I swallowed the sharp, bright pain in my throat and let Molly take the lead in clearing the rest of house.  There was a frozen corpse in the backyard and I let her deal with that too while I dumped huge plastic bins of holiday decorations on the bed in Brads parents room.

I grabbed everything that might possibly be of use and tossed it in the bins, all the while ruthlessly berating myself for having left this neighborhood as a kind of shrine.  It was stupid.  And it wasn’t the only stupid thing I’d done since the world had shit the bed.  There was really no good reason why I should still be alive with all my whining and drama, I told myself.

I cringed inwardly at the knowledge of how much food was just sitting in the houses on this street, going to waste.  All because I was too much of a coward to face the pain of memory.  The thought of Sarge out there risking his life answers that probably wouldn’t matter tormented me. He was so much braver than I could ever be.  And he was old.  And he was trying to find answerers, to keep us sane.  But…we didn’t need answers.  Not really.  What we needed was to survive.

I thought about the women back at the Inn.  They were brave too, so was Jason, and Billy.  I was the only coward here.  I tried to think of a way to redeem myself while we packed, but I couldn’t think of anything.  There wasn’t anything I could do to make up for my stupidity and cowardice.

And no excuse for it either.  So I concentrated on making sure we didn’t miss anything.

Into the bins went clothes and soap, pots and pans, huge bags of rice, towels, blankets, candles and everything else not nailed down.  Except the pictures.

I paused once, for just a few seconds and slipped one picture out its frame and gently laid the frame back down on the mantle.  The picture I folded and shoved into my backpack without looking at it.  Then I went back to looting my home away from home.  I even tossed the couch cushions in the back of the van.

Everything was stripped from the house indiscriminately.  The table clothes for summer block parties that “Mom” used throw went in with boxes of macaroni and crab traps from the back porch.  Nothing was organized, and I let the memories wash over me without protest, without trying to block them out.

The huge purple stain on the otherwise white lace afghan made me smile.  We’d made such a mess, trying to make Jell-O shots.  And we got into so much trouble when Brads mom had walked in on us trying to clean it up.

I saw Molly’s eyebrows shoot up when I giggled at the stack of 10 pound bags of rice under the kitchen table. “Mom” had seen something about rice shortages on the news YEARS ago and was obsessed with buying extra, even though no one ever ate it.

I giggled and cried and generally acted a bit crazy all morning while we emptied Brad’s home of everything we might possibly use.  Molly didn’t say anything, but I caught her worried glances at me, and ignored them.  I was busy.  Trying to accept, truly and finally, the end of the world was sort of difficult.  And I should have done it months ago!

We finished with Brads house about noon and spent the rest of the afternoon walking from house to house, killing every zombie we saw.  I accepted the guilt and the mental bruises silently while crushed skulls and smashed in frozen faces.

It was easy, they didn’t move around much in the cold.

When we got back in the van, pulling a small trailer we’d found behind one of the houses behind us I turned to look at Molly.  She wasn’t that much older than me, but there were grey hairs at her temples and lines at the corners of her eyes.  Dark circles stood out against her winter-pale skin.  She looked older.

She was stronger than I was, I realized.  She would survive mostly intact.  And I had been on the way to true insanity.  Not good.  I decided to that I would never let that happen. Annie depended on me, on my ability to raise her and keep her safe.  I couldn’t do that if I were crazy.

“Hey Molly?”  I asked, still looking at her face as she squinted at the road.

“What Liz?”  She wasn’t really paying attention to me so I waited until she stopped the van, allowing a fox to cross the road.

“We need to clear everything useful out of my house too.”  I looked down at my lap.  “Will…will you help me?”  My voice shook a little and I hoped she wouldn’t notice.

Molly glanced at me and nodded.  “Sure.  It’ll rain tomorrow.  We’ll do it as soon as the weather clears.  But Liz, you need to tell the others about those papers tonight.”  Her eyes narrowed and her shoulders tightened.

I looked out my window and watched the snow fall off of trees and roofs. “Yeah.”

Authors note:

Ok, I’ll answer everyone’s comments as best I can over the next few days.   First of all; thanks for hanging in there with me over the last year as I have neglected Liz and her friends terribly.

Some of you know that I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis right before Christmas in 2010.  Over the last year my health has been getting steadily worse.  I was in and out of the hospital so much that I just didn’t have the time, or inclination to write.

It took me a while to get over that first deep depression, and just as I did I got an amazing opportunity.  I was offered a spectacular novel to edit.  So for the last few months I’ve been editing instead of writing.

