I can see I am not going to win anything with any of you. I give in, but I don’t want to eat any more kids or babies.” Turning towards Nancy, “Is that okay with you?”
Nancy weighed the options a bit, she knew she could still reasonably force Veronica to do whatever she wanted, but she would rather have her as a willing partner than an unwilling one, so she said, “V, you are right. I am sorry and I won’t force you to do that again. I won’t force you to eat anyone you don’t want to eat. You know we can’t let them go though, right? I mean if we come across more families and the choice is to kill them or leave the kids alive, we will kill them all, right?”
Veronica nodded sadly, “Yeah I know, I know. I get it: us or them. What will we do when the food runs out Nancy?”
Nancy, looked sagely around at her group, “Well I don’t know. I don’t really feel all that hungry right now, I think I could control myself if we found another human around here somewhere, we could control them and pen them in for later consumption maybe, raise them for food? I have not thought that far ahead, but Veronica you are going to force me to think further than our next meal aren’t you? I tell you what, lets hole up here and see how long it takes us to get hungry again then decide what to do. Trish, Julie as junior members of the posse you guys have to clean up, roll the remains into the driveway and close the garage door, that way any other smart zombies will know this house was already taken. The dumb ones we can handle ourselves.”
The girls did as Nancy said while Veronica turned off the car and pulled the keys out of the ignition. Nancy went into the house and wandered around a bit, then noticed she was dripping blood everywhere and headed back to the kitchen, where she washed off as best she could. She held up each girl as they came into the house and made them strip off their soiled clothing and clean up a little before making more of a mess in the house. She then told them to get their things into the wash, take showers and get cleaned up. While they were exploring the upstairs and getting in line for showers Nancy started a load of wash on Cold, using the fine array of stain removers to work on the stains. Probably they could make due with the clothing the woman had left them, or one of her neighbors could provide a suitable garment, but just in case she ran the load anyway. As Veronica had said, what would they do with the food ran out? And that went for clothing too, what would they do when all the clothing they could find was blood stained? Go nude? While a good distraction, clothing provided some protection and in point of fact some warmth, Nancy was cold, always cold now. It was a strange feeling, almost more than human really, starting the stove she rubbed against the electric burner until it became too hot for her to touch it. After the burner heated to a glowing cherry red she forced herself to touch it with her left pinkie finger. It burned. It burned and hurt, but she forced herself to continue holding her hand against the burner. The smell of sizzling meat filled the air.
Veronica, coming downstairs in a white fluffy towel, called out, “Hmm, that almost smells good! What are you doing? Seeing if we can eat old style food?” She stopped as she observed Nancy holding her finger against the burner. “What..”
Nancy gestured with her right hand sharply, cutting her off. Both women watched as Nancy’s finger blistered and blackened over the heat of the burner, with more burn appearing on other parts of Nancy’s hands. Sweat was running out of the pours in Nancy’s face, dripping onto the stove in wet, slightly pink drops. Finally Nancy pulled her hand back and held it up between her and Veronica. As they watched the flesh on her finger grew pink and the splits in the skin sealed over. A blackened fragment of charred flesh fell to the floor and as the smoke alarm started to go off they continued to watch Nancy’s hand repair itself. In three minutes you would not have known anything had happened, except for the smoke in the air and the blacked bit of skin that had fallen off as Nancy’s wounds had healed. Both women stared past Nancy’s hand at each other, their eyes locking. Finally Nancy dropped it, the smoke alarm stopped chirping and she said, “I had to know Veronica, I had to know. My scars are gone, from my appendicitis when I was sixteen. I had that scar all my life. And it disappeared sometime since I became” she waved her hand up and down along her body, “this. What are we now?”
Veronica took Nancy’s hand and held it, examining it closely then looked back into the other woman's eyes and said, “I don’t know. I just don’t know Nancy.”
Chapter 29
Tom lowered the bat instead of swinging it. “Who is firing down there?” He demanded of the half naked, bald man.
“Probably Joe and the boys. And I gotta tell ya not a moment too soon too. You are both dead, you know that right? Fagot Jews with one shotgun between ya, my boys have my back and they got more than one shotgun. We have REAL weapons, you might as well shoot yourselves now and save us some bullets.”
Tom looked at Max, then turned back to the bald headed man, “How many are there?”
The man said nothing. Tom poked him in the testicles with the end of the bat and shouted, “How many?” The bald man fell half onto the bed before tumbling to the floor.
“Oooh!” groaned the man, clutching his groin with both hands and smearing blood from his head wound everywhere, “Thirty, alright, thirty brothers to kill your butt fucking asses.”
“Thanks.” said Tom. He turned as if to exit, Max backed up with him, then Tom turned around and lurched towards the man on the floor, hitting him repeatedly about the head and shoulders with the bat, screaming, “This is for my roommates you fuck!”
The shots continued outside and were joined by the sound of a horn honking urgently.
“Tom, Tom! We ain’t got time for this man, we gotta get out of here. Tom! C’mon!” Max said as he pulled Tom out of the room, away from the bald man who was probably dead. Max turned Tom around, gestured towards his stuff and pushed him towards it. Tom gathered it up, slinging the big pack over his back and onto both shoulders, grabbing the smaller bag in one hand and keeping the baseball bat in the other. He went out the door into the hall and turned into the bathroom, instead of into the living room, a move that may have saved his life.
A bullet cracked out, whistling down the hallway and into the hollow core door of the bathroom. Max, half out of the bedroom door, ducked down and let off a shot towards the flash of light he had seen in the kitchen. Loud screaming was his reward, followed by the sounds of one, or maybe two guns, with bullets hitting the walls and piercing through them into Tom’s bedroom. Max was not nearly as shielded as he would have liked, the drywall did not seem to be stopping the bullets at all. Tom’s bat lay in the hallway and Max could see enough of the bathroom to know that Tom had probably pulled himself into the tub, meaning he was alive, but was he wounded?
The fusillade stopped and Max remained very, very quiet. A voice shouted out over the moaning in the kitchen, “Throw out yer weapons and we won’t kill you! Do it now!”
Max remained deadly quiet, the shotgun still pointed towards the door, somehow, during the firing he had gone from standing up, to crouching, to lying prone on the floor. A minute later he heard voices in the living room softly talking amongst them; unfortunately Max could not hear what they said due to the crying man in the kitchen.
Then he heard movement and the crying in the kitchen got worse, then the screaming receded towards the front door, Max though now would be a great time to take some sort of action, as he was sure anyone in the living room would be watching the screaming guy being pulled out of the front door.
He regained his feet and in a crouch moved fast and low towards the living room. He saw three men at the front door, one was carrying the man Max had wounded in the kitchen, the other was at an extreme disadvantage as he had picked that moment to assist his friends out the door, leaving no one to watch the hallway. Max leveled the shotgun and fired on that man, then switched targets and fired at the other man, who was fumbling for his weapon, while his screaming friend grappled with him. Both men went down and the screaming mercifully stopped too. Max reloaded the shotgun.
“Tom, you okay? Tom?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I am okay, I am fine.” Tom emerged from the bathroom, a towel in his hand, which he was using to wipe off the blood that had splattered on him when he was hitting the man in his bedroom with the bat.
