Billions 15

A boat house wasn’t Phillip’s first choice.

 

“Why did I come here?” Phillip asked himself for the twelfth time. He was in his dad’s boat house just off the lake. Outside the undead were banging on the sides of the building that they could reach and there was nowhere for him to run to, only the open doors that led to the lake itself. “At least I won’t die of dehydration.”

The problem was the boat house was empty. His parent’s main boat was in dry dock getting repainted and his dad had just sold his hand made stripper canoe to another couple across the lake.

“And I can’t swim for shit.” Phillip said, shaking his head and looking out at the placid lake.

He could probably wade manage to dog paddle out and around the edge of the building, but there were a lot of zombies. Earlier in the day his parents and his sister and her family were watching with horror as the unthinkable happened; the dead rose and started devouring the living. Now it was just him. His parents were gone, his mother died first, his father was overwhelmed trying to fight the zombies off of his nieces and nephew when the zombie broke into the house. Phillip had barely made it out of the second story window before the undead broke down the flimsy door.

There had been a few zombies in the backyard, enough to make the idea of getting to his car another form of suicide. So Phillip had run for the boat house. The front of the house held a woodshop, where his father had constructed the cabinets for the house and lately had been building canoes one at a time to keep him occupied during his retirement. A half-finished canoe still sat upon the forms where his father was building a replacement craft for the one he had sold. Phillip thought the little boats were nice looking, but water had never been his thing, nor had woodworking.

He did know enough to use the tools in his father’s shop, which had saved his life…so far. The boat house had three doors, a normal looking wooden door, the lake door and an overhead garage door that led uphill towards the house. His father’s riding lawn mower was parked over by the garage door, further back a television with a dvd player sat on a movable cart and there was a small refrigerator, a sink and a toilet to round out the shop.

‘All the comforts of home, aside from food.’Phillip had checked the fridge, it was well stocked with two liters of Coke, fourteen beers and two liters of cheap rum, but not a crumb of food in sight.

Phillips familiarity with the tools had given him the ability to quickly barricade the door after he got into the boathouse. The zombies had broken out the windows as he secured the door with thick pieces of lumber and a power screwdriver. He also cut and nailed shorter pieces of wood over the windows, but so far the zombies hadn’t broken them out.

“What the hell am I going to do?” Phillip asked the empty lake. He still had power. Moving to the television he turned it on and flipped to a news channel. His father had cable streaming to the boat house, he had told Phillip he spent a lot of time out in the woodshop, so he might as well make himself comfortable. Watching the news wasn’t making Phillip feel any better, the authorities were telling everyone to lock themselves into their houses and stay put. There was no mention of Phillips area and no indication that authorities were ever going to resolve the situation and come to his rescue.

“I’m on my own. I gotta get myself out of this mess.” He flipped through his father’s dvd collection, it tended towards old sci-fi movies and ‘how-to’ videos for woodworking. One of the dvds was titled “How to build a stripper canoe.” Curious Phillip popped the disk in and started watching the video. Twenty minutes later he paused the video and started gathering supplies from the shop. He found that his dad had already cut the strips needed for the canoe and had them laying in a pile next to the forms. Of the other supplies the video said he needed his dad had a plethora. Epoxy, hardener, fiberglass cloth; everything was here.

Not knowing how much longer the power would last, Phillip got to work immediately. He stapled the strips to the form and let the video play over and over as he worked. To his surprise the work wasn’t that difficult and so far he hadn’t needed the power for anything, his father had already done all the cutting. In less than five hours he had a full shell of the canoe assembled. Outside it was full on dark and bugs were starting to come in the open boathouse doors. His father had spoken of making some sort of screen for the opening at one time, but he never had. Phillip was reluctant to close the doors too, they operated with electricity and how would he get them open again if the power went out?

He decided to give himself a good coat of bug spray and leave the doors open. Taking a break before the next step Phillip fixed himself a strong rum and coke and tried to ignore the rumbling in his stomach. Hunger drove him to make quick work of his drink and start sanding. His dad had an orbital sander and plenty of disks, so Phillip started at the front of the canoe and worked his way down both sides. He was not going to fine sand it, just a quick, rough sanding and then he would do the fiberglass shell. According to the video the shell was the important part of this process, it was the strength that held the canoe together, not the wood.

The glue hadn’t fully dried between the seams and that made sanding messy, but Phillip wasn’t too worried about it. It would finish drying while he slept and in the morning he would put on the first layer of epoxy with the fiberglass. In the afternoon he would put on the second layer and by the third day he would risk using the canoe, even if it wasn’t fully finished. With those thoughts running through his head Phillip sat down in his father’s chair in front of the silent television, the soft thumping of the zombie’s hands on the door and walls sounded almost like rainfall and lulled him to sleep.

