I awoke to the devilish laughter of Dean echoing in my ears. Which promptly coalesced from dream memory to real world sounds of the twittering song of a woodland wren, or some such songbird. It was dawn already.
Since the end of everything survivors tended to rise and retire with the dawning and setting of the sun and we counted the passing of days by the phases of the moon.
I took a good look around the surrounding woods, searching for danger signs. Then got out the binoculars and checked Emily and Dean's camp. They looked safe enough, still sleeping in their little tent. There were no signs of disturbance and no dangers in sight near to them.
I got down from my tree, bathed quickly in the nearby stream, gathered up my equipment and set off northeast, moving diagonally parallel to where Dean and Emily would be headed once they got moving.
They were following the northwest road toward the coast. I had been leading them, following the path of the road but staying just out of sight of it, in the woods. Most of the roaming scavengers still used roads to travel by which made them dangerous for small groups.
There was enough morality, residual desire and guilt in me to stop me going too far away from her. Just incase she ran into trouble. Not that, realistically, I would be able to do much from so far away. Still, it kept me from straying too far.
It felt good to be on my own again. To move at my own pace, to not have to wait for stragglers, to not have to worry about anyone but myself for once. Of course, in the back of my mind I was busy worrying about Emily, if she was still safe, but I resisted the urge of go back and check on her and instead plunged deeper into the woods.
*****
It was mid morning before I stumbled across the little cottage. I spotted its white washed exterior through the dappled curtain of summer foliage and undergrowth, saplings and bracken and brambles, as I trundled through the woods following what I assumed was a deer track. The cottage must have been a little holiday home or something, off the main road by a good mile and barely accessible by a overgrown track that was little more than two tyre-cut ruts in a trail made through flattened woodland undergrowth.
I had learned a few things in my scavenging experiences one of which was travel light but not to dump your existing supplies where people can stumble across them and steal them off you. I climbed a tree and secured my pack and weapon harness to the trunk, keeping only my hand held weapons on my belt, which included a number of kitchen knives, a hand axe and a claw hammer. My main weapon, that I always took with me into building searches, was the antique but razor sharp wakizashi. The Japanese short sword was ideal, in fact designed, to be used indoors when the full length samurai sword would have been too long and cumbersome.
The front door was locked, but only by the yale lock and an old credit card dealt with that in a second.
I was hit with the usual stale musty smell of houses that hadn't been aired in months, but not with the tell tale scent of rotten meat that would give me a zombie or corpse warning.
Saying that I stumbled into my first zombie in the hall, practically behind the door. He, an old man before he turned, was pretty fresh and showed no signs of decay yet. Which explained the lack of usual zombie scent.
He was lying on the floor, struggling to get up apparently surprised by my sudden appearance. He was trying to lunge for me and get up at the same time and failed in both cases. I put him down straight away with a huge, driving short sword slice to his skull, separating his brain and spinal cord.
I only started to examine him after I was certain he was no longer a threat.
He smelled strongly of disinfectant and I noticed that his chino style, tan coloured trousers were liberally stained at the crotch. He might have been in his sixties, had gray, slightly wild hair and a matching wispy beard. He wore a check shirt, that wasn't tucked into his trousers and an unbuttoned waistcoat.
Zombies are slow and lumbering and generally easy to avoid. The only times they really posed a dire threat was if you were panicking, if you found yourself cornered or if there are a lot of them tightly packed together. Then again, if you come up against them in significant numbers you're really going to be in trouble.
There is also the fact that while Human's get tired and require sleep, zombies don't. They never stop coming after you. There were also loads of unanswered questions, for example, if their senses were the same as ours, what kind of memory they had, long term, short term or goldfish.
There wasn't much of interest in this one's pockets, a set of small steel keys, a bottle of pills that I thought were for treating angina. Maybe that's how he died. There were no bites on him anywhere. I moved on.
It was a small bungalow with a simply lay out. A corridor led from the front door to the back bedroom with rooms off it to the left and right. Left: front bedroom and bathroom. Right: living room and kitchen. A back door in the kitchen led to a small walled in garden, now overgrown.
There was little to take other than tinned food and fresh clothing. Most of my weapons and survival gear were good quality and I'd only replace items that needed replacing. I was no bodybuilder and couldn't carry too much weight on my back and still be able to defend myself.
One thing he did have that was interesting was a petrol driven generator, something like a grand's worth of kit. He had it set up in the kitchen and was running the fridge-freezer off it.
I checked the fridge-freezer and found it was chock full of freshly caught and killed livestock. Mostly rabbits and squirrels and a few chickens and other birds. A lot of it was skinned and stripped. Just unrecognisable hunks of raw meat. Some was bagged up some ready to be skinned and prepared.
I wondered, beyond what he had it all stocked up for, how he was doing his hunting. Did he set traps like me? Or was he a go-out-and-find-em style hunter. And if so, what weapons did he use? A bow? A hunting rifle? A shotgun?
Any thoughts of searching around for new weapons was voided from my mind, like a flushing toilet, the moment I ventured into the back bedroom.
The noise initially alerted me what what to expect - a strange gargling version of standard zombie groans, growing more and more ferocious and animated as I got closer to the room.