get back in our good graces. Here is a hint; it involves pulling your own weight.'
Steve took Tim away mumbling about getting him a change clothes and finding a chain somewhere.
The next morning Dora woke up refreshed, she had slept twelve hours and everything was quiet. Getting to her feet she went to Paige's room, but the woman was not there. Going down the stairs Dora saw her sitting at the kitchen table reading a book with a cup of coffee in front of her.
'Good morning!' Dora mumbled as Paige looked up from her reading.
''Morning Dora. Guess what?'
'Good god, do I have to guess before I have had some coffee?' Dora said as she grabbed a mug by the sink.
'No it's good news!' Dora didn't venture any guesses, so Paige continued, 'There were no attacks last night.'
Dora stopped, her cup halfway filled. 'So. Steve was right then?'
'It looks like he might have been. Oh, that ziplock bag by the sink…' Paige pointed at the counter and Dora picked up a small sized plastic bag full of pills, 'Yeah that one, Mary says to take them all with breakfast, maybe only a little toast. They are prenatal vitamins.'
'Brilliant. Breakfast. Ugh!'
'It is almost nine! You slept a long time, you feeling sick?'
'Not yet.' Dora busied herself making up a couple of pieces of toast, she held up the sliced bread and said, 'Who cut the bread?'
'Alex was over, he cut it nice and even. I think Mary made that loaf. It is funny how you miss the simple things isn't it? Like bread, evenly sliced, full of preservatives, bread that was soft even after a week of sitting in your cupboard.'
'I think I miss butter more than evenly sliced bread.' Dora dropped the slices into the toaster, which turned on when she pressed the lever down. 'The power is on! Hurray! Why?'
'Why not? We are leaving in a few days, we can afford to run the power for a while. Leon checked our supplies of diesel and that is one thing we shouldn't have to worry too much about bringing with us, so he fired up the generators and plans to leave them running.'
'So any line on the buses yet?'
'They were waiting for you. Get this, there is a bus dealer not too far from here, Midwest Bus Sales. They sell school buses, we were going to hit up a school, but this is about as far so why not go to the source. Steve is ready to go when you are, he would have left already, but Mary told him to let you sleep, you needed it.'
'I can sleep all I want when we get out of here.' After pouring a cup of coffee Dora doctored it up with sugar and powdered creamer, neither of which were in short supply. Grabbing her toast she had just made it to the table when Steve came in.
'Good, you are up. Paige tell you the news?'
'No attacks last night, suspicious huh?' said Dora grinning.
'We needed the break. I think three quarters of the people here finally got more than six hours sleep at one time. We are going to a bus sales place, did Paige tell you that too?'
Dora nodded and crunched through her dry toast.
'There is peanut butter.' Paige said.
Dora shook her head from side to side. 'This is fine. You feed Tim yet?'
'Yeah, took care of it first thing.'
'Too bad, I wanted to spit in his coffee. He wouldn't have noticed.'
Paige shrugged, 'That is why I fed him first thing. You would have over salted his eggs or put hot peppers in his coffee. I thought it would be better to remove that temptation. Don't forget your vitamins.'
'Yes mother.'
'Vitamins? Maybe we all should start taking some? It has been awhile since we had any veggies or fruit that wasn't from a can or dried.'
'Doctor's orders for her.' said Paige hooking her thumb in Dora's direction, 'She is too stressed right now and needs to take better care of herself.'
Dora didn't say anything else, but was surprised that Paige and Mary had kept the fact that she was pregnant from everyone else. She finished up her meal and went with Steve out to the others who were waiting for them. There were three vehicles, two full sized pickup trucks and Dora's suburban. There were a couple of juniors coming along with them, plus a couple of the older teens and eight adult men and women.
Steven tossed Dora her keys for the suburban, 'You're driving, but Bob is leading in the white pickup, I am driving the black one, we all have walkie-talkies on channel seventeen to keep in touch. The only planned trips are to the bus sales, to a gas station to fill everything up and finally, if we can, to get some motorcycles. The bus sales place is farthest away, we should pass the motorcycle place on our way to it and then we have to go another four miles or so to find the buses. If we get the buses, we come back the same way, only we stop by and load up any motorcycles worth taking.'
Dora hopped into the suburban and realized this was only about the third time she had driven it. After z-day they had never done more than pull it out of the garage, for the daily running around they used Paige's car or one of the nicer sedans of the neighborhood. If they went out foraging they had used vans and pickup trucks, but never the suburban. Both pickups had barrels and gas cans in the beds, even Dora's vehicle had a bunch of smaller gas cans in the back. There was also some hosing that she recognized as the portable pump Alex had put together to siphon gas out of the in ground storage tanks at the gas stations. No doubt there were crowbars and other equipment to get the gas station tanks opened tucked away somewhere too. Everyone was well armed with shotguns tending to be the weapon of choice and baseball bats as back up weapons.
Pulling over to the first set of gates on the east side of the houses the group slowly drove out. Steve led the group at a cautious pace, the streets were fairly clear the way they were going and they made it to highway thirty two with no problems. The highway did not have exits or on ramps, it was more like a four lane street in this section of town and it was not clear. Bob was a decent driver and there was a reason he was in the lead; the truck he was driving had the front end reinforced with some welded on metal piping. He could not ram vehicles out of the way, but he could gently shove them and one of the boys with him knew how to disengage parking brakes and put the cars they might need to move into neutral so they would roll easier. It was the wrecks that would cause them the most problem and it looked like there would be plenty of them to deal with.
Dora turned to Ken, a swarthy middle aged man with black hair and a full Islamic beard, 'So Ken, you know how to drive a bus?'
'Yeah, I did it for a few years before landing a better job in sales.' despite his middle eastern appearance his voice had a Midwestern twang to it that just didn't fit his image. 'I know I can drive anything we find, it won't be too hard, most of them are automatics anyway, so I will just show the other drivers how to disengage the air brakes and put the things in gear and we will be back before you know it.'
'Sounds good to me. I think I will stick with this though. Anyone see any zeds?'
A chorus of 'no' answered her, 'How suspicious, don't you all think?'
'I was going to ask you about that.' Ken said, 'We heard rumors there were no attacks last night, is it true?'
'Yes. It seems to confirm what we thought. How does it feel to find out you were just part of the herd, Ken?'
The man snorted derisively, 'How long did they think we would fall for it?'
'Forever, I guess, eventually they might have come clean, told us they would keep the others away in return for one sacrifice a week or something. Who knows what they were thinking?'
'And all those people they brought back with them? To safety?'
'Dead, we figure. I wouldn't have kept them alive and making them into zombies would be too risky, we might start seeing those who fled show up in the ranks of those attacking us. So they probably just put them down after they ate them.'
Ken said a short prayer in another language, prompting Dora to say, 'Yo there Ishmal speaka the English please!'
'Just a prayer in the holy language. A fatwa on the ones who did this.'
'Nice, Jihad against the zombies huh? Kind of overkill really as we all want to take them out anyway.'