I just finished editing the first draft of Keep Your Crowbar Handy by SP Durnin.  It’s got everything I love in a zombie novel, and will be published by Knightwatch Press.

So…tonight I am going to sit down and write the next entry on ZD book 2.  And no, I’ve still got no clue what I’m going to title the book!

And I am really sorry for leaving everyone hanging for so long.  I really am!

I groaned a little as I stretched, trying to ease the soreness out of my too tight muscles. The last four days had been brutal. Four full eighteen hour days of mind numbing back breaking hard labor meant our odd tire wall was almost finished. Only a short stretch on the seaward side of the Newagen Inn was unfinished. But it had left all of us aching and cranky.

 
Annie’s abrupt shrill cry startled me mid-stretch and I jumped, making the muscles in my back scream in protest. But my girl was obviously hungry. My mouth twisted in an odd way as I tried to grin and grimace at the same time. It was funny tha

 
I limped through the routine of changing her and getting her a bowl of mashed veggies mixed with formula. We were running frighteningly low on both and I made a mental note to ask Peter if he thought the farm could supply a goat or two for milk. The makeshift cloth diaper went into the bucket to be washed later and I plopped down at my desk with Annie on my lap.

 
The list of helpful skills the girls had was finally done, and it was more than I expected. A lot of them knew about all sorts of things that would be helpful. Some had hunted or farmed, one of them was an honest to god mechanic, something we’d been sorely lacking here.

 Most of them could sew, thanks to home economics classes,I gave myself a sharp mental kick in the ass for NOT taking home ec. Just look how useful cheer-leading was now. Oh well.

 
But the barge was finally empty and Claire, our new mechanic was looking over it today. She and her husband had owned their own shop before the dead rose and now she was worth her weight in gold to us. Or more, as gold was freaking useless. Maybe her weight in toilet paper?

Sighing and shoving a hand through my hair, I decided to put all the paperwork away for now. I really needed to get out. And our dwindling supplies were the perfect excuse to do so. My shoulder and foot were both pretty much healed, and until Claire got the barge up and running again we were still dependent on local scavenging to survive. And there was still one area of Moosehead island we hadn’t touched at all.

Molly looked up at me like I was completely daft. So I shrugged and scooted a stool over to the counter next to her. I could help sort through the clothing while I explained again why I was leaving Jason and Billy in charge and why she was coming with me.

After I’d gone through all the logic for her again (and several tons of mismatched socks) Molly just nodded at me. I was right after all, we did need things…and things on the northeast side of the island needed to be…taken care of.

 
I stood and bent over a little to crack my back and tried not to think about what we would find. It would be bad enough when we got there, no use worrying about it until then.>

We muddled through the rest of the rest of the day, leaving instructions for the girls and trying to get them to at least get started on the enclosed pool-turned-greenhouse project. But I really didn’t have much hope that they would have anything done at all by the time we got back.
 

 
I was easily up before the sun the next day since Annie made a very reliable (and insistent) alarm clock. By the time we were both fed and dressed Molly was already outside in my moms mini-van. I didn’t ask when she’d retrieved or gotten it working, I didn’t want to know.

 
We drove in silence through the dark, foggy streets and my heart sank when I realized that the frost heaves were particularly bad. And there’d be no fixing them either. We drifted past most of the houses slowly enough for me to realize that there were still zombies in most of them.

 The houses on either side of the rural tree lined street were dark, pocked with bullet holes and broken windows. Gulls and grackles argues over unidentifiable gray lumps in the front yard and very occasionally we’d see a still form standing in a window.

The slowly melting snow still softened the damage enough that if I squinted, just a little, it almost looked normal. Apart from unnatural stillness. My heart twisted a little as we passed homes that my friends and family had grown up in, places where I’d had sleepovers and barbeques at.

The empty shells of memories taunted me all the way up the road, right up to the driveway of a small, nondescript split level ranch. Molly stopped the van and we sat listening to engine ticking as it cooled. The sun was just peaking over the trees, washing out the faded blue paint on the outside.

There were no other cars in this driveway. The attached garage was open and small items were strewn about, mostly lost in drifted, melting snow. The doors were all shut and the windows boarded up from the inside. Broken glass on the outside and dark smudges marred the once pretty house.

The plant potters were filled with dead, frozen flowers and the dog tied to the front porch was long since dead. Nothing more than empty sodden fur.

