“Well that went well.” I muttered to myself as I stomped through the snow. My whole list idea had not been well received. So here I was…stuck slogging through snow and mostly frozen zombies scouting for decent places to loot.
I drove my crowbar through the skull of some twitching corpse that I didn’t recognize and swore a blue streak. No one was interested in anything but looting the houses and the stupid greenhouse.
I continued up Newcastle Road, dragging my feet and muttering the whole way. This morning I’d been “volunteered” to check basements. Something we’d avoided in warmer weather. Tight spaces and zombies don’t mix.
I spotted an old A-frame house we’d never bothered to search before. It had been empty for years, at least I thought it had. I couldn’t remember seeing anyone in the stupid thing since I was about 10 years old.
I stopped at the edge of the road and searched the windows. They were completely shuttered, like they had been for years. There was no way I would be able to see inside.
I’d wanted to explore this house since I was a kid. It wasn’t just a single A-frame, it was a trio of A-frame homes, backs to each other arranged in a triangle. I knew there had to be an inner courtyard. The house was a dingy, peeling shade of gray that had been white at one time. Green shutters and trim were so faded that it was hard to tell what color they were supposed to be.
Wooden shutters covered the windows, and a rusty metal grating had been pulled down over the front door. Given the options presented to me, I decided that searching other houses basements could wait, and that one of the windows was the best way in.
Prying the soft rotting wood away from the shutters hinges took all of 30 seconds. A quick tap on the glass with the curved end of my crowbar and I was inside.
I flicked on the flashlight I’d brought with me for my basement exploring trip and panned around the room. It looked like a tornado had ripped through the room. None of the furniture was in one piece, or where it probably supposed to be.
Whitish fluff clung to every surface and covered the floor. Shreds of various fabrics were strewn everywhere I looked. There wasn’t a single intact object in the room. Other than some pictures on the walls, that is.
I picked my way through broken glass and shredded couches to the kitchen. The kitchen was just as much of a mess, with the refrigerator door hanging limply open by one hinge. The oven door had been caved in, and all the cabinets smashed to kindling.
The odd thing was that there was no rotten food anywhere. Empty broken jars and slashed open cereal boxes sure…but none of the contents were visible. And just like in the other room, everything that was more than 5 feet off the ground was perfectly intact.
That was weird enough to keep me preoccupied throughout my exploration of the house. The A frame facing the road contained a living room, kitchen, dining room/library and a bathroom. It connected to the A frames on either side with very short narrow hallways. Each hallway contained a door that led to the inner courtyard.
The house looked like it had been furnished by a 1950’s housewife/woopie witch. Maybe some nutty crystal waving Neo Pagan type had lived here? There were a lot of crystals. They were freaking everywhere, hanging from light fixtures, smashed into bits on the floor, on shelves, lying on top of picture frames and lintels.
The darkness inside didn’t give me much in the way of detail, but someone had been here after the weather got colder. The living room, one of the bedrooms, and some large, mostly empty room all had large stacks of wood next to their fireplaces.
Remains of blankets had been tossed everywhere, and there was cloth stuffed up against window sills and in a few cracks near the ceiling. None of the windows facing the courtyard were shuttered, but they were covered in clear plastic. It was too thick to get a good look outside.
It actually took me almost an hour to find a small door hidden in the kitchen pantry that obviously led to a basement. I swallowed, hefted my crowbar in my right hand, and raised the flashlight with my left.
For all my trepidation about the tiny, dark passage down stairs nothing happened. The minuscule stairs let out into a small room with white walls. It wasn’t much bigger than my closet back home. But there were doors on all three walls. Or, there had been at one time. Now there was just splinters and hinges.
The doorway to the right led into something that looked just like some sort of ritual room out of a movie about teenage witches. There was an overturned alter and everything. Candles and crystals everywhere. Pillows and carpets had been ripped into narrow strips.
The room to the left was set up like some sort of office. A bright green laptop lay underneath an overturned desk, and there were filing cabinets and shelves lining the walls. Faded paper everywhere. And a rather strong odor of feces. Huge piles of something nasty and smelly dotted the paper strewn floor and I backed out pretty quickly.
The door directly opposite the stairs led into a maze of shelves, most overturned. I was sweeping the room with my flashlight, marveling at the destruction when out of the corner of my eye, I caught the red reflective gleam of eyes pointed right at me.