章 5: Looting And Scooting

In the morning, we ate some pancakes and breakfast sausages. After cleaning that up, we picked out the guns we were going to be taking with us. I reloaded my Glock and AR-15 magazines, and I decided that I was just going to keep using them.

'We might run into another large group of Zombies. I'll be prepared, regardless.'

Zane brought an AK-47 which he had modified to allow for automatic fire as the manufacturer had not intended.

We got in my truck and began to drive along a rough dirt trail that led deeper into the country. About 10 minutes later, I saw a house in the distance. The whole area was in a mess. There were doors broken off hinges, windows that were shattered, and even the car parked in front of the house had its hood torn open and lines from it torn out and mangled.

'Someone, or something was here before us, and they may still be here.'

After parking my truck in a manner that I could easily drive away, we started to cautiously approach the building. I heard nothing but the leaves which crunched under my boots.

We approached the smashed in front door, and I went in first. I moved over the ruined door and right into a room with my eyes over the iron sights of my rifle. It was a bedroom and it was in a mess. I shouted, "Clear!"

I moved from the entrance of the room and back into the hallway. I stepped heavily to the next room. If there was someone in the house, they had heard us, but it wouldn't matter.

As I stepped around the corner of the next door, Zane shouted from somewhere on the right side of the house. "There's a body here!"

I moved into the room, which was a kitchen. On the floor, there were tracks of black dried blood as if a body had been dragged there. The cupboards had been smashed and glass shards lay all about.

The house was small and I had already covered my portion. I walked, with my AR-15 still at the ready, back towards where Zane was. "Zane, I'm walking over."

My boots hit the wooden floor and made it creak, that was the only sound that I heard.

As I went around the door to the room which I heard Zane call from, I saw him waiting for me in the corner of the room with his AK-47 pointed towards a bloody head. It was the body of a Zombie that had been torn in half. Its milky white eyes were even more disgusting than the gore which surrounded it. The dried blood looked like chunks of charcoal. Next to the body, there was a double-barreled shotgun. It was the weapon that had killed the Zombie. It was old and the end of the barrel had mushroomed out after being fired.

'How do they even move with dried blood?'

After looking at the zombie, we went around the house and began to loot it. As I was in the kitchen, looking for canned food to take, I heard something crash below me.

'Is there a basement?'

I saw a few rugs over the wood paneled floor of the kitchen. I grabbed them and shoved them aside. Surely enough, there was a trapdoor. I yelled at Zane. "Come here, I found a jackpot!"

'I will wait for him to come.'

A few minutes passed before he came from outside, he had been checking the shed and broken-down car for things that we could use. As he walked up to me his eyes widened as he saw the trapdoor. I raised my hand and then counted down from five with my fingers.

As my last finger dropped, I swung the trapdoor open on its hinges. There was a light down in the basement, and I could clearly see two forms huddled together in a corner. It was a mother and her boy. The woman had bruises all over her body as if she had been hit over and over.

I spoke calmly. "Listen, we have guns, but we were making sure that you were not Zombies. If you walk right up that ladder, we can take you both somewhere safe where y'all can rest."

She blinked a few times and then nodded. She probably understood that she didn't have a choice.

As they both got out of the basement, I nodded to her. "We are about to leave and go back to our place. There isn't anything you need from that basement, is there?"

She nodded. "There is some grain down there. We kept it in there to keep it from the bugs and to keep it dry."

I jumped down into the basement as Zane brought the two to my truck. There were two sealed sixty pound bags of wheat. I brought them up the ladder individually. Once I had them both up, I carried both of them on my shoulders. It took me about five minutes, but I slowly brought them onto the bed of the truck.

I jumped into the front seat of the truck and glared at Zane who had comfortably been watching me with his feet spread wide in the passenger seat. "You could have helped, you know?"

"Nah, you had it!"

'I feel like I broke a disk in my vertebrae, god!'

We drove back to Zane's bunker, and as we did, we talked to the woman; her kid was not very talkative. I glanced at her as the truck sped over the bumpy dirt road. She had bruises all over her milky white skin and her platinum blonde hair was filled with dried blood. She had a nice athletic figure besides that and icy blue eyes that seemed to be filled with confusion and sorrow.

I smiled at her. "So, what happened? Who was the zombie and why was your house in such a mess?"

She sighed. "That was Jake, my husband. Little Tim here has the cold and he was sleeping. I went into his room and I was praying with him. Suddenly, I saw a flash of light through the curtains. I couldn't tell what color it was, just that it had been really bright. After that, Jake went crazy. He got an ax from the garage and was breaking everything around the house. The scariest part was that his eyes were glowing green."

She paused for a moment as tears slid down her cheeks. "It was horrible! When I tried to stop him, he dropped his weapon and he began to hit me with his fists. He has never been abusive before!"

She began to cry even more, and she hid her face in her son's lap.

The boy looked up towards us. "He turned into a Zombie. When I saw him with his green eyes hitting my mother, I grabbed the shotgun from our mantle, and I hit him across the head with the barrel. The end of the barrel bent a bit, but I separated him from Susan, my mom. After that, I pressed the trigger and blew him in half. I don't feel too bad about it now, but after the fact, my hands were shaking."

I nodded. "You did the right thing Tim. You can take a shower when we get back."

'I thought they might drag us down, but the boy will definitely be useful. I'm sure they will be a great first addition to our clan.'