and a bowl of mashed canned carrots for her. She was so hungry all the time now that obviously bottles weren’t enough for her anymore. I let the women argue while they fussed over tea and ignored them while I fed my girl. She was so cute with carrots in her eyebrows!
When Annie was clean and sleeping the sleep of the sated again I got the books back out and spread out a rough map Billy had drawn of the Inn and it’s grounds.
“Ok. Here’s the theory, we wall off EVERYTHING. No one gets in or out without someone else knowing. Gates here, and here and here.” I put red X’s on the spots with a colored pencil.
“But…but why tires?!” Amy shouted over the groans echoing around the kitchen. She looked bewildered and frazzled and I smothered another sigh.
“Because, Amy, tires absorb bullets. There are a lot of them that are useless and need to be disposed of, we can’t afford to burn them. The rubber will absorb the blows of any undead and have enough bounce left that it shouldn’t crack.” I tried to mime pounding a surface with some yield, but failed miserably.
Amy pushed her hair out of her eyes and nodded, biting her lip. She seemed to get it and she looked (to me anyway) like she was done arguing when Chrissy piped up.
“Ok Liz, we get that, but why do we have to pound so hard to get the dirt packed in. Won’t that just make it too hard to bounce on?” The poor dear looked genuinely puzzled. I ruthlessly smothered an insane urge to pound my head into the kitchen table over and over by reminding myself that the bikers hadn’t been picking which women to keep based on brains.
“Oh, no Chrissy, it will still have ‘give’, AND we’ll be able to do without a foundation for the walls since the whole thing will be,like, six feet thick. Look at this picture here…” I let Molly take the book from me and explain AGAIN.
My priority was to keep as many trees as possible growing on the island. Clear cutting for a wall was just plain stupid. Sure…we needed a good long ‘killing field’, but losing all the trees was just begging to die of cold and starvation. The game would go somewhere else, the wind would be brutal, and there wouldn’t be any dead fall to burn in our wood stoves if we clear cut.
I took my frustration out to the small dock and worked on getting more of the huge tires off the little barge that had washed up during the last storm. Ten thousands tons of tires to unload before we could use it. Most of the tires were too bald to be of any use, and we didn’t have any vehicles that took tires that big anyway. But I put aside the useable ones anyway. Someone somewhere would need them.
I stopped occasionally to sip from my thermos of hot water. We didn’t have much tea or coffee left, so I made do with hot water for hydration and warmth most of the time. But it still bothered me that there was an entire island FULL of supplies less than five miles away. We NEEDED this stupid barge to get it all here. Of course how we would clear the exclusive resort of undead was a problem I still hadn’t figured out yet. Squirrel Island was proving to be a tough nut to crack.
That thought brought tears to my eyes. Sarge used to say that. Now he was gone on some dumbass mission and I was left to try and lead the women we’d rescued. I hated it, and I knew I was no kind of leader. I didn’t even like most of those girls, most of them were just about useless. A few were okay, but most of them were so helpless they couldn’t even go to the bathroom by themselves. Literally.
Of course, that made me feel guilty all over again. They had all been through something much worse than I could even imagine and survived. I shouldn’t look down on them, and I knew it. But I couldn’t help it. I continued to roll the huge tires off the barge and onto the docks until the sky darkened and began to spit icy rain on my head.
I let someone else fix dinner since I was useless in the kitchen and sat down in the dining room with Annie and the stack of books the girls had rescued from the ‘pig house’ as I’d taken to calling it. They were useful, but complicated and I found myself having to re-read most of them several times before I really understood anything in them.
Thank God whoever had lived there was a crazy hoarder obsessed with living ‘off-grid”. With these books we could grow our own food year round and have working self-composting toilets without relying on dead technology. Not to mention we’d be able to hook up solar panels if and when we ever found any.
I was deep in a chapter on “solar dynamics” when Billy dropped a piece of paper in front of me. Looking up at him, I realized he looked older. Not like a confused teenager anymore. There were lines at the corners of his eyes and he had stubble all over his face. I wondered for a second what I looked like now, and then dismissed it as unimportant.
“Found patient 0 (stop) taken care of (stop) looking into veracity of doctors claims (stop)” The note was simple and clear. Dashes and dots across the top made it clear that Sarge had transmitted in Morse code.
My heart rose out of it’s now permanent home in my boots just a little. Maybe he would survive after all!
“Is that all?!” I demanded, staring at Billy, trying to decipher his expression.
“Yeah.” His voice was low and quiet. “Yeah, that’s all he sent. But…” Billy shrugged and dropped into the seat next to me. I knew exactly what he meant. Sarge had hoped that killing patient 0 would get rid of the undead.
“We saw that small pack in the boat again. They’re not gone.” Billy’s voice was strained, tired. “I don’t think it’s gonna work Liz. Maybe that doctor was right and no virus or bacteria caused the…”plague”. But that doesn’t mean that it was God’s doing either.”
I didn’t have any answers for him. Pushing a book at him was the best way to change the subject.
“Did you figure out how to take care of a seawall?”
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