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.
However, the reek of disinfectant was the first thing that hit me, with a faint undercurrent of air freshener scent. The next thing that hit me was the brightness of the room. It was white washed floor to ceiling. There were none of the usual trappings of a bedroom, like a bed or wardrobe or chest of drawers. There was a rectangular dining table pushed up against the wall under the window opposite the door. And on the right hand wall was an archetype medicine cabinet. All white with mirrored doors. And that was all the furnishings in the room. Even the floor was white tile effect linoleum. Behind the door to my left were plastic gallon containers of industrial disinfectant, a mop and bucket, and other cleaning equipment. And something like a dozen aerosols of air freshener.
There was also a big carving knife suspended from a nail in the same wall behind the door.
However, the first thing that caught my attention once I stepped into the room before all of the interior decor, was the stark naked female arse mooning me from the table under the window.
I could tell from the dull, bluish-gray hue to the once pink flesh, that the naked arse was undead. My eyes were drawn to the pouting, slick, pussy lips that were now a dark, muddy shade of gray brown and above it a prominent ruddy star of the undead woman's anus.
My eyes readjusted, pulling back and taking in the rest. There were two female zombies chained up in the bedroom.
Even in their undead corpse state they were undeniably hot. Sexual beings.
Taking a step back I could have recognised the sexuality was purely in their voluptuous, over-ripe bodies, the way they were dressed and the fact that they were obviously shackled and arranged as sexual toys for the now dead man in the hall.
But I was in the moment and even looking them over was enough to get my underused phallus to fill out and harden. My heavy, blue balls, too long without attention, tingled insistently.
As with their departed owner, I could see no sign of the cause of their infection or devolution to animated corpse. They were to all intents and purposes pristine. There were no signs of decay, even though the whole room was suffused with the strong odours of disinfectant and air freshener.
Maybe he had snatched them as living women and out of some kind of sick necrophilic fetish, choked or drowned or suffocated them, turning them into zombies so he could have his little undead harem or slave room or whatever.
Or maybe he had found them recently turned, liked the look of them and hauled them back home and kept them as fresh as he could. Who knows.
Bent over the table, doggie style, with her feet on the floor was the elder of the two. It was pretty much impossible to tell the ages of the undead, even the fresh, un-rotted ones. I put her in her thirties somewhere, though maybe that was an under estimate.
She could well have been a barmaid, she was typical of the stereotype. Very busty, full hips, round face, full lips. Some would describe her as plump but she wasn't really. No more than Emily was. But she was a hell of a lot curvier.
She was wearing an unbuttoned white blouse, a pleated mock-leather mini skirt, striped knee socks and black ankle boots. But her most striking feature was her punk styled hair. It was dyed azure, the left side shaved to a hairs breadth stubble from her temple around the back of her ear with its multiple piercings. It was cropped at the nape of her neck and the right side had been left long, I suppose to be combed across her right eye, emo style. Of course, it was unkempt and needed a wash.
