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  Dad kept on talking, but Kern had already tuned out. If he didn't he would yell at him and ask him why he was kissing Lori right there, in front of everyone. His mind immediately shifted back to his pack, laying in the middle of the old truck's bench seat. Dad didn't bring his, saying that they wouldn't need them, but Kern was adamant about taking his. He figured he might have to use some of his own fishing gear, but now it looked like it might come in more handy than that.

  Pete parked the truck behind the building. The dead might not be able to make the connection between the truck they had chased and it standing empty in front of the building, but no one wanted to take any chances. As Dad helped Kern limp into building, silhouettes staggered into view up the road. Kacie had just finished bleaching the outside of the building, and was right behind them as they walked inside and shut the door.

  xxxxxxxxxx

  Kern woke up to the ever constant sound of the deads' low groaning and milling about. The stench of the old toilet in the back mixed with the smell of a recent bleaching attacked his nostrils, but he had gotten used to it. Nothing had changed since he had fallen asleep sometime in the darkness of the night. Lori was still clutching to Quinton's arm as they both slept silently. Dad had dozed off by the door finally and Kacie was taking watch. Pete was snoring lowly to Kern's left. The others were in the next room, taking full advantage of the old, musty couch.

  The windows had been covered with plywood and taped up, but judging by the dim, blue light coming from under the door and the covered holes in the top of the building, it must have been early morning. Few things ever really fascinated Kern, but the covered vent holes in the roof did. When they had designated this as a safe house, someone had cut the holes in the roof, installed metal bird screen to keep the animals out, and then installed small awnings over the top of them to keep out the rain. Ventilation had probably kept them all from getting sick with the amount of bleach they were using.

  Pete, ever the historian, had ample time to explain to them the history of the cinder block building that had been their home and refuge for the last three days. For decades, it was a general store which sold everything from bags of flour and sugar to hardware supplies and grain. Long before Toby Wright, the son of the original owner and proprietor, had died, the big box stores and overpriced dollar stores had popped up in the town down the road. After he died, the building had been a lot of different things. Without the family name to carry it on, the building couldn't draw enough customers. When the dead began to rise, the building was home to a rural clothing outlet.

  Kern had hardly spoken to anyone except Pete since they had arrived. He knew one of the other men, Harold, because he mended the fences and checked on all the houses periodically in Kings Mill. The other three he didn't know, but he had already grown to like Kacie. At least she had some sense of what they were facing. The others seemed to think it was some kind of minor threat, like a thunderstorm, that would pass and then everything would go back to normal. Kern hated to tell them, but it seemed like the dead had settled in.

  Packaged and canned food along with bottled and jugged water was all that they had to sustain themselves. A few of the people complained. They were spoiled, and used to the fresh vegetables, fish, and meat they had gotten at Kings Mill. There was a case of MREs, but Quinton had told them to save them for last, so there was no way to heat anything with the dead so close. Some of them even complained about the food being cold. From where Dad and Kern had come, anything in a package had been considered a delicacy.

  Kacie moved slowly away from the door and back to the room, using a small flashlight to guide her. When she returned, she handed Kern a bottle of water and a pack of crackers with some potted meat.

  "You need to keep your strength up," she said, and stood over him until he opened both packages and took a bite of stale cracker with some of the salty, almost liquid meat.

  As she stared at him, he studied her. She was a redhead, with her shoulder-length hair pulled back into a ponytail. Even in the dim light, Kern could make out the freckles that dotted her face and arms. If she hadn't been wearing a tank top, she might have been mistaken as petite, but her thin arms were muscular, and the tank top betrayed her abdominal muscles. She had to be in her late teens or early twenties, and Kern had to admit that she was cute.

  "I know," Kern said. "Probably better than anyone else. Thanks." Satisfied, Kacie sat down beside him.

  "I took a few glances last night. They are moving, but they aren't getting in any hurry about it. Some of them have been standing there all night, but at least some of them have moved on. I don't like it, it's like they are staking us out."

  "That's exactly what they're doing. They know something is up, probably because of the smell of the bleach. It's getting harder and harder for them to find us, and they have to associate the smell with us now." Kacie smirked.

  "Is that a fact, or just something you came up with?" Kern was taken off guard that she would question him on it, and fumbled for a response.

  "I guess it's just something I made up, but it makes sense. Why else would they come all the way through the woods and down the road, and then just stand right in front of this building?"

  "There may be something to that," Kacie said, crossing her arms and stretching her back against the wall. "Where are you from?"

  "From the East," Kern said. No doubt Dad had told someone where they were from, but that didn't mean he had to.

  "The East," she repeated. "Is that like New York? Or just a small crap-hole town like this?"

  "Very funny."

  "Fine. Tell me about your family."

  "He's right over there." Kern pointed at Dad.

  "What about your Mom? Do you have any brothers and sisters?"

  "It's just me and Dad."

  "Surely you had a mom." Now she was knocking on the wall of Kern's psyche. Emotions and memories began to well up inside him. He battled against the tide for a moment, blurry faces trying to push their way into the forefront of his memory. This had to stop.