Phillip woke to pangs of hunger. ‘It’s only been eighteen hours or so, am I going to make it three days?” To quell them he took a slug of rum and washed that down with more of his father’s cola. ‘Drinking and using power tools, what can go wrong with that?’

He was done with the cutting already, so the tools he had to use now mostly consisted of a brush to paint epoxy on over the fiberglass cloth and maybe a pair of scissors to cut the excess cloth off with. The thumping on the door was louder this morning and when Phillip inspected the large garage door he found two of the boards had cracked under the assault.

“Why don’t you leave me alone?” he shouted through the largest crack. Now he was going to have to make some repairs to the garage door to keep the bastards out. There was still plenty of lumber so he measured three cross pieces to pound lengthwise over the door, securing them into the walls on either side of it. He wouldn’t be able to open the garage doors now either, but then his plan all along was to sail out onto the lake.

Phillip rolled the fiberglass cloth out over the canoe; he didn’t trim it yet, but mixed up and poured on the epoxy, following the instructions on the dvd exactly. Cable was off this morning. Not completely off, but there were no channels, just a blue screen with the station letters in white. Spreading the epoxy was easy enough, just time consuming; he scraped the air bubbles out and had the first coat finished before eleven.

Moving back to the garage door he inspected his earlier work. The zombies had broken through in one of the chipped places, pulling out a two inch wide strip of wood almost two feet long. Through the crack he saw a woman’s bloody face, when the zombie noticed him she lunged forward, banging her face on the door. Slowly, oh so slowly, she pushed her face up the crack in the door, ramming a long sliver through her bottom lip.

Phillip pulled back and looked for something to drive her off with. A power saw? No. Thinking quickly he ran to his father’s toolbox and selected a long, flat screwdriver. It was the heftiest one of the bunch, but would still fit through the crack in the door easy enough. When he made it back he saw the zombie had pulled her face back, peeling the sliver of wood away and making the crack a bit wider.

As she saw him she lunged again and Phillip thrust the screwdriver towards her eye. The blade sunk in and with a firm push he broke through her skull until the handle was pressed up against the inside of the door. The woman was still moving.

‘Damaging their brains is supposed to kill them!’Phillip grew even more scared than he had been, he felt a distinct need to urinate, but stopped himself from pissing his pants. With a firm shove he pushed the handle of the screw driver sideways, using the door for leverage. The woman’s head was moved in the opposite direction, but not as quickly as the blade of the screwdriver, which cut through her brain before impacting the inside of her skull. She was still moving.

With frantic movements, Phillip twirled the handle in circles and pulled it in and out for several seconds. When he was done, so was she; the zombie wasn’t moving anymore. He pulled the bloody blade out of her eye and the woman slumped to the ground outside the door.

Laughing with relief Phillip stared at her from inside the shed. His laughter turned to a squeak of surprise as another zombie thumped into the door outside, taking the woman’s place and awkwardly standing over her body as it tried to get through the narrow crack at Phillip.

The thing pulled back and thrust its hand at him, wedging two fingers into the crack. Phillip jumped back and ran to the work bench, where he picked up a small sledge hammer. Returning to the door he smashed the zombie’s fingers, reducing them to broken pulps of sausage links. Phillips stomach growled and he started salivating at the very thought of breakfast sausage. The zombie didn’t pull back, it kept trying to thrust its arm through the crack without success. A splash caught Phillips ears as something went off the dock near the boat house.

They couldn’t swim. He knew that. And the boat house water was well over ten feet, he knew because he father had paid a man to dredge it out again this year so the motor boat would have plenty of clearance. Still, the splash worried Phillip and he crossed the boat house to peer out along the dock as best he could. There were no zombies on the dock; they must only go where they thought food was. The constant thumping on the boat house was a pretty good indication of that.

There were ripples in the water from where the zombie had gone in, they radiated out from a point that Phillip couldn’t see, probably the thing had fallen in where the dock met the boathouse. There were no swirls of movement in the water inside the boat house, Phillip watched for a moment before a thought crossed his mind, fish.

