Silencer, p.7
Silencer, page 7
Holsom pointed and tried to pretend his words were sly.
“You can't even wait for lights out? You two should get a room. Don't ask her for anal though, she'll never forgive you. As if her ass is too good to be touched. No one else here is that cold.”
Carley spun, ready to start shouting at the idiot, so Jake reached out and touched her arm gently and smiled.
“Remember not to yell. You have a gun now... A way of dealing with problems that are larger than you are. More to the point, Holsom doesn't.” He gestured with his right hand, using the whole of the nearly frozen mass to indicate the weapon on her hip. Special and shiny. Wanting to do its job and remove a certain ex-cop from the world, so that the rest of them could live that winter.
True, making fun of them wasn't a killing offense, not even to Jake, but the man had been warned. The idiot just didn't seem to get that the ice he walked on was quite as thin as it really was. Carley didn't draw down, clearly holding life as sacred or something noble like that. Instead she just smiled and nodded, suddenly seeming much happier.
Her words were soft then. Relaxed and mildly cheery.
“Right you are. I forgot about that part. Silly of me, thanks for the reminder.”
Holsom stormed off, muttering something. It was probably just as well the fool didn't let them hear it, being that Jake really wanted the guy gone and didn't trust him not to come back if they just kicked him out. That, or managing to get a lot of the women to work against them. It was a bit untrusting of him to think that, of course. As if women in particular would work against the common good, their own best path of survival, just because they all liked the same guy. That was insane. Still, he wondered if it would happen that way.
He collected his now dry clothing from the line and went to the men's washing area. He had just enough time to scrub, clean the now dirty outfit and get to dinner on time. If he hurried. It was going to be a pain, since his fingers wouldn’t close or open properly, of course. Just in case it was needed, he kept those moving, trying to fight against them closing down on him totally.
Some of the people were going in filthy but most of the ones he liked washed first. Molly did too, or at least she looked cleaner when they all sat. She was slightly damp still, and not covered with grime and saw dust.
There was a different area for men and women, behind screens, for getting clean. A few of the guys had been caught peeking but Jake hadn't bothered trying that, himself. Oh, he'd wanted too, on some deep level, but only the real jerks and asshats were doing it. Holsom and his old crew come to think of it. Now they were mainly all dead. That one probably wasn’t a direct cause and effect situation. There had simply been a whole bunch of great reasons to get rid of them.
That night's dinner was more filling but heavier on vegetables, there not being any new meat, it seemed. They really needed to get a crew out to scavenge supplies soon. They had a lot but live animals would be good, in the colder months. Doing that meant finding more wood for fencing though, and he still had to get the book on wood stoves and water heaters from Burt and read it. When that should happen he didn't know. During the day of course when there was light. Not that he had time.
He'd managed to get himself pretty busy all of a sudden. Well, he'd get the book from Burt and make it happen. If nothing else he could carefully read at meals. Breakfast and lunch. There wasn’t going to be enough light left, at dinner. Not even in the summer.
The soft chatter from around the table made a relaxing wash of sound to him, kind of like the old family dinners from when he was a kid, before his parents had correctly decided that their son had been taken over by an incurably lazy alien body snatcher.
It had been all about the depression, after the thing with Rachel but it was probably fair enough of them to have had a problem with him at the time. He'd turned into a little whining waste of space for a long time. Over a year. If they'd been alive they'd be pleased to know that the curse hadn't lasted at least. Jake didn't feel lazy at the moment anyway. Just a bit sore and tired.
Nate looked across the table at Burt, one table over from the one Jake was at. The important persons table really, if unofficially. Technically Tipper and Vickie should have been there too but they left that part of coordinating the teams to Carl.
His cleaning crew sucked, even though Carl had some real skill for the brutal job personally. His people kept dying on him though. That happened to all of them but Carl's team had three times the attrition rate that Vickie's did. Tipper's group used to have a man named Jay but he hadn’t died on a mission. He'd passed early on, about a month into the cleaning work, when he’d started screaming one night and wouldn't stop. That had been the second time Jake had executed a still living person. He'd gotten about fifty dead ones by then but they almost didn't count. Everyone had killed a lot of those. Not that they really died.
Well, not everyone.
About ten percent of the people had fought back well enough. Most people had just died. Jake blamed zombie movies for that really. Everyone had really expected zombies to start out slow and stupid. They were stupid, mainly but to start with they managed to be nearly as fast as a living person. They slowed down as they took damage and didn't heal from it, and from decay, kind of. To start though, they weren't slow. They also didn't always moan or chant about braaaaiiins like they were supposed to. Even after the CDC came out and flat said they were zombies, undead that couldn't functionally be killed, just beheaded, and made safe, most people couldn't believe it.
So those people died.
So did the morose and those who secretly wished for the end of the world. You could still survive in the new world but you kind of had to want to on some level.
