She went upstairs and quietly gathered Drew and LeBron to come down with her. They painstakingly spent the next hour quietly moving furniture to shore up the door. Hopefully they’d be able to do some carpentry work once the sun came up to further strengthen the door. They’d just have to manually screw the boards and take their time so as to not make much noise. The three of them working together should be able to figure it out. Now that she thought about it, they should’ve been doing that now instead of trying to lean couches against the door.
A loud whack from the back of the house froze them all in place again. That noise was followed by others as it seemed like all of the plywood on all of the windows in the back of the house were tested. Each time one of the boards was struck the sound echoed throughout the house. Thinking of some of the videos they’d watched online they knew the worst was still to come. Some of the footage that’d been uploaded of towns that’d been hit by the crawlerz looked like they’d been hit by a hurricane. Windows were smashed, cars were dented in, houses were burnt to the ground and there were always corpses scattered haphazardly around the area.
Yue tugged on each of her brothers to get them to head back upstairs with her. Drew followed along easily enough, but LeBron hesitated. In the extremely dim light seeping in from the moon she saw that LeBron seemed transfixed by the pile of crap they’d just spent all that time putting in front of the broken door. She grabbed his shoulder and tugged it harder to break him out of his trance. He shook his head to clear it as he turned to follow her up the stairs.
They sat silently in the loft until morning. They jumped each time they heard the random smacks on the outside of the house. The strikes intensified in ferocity and frequency the closer it got to daybreak. By the time the sun came up there hadn’t been any attempts to break in through the windows downstairs for at least an hour. The coming of daylight lifted a gigantic weight off their shoulders. Dog tired their spirits were buoyed by the fact that they’d survived the night. At different points over the evening each of them had been sure they weren’t going to make it. Seeing the sun come up was a big deal.
Feeling someone’s eyes on them the siblings looked up to see Bart had finally woken up. He smiled down at the three of them.
“I feel great. Thanks for letting me sleep. I miss anything?”
Chapter 16: Hump Day
The situation didn’t get a whole lot better once the sun came up. The crawlerz all disappeared but the surgers were running around everywhere now. The extent of the damage to their house was staggering. The crawlerz hadn’t even made a serious attempt to get inside. The random attempts had been powerful though. Plywood was bent and cracked. Windowpanes had shattered from the battering they’d received leaving shards of glass all over the floor.
It was a complete disaster outside. Bodies were scattered all over the alley. The bloated corpse of the first surger they’d seen was now part of a set. Vultures were feasting on the corpses of the dead. Here and there dogs and cats could be seen slinking around. The dogs occasionally either barking their heads off or whining in fear. The surgers ignored the animals for the most part. They were focused on finding people. Whatever chemical cocktail was eating away at their sanity gave them a single-minded focus on finding and attacking anyone who wasn’t one of them.
Bart was sitting in a puddle of his own sweat up in the loft. Every time he moved around, he started seeping blood again. On the plus side they had more gauze wraps than the costume trailer for a mummy movie. Yue was able to change the dressings on her dads wounds multiple times a day. She was hoping the cleaner they kept it the faster it would heal. It wasn’t like she normally had much else to do lately. Today was an exception. They easily had a full day’s worth of hot, sweaty repair work to do on the house.
“I should’ve grabbed bricks and bags of mortar instead of wood.” Drew whispered looking around the room. It was much easier to look around thanks to the light leaking through all the cracked and loosened wood. If only he’d been thinking of the three little pigs when he’d been ransacking the Home Depot building supply aisles.
“Those things weren’t even trying to get in here last night. Maybe we just take for granted that they’re going to get in tonight. We could work on sealing off the upstairs instead.” LeBron said thoughtfully.
“We don’t have enough wood left to block off the second floor.” Drew said. He was looking at LeBron like he was crazy for suggesting it might be a good idea to let the crawlerz get into the first floor.
“What if we took all the doors and cabinets off their hinges and used those?” LeBron suggested quietly. He was staring at the gap in the ceiling above the stairs