It took a few minutes to get up the courage to get out of the van and climb the steps to Brad’s front door. A few more minutes while my hands trembled and went weak while I opened up the turtle shaped key holder.

I let Molly unlock the door. My knuckles were white around the crowbar and I couldn’t feel my hands anymore.

Brad’s mom and little brother were waiting for us in the living room. They stood still for several long seconds before moving. Searching their eyes I didn’t see anything. I hadn’t really expected to, not anymore. And in a way it was both a relief and a disappointment.

They were both still dressed in summer clothes, leaving their exposed skin faintly blue-gray and wrinkled. The gaping holes that exposed bone on their arms didn’t leak anything, they were just there.

Shrunken lips had pulled away, exposing yellowed teeth in the boy and oddly white, pristine dentures in Brad’s mom. There was a brief flash of memory, the day she got them she took us all out to get ice cream and watch the tourists get lost. Then it was gone.

She stumbled forward and Molly raised her pistol. I grabbed her arm before she could fire and shook my head at her. We hadn’t cleared this area, to much noise was suicide. She gave me a searching look, staring at my face for a few seconds before she stepped back. I never knew what she saw there, but she left me alone and let me finish what I should have done months ago.

Both of them were stiff with cold and it was easy. Too easy, one blow with the crowbar and they went down. It felt like cheating somehow, like we’d never given them a chance. It felt like we…took advantage in some obscene way. They were more helpless than children with their half frozen muscles. That word took on a new meaning for me, horrible new depth. And the notion that nothing on this earth was as helpless
as the dead struck me like a sledgehammer to the gut. They’d been helpless. Unable to move, unable to see, unable to hear or smell or love or hate or even think. Tears scalded my eyes and dropped like lava down my chilled face and the inside of my of head grew a little darker and a little colder.

Everything in their bodies had either dried up or was half frozen, there was very little mess left behind. I stared at the almost clean crowbar for a minute and tried to sort out what I was feeling, but it was impossible. I knew they’d kill and eat me if they got the chance. I knew that, but it didn’t make the unclean feeling crawling over my skin or the guilt go away.

And then I realized that I felt sorry for them. Sorry for their ever hungry corpses. That was something I could never tell anybody. Not ever. The feeling of being utterly alone staggered me for a moment, and I gasped. But Molly was still staring at me and we had things to do.

 “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?”                                   

“I’m not sure this is such a good idea Sarge.  Pemaquid used to be about 45 minutes away, by highway.  Without being able to take the highways, and who knows how many bridges out it could take months to get there and back.”  I tried to sooth myself by rubbing Annie’s back.  It sounded like a horrible idea.  A really, really horrible idea.

“Damnitall girl, if that Dr Tom Whateverhisnamewas was right, we do this and it could all be over.”  Sarge’s rough voice was low and urgent.  He didn’t sound worried.  He sounded sure and confident, but the pen he held in a white-knuckle death grip tapped the map on his desk in a quick, agitated frenzy.

“I can’t go Sarge.  I just can’t.”  I lowered my eyes; I didn’t want to see the shame in his eyes at my cowardice.  I started rocking back and forth a little and the old chair under me began to squeak in time to my movements.  I refused to look up at him.

I fidgeted with Annie’s blanket and ran my eyes over Sarge’s office.  He’d been here less than a week and he’d already turned what had once been a charming, private little bungalow into an almost efficient-looking office.  Maps covered the floral wallpaper, boards covered the cute little windows, and the large armoire had been chopped up and turned into a desk.

He’d moved the huge king size bed out, and replaced it with a twin that was covered with olive drab wool Army blankets.  He’d also added hooks and things to the fireplace so that food could be cooked in it. Mismatched, purloined file cabinets and bookshelves took up an entire wall.  I liked it.  The romantic honeymoon retreat had been transformed into the best office that the post-apocalyptic world we existed in could offer. I was so absorbed in my perusal of his little corner of the world that his voice startled me.

“Elizabeth.”  The old man’s voice was soft, gentle and held a world of compassion.  That was my undoing.  I started sobbing and shaking my head. I was afraid, afraid of the truth.  If that doctor had been right about ‘patient zero’ we were all screwed.  Like, royally screwed.  More screwed than the dead rising to eat the living screwed.  And I had really thought that that was the pinnacle of how screwed we could be.  Looks like I was wrong.  Again.

I hid the trembling in my hands by patting Annie’s back, trying to get her to burp.  She dutifully expelled a loud belch that any grown man could have been proud of and snuggled into my neck.

