After a ten-minute walk, she came to the house. It loomed up at her, casting shadows in the grey gloom of the early morning. The snow was broken in more places here, and a neat stack of the dead let her know that someone had been living there. She smiled then, knowing that Mort was still alive.
Katie climbed the steps that led up to the house. She couldn't see inside. Mort had blocked off the square windows of the front door by nailing wood over them. She reached out to turn the handle and found it locked. The handle didn't turn. She stood there, her brain going over possible courses of action. She could wait in the cold, but who knew if he was ever going to return? What if today was the day that he had decided to set out on his own? She could break into the house. She discarded that plan too, as she simply didn't have the energy to do it, and the noise might bring any of the random dead to her location, though judging by the stack of bodies in front of the house, that wasn't as much of a concern as it once was.
In the end, she decided to write a simple note in the snow. With the tip of her rifle, she found a clean patch of snow and wrote, "Still alive. Katie and Joan." She stood there, trying to imagine what Mort would see when he stumbled upon the words. She worried that it wouldn't be enough, so she scrawled the word "compound" in the snow, so he would know where they were.
With her work done, she shouldered her rifle and walked back the way she had come. She mentally crossed her fingers and hoped that none of the dead would come along and walk through her message.
****
As Katie was returning home, prepping herself to cross the treacherous ledge one more time, Mort was kicking in the door of a house. He had watched the house for some time, listening to see if there were any signs of life.
So far, he had cleared two homes on his side of the washout. This house was the third. They were vacation homes, empty, abandoned. Inside the previous two homes, he had found precious little that would help him. He had been living off condiments and preserves for the greater part of a month. It had gotten to the point where he had even taken a shot at a chipmunk. He had even hit it. Unfortunately, the rifle he had used obliterated the damn thing, and on top of that, he had become surrounded by the dead in his house.
In his weakened state, it had taken him a few days to kill them off. He was still recovering from the day he and Katie had assaulted the compound. His knees, his hips, his shoulders, they all felt like shit when he woke up. He was a ball of stiff pain every morning, and he spent the better part of each morning trying to stretch out his aching joints.
It took him two weeks to go through all of the food that he and Katie had brought to the old lady's house. It took him another hungry week to recover from his wounds to the point that he could fight off the dead. By then, he had lost a lot of weight and had next to no strength, but he managed to scrounge enough food to stay alive by walking upriver and picking through the bloody remains of campsites. When the snows came, and the inside of the house had become unbearably cold, he knew he couldn't continue without finding more food, so he had explored all of the little roads that branched off the main road.
The first house he broke into was the closest, about a half-mile down the lane. It was a standard-issue cabin, still fancier than anyplace Mort had ever lived. He had kicked down the door, looking over his shoulder with each boot stomp, waiting to hear the sounds of the dead clomping through the snow. On the tenth kick, the door swung inward, slamming against the wall, and he limped inside, shining his flashlight frantically into every corner.
He eyed the mounted elk head on the wall with some suspicion, but there were no signs of life–– or death for that matter. He eyed a few magazines on the coffee table, but he wasn't much of a reader, so he left them alone. In the back half of the cabin, he found a small kitchenette with a refrigerator and plenty of cabinet space. Out of habit, he avoided opening the refrigerator, though his own pluming breath let him know that whatever was inside was probably cold enough to be tolerable. He went through the cupboards first and found nothing but dishes and an old canister of oatmeal. He bagged the oatmeal and then began rifling through the drawers, where he found the real haul, a drawer full of condiment packets, ketchup, mustard, and a ton of hot sauce packets from Taco Bell. Each packet was food. Each packet contained enough energy to keep him going for a while longer, so he threw them all into his bag as well. Before he left, the last thing he did was look in the fridge.
With a hand over his face to hide the smell, he threw the door open and then shined his flashlight into its interior, only to find empty shelves and an open box of Arm and Hammer baking soda. With his work done and his bag slightly heavier, he returned home and spent the evening eating a small amount of oatmeal covered in condiments. He rather liked the combination of Taco Bell mild sauce and oatmeal. It had a solid flavor, and Mort had eaten worse in his life.
He continued like this