  "It's always just been me and Dad. What about you? Do you have a family?"

  "I did," she said, putting her hands together behind her head. "They're all dead, or worse, I think. I'm not from Kings Mill. I came from Graysville. It's up the river from here. My dad never came home, and by the time me and Mom figured out what was going on, there wasn't anyway to get out of the town except by boat. We thought we could float down the river, find safety somewhere. We never thought about how the river got shallow in places, and one of those things flipped our boat. I went to one side of the river, and Mom went to the other. There weren't any of them on my side, but Mom wasn't so lucky. The last time I saw her she was running into the woods, with those things following her."

  "I'm sorry," Kern said, instantly regretting asking her, but she did start it. "Did you play sports? You're pretty built."

  "Oh, you like that, yeah?" Kacie said. Kern was glad it was still dark, hoping she couldn't see how bad he was blushing. She giggled. "I played soccer and softball. I still try to stay in shape by running and doing a little exercise. It's funny how most people just go on like nothing ever happened. They still gorge themselves, and let's be honest, there isn't a whole of them doing any kind of exercising. Building a house or picking vegetables is rough work in the hot sun, but it isn't benefiting them much health wise."

  Kern watched her, the way her face moved when she talked. With her hands behind her head, he couldn't help but notice her ample cleavage. He sat there and listened to her for a few minutes, nodding or offering a word. Something was stirring inside of him he hadn't felt in a long time. It was right in his gut, and there was a tension inside that he knew all to well. It was like she had sensed it herself, and stood up.

  "I guess I better bleach the windows and doors again," she said as she turned her flashlight back on and went to the back room. Kern watched her go. If things got better, and when his leg healed, he would definitely be talking to her again.

&nbs
p; xxxxxxxxxx

  The heat was miserable. The first few days had been tolerable, with the late summer heat beginning to give way to the cool mornings of early fall. That didn't last long, and the heat came back with a vengeance. As if the heat weren't bad enough, the smell of human waste coming from the buckets in the back was. Almost two weeks now, and while the dead had been slowly moving on, some lingered for sometimes days. Quinton and the others said several times that this was something they hadn't seen before, a group this large.

  The battery on the radio had went dead over a week ago. Pete had been successful in drawing the majority of them away from Kings Mill, but there were still enough to make things tough. Last they heard, four people were missing and three were dead. The corn field on the south side of Kings Mill was trampled, and the fences were down in several places. Quinton was beside himself, but at least he knew his family was safe, but all of them were upset about their losses, including Kern and Dad. Kevin, the resident sheriff, had died holding the fence line against a large group before the others could get there.

  Tensions were running high. Everyone was tired, hot, and now they were getting hungry. A few days before, they had agreed to cut rations even further than they had, now expecting the worse. Kern wasn't nearly as upset about as everyone else. The day before, he had eaten half of a spaghetti MRE with Dad for breakfast, a few canned apple slices for lunch, and eight crackers with sardines for lunch. Dad had looked at their food stores, and figured they could last a few more days if they continued to ration. Quinton's estimate of four or five days was regular, overflowing meals. Dad had set them all straight on that.

  Drinking water was what they were lacking. They had maybe four days' supply, and they couldn't ration it the way they were sweating. Eventually, if the dead didn't disperse, they would have to make a run for it. If they were dehydrated, they probably wouldn't be able to make it far. The plan was that they would all eat their fill within reason the day before, and hydrate the best they could. Since no openings had shown themselves yet, they would just have to go for the truck and pray that the battery hadn't gone dead. Pete said the battery was still good, but it was possible that it had died after two weeks of disuse.

  Kern's leg had gotten good enough that he could walk on it, but their meager medical supplies were running out. Twice a day, Quinton would clean the wound with alcohol and rebandage it. After a few days, he had gotten to where he would flip the bandage over after sterilizing it. They were down to a handful of alcohol wipes, a half-empty bottle of alcohol, and a mashed tube of antibiotic ointment. Kern never told anyone, but he had a better medical kit in his backpack. Dad knew, and had eyed him a couple of times with disdain as the last of the community supply was used on him. Kern shrugged it off. After all, he wouldn't need any of it if Lori hadn't shot him, and if that hadn't happened they would be well on their way to Canton.

  Luckily, Kern had something to pass the time with, at least mentally. Kacie had gotten to talking to him more and more as the days went by. She had made a deck of playing cards out of the cardboard that had boxed their food and she spent a good bit of the day playing cards with everyone else. It seemed like at least once a day, Kern would get a few games with her by himself. They talked a lot about her family and her life in the old world, as the people of Kings Mill had come to call it.

  Sports were something she was heavily involved with, but her real passion was horses. Her family was what he would have considered poor before. She didn't have a cell phone or any kind of electronics. Her parents had one car that her dad used most of the time to go to his job as a construction hand. They ate three meals a day, and a lot of it was made up of the vegetables in their garden and their chickens. What they did have, though, was a small house on twelve acres of land, which they were very proud of. Kacie's pride and joy was her two horses, Kimbal and Caesar. Even after a hard day of school and soccer, she would go home and ride for around an hour.

