Rick nodded thoughtfully and closed his eyes. In ten minutes, he snored as loud as Jessie. I turned the music up a notch, ignored them, and stared glumly out the side window. I concentrated on a conversation I'd had with Doc Sparrow several years before. It was right after we'd found a newborn infant zombie birthed by one of the early full-bodied mutations. The baby was hours old but crawled, had a full set of teeth, and ate raw meat. Human flesh. Doc had speculated that if the growth rate was that fast, it might compress the lifespan to a much shorter period. Over the past five years we had shot many naked, full-bodied undead ranging from children to adolescents to adults. This was the first rotting geriatric I'd seen. Maybe Doc's speculation was right on. Maybe the damned things were in the process of dying out due to old age. At our next group meeting, I'd ask everyone to watch carefully to see if the old zombies might die on their own without our help. A sudden scorching thought evolved. What if the damned things were reverting back to being human? How many of their generations would it take for them to look like us and learn to dress to blend in with us? Could the original curse be weakening, maybe wearing off?
That evening, Shane Holescheck and Ed Jarnigan sought me out shortly before supper. We grabbed our rifles as we headed outdoors to a patio table and chairs. After sitting in the shade of an umbrella, Shane said, "This morning before dawn, Dean Thibodeaux, Barlow Jones, Morgan Halcom and I were in the deer blinds down by the lake. By ten we hadn't seen a single deer, buck or doe. We left the blinds and walked around the shoreline of the entire lake. There wasn't a deer or small mammal track near the water. The deer have always hung out around the lake. I think the damned zombies have killed all the deer and small game in this area. We don't see pheasants or rabbits, and squirrels have even become scarce. Even the animals we don't eat, like groundhogs, opossums, and raccoons haven't been seen in the same numbers as a couple of years ago. Although, we've made our livestock pens and barns more secure, we still lose an animal occasionally when the damned zombies break into the pens or the buildings."
Ed leaned forward across the plastic table. "While they were at the lake, I took a crew over to Hatcher's Point to that spot in the bottoms where we could always count on finding several sounders of feral pigs. This morning we found one, and it only had nine head. We got four of them that averaged about a hundred-forty pounds apiece. Last year we could get ten or twelve on any given day. The zombies are competing with us for food, and they're winning because they hunt twenty-four hours a day."
I glanced at each of them. "Do you have a solution?"
Ed drummed his fingers on the table before he looked up. "Build hunting blinds and make injured animal sounds to draw the zombies within shooting range. I've asked around and some of the hunters in our group brought injured animal distress calls with them; they say they know how to use them. Others have duck and goose calls that may work as well."
Four days later, Kira and I, our daughter Paige and her husband Mitch; and our granddaughter Sarah sat outside in the midafternoon sun under an umbrella. Kira nursed our two-year-old daughter, Katherine, as the five-year-old twins, Tom Jr. and Dominique, yelled and played with several others near their age. Other families took advantage of the warm late April weather to relax and mingle within Deliverance's tall, protective, chainlink fence.
I withheld a frown as Nate Robard stepped outside with his worn and ever present Bible clasped in his righteous hand. From a lazy, obnoxious drunk to a holier than thou preacher in four short years. His hypocrisy overwhelmed me. Kira saw my stern gaze, placed her hand on mine and gently squeezed it. She'd seen my reaction enough times to know my opinion of the phony preacher.
The outside speakers shattered the peacefulness and pulled my attention away from Nate. The guard in the southeast tower alerted us, "A pickup pulling a trailer turned off the blacktop road and is coming up the lane. It's alone." Kira pulled Kat's lips away from a teat and patted her to stop the cries before she corralled our other children and took them inside. My rifle sat behind me against the building. Paige ran into door nine and returned with rifles for her and Mitch. Everyone but us, Ed Jarnigan and Nate Robard hurried inside. I pulled a pair of binoculars from the weatherproof phone box beside the door. I kept adjusting the focus as the truck approached until it stopped twenty feet from the gate. Tim Masters stepped from the lone truck and waved.
I called the watchtowers and asked Kelly Pitchford to open the gate only far enough for me to slide