“Liz, I want you to stay here. I’m going.  I’m going to fix this I promise.” His voice was quiet, soft. I swallowed and nodded.  Numbly grateful that he hadn’t called me a damn coward and demanded I go and be a hero.  I didn’t want to be a hero.  I just wanted to live.

“Ok.”  I nodded and looked down.  Part of me wanted to tell him ‘No, don’t it. Let someone else handle it.’  But there wasn’t anyone else and we both knew it.

“Liz, I’m an old man. But I can handle this. I spent almost half a century in the military. This is what I’M good at. You stay here and herd the cats.”  He chuckled roughly, and I couldn’t help but grin a little.  He wasn’t good at dealing with the day to day minor conflicts.  I wasn’t much better at it, but I was learning quickly.

I swallowed hard and nodded.  I was scared. Really scared, and deep down I knew that I would never see the old man alive again.

“Who…” My voice cracked so I tried again.  “Do you know who you’re bringing with you? You can’t do this alone.”

Sarge shrugged and grunted.  I took that to mean he hadn’t decided yet.  I nodded maybe a bit too fast and a bit too…repeatedly before standing up to leave.  Odd how impending grief felt like acid reflux.

I got out of that office as fast as I could, my heart was breaking.  I had never really even thought about being separated from Sarge for any length of time.  I loved the old man; he had saved my life that first day.  I had depended on him for nearly everything since the shit hit the fan.  Those first few weeks when I was nearly catatonic, he had gotten me through my shock and grief.

When the other survivors we collected started dying like flies he had quietly taken care of their bodies, he’d gotten us fresh running water, power, and even showers (sort of).  Sarge was my rock.  He was the one of the only constants in my life.

And now he was going die on some stupid mission to find the first person that had risen from the dead.  He was putting all his faith in a bunch of stupid blood spattered paper.  My eyes were burning with the need to cry and my throat was raw.

I knew, deep down in my bones knew he wasn’t coming back. And it was killing me.

I stretched out with a smile. My shoulder wasn’t killing me anymore, my foot barely hurt at all, and best of all I’d gone to sleep in a real bed. There were even sheets on the bed. Billy’s arm snaked around my waist and he began to walk to his fingers up my belly and towards my chest.

I lightly slapped his hand away with a laugh and said “Later Billy!” He laughed at me and settled for smacking my ass as I bent over at an awkward angle to pluck Annie from her laundry basket. Hmm. She was getting long!

“Hey, we need a real crib for her. She’s out growing the basket.” I laid her down on the bed and reached for a stack of neatly cut up towels that had become her diapers. Billy yelped and leapt out of bed like he’d been bitten.

“What?” I looked up at him, a little puzzled.

“Christ Liz! Do you have to do that on the bed?” He sounded rather aggrieved and shot me a dirty look when I laughed at him and mimed throwing a wet diaper at him.

“Oh Billy, do shut up and go round us up some breakfast. Jenny promised hot water by this morning, so I’m going to test the tub.” I picked up my little angel and nuzzled her head as I walked naked into the bathroom.

Jenny was as good as her word, there was hot water! Really hot! So without a trace of guilt I dumped half a tiny bottle of shampoo into the tub and ran some barely warm for Annie’s bath. After she was all clean and playing contentedly with a teddy bear that someone had left in her basket I added some more hot water and sank into the first bath I’d had in almost a year.

Electricity was being tightly rationed, so the dining room was rather dim, with weak late winter sun streaming in through cracks in the boards on the windows. But everyone was downstairs, and most people were in the dining room, feasting on eggs and freshly fried flat bread. I didn’t even mind that the eggs were powdered and the bread was flat. It was so much better than oatmeal that it didn’t matter.

“Hi, I’m Amy.” I looked up and was surprised to see a rather beautiful young woman hovering next me with a high chair.

“Do you mind if I join you two?” Amy nodded at Annie who I had in my lap. I was feeding a bottled of formula mixed with a tiny amount of oatmeal. We didn’t have baby cereal.

I nodded and glanced at the high chair. “Sure, where’d ya find that?”

“Oh, there’s a whole stack of them over there.” Amy pointed a long delicate finger at a dark corner of the dining room.

I couldn’t see into the corner, but that was where we had kept them before. So I shrugged and stood up, laid Annie against a shoulder and ignored her fussing until I got her settled in the chair. She looked a little startled and was immediately distracted from her fussy whines as she explored her new perch.

“She looks happy!” Amy giggled a little and plopped down beside me. We watched Annie batting her little fists against the chairs tray and trying to get to her toes.