  She argued that they weren't really poor. Her parents didn't want her to have any electronics because they wanted her to be more active. One car was all they needed, she reasoned, because her mother was a home body who preferred to tend to the home and the garden. Stories of birthdays, the time she got bucked into the river by Kimbal, and how her softball team lost the district tournament were all stories that Kern hung on to every word. She was the first person he had truly connected with on a personal level since Fireside, and it felt good.

  Kern was laying down, reading a wrinkled car magazine. He had hoped to maybe learn how to hot wire a vehicle, but there wasn't anything practical like that, just ideas of how to trick his foreign car out if things hadn't gotten so bad. Quinton was asleep, next to the dead radio. Everyone else was in the back, and given the current situation he was getting claustrophobic. He was about to walk to the back to talk to the others when Dad walked in. He looked behind him and sat next to Kern.

  "How are you feeling?" Dad asked.

  "Pretty good, I guess. We are trapped in a hot box surrounded by the dead, you know."

  "Yeah, I know. Look, I have to tell you something. Do you think you can walk good enough to get to the truck?" Kern didn't have much trouble walking around the building, but he knew if he went too far his leg would start to hurt, and the wound would open back up. He nodded. "Good. I've been talking to some of the others, and we can't afford to run out of food and water. Pete and Lisa are already getting weak. Quinton is wanting to stay, and Luke and Chris agree with him. So we're going to press the issue tonight, eat well tomorrow, and then break out. Here."

  Dad handed Kern a whole can of beans and a sandwich baggy of wheat crackers. Carbohydrates. That was good, Kern thought. Dad hadn't forgotten what they had learned over the last two years. As much as everyone at Kings Mill liked to think their reality was the status quo, this had shown them the true terror of what could happen. Sure, they had all had their own moments of terror when everything happened, especially the ones who trickled in from other places, but they had settled into complacency. Kern and Dad hadn't, though, and Kern was glad that Dad was thinking like himself again.

  Lori was still a problem, though. She had been hanging around Dad quite a bit, and Kern had even spied her sleeping on Dad's shoulder. More often than not, she spent her time in the back room away from Kern. That suited him well enough. Anger still flashed inside his mind at times, thinking about how she had shot him, and then Dad's betrayal at forming a relationship with her. Any kind of drama or argument would draw the ire of the dead lumbering about outside. As soon as they were free of them, Dad was in for an earful.

  "What about Quinton?" Kern asked, nodding toward the sleeping man on the couch.

  "He will come around when we tell him. He just doesn't want to see anymore of his people hurt or killed. A man in his position has to think about those things. It's not like he got elected. People flocked to him on their own, and he has a duty to each of them."

  "What's the plan?" Kern asked.

  "What else? We're going to rush out the back door and make a break for the truck. Quinton's SUV is a little further out in the back field, so if there aren't a lot of them back there, we will try to get both of them to keep from having people having to ride in the back of the truck."

  "That's tricky. There isn't a window back there. Has anyone opened the door to look outside?"

  "No. I'm afraid that if we do that, their might be some close to the door that will alert the others. This will just have to be quick and kill only the ones that get in our way. I'm going to go hammer out the rest of the details with the others."

  Kern waited until Dad left the room before he groaned. Their plan could turn ugly really quick, depending on what they found outside. His leg wouldn't hold up if they had to abandon the vehicles, and someone would likely have to help him get in if they did make it. His rage flared again, and he cursed Julie under his breath.

  "I don't like it either," Quinton said, raising his head up and looking over at him.

  "You heard it
all?" Kern said. Quinton smiled.

  "Most of it, I think. And don't worry, I'm not mad at anyone. I was considering something similar myself. The food and water won't hold out too long, and if we wait we may be too weak to put up a fight."

  "It could be bad."

  "Extremely bad. Kern, your father was right that I worry about the lives of everyone in my little slice of civilization. If there is any way possible to keep them safe, I will go down that road. We are near the end of that road. It pains me to think that one or two of us might not make it, but it's better than all of us dying.

  "The people at home know we're here. If there was any way they could stage any kind of rescue, they would have. Either they have problems of their own to worry about, or they know they can't get us out of here. Even if they could fight their way through, we haven't had any contact in days. No one is coming, and we can't stay here much longer."

  Kern didn't have anything to say as he watched Quinton attempt a smile, beads of sweat trickling down his face. There wasn't anything to say. Kern had already resigned himself to the fact that in a day or two, he would be stumbling out the back door to the vehicles. Quinton looked up at the ceiling and sighed, crossing his fingers behind his head as he laid back down on the couch.

  After eating what Dad had given him, Kern milled around the building for the rest of the day hoping to work the stiffness out of his leg. It would be a bit until he could run on it, but he could manage a quick stride for the length of the building. Everyone was happy to get their stomachs full and be able to hydrate themselves, but they were tense. Dad and Kern had spent two years running and fighting. They knew what to expect and if they didn't make it, they knew it would be the end of their struggles. These people were used to having the upper hand. There were always more of them, and the dead were slow. Now that the tables had turned, Kern knew that they were terrified. Only Quinton and Kacie seemed to be anywhere near ready mentally.