Werewolves and Zombies, chapter 2 (Patreon)

Stella moved more carefully now that she was closer to town. A number of these trees had ropes tied to the limbs to facilitate a quick climb, and she jerked on each out of habit. Oregon rain made everything mildew and rot and she didn’t want to discover a rope had been chewed through or frayed when she tried using it to get out of the path of a zombie.

This fringe of forest near the town was the most dangerous part of her journey. With the sun high, zombies would often wander toward the shade, and the trees weren’t dense enough to block their passage. Ahead, a strip of mud had captured a footprint.

Stella went on one knee and touched it. It looked like a dog had survived, although she had no idea how. The stupid creatures had more loyalty than common sense, and that had been the end of most of them. Even when their owners turned into shambling monsters, the dogs had still wagged their tails and tried to make their people happy. Most had died at the hands of the people who had once fed and petted and spoiled them.

Luckily, zombie dogs were not a thing.

But maybe one smart dog had survived, and a big one from the print. Great. Now she had to worry about getting bit by a feral dog. She could add rabies to her list of reasons to hate the apocolypse.

After checking the rope closest to the edge of town, Stella eased into Mrs. Henderson’s backyard. The woman had been in her eighties, and she was a hunched, arthritic zombie that haunted the clinic more often than not. Maybe she was searching for her husband who died there before the government ordered everyone to stay home and call to have the military pick up the sick. Maybe she’d just died closer to that building. Either way, Stella assumed she could find what she wanted in the Henderson house.

Mrs. Henderson had been friends with Stella’s mother, and Stella remembered the two comparing quilt patterns while Stella ate cookies and played with the Henderson’s baby grandson, or maybe it was a baby great-grandson. That’s how Stella knew that Mrs. Henderson was a well-organized and socially acceptable hoarder.

Or, as her father had always said, “Someone who knows how to be prepared.” Her mother and always rolled her eyes at her father's desire to be prepared but the solar panels and generators had kept her family going long after most of the town was gone. Unfortunately, her father had been less insightful when it came to human nature. Stella pulled a crowbar out of her bag and quickly popped open the back door. She stopped before entering the shadows, listening for movement inside. It might be daylight, but buildings created their own shade, and that made them dangerous.

After listening long enough to decide that there weren't any zombies moving about, Stella eased into the Henderson’s kitchen. Mrs. Henderson had left dishes in the sink, and at some point, a mouse or perhaps a larger rodent must've gone running across them because half the stack lay on the floor in front of the sink. Anything that looked like food had been long since eaten by rodents and bugs, and anything stored in paper bags would have suffered the same fate during the first year. However, Mrs. Henderson tended to move everything into plastic containers. Stella remembered seeing them when she would bake cookies. While they weren't as secure as the metal storage boxes her father had set up at their lake cabin, with a little luck Stella would be able to find what she needed.

She quickly checked the rest of the house discovering a dusty bedroom and a quilting room that smelled nauseatingly sour. The roof had leaked so Mrs. Henderson's impressive quilting fabric stash had turned into a mold factory.

Only once she was sure that she was alone in the house did Stella risk heading back and searching the cupboards. It took a few tries before she found the tall plastic containers with their country-chic chalkboard labels. Mrs. Henderson’s handwriting was like a time capsule. The woman who had written “sugar” and “flour” and “almond flour” and “cake flour” on these various bins was long gone.

Most of the time, Stella moved past the detritus of the world she'd known growing up without giving it much thought. People who thought too much ended up not surviving. But every once in a while, she would see something like Mrs. Henderson’s neatly laid out baking supplies and her heart ached. Mrs. Henderson’s great-grandson should be in school now. He should be getting papers back with smiley-face stickers from his teacher. She should be baking him cookies using butter and eggs that she took out of a refrigerator decorated with his school pictures and his drawings.

Melancholy swept through her, but she focused on here now. She'd come for sugar. The library had given her some good hints about local plants that made a respectable tea and her scattered gardens and rabbit snares fed her, but she absolutely could not get use to eating food that had no sugar or salt or spice. Her last trip had landed her a significant salt source by the old solar ponds. She wasn’t sure the salt was intended for human consumption, but she was careful to avoid adding too much. Other forms of salt were just too hard to come by these days.

But today, she was all about the sugar. Her father would've called her an idiot for risking her life for that luxury, but it wasn't like Stella was holding out hope for some grand future. She would survive until some day she didn't survive and whether she risked herself for some sugar or not wouldn’t make a huge difference in her life expectancy.

She eyed the flour container. The pigeons laid some pretty decent sized eggs that she could harvest. With flour, sugar, and eggs, she could make a pancake of sorts.

But that would require her weighing herself down like a pack mule, which wasn't the wisest choice. Maybe she would take a few risks for sugar, but she didn’t want to be stupid. With a wistful look towards the various supplies that she was leaving behind, Stella grabbed the sugar and slipped it into her bag. After a second, she grabbed a small container of cinnamon and added it to her loot.

The rest she would leave for someone else to scavenge or for any rodents determined enough to chew their way through the plastic. She had no idea which of those two would win this race. With her prize safely secured, Stella headed back out into the midday sun. Once again, she searched for signs of zombies. Or dog. She had to worry about that now. She touched her sidearm, aware that if the dog came after her, she would have to fire it. An injury could kill a person as easily as a zombie. There was no clinic to stitch up a wound or prescribe antibiotics, and the drug stores had all been hit first.

Luckily, the backyard was as quiet as it had been when she slipped in. She moved for the trees, freezing when a shadow detached itself and moved towards her. She pulled her gun out, aware that if it was a zombie, she would have very little time before it rushed her. Worse, it was between her and the safety of the trees where she had her ropes waiting. However, the form didn't rush at her. It eased through the shadows using the same care she had.

