Kirk Allmond - What Zombies Fear - A Father's Quest

For the job, I’d need to make sure we had nails for the nail gun, screws, ideally some big bolts to put through the posts, if we had any concrete. The posts will have concrete on them already, but I’d like to add some more. I brought all of my tools, and the farm had a pretty well stocked tool room. Those boards won’t stop bullets, and they won’t hold forever, but they will give time to get inside the house, and they’ll make it hard to aim at anything/anyone specific.

About five in the morning, just before sunrise, I saw headlights moving fairly slowly down Route 15. I dove into the boxwood bushes that create the formal gardens, and watched, suddenly wishing I’d brought my 30.06 with the scope. The car turned its blinker on, and turned up the driveway, and I sprinted towards the parking area, and stepped into a shadow. The house lights were off. With the light of the full moon, I could see the windshield was smashed out of the car, explaining the slow speed. If you’ve ever driven anywhere at night on a motorcycle you know the bugs are attracted to your headlights.

The car slowly moved up the driveway, but I couldn’t see the driver. It pulled up beside my truck, the headlights blinked off at the same time as the motor. The white car had streaks of blood dried in sideways lines down the doors. When I heard the car door open, I lowered my voice by an octave and said, “Stop where you are. Identify yourself,” trying to sound as intimidating as possible.

“Vic. Shut up and get over here.” was the response.

I grinned from ear to ear and burst out of the bushes.

14. Our New Life

I ran up to my brother and gave him a big hug. “Marshall, glad you made it. How was the trip?”

“Well, I don’t think I’m going to be making many more road trips in that car.” He replied.

“Have you seen my truck? I think we’re both stuck here for a while. Let’s go inside and find some food.”

Just then Leo stepped out of the bushes, and John stepped out from behind one of the brick pillars connecting the main house to the summer kitchen.

“We saw the headlights and came to back you up.” John said.

“Geezus, I didn’t even hear you, and I was listening as hard as I could. You two are freaks!” I joked.

“Tookes, you were making enough noise to disguise an elephant passing by.” Said Leo.

The mood was happy; I hadn’t seen my brother since the previous Christmas. He was looking well considering what he’d just been through.

“Marshall, these are my friends, Leo and John. They saved Max and me on our trip down here, but Candi didn’t make it.”

Over the next two weeks, our new life sort of became normal. We had Candi’s funeral and buried her in the boxwood gardens the first day. The ceremony was nice; Mom and Marshall both gave beautiful speeches. I hope Candi was happy, wherever she was.

We built fortifications around the house, enclosed the garden and fountain in the rear courtyard, we’d started visiting all of the neighbors. Of the five houses within walking distance, only one person was alive, and he was bitten by his wife that morning; she’d been bitten the previous day by a wandering zombie.

Each time, we re-killed the infected, and loaded up the food they had, paying extra attention to cleaning supplies, and personal hygiene products. We had enough soap to last a year or more. We took toilet paper, and Kleenex and paper towels. Anything of use that we didn’t haul off we noted in a spiral notebook. Inventory of tools, materials, gadgets, clothes, things like that. Most of the neighbors had some kind of livestock, cows, pigs, horses, or goats, which we turned out into the fields. We opened up the barns, and all the gates we could find to let the livestock roam. There wasn’t a lot of worry about traffic; we hadn’t seen a car on the road.

We’d lost power at the farm a few days prior in a windstorm, we were prepared for that to happen, and the farmhouse was equipped with a 15kw whole house generator. Power supply was always sketchy this far out on the country, they’d installed the automatic backup generator to keep the well pump running and the place heated if the power went out for an extended period over the winter. The gennie was connected to a thousand gallon buried propane tank, shared by the commercial kitchen and gas fireplaces throughout the house. We unplugged everything in the house except the refrigerators, and were using about forty gallons each day. We were counting on two weeks worth of power for refrigeration before having to refuel the propane tank.

Every adult except Leo carried a gun of some sort. Marshall had taken a liking to the scattergun; he was a surgeon with that shotgun. Leo refused, she was better with her kukri style machete than any of us were with guns, except John. He carried the 9mm Glock, his favorite because it had the largest magazine capacity. I once watched him hit a zombie from four-hundred yards through the scope of my rifle. He hit it square in the head using his hands and eyes to adjust for bullet fall and windage. I’ve never seen him miss. Not even that time he put the AK on full auto while sitting in the window of my truck bouncing across a field.

Even with my stash, we were pretty low on ammunition, lower than we’d like. Of course, knowing that there were over half a billion people on the continent, I’m not sure there was any such thing as ‘enough’ ammunition. In visiting the neighbors looking for survivors, we were able to recover a pretty good haul of various weapons, with a little bit of ammunition for each.

By the time we’d been there a month; the ammunition situation was getting pretty dire. In conversation, I mentioned that there was a sportsman’s club about two miles upstream from the house, and maybe we should go check it out to see if they had anything worthwhile there. From that moment on, John was convinced that we had to go there. I understood, he has this amazing ability, but if we run out of ammunition, he’d be back to normal. Leo on the other hand, had talents that weren’t so specific. Not that it was a competition between them, but I think they did each have a zombie-count. By my tally, John was ahead by four. I was in third place, six behind John, but only because my rifle bullets traveled faster than his 9mm. I was getting pretty good at the 400+ yard shots with the 30.06 I’d named Sammie and scope, but I was hoping to find a more powerful rifle and bigger scope. I wanted to be able to hit a walking zombie at the bottom of the driveway from my spot inside the upstairs balcony. I’d been in that gun shop a few times, mostly when we were visiting mom, and I could sneak away without Candi knowing where I was going. The last time I was there was about a year ago, they had a brand new Barrett .50 cal sniper rifle on a shelf behind the counter. The $9,000 price tag for the rifle and scope combination was laughable.

We started to make our plans for the run up to the gun club. We decided that John and I would go, leaving Leo and Marshall to guard the house, and Mom to watch Max. I knew the woods the best, and there was no way John was going to stay home.

Our plan was to head upriver to the fishing area, where we could get a good view of the back of the club. There were game trails all up and down the river that we could easily follow. I brought my Sig and the 30.06; John had loaded out with his Glock and the small .410 shotgun full of birdshot. I’m not sure what he planned to do with that, even though I’m certain he could hit a zombie in the eye from a hundred yards with it.

We left about seven in the evening, just at twilight, walking up the river. The two miles took us about twenty minutes. It’s amazing how much better shape I was in after only a month of leaving my old sedentary life behind. We crawled into the bushes about fifty yards from the clearing that made up the back ‘yard’ of the sportsman’s club. There was no sign of movement or life anywhere. The outdoor 125-yard shooting range stood empty; there were no arrows in the Styrofoam deer targets in the archery area. There was no one trying for one last trout before full dark.