How he'd made it so far Jake didn't know. Honestly, if someone had asked him seven months before what he'd do if zombies took over the world, he would have said that he'd swallow a gun. Even when things had gotten darkest he'd never felt like dying though. Inside a dam had broken open, right after the start, something else had hardened and closed. Almost in the blink of an eye. That was just after he killed the first two zombies. After that he'd had to live, no matter what. Those first kills had done it. Broken him somehow. In a way that really fit the new world around him as odd as it seemed.
Not altogether sane but adapted.
At the other table, the head one, they'd been talking for some time, with Jake ignoring them but Burt switched to the topic of how much more wood they needed, so he made himself focus. That was his job after all, so it could be important to know the score. Well, Carley's job but he was helping to get wood.
The man sounded reasonable when he spoke. Pleasant, even. Jake tried for that himself, most of the time but most didn’t really. It was effective.
“We need about twenty cord of wood by my back of the envelope figures. More than that if we can get it. The logs will probably be faster to get and save on fuel. We can set up teams of people here to use the pit saw and then split. At least some of the first stuff is pretty dry. Deadfall mainly?” This got addressed to his table, so Carley answered.
It was her job as boss, after all.
“Yes. Jake suggested we take that first, since it's a fire hazard where it is anyway. I don't know how much wood we got today but the getting logs idea will be faster I think.” Harder went without saying but quicker by far.
That got the older man to smile and nod at her.
“My guess? You probably got about two and a half cord. It's a lot more than I thought you'd get the first day really. If you and your people can keep that up we may even have time to get the wood stoves built. Doing that will be safer and save on fuel, a lot, compared to open fireplaces.”
Jake nodded to himself and nearly whispered the next bit, being quiet even for him. He had to repeat himself, since Nate couldn't hear him at all.
Still, he smiled, even if no one could see him do it.
“Oh. Sorry. I said that we need to go on a scavenging run soon, too. To get the supplies for the stoves and to see if we can just steal some from in town. I know at least a few of the houses we've cleared have had them and not all the stoves need to be water heaters or large cooking units. Anything we don't have to make, especially at first, will help. We also need a forge. I know nothing about that. Some kind of brick or rock? I need to know what to look for. I want to get the wood first but we may have to stagger things, depending on who's doing what and when.” He had a real job to do too, after all.
Cleaning and being on guard duty at night when it was his team’s turn.
After the meal Burt waved to him and drew him over to the library, which was a single bookcase that no one was supposed to touch except Burt or Nate. The one that had all the useful books. There were several others with fantasy, romance, regular fiction and even three, very lonely, horror novels. Anyone could read those if they had time.
Burt showed him the plans he wanted to use, not speaking, just pointing at the correct pages. They were all basic things if they had the tools for them. Meaning much harder without that kind of help, of course. Still, a steel drum with a tap should be doable. A fill line on the top and one going out lower down, set high enough up to build water pressure. Then they just needed to get a fire under it. Then, boom, water heater. Easy and simple.
Or it would be with a credit card and a Home Depot. They hadn't gone to the closest one themselves, it being over twenty miles away. All they had in town was the nearly empty... Robson family place. About a third of what they'd had sat out in Burt's shed. They'd have to make do.
That or go back to the hardware store and see what the shelves still held. He honestly didn’t want to do that. Even if he knew it was probably going to be needed at some point. Forcing his mind away from the old store, he smiled and wandered into the kitchen.
Jake tried to help with the dishes again, which didn't really work too well, the water and grease stinging his abused and swollen hands. He didn't complain but Sammi looked at them in the near dark and then sent him away after shaking her head for about ten seconds. Just pointing at the door, not speaking at all.
A total Lois move.
She took care of the kids all day, so that probably had to happen. The two youngest people there becoming more like her. Then, hardworking, and capable made a decent role model. About the best they had really. Jake certainly wasn't going to insist the kids solve all their personal problems by shooting people for instance. That could get messy.
After that Jake just sat on the back porch for a while, enjoying the cool evening air. He couldn't read in the dark, lacking that skill so far, so it wasn't really slacking off. Not enough light meant it had to be allowable for him to just sit for a moment or two. It was pitch black out, a deep kind of thing that he hadn't really ever appreciated before.
Looking up at the clear sky, he saw the stars twinkle and the Milky Way actually looking white and cloudlike. Back before the world had ended, he'd never really bothered to check out the sky. That took too much effort and hadn’t been interesting enough. Not when they’d had television and videogames, loud music and a thousand other better things to pay attention to.
Now the sky seemed peaceful and calm, with just the occasional satellite roaming from place to place. He thought that's what they were. They could be spacecraft or even aliens, of course. They just looked like moving lights to him.
A year before he'd laughed when people had talked about aliens as anything but a joke or movie device. Now he laughed a lot less. If someone came to them and started complaining about vampires in the area, or werewolves, Jake would have had to listen, with a serious bit of focus on what was being said. If those things had to be considered as possible, then so did aliens. For all he knew that's who made the zombies.
