After not finding anything to grind on in town yesterday, we decided it was time to spread out. Not separating ourselves. No, we decided we needed to fan out the radius of our patrols a bit further. There are parts of Mars we haven't gone to yet. To be fair, they were miles outside of Mars proper. One such place was Reglan’s Bluff. Named oddly after the man who founded our neighbor town Reglanville.

Reglan’s Bluff was a suburb, newly built two years ago, that boasted 100 homes, its own facilities, like: a public pool, a library, a sports facility, and a senior center. It seemed like its own little town. A town made from perfectly matching little homes, with perfectly matching lawns. Kind of like walking into a real life suburb from a movie like ET, or Adventures in Babysitting.

But the kids that lived there, twenty at the most, were bussed into Mars School District.

Some of those families had fought to have their kids bussed to the literally closer (by a little over a mile) Raglanville, but were ultimately denied entrance. Turned out our neighbor city decided they didn’t like how we’d named our subdivision after them.

Go figure.

So, after we pulled some bikes out of our inventories, we all started our way to Reglan’s Bluff. Well, except for me. Being too short to reach the pedals, I was strapped onto the back of Teddy's bicycle. I didn’t mind. Though, if we were attacked on the road leading there, I would be a sitting duck. And very little help to my friends.

I just hope that the trip would be fast. All of us had extensive experience riding bikes. So I didn’t think it would be much of a problem.

Once we got there, we found the place to be kind of similar to Mars. In the fact that it had been very much bashed and mangled like our hometown. Only one of their facilities had managed to survive completely intact. The senior center. The public pool was a crater. The library was a completely fire-gutted skeleton of a building, and the Sports Center… well, there was something in there that looked really squishy. It seemed that the entire complex was filled with it. There were decomposing bodies floating around in that squishy whatever it was.

We walked past that fast, making our way into the suburb subdivision itself. All those little houses were in perfectly organized, little yards. Everything was so neat. Heck, even the lawns were nearly perfect still. Who knew, maybe the builders had imported some kind of special genetically altered grass that only grew to a certain length and stopped. Anything was possible when it came to how far people would go for mundane perfection in a suburb.

Overall, about one in every ten houses was trashed, or looked like it had been bulldozed, or completely blown up.

We hoped that meant we’d have more luck finding nonperishable food items, and maybe some more books to entertain ourselves with.

We went into the first intact house we came to, filing in single file, and closing the door behind us. Why? Maybe it was out of ingrained politeness? Who knew?

The house hadn’t been touched by the Apocalypse. There were no bodies to be found. Whoever lived here was very neat, had left no food out to rot, and had a fairly minimalistic view of decorating. We went straight for the kitchen cupboards, forgoing the refrigerator since everything in there would be so rotted and foul smelling, my friends would be gagging.

The cupboards were full of non-perishable treasure. Canned vegetables, more Top Ramen, boxes of macaroni and cheese, cans of soup, Cake batters, cans of icing, cookie mixes…

Overall, it was quite the treasure trove.

Heck, this house even had a pantry. We found sweet, dill, and bread and butter pickles, olives, hot chocolate, a literal shining brick of beef Ramen, more canned vegetables, and some freeze dried ice cream sandwiches–actual end of the world, survivalist stuff. There were even boxes a Little Debbie snack cakes of all flavors. Even cosmic brownies.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

After we raided all of that, we went upstairs. The bathroom, the main room, and a guest room were super tidy, and utterly minimalistic. You would almost think that no one had lived here.

Then we got to the last door, and when we opened it…. we knew it was a teenagers room because… well, it was a mess. There were dirty clothes on the floor. There were school notebooks, more dirty clothes, some open magazines, but then— and this even took my breath away, and I don’t have breath anymore—the nerd treasure of all nerd treasure s.

Oh my freaking God. On the bookshelves, on shelving units all over the room, we saw everything any nerd boy could ever want. Figurines from everything from Battle Star Galactica, The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Speed Racer, One Piece… anything you could think of and it was there. There was an entire wall devoted to high-end comic books. We’re talking first runs of some of the best comic books ever. No filler, no skips. Whoever this was, they had a nice assortment of Star Trek novels, your usual Lord of the Rings Trilogy (seperate, huge anthology, even a mini version with gilded pages), The Hobbit...

He had a giant playing screen, a PS5, the newest Xbox incarnation, a PlayStation, even a Wii. I wasn’t really sure what you could do with the Wii anymore, but this place had one.

I’m not really sure why I took them all. Without electricity or the internet, they were pretty much useless. But I took them and put them into my inventory under video game stuff.

I sighed.

My eyes cut to something weird sitting on one of the shelves. I walked closer and gave it a good long walk. It was a tiny version of me. No, I don’t mean a tiny gnome statue. This thing was literally a version of the gnome I am, perfectly rendered. I was reaching out to touch it when the doorbell rang.

I stood there, my fingers inches away from the tiny gnome, when it suddenly occurred to me, “ I thought doorbells had to have electricity to work?”

I looked over to Ellie and she nodded. “They do.”

Everyone started for the door of the room, out into the hallway. I started to follow them, but then I thought better, turned, grabbed the little gnome and put him in my inventory under ME?

I caught it up with my friends by the time they’d already gotten to the stairs, and we all made our way downstairs. The doorbell rang twice more before we even got to the door.

Teddy looked through the peephole for a few seconds, and then stepped back away from the door, shaking his head.

The doorbell rang again, and a bright cheery voice announced from the other side of the door, “Avon!”

Teddy turned and looked at us, and shook his head. “Zombies.”

What?

I heard Ellie’s scared shitless voice repeat, “Zombies?”

I looked over to her. She was turning extremely pale.

“I hate zombies.”

So did I. But I had always played it down to try to make myself look more… manly?

But something that could eat you, and while you are alive?

Fucking fucked!

The doorbell rang again, and this time there was a light wrap on the wood of the door.

“It's your friendly neighborhood Avon lady!” The voice intoned. “I can already tell someone in there has combination skin.”

Ellie was getting paler by the second. I felt fidgety just thinking about zombies… taking bites out of my friends.

“How do you know they’re zombies?” Wood asked Teddy.

Teddy looked at his brother, his eyes wide. “The first one’s eye was hanging out of its socket. And there’s another one with just half a face.”

Wood nodded.

“I think another has somebody they’re chewing on… I think they’re still alive.”

Ellie made a sobbing sound and turned away. She held her hands up over her mouth so she won’t make any more noise.

I couldn’t remember the last time she freaked out. Like when she’d find a spider in her room.

Wood turned toward us and mouthed, “Back door!”

As quietly as we could we made our way through the house and to the back door. It was solid wood as well. But there were glass side panels about six inches wide and two feet long on each side. Through those I could easily see that there were more of these zombie Avon ladies, milling around outside.

Shit, fuck, damn us all to hell…

The zombie Avon ladies started knocking on the back door now.

“Well,” Wood whispered. “at least there isn’t a doorbell back here.”

Teddy held up his hands right as I was sure Ellie was going to lay into Wood. “Let’s look for side doors, or windows we can get out of.”

As we walked to one side of the house and found nothing but a large bay window that was painted shut, Wood decided to ask, “Do you think these are the slow shambling kind of zombies, or the fast run-you-down ones?”

“Oh God… oh God, oh God, oh God.” Ellie started to hyperventilate.

I turned to Wood. “Not helping, shut it.”

I was pretty sure he was going to say something scathing back, but then he took in the even pale, kind of sweaty site of Ellie, not even a yard away. He bit his lower lip, and then nodded.

We turned to walk towards the other side of the house, and that’s when we heard glass break from the direction of the back door.

Shit…