5)

The rest of the night passed easily enough. With two good arms between me and the Fetch, we dragged the dead Nightmares, hounds, and serial killer, into the cage and doused them down with gasoline. I had never been sure if the things rotting were a health hazard or not. No bugs would touch them, and they didn’t seem to rot, but the sun would slowly blacken the things once dead into a sticky bubbling mess.

Burning them didn’t smell that nice either, but the smell didn’t linger like leaving them in the daylight did.

The Fetch always had an odd look on its face when it and I watched Nightmares burn. I asked it once and it just shook its head. "At least I outlasted these ones."

Worn out and hurt, I washed up a bit and crawled into bed. As I began to lie down, I saw the bargain packs of noodles stuffed under the bed in the vanity mirror.

“Oh good. At least I can sleep easy now.”

The Fetch didn't need to sleep, and I didn't want it standing guard stripped down my skivvies, so I sleep in sweatpants and a tee shirt. Stucker nearby leaning up against my bed.

I had rigged up enough solar panels to keep a few electronics charged up. The Fetch spend most of the nights reading a tablet loaded up with books I hadn't had the chance to read since all this had begun. It said it was already thirty two books up on me.

After downloading everything to a flash drive, I had asked Suzy to hide it for me in case the Fetch started deleting the still unread books when I pissed it off. It’s what I would do.

It would still have a backup copy for bargaining, but why bargain when I could plan ahead? Of course, Suzy had a hard time telling us apart, so I gave her a password too. Random page, line, and word from the right margin in the bible so the Fetch couldn’t guess it.

I woke up to sunlight lighting up my bedroom windows when I rolled over onto my injury, after the pain faded away enough that I could sit up, I made my way to the bathroom. While gas and electricity were both out, for some reason we still had water on our block. Possibly it was just water pressure still in the system, but I would enjoy even cold showers and flushing toilets while it lasted.

Two tablets of some serious pain medication looted from the Henderson’s bathroom cabinet started their magic before I soaked the gauze bandages to loosen them up from the dried blood. Even before I took them off I could see that my entire shoulder and upper arm had turned a lovely shade of purple black.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Even with the bandages soaked, fresh blood seeped out of the still open cuts. For once the cold water from the shower was really nice as it numbed my arm down pretty well before I deep scrubbed it with soap and water again.

I decided to reapply antibiotic again rather than air dry it, I needed to worry more about infection right now over starting the healing.

The Fetch was in a talkative mood this morning. “Oh wow, that looks ugly. Maybe we should try stitching it up. We have that book.” I ignored it. It’s not like it ever have anything to say that I couldn’t think of myself.

But yeah, stitches could be a thing.

I had looted an entire ambulance early on, not the contents, but the whole ambulance. It was parked down the street with most of the other medical stuff I had collected in it just in case my house got burned down one night.

I decided to head over there after breakfast, the light would be better outside anyways.

Breakfast was a plastic bowl of oatmeal with raisins and cinnamon sugar sitting on a chair on my front porch. Suzy tended to make the first meal of the day for both of us since she could sleep most of the night and get up early. I had hooked up a propane camp stove with a sparker to light it in her backyard. There was also a full sized propane barbecue as well that I cooked on for both of us and heated water with.

I can't have slept all that late, since there was still a bit of warmth in the oatmeal. A drink bottle with an orange flavored drink inside of it finished up my meal.

I flossed and brushed my teeth afterwards. You had to take care with your teeth now, It wasn’t like I was going to see a dentist again anytime soon.

The Nightmare ones were less than helpful. Sure they could do extractions, but I doubted they would stop with just one.

The Fetch put in a series of stitches as I sat in the backdoor of the ambulance, I thought to myself that eating before an amateur medic who didn’t like you very much sewed you up had not been the best idea.

After tossing the mess left over into a garbage can sitting beside the nearest house, me and the Duplicate stood looking at the smashed and broken apart cage. It had been a major pain to build the thing when me and it had both been healthy. With a messed up arm each… "Not happening, we need another plan."

It offered up a suggestion. “Spotlights?” I shook my head. “It would be too much light, things and people would know to come looking for someone here.”

It rubbed its chin. "Tiki torches?"

I thought that one over, it would be a fire hazard. But we needed something tonight, that we could set up while injured.

The Fetch perked up. “We can get the kind that burns stuff to keep bugs away. Citranelin? They don’t bite me, but your bites still itch.”

I started making a list of places we could hit before early afternoon so we would still have time to set things up. Stopping by Suzy’s resulted in an awkward conversation for everyone involved.

A stop at the drug store was added to the list, with as much feminine hygiene product as I could haul back so I would never be asked to get more ever again.

While the cars still ran, and the streets were pretty clear, the Nightmares had taken to wrecking all the tires on every vehicle they could find. Even sometimes during the day when it was overcast. They got all the cars on my street including mine before I had a clue they were working together to prevent combination weapons and mobile lighting systems from wreaking their fun.

Instead, me and the Fetch would be doing bicycle shopping.