Her heart beat faster as she realized she was facing off against another person. Maybe her father had underestimated the danger people posed during a zombie apocalypse, but she didn't. The person left to the safety of the trees and stepped into the knee-high weeds that covered Mrs. Henderson’s backyard. When she recognized him, her heart slowed to a steadier beat.

“We told you that this is our hunting ground.” His voice was an intense whisper.

She stepped forward and kept her voice as quiet as his had been. “And I told you that I lived here long before you and your family found this town. We can both scavenge for what we need.”

“There are already too many people scavenging these houses. There's almost nothing left, and you come to take what supplies there are.” He scowled at her.

“I'm not raiding the houses. I came to the house of someone I grew up knowing. I took one thing out of it. And you have no right to tell me what I can or cannot do in the town where I've lived my whole life.”

It was strange having this fight in whispers, but she had grown use to controlling the volume matter what her mood. He stepped forward and pulled a machete from his belt. “We have children to feed. You have no right to come in here and take what we need.”

Guilt pulled at Stella. She had seen him and his family. She didn't know what exactly the relationships were, but there were four men in the group, one old enough to be a grandfather. She had also seen a couple of teenagers, three women, and rarest of all—four children.

The men would find it easier to survive without trying to either hide or protect women and children, so she had assumed they were a family group, and she respected that they were managing to do what her father had tried and failed to. A little voice suggested she hand over the sugar, but they weren't likely to make it long-term any more than she was. All of them were simply trying to survive their corner of the apocalypse for his long as they could and find whatever pleasure possible before the end. Giving them a container of sugar wasn't likely to make those children survive any longer and they didn't have any more right to it than she did.

“You don't want to fight me,” she said.

“Maybe you don't want to fight with me.” The man looked to be in his early thirties, and his gauntness spoke of having missed a lot of meals before they landed in this town where food was marginally easier to get because they didn't have the volume of zombies as in the cities. But despite that, he moved with a grace that suggested he knew how to fight.

“If you’re injured here, your family is at a serious disadvantage. You can't afford that anymore than I can. I'm leaving, so there is no reason for you to take that risk.”

“I also can't risk my family starving to death because you keep raiding these houses,” he said. He held his machete higher. There are too many of you trying to feed yourselves and too few resources left.”

She knew that was true too. She'd seen a few groups around town, and not all of them were the sort to have children. But as long as they didn't invade her part of the forest, she tried to ignore the danger. It wasn't like she could chase people out of town.

“I feed myself from the forest. I have snares and gardens that provide for me, so came for a few luxuries that you won't miss anyway. I doubt you are interested in tea,” Stella said, intentionally misrepresenting the loot she had come searching for. No one killed over tea, but refined sugar was a high calorie food the people did kill over.

He straightened up slightly. “Tea?” That had confused him.

Stella shrugged. “The world has ended. If we can’t risk our lives for a small pleasure, what's the point?”

“Protecting our families,” he said with an intensity that suggested he hadn't yet given up hope for the future. That was somewhere between cute and pathetic. “You have a family to protect. Mine’s gone. So, for me library books and tea are my reasons for living. I suspect we can forage from the same town without stepping on each other's toes.”

That made him look more confused. She was the only one taking books out the library, and given the extensive section on local plants, that was stupid. She thought he was going to challenge her again, but his eyes grew large and he started backing up. “If I see you again, I will cut all of your ropes. Stay out of town.” He disappeared into the shadows.

She did a quick scan of the area because his retreat felt more like one borne of necessity than a willingness to back down. That screamed zombie. Instead she spotted something roughly dog shaped. Sort of. It was bigger than a dog. Significantly bigger. In fact, it looked a lot like a fucking wolf.

She froze. The wolf cocked its head to the side and watched her. “Nice doggie doggie,” she whispered as she eyed the trees. Wait. Trees were their natural habitat. She probably shouldn't be going for trees.

She backed up toward the Henderson house and eased through the door before jamming a kitchen chair under the doorknob. That was the best she could do, although it felt pretty flimsy compared to the wolf’s massive size. Stella watched through a stained and dusty window as the wolf padded across the backyard. Its ribs showed, and it had patches where the fur thinned. The end of its tail was even missing. It looked like it had gone through the wars, except living creatures didn’t survive the zombie wars. It reached the treeline and looked back toward the house, amber eyes seeming to reflect the sunlight. Stella felt trapped in that gaze, but after a long minute, it whipped around and disappeared into the trees at the exact spot where her visitor had vanished.

She pulled Mrs. Henderson's old aluminum stool away from the stove and sat it next to the window. The sun was high, and she had some time before the fading afternoon light would pose a real threat. She had to give the wolf enough time to wander away.

Nature had been reclaiming a lot of areas, but she had never expected to see a wolf. That was a rush. Her dad would've loved seeing wolves return to the area, and then he would have gone online to find out how a person got a hunting permit for one.

“What you think of that, Dad? I guess nature is taking back the world.”

He would've told her that was hippie tripe. And maybe it was. But it was the end of the world, and she could indulge if she wanted to. Maybe when all the people were gone, nature would figure out how to get rid of the zombies too. Then the wolves could have their forests back. They couldn’t fuck things up more than people had.

Her father definitely would have called that hippie thinking. He probably would have blamed public education for putting those thoughts in her head.

“I’m sorry you’re not here to argue whether wolves deserve to inherit the earth,” she whispered to the shadows in the house. The shadows didn’t answer.