“She likes to eat her own toes.” I explained, a little embarrassed. It seemed weird to me, and I had no idea if that was normal for a baby or not.

“Oh they all do at that age.” Amy couldn’t take her eyes off of my girl; she was ignoring her food so I ignored them both while I finished my own breakfast in hurry. I wanted to be done by the time Annie remembered that she was hungry.

Amy’s smile turned a little sad and she finally looked away and started poking around her own plate.

“I always wanted kids of my own. I used to baby sit as often as I could, until I got too sick.” Amy almost whispered, but I heard her any way. Stuffing a piece of bread in my mouth I asked “Sick?” heedless of proper manners. No one gave a damn about proper etiquette any more anyway.

“I had cancer. Leukemia, anyway, I went into remission officially about three days before…” Her voice trailed off and her mouth twisted into a bitter smile.

“But I survived that, I survived the first day, and months on my own, I survived those assholes raping me every day, and I’ll survive never having kids too.” She shrugged, her pretty face distant and hard.

“How…” I swallowed the lump of bread and tried again “How do you know you won’t?”

“The radiation. I’m sterile.”

“Oh.” I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to that and started looking for a way to change the subject, but she did it for me.

“So who the hell is that crazy tall kid? And why does he keep talking about llamas?!” She sounded rather amused again.

“Oh, his name is Peter and there’s this farm.” I spent the rest of breakfast explaining what had we had found out, and what we wanted to do. Amy seemed fascinated and asked dozens of questions. By the time I was done answering them Annie was done eating and she’d been burped and changed again and was ready for a nap.

Luckily enough for us she could sleep through nearly any type of noise, so I walked around with her sleeping on my shoulder and gave a tour of the Inn and its grounds to the few women who seemed capable of thinking straight. Most of them were just shy of catatonic.

When that was done, I bundled Annie up and trudged outside to one of the little cabins that Sarge had taken over as his own space. He was even more of a loner than I was.

He stared at the tiny bundle snoring rather loudly at my shoulder and walked me through the exchange plans he and Peter had come up with. Apparently they had been on the radio with someone from the farm.

And then he asked about those god-forsaken papers and my heart froze and sank all the way down to my shoes.

I shivered again as tendril of icy water found its way under my hat and snaked down the back of my neck and was absorbed into the band of my bra.  For some damn reason I kept getting the occasional drop of rain inside my clothes.  Damned irritating it was.

Something crunched under my foot, my skin jumped even while the rest of me froze in place.  Biting my lip to keep from muttering (or screaming) out loud, I lifted my foot in excruciatingly exaggerated slow motion.   This town was just too creepy.

Damariscotta was empty. Completely empty. No corpses, walking or otherwise.  Every gas station was dry, every car utterly drained of even the smallest drop of gas.  Every house, every store, every building had been stripped completely clean.   Even the ‘blacksmith’ that made ornamental crafts and wrought iron fences had been stripped of its tools and metal.

All the cars had been shoved to the sides of the street with something that had dented and battered the crap out of them.  Not a single trunk, door or
hood was still closed.  Suitcases, boxes and bags of every description lay open, THOROUGHLY  plundered.  And every bit of the resulting debris had
been shoved to the sides of the streets.

We walked as quietly as we could through town, looking mostly for answers.
But there were none to be had.  The entire town had been systematically stripped of everything useful.  Half frozen tracks in the mud made it clear
that a large convoy of some sort with several tracked vehicles had been through
here.

“I think we know where at least part of Corpse Mountain came from.”  Sarah
was the one who finally cracked under the weight of the silence.  Her voice sounded as strained as I felt and unnaturally loud in the oppressive quiet.   I just shrugged in reply.

“Let’s just go. There’s nothing here.”  Sam whispered, her eyes darting
about nervously trying to pierce the thick New England fog.

“DEAD AT TWO O’ CLOCK!”  boomed through the streets accompanied by a
deafening roar.  Every single one of us let out started shrieks and dropped to the ground.

“Wait! Wait! They yelled!”  Another voice shouted.  The four of us desperately searched for the origins of the voices and the gunshot.

A tall figure burst the mist shrouded alley to our left and ran straight for us.

“Hey! Hey! We got live ones!”  The voice warbled and cracked like a boy half
way through puberty.  He ran right up to us and started babbling something about llamas.  Llamas?

“Damn it Peter. They are NOT llama’s, they’re alpaca’s!” The woman’s voice from the other side of the street sounded distinctly insulted.

