The Survivors (Book 1): Summer (4 page)

I sneezed violently.

Mum would be so proud,
I thought dryly as I rubbed my nose.  God knows that I never did this much dusting at home.  Still, if I wanted to make this little loft into my new home then it would have to be clean.  It was hard enough to find food and water without a crusty layer of dust getting all over everything.

An hour earlier, I had finished my inspection of the little apartment, and found that there really wasn’t much to it.
 A tiny kitchen opened up off the living room, with a stove, a fridge and a decent-sized pantry. At the far end of the living room, a door led into a small bedroom with an attached en suite.  It was just right for one person, maybe two if they didn’t mind getting a bit cosy.

For me all on my lonesome, it was perfect.

The bad news was that the dust was just as thick everywhere else as it was in the living room, and the kitchen was a disaster area of a whole other stripe.  The good news was that when I tried a light switch, I discovered the place was still attached to the power grid, and the grid was miraculously still going.

Thank you mysterious heroes, whoever you may be.

I was going to have to invest a substantial amount of time in getting the place clean, but it was water-tight, wired, and very secure.  There was no sign of rats or roach infestations, which was a blessing.  I hated rats.  While I was immune to Ebola-X, that immunity did not extend to all the other diseases that could be brought by pests – and if something were to happen to me, where would I go for treatment?

Being a survivor meant being self-sufficient, but it also meant being a bit of a neat freak.
 It was just better to stay healthy to begin with than to have to try and pull myself back together after a nasty bout of the flu – or worse.

As soon as I
had finished my inspection and judged the place fit to be my new domicile, I went back down to retrieve my backpack so that I could leave it somewhere safe while I cleaned.  No time like the present; the sooner I got started, the sooner I’d be finished.

I discovered a small vacuum cleaner hidden in the back of the linen cupboard, but my inner survivalist was loathe to give away my position over something as minor as a little dust.
 Our world was a silent place now, without the drone of traffic and human voices; the noise of a vacuum cleaner would carry over half the township.  As far as I was concerned, there was no reason to assume that I was safe and alone just because I hadn’t seen anyone yet.  After the pain that I’d been through, I chose to err on the side of caution.

Luckily for me, it seemed that Benny had been a rather fastidious fellow in his former life, and kept the place well stocked with cleaning supplies before his untimely infection.
 In no time at all, I had the windows open to let the apartment air out and I’d tossed the worst of the dust right back outside where it belonged.  In some places, the dust was so thick I didn’t even need to use a dustpan; I just picked it up with my fingers and it all came up in one big wad of filth.

The spiders were another story.
 They were a little territorial.  Thankfully, any arachnophobia that I might have once suffered from was a distant memory.

"
Sorry, mate, but this is my house now," I told one particularly large daddy longlegs as I swept him off the ceiling with my broom, and shook him out the window.

Good thing that spiders were also immune.
 Could you imagine a zombie tarantula?

That thought made me chuckle, even in the face of so much horror.
 I figured that you had to keep up your sense of humour, or you'd go crazy.

I suppose when you had spent the better part of the last ten years alone, it didn’t really matter if other people thought you were crazy, did it?
 All kinds of things stopped mattering when you no longer had society watching and judging you, and from what I’d seen it seemed to be different for every person.

For some survivors, personal hygiene seemed to be one of the first things that they abandoned, but I still considered it vitally important.
 Perhaps it was because I’m female, and we were just more sensitive to that kind of thing.  I hated that unspecified itchy feeling when your skin was all filthy and sweaty, and I loathed being able to smell myself.  Most of the male survivors that I’d met didn’t seem to care.  I could only guess that they couldn’t smell their own stench the way I could.  

Yet another reason to avoid them, as if I needed any more after what had happened the last time I saw another living human being.

I let the broom head drop to the floor, and stood back to admire my handiwork.  Not perfect, but it was a start.  There was still the matter of the bed, though.  The last person who had slept in that bed was Benny, and that was years ago.  I hated to think what kind of foulness lingered in those stale, old sheets.  They’d have to go.

With a determined stride, I crossed to the bedroom and set about stripping off all of the bedding.
 Sheets, duvet, and pillows alike, I flung them into a pile on the floor.  When I reached the mattress, I was relieved to discover that it was still in excellent condition, with no signs of fungus or pests aside from a tiny bit of mildew on the underside.  A wee bit of mould wasn’t enough to deter me from sleeping in it though, not after I’d spent the last couple of years living in the back of an old shipping container.

It gave me the shivers just thinking about sleeping in a real bed again.

I gathered up the old linens and dumped them in a pile in the living room so that I could deal with them another day.  As filthy as they were, a survivor threw nothing away if there was any chance it could be saved.  Waste not, want not.  After the end of the world, you became the ultimate recycler.

From the linen cupboard, I fetched the spare set of bedding.
 Despite the years, the sheets were relatively clean and mould-free.  I unfolded them and flapped them out the window, giving them a damn good shake to get rid of any excess dust.

There would be time to wash all the bedding out another day, but not tonight.
 I was working against the clock, with not much time before the sun set.  Knowing that the power was still on did relieve the tension of impending darkness, but I preferred not to rely too heavily on something that could abandon me at any moment.  It was not terribly surprising that we suffered a lot of blackouts in this day and age.

