This Shattered Land - 02 Read Free Page B

light of the early morning sun. A few tense
seconds went by as we listened for the two follow up shots that would indicate
a distress call. They didn’t come. We both let out a sigh of relief.
    “I
hope he got something.” Gabe said.
    “If
he did, I hope he gets to it before the dead show up.” I replied. A shot that
loud was bound to attract the infected.
    We
spent the rest of the morning taking stock of what we needed to raid from
Marion. Medical supplies were at the top of the list, as well as clothes, new
boots, and toilet paper. I never realized until the collapse of civilization
how much I took the little things for in life for granted, like toilet paper.
The stuff is like gold if you can find it. I think there is a certain amount of
irony in the fact that at the end of the world, one of the most valuable and
treasured commodities a person can hope to come across is a roll of ass-wipe.
Maybe that says something about the human race in general.
    By
ten in the morning we were finished taking inventory, and our stocks of food
were down to just a couple of week’s worth. After that, we would have to delve
into one of the four plastic buckets of freeze-dried provisions that Gabe had
stockpiled a few months before the Outbreak. The desiccated food lasts damn
near forever if kept in its original packaging, and one bucket would be enough
feed us both for fifty-five days. We would not have to go hungry anytime soon,
but the freeze-dried stuff constituted our emergency rations. We wanted to save
it for the trip to Colorado. As for water, our rain cisterns were full, which
gave us a little over four-hundred gallons of fresh drinking water. That would
keep us stocked for a good long while if we were careful with it.
    Most
of the rest of the day saw us doing mundane work around the cabin. We rotated
out the repetitive day-to-day tasks so that we didn’t get too tired of having
to do one thing or another. It was my week to clean the cabin and do laundry.
Gabe had wood chopping, water hauling, and dishwashing duty. Bringing water up
from the stream at the base of the mountain was the most important of these
tasks. We only used the water from our cisterns for drinking and cooking. Any
other use and we got it from the stream.
    There
was nothing difficult about cleaning the cabin. Running a broom across the
floor and giving the smooth concrete a once-over with a mop was usually enough
to keep it livable. Other than that, all I really had to do was dust and shovel
ashes out of the wood stove. Laundry, on the other hand, was a different story
altogether. Without the benefit of a washer and dryer, it was an extremely time
consuming, labor-intensive task. This is especially true during the winter
months when it is too cold outside to dry laundry on the clothesline. During
that time, we have to wash clothes a few items at a time and hang them up over
the stove to dry. Now that the weather was finally warming up, we would be able
to do laundry in larger quantities, and do it outdoors. That would save us a
lot of time. After I finished cleaning the cabin, and hanging our clothes and
linens out to dry, I took a few minutes to look over our weapons.
    Gabe
had quite a number of firearms before the Outbreak, which we had supplemented with
my own collection and a few other scavenged items. We had a wide variety of
weapons to choose from, but mostly we just stuck to the ones that we could fit
suppressors to. Less noise equals fewer encounters with the undead. Even though
there was enough ammunition on the shelves in our underground shelter to outfit
a small army, we were always on the lookout for more. We could only carry a few
thousand rounds with us on our journey west, but it was still nice to know the
location of a large stockpile, just in case. We had also cached a few boxes of
ammo in the mountains around the cabin along the paths that we traveled the
most frequently. We might never need it, but it was good to know it was out
there if we