‘There should be fish in the lake, they probably come into the boat house. Dad used to fish.’He looked around and spotted his father’s old gear hung in the rafters, he found a hand axe when he moved the ladder to grab the gear, which was a bonus. Pulling the old box and the two poles down didn’t take any time at all. The epoxy had to dry for four hours, minimum, six max, depending on the humidity, so Phillip had plenty of time to kill at the moment. There was no bait, the box had been sitting up there for years and it would have spoiled by now anyway, but there were plenty of lures. Would a fish bit a lure from inside the boat house? Phillip didn’t think so; he thought fish were attracted to lures by light shining off of them, but he could cast out far enough to get into the lake itself, maybe it would be enough.

By three in the afternoon Phillip hadn’t caught a thing. The power had blinked off once and the cable news channel had come on briefly for a few minutes around two. All he learned in that brief time was that he was definitely on his own; the authorities were focusing on protecting people in the cities.

Phillip turned his attention back to the job at hand and put another coat of epoxy on the outside of the canoe, this one should fill in all the small divots left by the first coat and go a long way towards streamlining the entire canoe, which was supposed to help it glide through the water. It needed to dry 24 hours, but Phillip was going to set the alarm and turn the canoe after 12 so he could knock out the forms and start sanding the inside of the canoe. With luck he would have it coated by 4 in the morning and it would be ready to float by this time tomorrow afternoon.

The first shot of rum in the morning hadn’t done much to quell his stomach and he knew if he drank any more it would push him over the edge into distraction. If only one of the damned fish would bite! His dad had an old wind up alarm clock on the stand by his chair, probably just for taking short naps. Phillip set it to the current time and figured out how to set the alarm for four in the morning. He didn’t turn in, he was far too hungry for that, so he turned his mind towards food.

After fishing for a half an hour with no luck he started looking around the shop once again. Nothing. Finally his eyes landed on the trash bin, maybe there were remnants of food there? Near the bottom of the barrel he found half a lime and an old brown paper sack with grease stains on the sides. Carefully he set the lime on the workbench, as if it were the greatest of treasures. Then he peeled back the bag to reveal half of a wrapped up, moldy sandwich with a full bag of chips. There was also a pickle spear wrapped in saran wrap.

The sandwich wasn’t edible; at least he wasn’t hungry enough to give it a try. The lime had crusted over the cut edge and looked decent to Phillip and the bag of chips was pure gold as far as he was concerned. He opened the chips and eyed the pickle. Finally he decided it wasn’t worth eating yet either. In a moment of inspiration Phillip decided on another use for the half rotted sandwich; bait. He strung both poles with floats and hooks and baited them with the moldy bread and cheese from his father’s meal gone by and gently tossed the hook into the drink. Using scraps of lumber on hand he built two braces for the poles so they wouldn’t be pulled into the drink by the fish he imaged lurking at the bottom.

Finally he returned and ate the last of the small bag of chips and turned his father’s chair around to face the open water, sitting in it he checked the alarm clock and dozed while keeping an eye on the bobbers in the water.

At four in the morning even the sun was still asleep, the alarm clock started ringing, which set off the zombies around the boat house to increase their cadence on the walls. Phillip woke from a nightmare, standing up and almost falling into the water before he regained his focus.

“Zombies. Boathouse. Fish?” This last came out as a question as the florescent lights allowed him to see two poles bent at crazy angles beside him.

Phillip rubbed sleep from his eyes and tried to ignore his protesting stomach. He reached down and started reeling the line in on the smaller of the two poles. A catfish. Phillip didn’t know what kind, all he could think was ‘How am I going to cook it?’ As soon as the thing cleared the floorboards he swung the fish over to make sure his breakfast didn’t get away. Grabbing a piece of scrap he knocked the fish on the head to end its struggles and turned to the other pole. This one was bent down more and he hoped that meant he had a ten pound catfish on the line.

Pulling the thing was difficult and Phillip immediately felt something was wrong. He had fished plenty of times as a kid and knew how fish played the line, this was more like a dragging snag, with just enough tug at the other end to make him think there was something alive on the other end.

‘Or not alive.’He broke out in a cold sweat, ‘I could have snagged that zombie.’ He envisioned a pale, dead hand being tugged up out of the water. ‘No, it’s not as heavy as a body, the line would’ve broken.’

He continued to pull until he revealed what he had on the other end of the line; a good sized turtle.

‘Can you eat turtle?’This thought was immediately followed by ‘It’s got meat, I’m eating it.’ His stomach growled in agreement.

Killing the turtle turned out to be problematic, the damned thing was armored against death and no amount of pounding on its shell had any effect on it. The sledge hammer made short work of the shell, but the thing die a hideous death. Phillip did his best to gut both of his catches with the utility knife from his father’s toolbox. As he worked he looked around at his cooking options.