I suddenly understood the term ‘flabbergasted’.  Flabbergasted. I was definitely
flabbergasted.

After much confusion and sincere apologies we eventually sorted out that the other three people running around the ghost town that had been Damariscotta were part of Bob and Elena’s group.  They ran the local alpaca farm.  I didn’t even know we’d had an alpaca farm in the area.

We traded minor bits of information and some more deer meat in exchange for a fifty pound bag of flour and some baking powder.

As it turned out it had been the motley group of military that had stripped the town clean.  And every other small town in a fifty mile radius.  It also turned out that they had a grand total of eleven people at their fortified farm to care for over two
hundred animals.  Mostly goats and alpacas.  Although, Peter amended, the ostriches were dying off really quick and so were the miniature ponies.

It was just so weird. I’d known, intellectually, that most of the locals were involved in either the farming or fishing industries in one way or another.  But I’d never, ever, given any thought to the livestock.

We split back up into our respective groups after only a few minutes and decided that Sarah would go with them, and the overly tall Peter would come with us.  Sarah would check out their living arrangements to see if they were suitable for a bunch of traumatized and mostly
pregnant women, and Peter would ‘interview’ said women to see if they could
handle the heavy labor on the farm.

The woman, whose name I never did learn was in a hurry to catch up with a small wandering herd of alpaca…alpacas.  What was the plural of ‘alpaca’ anyway?  She hurried her group on and we slowly trudged back to our trucks while Peter bombarded us with questions.

“He’s riding with you.” I didn’t even give Billy a chance to argue as I hopped into Sarge’s truck.  I also made him take that damn bag with papers in it.

The long drive back to Moosehead Island was conducted in blissful silence.  We drove past Christmas Tree Inn only to find it empty and continued on Newagen Inn.
Too many damn hotels on this little island. I thought, annoyed again.

I averted my eyes from my own house, mostly out of habit, and sped up a little on the long winding drive to the Newagen.  That was habit too. I’d
worked there most summers in various capacities since it was less than a
quarter mile from my house.  I’d hated walking there every day until I was old enough to take Mom’s minivan.

All four of us were speechless when we finally got inside. It was brightly lit and very, very warm.  There were fires roaring in the fireplaces and I could hear the distinct clacking sounds of billiards tables in enthusiastic use.  I had a moment of disjointed,
confused déjà vu until Sarge stomped into the foyer practically growling.

I let the others handle whatever the problem was and wandered slowly around the room.  My eyes stopped on an old framed letter on the wall.

“We hope you choose Newagen for a restful furlough from this troubled world.”  It had been written to a guest in 1943 after a major fire had burned the original inn to the ground.  I knew the story by heart by the time I was fourteen.

Swallowing back the abrupt, painful tightness in my throat and blinking rapidly to clear the excess of moisture in my eyes kept me occupied for a few minutes while I made my way back to the kitchens.

It felt like coming home.

I put the radio down and stuffed the papers back in the expensive, blood spattered messenger bag we’d found them in. I never wanted to see the damn things again. I never wanted to think about the damn things again. Sarge could deal with it when we got home.

A single sharp CRACK startled the crap out of me and sent me flying to the
open doors of the home improvement store. Billy was standing way over by the gates, both hands holding his raised pistol in a teacup grip.

Drawing my own pistol I ran as fast I could in his direction, sweeping my eyes over the fence line in every direction I could see. Nothing.

“Intruders.” Billy mumbled at me when I reached his side.
I nodded and turned around, gesturing at Sarah and Sam to run back and
get on the roof.

“How many?”

“I saw four. Two trucks, both with empty beds. They stopped and…” Billy let his voice trail off and nodded to the narrow road, mostly obscured by fog.

Two trucks idled in the road; each had a scrap of white cloth waving wildly out the passenger window.

Nibbling on my lower lip for a minute I considered the trucks ahead.

“Cover me.” I stepped forward and unlocked the gates, then locked them behind me again, trusting that Billy would watch my back. Regardless of the bitter, vicious argument we’d had when we realized the implications of the papers we’d found, he was still trustworthy.

Pushing the argument to the back of my mind again I stepped forward, stuffing my gun back in the waistband of jeans again. As I raised my hands and slowly stepped forward I reminded myself that I really, really wanted a decent holster for the stupid thing.

With my hands raised above my head I slowly walked to the truck in the lead. I kept my hands where the people in the trucks could see them and tried to convince myself that I wasn’t being absolutely idiotic.