If so they were dickheads.
A breeze ran over him, removing the light sweat from his skin. Jake's body was still warm from all the work of the day and the healing his muscles needed to do in the moment. In the backyard he could hear the windmill clacking as it started to turn slowly, each revolution pumping the well twice, and filling the raised tank that provided water to the house now. Burt had set it up so they wouldn't have to cart in buckets of water to flush the toilets, which made Jake smile.
It was almost like they were civilized or something.
They'd still have to build a much larger septic system but they probably had a few months to get to that. From what Burt had told him the system the house had would service eight people for years. But seventy wasn't eight. The only good part of the whole thing being that everyone was eating a lot less now, meaning that the level of crap wouldn't be as high.
That kind of shit at least.
Fixing that meant a lot more work but he didn't want to get to January and have the whole thing go on them in the middle of a snowstorm.
Jake was thinking about what they'd need when he felt it. A sudden slap that hit him on a breeze. A wave of intense panic. Pure fear tingling in his gut. It tightened within him and got worse as he sat. Not waiting to see if the move was just paranoia, he pulled the nine on his belt, trying to be silent about it, making only a hint of rustling. For a long time nothing happened, until someone inside the house spoke just a little too loudly.
That happened at times, people had gotten lazy, as things had returned to being mainly safe, and without him there to suggest being quiet, they returned to normal. Old world normal, meaning way too freaking loud. It honestly wouldn't have been such a big deal, except a bunch of shamblers came at the house without warning.
In the dark.
The light from the quarter moon didn't do a lot for him, so Jake ducked down, letting the zombies get close, on purpose. Their clumsy and slow forms backlit against the much lighter sky. He could see their outlines, a darker black on a deep blue star-studded universe above.
It was kind of beautiful, he had to admit. There was a quality to the scene that would have made a great painting if he’d been the sort to do that kind of thing. Maybe a song. There had been a time when he would have started composing that sort of thing right then, inspired by the loveliness of the composition in front of him.
Now he just wanted to live.
His fingers throbbed and felt like sausages had been painfully glued on the ends of his palms to replace the useful things that had been there earlier in the day. Just what he wanted for this. Honestly, Jake had always been for gun control when he’d been younger. Clearly this moment was going to teach him about how silly that idea had been. Smiling he considered his options. Possibly just waving the black metal at them and scare them away. If it wouldn't have drawn them in even faster he would have called out for them to shoo. Like they were stray dogs or cats.
There were six of them and all in the open, at the moment. After a few seconds they all started too close on him for some reason. He smelled like food most likely. Yummy fresh Jake ready to be eaten. Like fast food. Looking at the situation he knew how very bad it was. He had to start shooting and not call out first. Because if he did, they'd be on him even faster. If any of them were runners just shambling for fun, he was dead.
Terror ripped through him but he didn't stop just because of that.
He aimed carefully, hands steady as far as that went, and took the first one in the head, missed on the second and had to shoot twice. The next two ran at him but not that fast, thankfully. He used up four bullets on them, his aim horribly off from the slight swelling of his hands, which was annoying. Not that he'd normally do much better, flailing around in the dark like the moment called for. That left two in the magazine and two more undead coming his direction. Slowing only a bit when they hit the fallen bodies. Taking the fifth one, smaller than the others, so probably a kid or woman, took two shots.
He grinned, which if anyone had seen it, probably would have seemed filled with peace. Even compassion. It was just to hide his abiding terror, of course.
That one had been hunched over, eating at the time, too. Meaning it had been his own fault that he was going to die now.
That meant the last one got to him before he could reload or even get to his backup weapon.
What saved him was the noise from the house. That and the stairs. Zombies could take them but the lack of coordination meant that it took them a bit of extra time and they basically had to crawl up. A smart one could walk them but even they didn't take them fast. Jake ran to the right, along the wonderful, covered porch, trying, fighting really, to stay calm and not wet himself as he got out the forty-five. Which wasn't there. Suddenly he remembered that he'd left it off for dinner, since sitting with it made his butt hurt.
Which was a brilliant thing. He was going to die.
Because of his ass.
Jake grinned and fought a snort then. It was ridiculous, but perhaps fitting, for his end.
Taking his time, moving in that fast-slow motion that happened when you know you're going to be killed, he tried to reload the nine blind. If he fumbled he'd be dead.
Unless...
Looking around he noticed the porch railing. With a sudden grin, feeling bemused as he fought the rather painful desire to both cramp up and wet himself at the same time, holding on to the gun in his right hand and the magazine for it in his left, Jake ran to the far right and jumped over the railing of the porch. Twisting his ankle as he landed, a sharp ripping sensation running through his groin. It wasn't even that high, being only about a six-foot drop onto fairly soft ground. Things like that, falling, were always so much easier in video games. He reloaded just as someone poked a head out of the back door. Someone short. Sammi, probably. Whoever it was made only a soft gasping sound.