When the new bedding finally passed my critical inspection, I returned to the bedroom.
 There, I flicked the bottom sheet over the mattress and quickly mitred and knotted the corners the way my mother had taught me when I was a little girl.  A pang of longing and loneliness twisted my heart when I thought of her, but I fought it off.  If I gave in to despair, I might as well have killed myself right then and gotten it over with.  Mum wouldn't have wanted that.  

Besides, I still had to deal with the kitchen, and I wasn’t looking forward to that at all.

***

By the time I finished sanitising the kitchen, I decided it was appropriate to coin a whole new word to describe the state it was originally in.
 'Epigross' seemed appropriate, or perhaps ‘grodetacular’ was better.

I wonder
if Oxford is still taking submissions?

The kitchen held all kinds of smells in unexpected places, and none of them were good.
 Most of them came from the fridge, which I was sad to discover had burned out years ago.  Given enough time I could probably have fixed it but there was no real need to do so.  What would I refrigerate?  Everything I ate came in cans or packets, or was fresh out of the ground.  I settled for scraping out the contents and giving the fridge a quick wash, then I left it alone.

The pantry was in no better state, and everything that was in there soon went into a rubbish sack as well.
 Sadly, my good friend Benny was not the kind of fellow that kept a stash of canned food in case of emergency.  Rather selfish of him, if you ask me.  I did come away with a couple of tins of baked beans and minted peas.  Not an amazing haul, but decent enough.  Combined with what I'd brought with me, it would be enough to keep me going another couple of days – long enough to explore this pretty little town and map out the available resources.

What was important was that it meant I wouldn’t have to eat cat food or bugs for dinner tonight.
 Been there, done that.  Not fun.

When the pantry was clean, I put my tins back in and lined them up in an obsessively neat little row with their faded labels facing forward.
 Tidy little soldiers, all standing at attention, ready to be devoured at my leisure.  Om nom nom.

By that stage, I was starting to lose the daylight.

"Time to batten down the hatches," I murmured to myself as I glanced out the window at the setting sun.  While I had artificial light if I wanted it, I did not want to go advertising my position to every Tom, Dick and Harry in the local area.  Don't poke the bear.

Bear?
 What bear?  
I crinkled my nose; I was really starting to go a bit peculiar, and apparently my head was full of delightfully inappropriate clichés.

I shook my head and decided to let that one go.
 I'd worry about my mental health later, along with my many, many other problems.  Such as figuring out if the plumbing in my new home still worked.  Oh, how I longed for a hot shower.  That would have been just lovely.

Taser in one hand and keys in another, I trotted back downstairs and peered cautiously out at the office through a crack in the door.
 Nothing stirred.

Then I crept into the main room of the store, and inspected that just as thoroughly before proceeding.
 Still nothing.

I stuck my head outside, and look
ed up and down the street.  Once again, I found no signs of life except a pair of magpies chatting about how silly I was for being so paranoid.

You think that's paranoid, maggies?
 Just watch me
.

Still not satisfied, I slipped outside and circled the store in a low crouch, peering into bushes and over obstructions to make sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that I really was entirely alone.
 One full circuit completed, I turned right back around and went the other way, checking that my footprints were the only ones visible.

Satisfied at last, I returned to the front door of the shop and paused to examine the debris in the doorway, making sure everything was exactly as I'd left it.
 It was.

I was safe and alone.

Part of me wondered if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but the part of me that remembered the pain of violence most vividly reassured me that it was definitely a good thing.  In this messed-up world, there was no one that I could trust, no one that I could love – no one that would put my safety above their own.  I was alone in every sense of the word.

With a sweep of my foot, I cleared away as much of the debris from the doorway as I could, then shoved the outer door closed and turned the lock.
 I didn't have much faith in the door's strength, given that the glass was badly cracked, but it would do.  At least if someone – or something – tried to come through it, I'd have plenty of warning.

And the taser wasn't the only weapon in my possession.

Retracing my steps, I retreated back behind the counter and paused to examine the old refrigerator that had once housed drinks for sale to the public.  I didn't trust the various kinds of soft drinks and juices, but there were a number of bottles of water inside that were still sealed.

Gathering up an armful, I took them with me as I retreated back into my new home, closing windows and locking doors behind me.
 First, the office was locked up, then the door to the stairs, and then the door at the top of the stairs as well.  Apparently, Benny was as paranoid as I was, or at least liked the security of having several locked doors between him and the rest of the world.

I wasn’t sure what Benny's excuse was, but who could really blame me?
 I had barely survived my last encounter with other people, and the experience had left me scarred both mentally and physically.  

Once I was finally safely confined to my new home, I lined up my water bottles on the kitchen bench
– more neat little soldiers destined to sacrifice themselves to fill my belly.  I broke the seal on one and sniffed at the contents, then tasted it cautiously.  Nothing but fresh, clean water.  A little tainted by the plastic over the years, but it wouldn't kill me – at least, not anytime soon.

'Have a drink!' the bottle encouraged, with its happy little cartoon mascot dancing for my amusement.

"Don't mind if I do", I said to myself, and swigged from the bottle as I meandered through my little flat, to close up the windows that I'd opened earlier to let in the afternoon breeze.  It was getting cooler, I realised as I studied the setting sun.  Clouds were rolling in from the west, obscuring the sunset.  It had been fine all day, but it looked like this evening there would be rain.

Not that I minded.
 I was safe and sound, inside an elevated building well away from the risks of city life.  It could rain all it liked.  I didn’t mind at all.