The food and other goods we anticipated thirty people would need could be stored on the second floor safely. John had even suggested installing a freight elevator instead of using a portable conveyor belt to move supplies to the storage area. Now we would take advantage of that over designed capacity.
Having some of our people kidnapped, raped, and abused the previous year made us accept the truth that a percentage of the apocalypse survivors would not hesitate to steal from and murder other humans. It's a fact of life in these terrible times. But, as Shane and I discussed many times, there has always been an element of low class scum suckers from all races who will take advantage of others. Some used a gun or a knife, some were slick conmen, while others ran for public office.
While welders fabricated steel panels for the gun ports on the perimeter of the second floor and inside the two watch towers, people with carpentry and building maintenance skills dressed out a safe room for the children and their teacher Shana Thompson. That space, for emergency use only, was being constructed in one of the four concrete enclosed rooms beneath the ground level concrete floor slab. In the event we were overrun by zombies or attacked by a group of evil humans, we wanted the children to be safe during the battle.
Kira and Vivian became friends in record time and spent much of their free time together. After school classes, I noticed Kira's daughter Paige often hanging out with Mitch and Susie Robard. All three were polite well behaved teenagers.
Jerome Watters, the army retiree, fit in with the group immediately and proved to be reliable. Sam Williams was the youngest of the new adults. He was an all around good guy with experience in several construction skills we could use. Both men were strong and healthy and good shots with rifles or handguns.
Vivian was a mystery. She continued to be vague about her past and didn't reveal intimate details about herself. But then it could simply be her disposition not to open her intimate secrets up to others. She wasn't an outdoors person and had no skills in self defense. At least she was open to learn and with Kira's guidance and support she quickly began to show progress. She, like Kira, caused men’s heads to turn every time she strode by them. In fact, I suspected the sore neck I'd been rubbing was caused by them.
CHAPTER FIVE
On the last Monday in February, Ed, Jerome, and I left for a three day ammo run. We headed for Oklahoma City by way of Kansas City and hit any size store that could possibly have even a small supply of ammunition. Our first day proved unrewarding. We blasted away more ammo at zombies than we found to replenish what we shot. We were in one of the four Ford Expeditions we'd liberated from dealerships after the undead decimated the humans in those surrounding towns. I liked them because they're big and heavy and powerful enough to run over or through groups of zombies in an emergency. Late that afternoon Jerome saw an SUV moving across a highway overpass above us. It had become rare for us to have contact with other humans. However, seeing other people gave us a good feeling to know we weren't the only ones still alive. It's depressing to think we're the only human beings still struggling to live in a country as big as the USA.
South of Kansas City we fell into good luck at three gun shops. At two shops under the same ownership, most of the stock on the shelves of the customer sales room had been taken. But in storage areas in the back, we found stairs to second floor or basement storage spaces. Unopened cases of ammo were concealed under miscellaneous debris in large, obscure closet spaces. We made a good haul of most of the bullets types and shotgun shells we could use plus other sizes for possible trading. We also loaded up on 12 gauge double aught buckshot and shotgun slugs. At close range, we'd found the 12 gage slugs devastated zombie's skulls.
Ed thumped the steering wheel and grinned broadly as he drove slowly through a residential neighborhood. "See those stickers on the bumpers and in the rear windows of those pickups? Some are for the National Rifle Association, and others are from local gun shops or shooting ranges. Those people owned guns and had ammo for them. Let's see if anything is left inside their houses." Cautiously we opened an unlocked front door and slowly cleared the house. We didn't detect any odors indicating recent zombie activity.
Each of us had a rifle slung over our shoulder and a large bore, high capacity semiautomatic pistol in our outstretched arms. Ed's hunch was right. In a room at the back of the house, we found a man cave with two gun safes containing rifles and shotguns. Seven handguns were in drawers below the long guns. It was clear that several guns were missing by the wear and imprints left on the felt linings. Four of the guns met our criteria, but we took the others in the event we could someday trade them with other survivors. Jerome whistled at the sight of more than eight thousand rounds of ammo he found in a closet beside the gun safes. At the end of the room sat a refrigerator full of warm beer, soda and bottled water. We took the water and several full cases of water from a cabinet. We searched through other houses in the neighborhood with good results at about thirty percent of the homes. In homes that didn't have an