“We’re not here to cause trouble, just looking for supplies. Need nails.” I wondered how the man with the nervous voice had managed to stay so damned fat over winter.

“Ok. We’ve got plenty of nails inside. Got anything to trade with.” I answered the driver who’d spoken and tried to see past his enormous bulk to the passenger.
It was too dim and foggy to make out any details though. Other than a cowboy hat. Great. Rednecks.

“We got eggs. I’m Bob, this here’s Elena.” The
fat man’s jowls bobbled nervously. I watched his eyes flicker between me and Billy, who was still at the gate. Billy had his AR-15 trained on ‘Bob’.

I gave him my best ‘I’m a just a harmless, ditsy cheerleader smile’ and suppressed a chuckle when his eyes almost crossed in confusion.

“Hi Bob. I’m Liz. So nice to meet you. Why don’t you come inside. Just you two.” I nodded my head at his passenger and continued to smile.

“Yeah sure. Lemme jest tell ‘ta others ‘bout what’s goin’ on.” Bobs rather odd accent got noticeably thicker. His hand, slowly moving from the steering wheel to somewhere under the dashboard was shaking. I continued to smile, but reached behind me and put one hand on my pistol.

Bobs hand came back up a second later with a cb radio and he talked for a few minutes with someone named Ray. They argued back and forth and eventually decided that they could give us all the eggs they had for a truckload of lumber and various small bits of hardware.

I led Bob and Elena through the store, letting them load up shopping carts and when they were done, Billy took Elena to the lumber yard section while Bob and I loaded their goodies onto the truck under the watchful eyes of Sam and her rifle.

Eventually Bob started talking about where he and his group were staying. They’d hid from the Army a few months ago by moving their entire farm up into a cavern system about 50 miles away. That made me nervous. Corpse Mountain had to have taken some time to accumulate, and if the military had been through here as recent as a few months ago, it didn’t bode well for us.

Eventually the first truck had been loaded up with everything they needed. And we’d agreed to let them bring in the other truck in exchange for half a blueberry pie and a loaf of bread.

Yum. Homemade bread.

Bob radioed back to someone named Helen that they were staying the night and the 7 of us sat down and split the best meal I’d had since the shit hit the fan. Honest to god salad, fresh homemade bread, homemade applesauce, deer steaks, deviled eggs, and a blueberry pie for desert. I stopped wondering how Bob had
stayed so fat.

We all talked and exchanged stories over dinner, camping out inside a cavernous
hardware store. It took most of the evening, but by the time we went to bed we’d reached an agreement to meet once a month for trade.

Elena mentioned that they had a ton of work to do on such a large farm and not enough people to do it, so we’d agreed to meet back here in one week. Maybe some of the women we’d picked up could go and help.

Elena’s only stipulation was that they’d have to learn to shoot. And follow some basic common sense rules about not overhunting the area.

Hmm. Maybe rednecks weren’t so bad after all. And the chance to lighten our load of dead weight was good. But, we could be sending them into a trap. It definitely needed some serious thought though.

Billy laid down next me when we’d all tired of talking and wrapped his arms around me.

“I’m sorry Liz. I was just a little freaked out. And scared.” Billy whispered in my ear as he wrapped his arms around me. I thought about what we’d read in those damn papers in the bag.

“Me too.”

I stared at the dead deer in front of me and told my brain to stop screaming “HOLY SHIT!” at max go-crazy volume. Right…just a deer. A deer. Not a zombie. Phew. And then it occurred to me…”oh hey, dinner!”

The pain in the butt came after I finally calmed down. Gutting and skinning a couple hundred pounds of dead deer in freezing rain isn’t fun. But still totally worth it.

Dead deer is yummy. Nearly as yummy as dead pig. Guess my short lived as a vegan before the world up and shit the bed on me really wasn’t me after all. Or maybe it’s just that our diet was particularly bad. No way to tell really. But the really rare, unseasoned slabs deer meat we ate that night tasted better than anything I’d ever had in my mouth. Even my mom’s cookies.

After we ate we all sat around an ornamental brass firepit in the toilet and sink isle of the store. The smoke collected in the rafters above our heads and was sucked through a makeshift venting system the previous tenants had installed, but the heat filled up the area and I felt warm for the first time in days.

Warm and full and relaxed enough that I didn’t even give Billy a dirty look when he kissed my head and dropped my recently liberated guitar in my lap. I picked it up, sipped the beer we’d found in a cupboard of the little kitchen area and tried to decide what to play.

