Right before I gave up fighting, the contaminated’s head exploded in an array of red and purple gore, one of its yellow eyes flying directly overhead. I sat against the fence, laughing to myself uncontrollably. I had literally just stared down death and somehow escaped. My weak body somehow felt more alive than ever before.
Fortunately, we were able to patch me up though Chelsea’s stitching left something to be desired, and hurt like a bitch. I was able to recover quickly though I could not wield the wrench but the baseball bat would still work well enough. Whenever I swung an object, I was able to feel the stitches digging into my skin, trying to break free. I really did not want to risk breaking the bond of stitches to skin if at all possible.
We had run through a whole bag and a half of hotdogs, leaving us with one and a half left. Two of the rolls of bread also went bad when we took them out of the freezer, being solid blocks even after defrosted. Even our canned food was running thin in the basement, and the cat food had been empty for about a week. It was a good thing that Coal ate tuna from a can and that Chelsea and I hated it.
“Chelsea,” I said over our eighth hotdog dinner in a row. “We need to do something. I don’t think that we can hold out in our position forever. I mean our food supplies are running short and we don’t know how long the power will hold up for. Besides, you beat the contamination, maybe you could have something to do with a possible cure. Maybe you are the cure.”
She looked up from her dog, “I’ve been thinking about that myself, but what could we do? It’s not like we can just go to a police station and say ‘hey, we’re still alive and able’. It’s not that easy anymore. And we can’t call anyone for assistance and I doubt they’re monitoring the internet for living people, otherwise they would have been here already.”
“You think that the government is isolated and gave up on people?” I asked.
She nodded her head, “Well, yeah. Why else wouldn’t they be here by now? The convoy that took your grandma was supposed to come back over four weeks ago and we’ve been surviving here for longer than that. Either the government is dead or they’ve stopped caring.”
“It’s probably because we’re not paying taxes,” we both laughed. It was good that we could always find a way to keep the mood up, even in bad situations.
“Either way, we need to find a way out, a way to civilization or what’s left of it,” she said.
“Well, we need provisions first, and there’s a supermarket not too far up the highway, maybe three miles at most. I think that we should try there.”
She looked at me, thinking, “Maybe, but how would that work out? Walking there would be super risky if we were caught by a contaminated.”
“I think that we could handle that. We’ve been practicing in the field for over a week now, improving our bodies against the contaminated, and we aren’t usually quiet about it either,” I took a drink of water to moisten my throat. “We have never gotten jumped by more than three at once, and we have always come out on top, though I really don’t want to test that.”
“Then what are you planning?”
“Take the cars, well one car. Taking both would be a waste,” I said as I jingled the keys on the key ring. “There are two of them, so realistically if we only use one, we’re not wasting gas from the other one. As long as we have one usable vehicle, we will have an escape plan.”
“Okay then we should go with that, and tonight.”
“Tonight?” I was taken aback.
“Yeah. Why wait? Besides, we’ll be raiding the store under cover of darkness. It’ll be easier to get back to the house undetected,” Chelsea said, finishing her hotdog.
It was a good plan. The only problem was that we did not know how the contaminated acted during the night and had to account for that. I ringed the keys around my index finger, “What are we waiting for?”
“Oh well just let me go to the bathroom and then-“
“You ruined the moment…”
Chapter 11
After Chelsea went to the bathroom, we got in the car and started it up. It was a little tan sedan, the quieter of the two vehicles we had access to. It was around six o’clock and November, so it was dark outside. I was afraid of using lights as it would attract the contaminated to us. A train of contaminated making its way to the local superstore was never a good thing though management was sure to be pleased by the extra store traffic.
Regardless, I was forced into putting the car lights on. Chelsea kept insisting that I do, as we did not want to crash into a contaminated, deer, or anything for that matter. The street was still alight due to us being in a powered zone, so I was able to keep them on low or off whenever we got to a fully lit street. The only issue was that once we got to the highway, everything was a perfect dark.
It had never occurred to me where our powered zone would end, but now I knew. With the car lights on, we would glow like a firefly in the dead of night while driving down the highway. Contaminated from all over would be able to see us, and the clouds above prevented any moonlight from passing through, making the darkness ever more present.
“This isn’t ideal,” I said to Chelsea, the car idling in front of the highway, which resembled nothing similar to post-apocalyptic
