07 Searching

Sleeping near a stranger made me uneasy, even if she was chained to a tree. She could kill me just by making too much noise. She was too weak to do much work, much less fight anything. And, finding her had wrecked what little semblance of a plan I had. I was going to spend fall and winter studying, and maybe round up some zombies and do tests on them, but there was no way to do that while keeping an eye on such a fragile, helpless waif.

In the morning I discovered she did have one skill: cooking. She was able to help me make a stew, though it tired her out, and I made her eat three helpings. She did the cleaning without being asked, so I assumed that was one of her regular chores, but it exhausted her. Yet, when I ordered her to go back bed she looked frightened.

"Why the look?" I must have sounded exasperated, because that's how I felt. Every minute spent with her was a guessing game. I wasn't about to ask what horrible things had been done to her, and I assumed she wasn't ready to talk about them, but because of that I had no idea how she would react to anything. It was trying my patience.

"I'm so sorry!" She started trembling, like I might punish her for something, standing there on shaking knees and on the verge of tears.

"I'm not going to hurt you. Why don't you want to go back to bed?"

"Are you going to leave me here?"

"No Sandy," I sighed, "I'm not going to leave you here, because I don't want you to die. But you do need to rest. Here, give me your good hand and I'll chain you to the tree." Strangely enough, that reassured her. If she was chained then she couldn't get away, which meant I was planning to keep her.

For the rest of the morning I read from my new books while she slept. Summer days in that part of Utah were hot, even in shade, so she sprawled on the sleeping bag and air mattress we had scavenged for her, her bare limbs flung out to catch the breeze. Clean skin and clothes had made a big difference in her appearance, but she was painfully thin. The creases in her skin still held dirt, and something had to be done about her hair. There wasn't a single straight or even cut on her whole head. A few sections had been cut close to the scalp. Occasionally she would wake up, check that I was still there, and then go back to sleep. Once, she caught me watching her and smiled. She looked happy for a moment, truly happy, and in that moment I thought I could see the girl that should have been, pretty and carefree, whispering with her friends, dreaming of a future, complaining about homework, and doing whatever else girls and young women are supposed to do.

We spent the afternoon raiding a small town library for books. A school would have been better, we could have found actual workbooks and teaching aids, but schools are tricky. It was a blessing that most people were at home when they began to change, so you didn't encounter a lot of zombie-filled workplaces, but zombies manage to get into everything, and the many separate rooms of a school made too many places where the alternatively-alive can hide. A library is easier to clear, because it is mostly just a few big rooms. You make a little noise, and most of the dead will come to you. If there's too many to handle, then you just leave.

I perched Sandy on top of the car, where she would be hard to reach, and set to work on the town's little library. There was only a main reading room, a couple of staff offices, a janitor's closet, and a unisex bathroom shut with a piece of wood wedged through the door's handle and nailed to the wall. The three resident zombies sensed me and were pushing on the door, and that was causing the shoddy mechanism to fail.

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I have found a lot of zombies in basements and bathrooms, but hardly any in janitor's closets, and that strikes me as odd. People always end up rigging some awkward locking mechanism that eventually breaks, when there's a perfectly sound closet with a lock down the hall. Maybe people just don't think about custodians very much, but we always know where the bathrooms are.

I opened the bathroom door and retreated, leading the zombies out to the parking lot. I stood on the hood of the car and finished them off with a sling and some nice smooth rocks from the landscaping. I could have used the bow, that's true, but I hate to waste arrows when I feel I have good control of a situation. And, I wanted Sandy to see how it was done because I was going to teach her the sling. They're easy to make, light to carry, and take less strength than a bow. It doesn't take that much effort to stave a zombie's head in, if they haven't eaten recently.

And that's how we got reading materials for Sandy. There aren't many books for adults learning to read, so her practice books were all aimed at children in grade school, but I told her she could pick anything else and I would read to her a little each day. She chose two series of books, one about a boy wizard and the other about a girl detective, mainly because the library had posters for them. Considering her age, I wondered what kind of life she had led Before that she didn't know about the boy wizard, at least. We took all the books in both series, plus a stack of children's books for her reading practice.

The library task took up the whole afternoon. I was never going to launch my hitherto-unformed-zombie-annihilation plan, or even make that plan, with her in tow. Abandoning her would be murder, so I couldn't do that, but she was too much for me to handle. She needed too much. I didn't doubt that food and time and exercise would make her useful, but she also needed teaching and training, and normal people to be around, and friends her own age (whatever that should happen to be). I couldn't do all of that even if I wasn't contemplating a zombie reverse apocalypse. I had to enlist the Sojourners' help, and sooner rather than later.

There were other reasons to find the Sojourners, too. My trip to Utah had been more solitary than planned. When I had gone west only a few years prior, there were lots of little settlements. They were mostly crazy, or wary as hell, or both, but they had existed. Coming east I had found next to nothing: static on the shortwave, no smoke rising from cooking fires, roads clogged with years of undisturbed debris, not even any raiders. Central Valley, Death Valley, northern Nevada, and western Utah were scrubbed free of humanity. I had spotted one settlement in the Sierras and, maybe, detected traces of another in the direction of the Grouse Creek range, but steered clear of them both. People had been scarce three years before, but they had become vanishingly rare. I was starting to worry my former companions weren't alive any more, and I a growing need to find them sooner rather than later.

We, Sandy and I, spent several days driving and camping around Utah and southern Idaho. I taught her how to siphon gas (when we could find it), use my rigged car charger to pull power from large solar arrays, how to drive, and use a sling, made her read aloud from her books and, in the odd moment here and there, I read to her. I also fed her, a lot, especially the peaches. As they ripened, I cut a slice for myself from each one, then gave the rest to Sandy. She savored them all like she had the first, and when she was done I always had to clean her up. I doubt anyone had been that nice to her in a long time and she soaked up the attention, her eyes on mine, tilting her face for better access as I worked.

Our wandering had purpose. In the hour near sundown I tuned my shortwave radio to the Sojourners' frequency, listening for their signal. They broadcast three times a week, on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, always near sundown, but they sometimes skipped days when there was a lot going on. Cars and cell phones were still getting date-time signals from GPS satellites, so I knew what day it was even if I didn't know where the Sojourners were. All I had to do was move around every day until I found their signal. We did this long enough for Sandy's Scan-All report to come back clean, and for all the peaches to be gone.

On the sixteenth day, as soon as I dialed the sundown frequency, I heard it: a sermon, given in a familiar voice.