Oddly enough my fingers decided for me while my mind wandered. I played one of my dad’s favorite old sea chanteys absently, thinking about all the times we’d sat around a fire singing and roasting marshmallows when I was a kid. I was surprised when Sarah joined in on the chorus, singing in a soft almost brittle voice about loved one’s lost to the sea.

We sat in the darkened store in front of the fire and sang old songs. Nothing modern, no Nickleback or Lady Gaga…just old Irish airs or sea chanteys. It was actually really nice. Comforting, and almost like a slice of normality.

Morning came and went without us even noticing while we slept. The darkened interior of the store letting us sleep in far later than we should have. Too bad alarm clocks were a thing of the past. Sort of.

The drive to Round Pond that afternoon was surprisingly nice. No traffic. No abandoned cars either. The roads were completely clear and the sun was shining and the breeze was almost warm.

Probably too warm.

When we finally got to Round Pond the entire town was surrounded by a chain link fence. That was wasn’t there the last time I’d been here. Before.
Main Street was covered in bodies. Covered in bodies. Doesn’t really portray the scope of it. Corpses were piled up taller than the roofs of some of the buildings. There must have been thousands of them. Not a scrap of ground was visible. Just bodies. Men, women, kids even a few animals. There was a dead horse in there.

We all just stood outside the fence and stared. It was worse than something you’d see in a movie. Maybe because you couldn’t pile the extras that high. The weight of the bodies on top had liquefied the ones on bottom and putrid fluid oozed out of mass of corpses and covered the ground three inches deep as far as we could see.

Gulls and ravens were everywhere. Swooping about in drunken spirals before landing again to rip off hunks dead people and swallow them whole.

The noise and the smell were beyond overwhelming. No words existed for something so bad. The air was thick and palpable with decay and our shoes squelched in fluids best unknown.

And we stared and stared. It was too much to take in all at once. The scope of it, the sheer numbers of dead people numbed my brain. It actually took several minutes to realize that a section of fence had buckled and collapsed beneath the press of the dead on it.

I didn’t even notice it until Billy started climbing. He climbed over the edges of the massive pile and stumbled his way to roof a building that was only a few inches above the top of the corpse mountain.

“Hey guys! Check this out.” Billy seemed disturbed and excited, so I swallowed the bile rising in my throat, sighed and followed him.

I ignored the disgusting sounds squishing out from under my feet and struggled my way across the disturbingly soft surface of what we later dubbed Corpse Mountain. Several minutes later Sarah, Sam and I were standing next to Billy on a rooftop staring at a bulldozer that was bogged down amongst the bodies.

The driver of the bulldozer was still there moving fitfully against the seatbelt, half hanging out of the interior of the sideways canted machine. The small torso of a child was caught under the treads, slipping them off their wheels.

I looked away. The limbless torso was twitching. Suddenly I just didn’t want to climb back down the Corpse Mountain. I swept a look over the rest of the town and realized that the entire town had been filled with bodies. There must have been hundreds of thousands of bodies.

And they couldn’t have all come from this area. Round Pond had had a population of roughly 2500. And most of the towns in this area weren’t much bigger.

“Liz, you lived in this area, is it just me, or does that seem like too many bodies?” Billy whispered in my ear, trying not to freak out the new girls. I just gave him serious eyes and nodded before going back to staring at the seeming endless vista of death in front of us.

“There’s tents, trucks and a tank on the west side of town. I think the Army was here.” I whispered back at him and nodded in that direction.

“Sarge was right.”

Corpse Mountain continued to shrink in our rearview mirrors as we headed back to the lumber store. Sam sat beside me shivering and mute. The sun was disappearing behind more rain clouds and I shivered too. I just hoped it stayed cold enough to keep the Dead slow and sluggish.

No one said anything until we sat down with more venison steaks and a salad of some greens and asparagus that Sarah had found still growing in the garden center portion of the store.

The food should have been good, it had been almost year since any of us had fresh meat or veggies, but it was oddly tasteless.

Sarah finally broke the silence with the question no one else was willing ask out loud.

“What now?”

“I don’t know. Strip the area for goods and then head back. There’s nothing we can do about it now.” I shrugged and toyed with my food.

I avoided looking at the others. Their hunched shoulders and hesitant movements and voices just made me feel worse. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the bag with all papers we’d brought back though.
“I’m going to bed.” I stood up abruptly and just left my plate on the lawn chair I’d been occupying. I needed to be alone with my despair for a while.

Billy came in a few hours later and laid down with his back to me, as far away from me as he could manage on the creaky air mattress.