“How are you going to do all of that quietly in one day and make it good enough that the crawlerz can’t beat their way through it to get upstairs?” Yue asked. She hated the stair idea but was liking the inner doors as a source of building material idea.
“Yeah they get in here we’re screwed.” Drew said. The three of them stood there indecisively staring around the living room. Outside the din of the surgers continuing to tear apart the neighborhood was loud enough that Yue thought they could almost risk building a deck on the second floor. Mostly she felt claustrophobic. The walls were starting to close in on her. It sucked to be claustrophobic and agoraphobic at the same time. The thought of being caught out in the open with all those things was even worse than the feeling that the walls were closing in on her.
Drew won the door placement argument by default since he was the only one of them who was good with his hands. Bart was a hobbyist at wood working and loved building projects. He’d tried to transfer that skill and passion to all three of them, but Drew was the only one who’d caught the bug. While the surgers howled away outside they carefully repaired all of the windows and doorways as best they could from the inside of the house. When that was done, they followed Drew around the house cautiously pulling doors out of doorways and off of the cabinets.
The fun part of doing that was trying to quietly knock the doors out of the hinges. They had a mallet, but it was sitting out in the garage. No way any of them were risking their lives for a mallet. That meant they had to use a hammer. A bit of trial and error with the hammer and a blanket and they were able to make it all work without too much noise. In the end the doors were duct taped to the wall while leaning on the floor in front of the windows. They manually put a few screws through each door to hold it to the wall. They’d searched high and low to locate a whopping three drywall anchors. Drew knew they had some in the wall he might be able to reuse but by the time they finished it was getting pretty late.
They stumbled their way up the stairs. If nothing else, they’d succeeded in making the downstairs section of the house completely dark again. The darkness didn’t fool any of them into believing they’d actually done a great job hardening the defenses down there. They were literally using duct tape to protect themselves from killer freaks with superhuman strength. None of them were feeling super confident about their chances of surviving the night. They reported in upstairs to Bart and let him know what they’d accomplished.
“What’s the plan if those things get in here?” Bart asked. His three sweat soaked miserable looking kids didn’t answer as they plopped themselves down in the areas that they’d each claimed as their own. Once all three of them were comfortable he asked the question again.
“Blaze of glory time?” Drew asked sarcastically. It was the wrong answer. His dad ignored him.
“You need to always have a backup plan. Those things might get in here tonight. Hell, based on what you told me happened last night I’m willing to bet that no amount of duct tape is going to keep them out if they decide they want to come in. Now what’s the plan if they get in?” Bart asked again.
“We hide?” Yue said tentatively.
“That could work. Where are we hiding at?” Bart asked.
“We could knock the wood off the windows and hide in the master bathroom.” LeBron said. He was talking in that hyper way he had that meant he had an idea spinning around in his head.
“Why are we knocking the wood off the window?” Drew asked trying to keep up.
“So, when the sun comes up none of the crawlerz decide to hang out in the bedroom for the day. Once the light starts coming in, they’ll leave.” Yue said excitedly. She started getting into the plan. She loved the idea of having a backup plan. It was helping her deal with the feelings of helplessness she’d been coping with.
“The roof to the patio is right outside the bathroom window. That’ll make it easy for us to climb down if we need to abandon the house.” LeBron added.
“You think it’d be nice to have any of your stuff with you if you need to ditch the house?” Bart asked trying to lead them into a plan that would give them a decent chance at survival.
They continued discussing the aspects of this plan they’d come up with. Working together they came up with ideas on what they could do now to enable them to pull it off later if they had to. With only an hour to two of decent daylight left they got to work. It turned out they weren’t going to be able to get the plywood off the bedroom window unless they went outside and used a ladder and a drill. The window had the big firing port sawed out of it though, so they settled for just getting rid of the curtains. That should let in enough light to discourage the light averse crawlerz from taking a siesta in Yue’s room.
They stocked the bathroom with medicine, food and weapons. They put together ‘go bags’ using their backpacks. Bart advised them on what should go in the bags. The general idea was they should be able to survive for a couple of days off of the supplies in the bag. They should have some medical supplies and other essentials like food and water in the bag. Every other
