Mark Clodi - Discovery

“Not yet, not while Stewart is in the pool.”

“I'll take my turn then.” said Tom, sitting his rifle down against the fence, then dropping two pistols onto a chair, where he started tossing his clothing.

“Find anything in town?”

“Yeah, we did. You have any trouble here?” asked Tom.

“One slow zombie, nothing else. It is really quiet. What did you find?”

“A generator was running at the grocery store, we cleaned out the spam and we got hot dogs and steak to cook up. The dry ice freezer was still good so we filled the back seat with Styrofoam coolers, meat and dry ice. We'll eat good tonight.”

“Steaks? Any bread?”

“Prime cut steaks, corn fed Iowa beef. No bread, sorry, all of the good stuff was gone, we found the meat in back in the deep freeze, the display cases were empty. We did find a pallet of crackers in the back though, brought a couple of boxes.”

“I could kiss you Tom!” said Max.

“Maybe later, I'd rather kiss Stewart or Amelia though, no offense.” Tom finished undressing throwing his underwear on top of the pile.

“None taken. Go clean up. Amelia brought over soap, not sure where it got to, I know the kids didn't use it.”

Tom slipped into the pool without the fan fare of Stewart, after about half an hour, right as the sun was setting Tom got out and took over watching. Max undressed self consciously, trying to decide whether or not to go the full monty, when Stewart yelled at him to quit being a chicken and get in the pool before it was too dark to see. With a quick gesture he disrobed and dove into the water. Once in the safety of the pool being nude wasn't a big deal at all, Stewart kept to the deep end, up to her neck in water, which made Max feel more comfortable. Max did seek out the soap and soon had a lather built up as he cleaned himself off. Amelia sent the boys over to him and he supervised as they scrubbed off. Stewart and Amelia then handled the girls at the opposite corner and soon all seven of them were ready to get out of the pool.

As a general rule the group did not travel at night and tried to stop around an hour or two before sunset to find a place to sleep. It was not as if the zombies were more active at night, only that it was harder to deal with them then, the darkness did not seem to cause the beasts any problem and the living still could not see that well. So by full dark they were all behind the protective barricade in front of the motel room doors. They kept the coolers in the van for now, by consensus they would sort out where to stow the stuff in the morning. The steaks they brought were half thawed and the kids were okay with eating hot dogs instead of spam, even if there were no buns and only crackers to go with them. They did have ketchup and mustard and everyone had their favorite drink to go along with it.

“Do you think there was anyone alive in town?” asked Max.

“No, it looked like it was evacuated. People left in a hurry, but there weren't many bodies lying around.” said Stewart.

Bodies meant zombies who had been killed. A human killed by zombies got up and started eating others. The abandoned towns were something they started coming across this afternoon. Before they had come across plenty of evidence of fighting; burned buildings, corpses of the dead again, blood everywhere, shell casings. Today had been different, it was like there was a concentrated effort to removed the population before the zombies arrived. And arrived they had. Whenever Max and his group stopped there were tracks of thousands of people who had walked around on the shoulders of the road, all heading north east into Nebraska along highway seventy six. The mob of zombies seemed to be well ahead of them, Max was very worried about catching up to them. Sometimes he thought about just sitting tight in one of the small towns along the way, they were behind the zombie horde after all, so they should be safe. This town, for instance seemed like the best bet so far, few zombies, no people, a grocery store with a generator that was working and some food left in it.

“Any zombies?” Max asked.

“A few, none in the grocery store, where we heard the generator. But we had to put down three when we got the gas. Oh, we filled the generator too. It was almost empty. How long do you think it could run on a tank of gas Tom?” Stewart asked.

“I looked it over, it depends on the draw of electricity from what the instructions on the side said, with the highest demand it would last two days, if the tank were filled. With a low draw it could go four, maybe five days. There were a lot of freezers on that line, so I would says it's been closer to two days than four. And it has a manual switch too. Someone had to turn the freezers over to the generator, it didn't happen automatically.”

“We unplugged all the front freezers too, just left the deep freezes on. The engine idled down substantially after we did that. I think we should run by there tomorrow, let the kids stock up on food and drinks and refill the tanks before we go.” said Stewart.

“Yeah, we could use all the good karma we could get.” said Max.

“What's 'Karma'?” asked Jessica.

“It's kind of like luck.” answered Amelia before Max could, “It means that when you do good things for other people, good things will happen to you. And if you do bad things, eventually bad things will happen to you.”

The girl got real quiet for awhile, then said, “We must have all done something really bad then, huh?”

“Oh I don't know, we are still alive, right?” said Amelia.

Bill was ecstatic, he had reached the solar company and found out his array had reached the trucking hub in Ames, a mere forty minute drive away. The driver had abandoned it and left for Minnesota, which was having some issues with the infected. The hub was dealing with a backlog of abandoned and missing cargo, most of it was due to move on to other states and had just been dumped there when the truckers opted to race to where ever they hung their hats. The dispatcher was in a foul mood that brightened just a little bit when Bill offered to come pick up his package himself.

“It is a huge crate and package, I don't know if you could get it into a regular pickup. And it weighs over five hundred pounds, can your truck handle that? We can boost it up for you, we have a forklift, but how will you get it off the truck?” the dispatcher asked.

“Probably in pieces, if I can't fit it on I will probably take it out of the crate and fit it in where I can. I have a regular bed pickup, with an extended cab I can fill, if I have to.” Bill said.

“Fine, look if you get it out of here I would appreciate it. It is not that big overall, but we are crammed full right now and the yard is littered with trailers, so we can use every bit of space inside the terminal.”

“I will get it, can I come up now?” it was a little after eight in the morning.

“Yeah, I would like it if you did.”

Bill hung up the phone and turned to Trisha, “Mind if I take John awhile?”

Of course she didn't. Before leaving Bill grabbed a blue diesel can he had gotten from his father-in-law a few years back. He didn't have any vehicles that ran on diesel, but he was going to pick up five gallons of it anyway, if he could, along with two cases of motor oil, two packs of light bulbs for each vehicle and new wiper blades. Trisha doled out the money, with an admonishment to spend it wisely. Once on the road the trip up passed quickly, there was nothing unusual until they got into Ames, where they were met by a road block as they exited the highway. Rolling his window down Bill was surprised to see it was the Iowa National Guard, not the police, who were stopping people.

“I.D. sir.” the guardsman said, holding out his left hand, his right, Bill noticed was on the butt of his pistol.