His dad had matches and candles on the shelf, probably in case the power went out, but Phillip didn’t think he could cook very effectively over a candle. Looking around he spotted a pie tin full of nuts and bolts, he emptied that on the workbench and filled it with scrap wood and sawdust. From the sink he got a cup of water and wet the dock near the lake then raised the pie tin with two short lengths of wood to keep it off the dock itself. Using the matches and some paper from the trash bin Phillip managed to get a pie tin fire going.

To cook the turtle he put half of its shell on the edge of the fire and let it heat up, slowly he pushed it into the coals to clean off the meat and sinew. While he was waiting for the fire to clean the turtle shell he skewered the fish with a coat hanger that he had taken apart and formed into a two prong fork. He weighed the back end of his cooking fork down and let the fish cook a few inches above the fresh coals. When the turtle shell was cleaned off enough to suit him he tossed on the cleaned bits of the turtle, the small legs, the meat from the body, everything except the head and guts.

He also re-baited the fishing lines with fish and turtle guts and tossed them back into the pond, he might get lucky. Phillip brought the half lime out of the fridge and squeezed several drops of the juice onto the turtle meat. After only a few minutes he could wait not longer and started peeling the meat off of the catfish, it was flakey and firm, so he thought it was done. He turned it to let the other side cook and devoured the few ounces of meat that he felt was cooked enough.

It took him an hour to carefully cook and eat every part of both creatures, and at the end he was still hungry. The turtle varied between gamey for the legs and ‘not too bad’ for the meat he had harvested from under the shell, nothing he would want to eat again if he were given a choice.

“Any food is better than no food.” He said to himself as he checked the lines. Nothing, but it might take a little while. He went back to the canoe project and tested the sides with his hands, it was still a little tacky, but not sticky or wet.

Flipping the canoe over he looked at the inside, the video said he needed to knock the forms out and that he should carefully pound out where the first strip was attached with a blob of hot glue  first. His dad had been making a canoe without using staples, so Phillip hadn’t had to remove them before putting on the fiber glass and epoxy, but getting the forms out would be more difficult, or so the video said.

The forms pounded out with hardly any effort at all. It looked like his father had smeared some sort of grease on the edges to keep the glue from sticking to them. The only bead holding the forms in place had been midway up the canoe, where the hot glue had been applied.

“Thanks, dad! You made that easy for me.” Just thinking of his father, who was undoubtedly on of the numerous undead pounding on the boat house walls brought tears to his eyes. The shock of the last few days hadn’t really set in. Starting the canoe had given him a focus so he wouldn’t think about the ceaseless pounding and what it represented.

Wiping his hand with the back of his hand Phillip looked the shell over. He had to make a decision, sand down the inside or leave it rough. The easy solution was to leave it rough, but that would make it hard for the fiberglass to lay flat on the surface, which would keep the epoxy from adhering to the wood correctly, which would make the whole canoe weaker.

‘I’ve got some food, a quick sand wouldn’t hurt.’He told himself. So he set to work, he gave himself two hours to sand, after that he would clean off the dust and move on. Despite his intentions Phillip ended up sanding for three hours, he also measured and cut out sections of wood to make air pockets in each end of the canoe, which would go on after the epoxy. Finally he layered on the fiberglass and epoxy, it looked good. The inside of the canoe would only get one coat of the epoxy, it didn’t need to be smoothed out, in fact leaving it a little rough would give Phillip a little traction when he had to get in and out.

Leaving the canoe Phillip checked his fishing lines, he thought he had seen the small pole pulled down as he was working and sure enough when he pulled it up the bait was gone. He rebaited and tossed it farther out into the lake. The other pole was fine, nothing had eaten the bait off the hook, he tossed it back about where he had pulled it from.

Now he had some time on his hands. ‘Time for a drink and a nap. First I gotta check the walls.’

Making a circuit of the walls he found two places where the zombies constant pummeling had broken through the wood and the garage door was looking even worse for the wear now too. He cut and patched the smaller sections of wall before returning to the garage door. The zombies had torn a plank loose, and even as Phillip watched one of the more aggressive creatures hooked his fingers around it.

“No you don’t mother-fucker!” He screamed reaching for the sledge hammer. A few quick whacks and the things fingers were mush. But the board took a pounding too and fell free from the door, leaving a gap six inches wide. Fortunately it had broken off about halfway, so the gap extended from midway up the door to the ceiling.

“Shit.” Philip scrambled back to the wood pile until he found aboard wide enough to fit over the gap. He had to make a quick cut with the chop saw so the board would fit snuggly over the gap, but by the time he had returned the zombies had pulled off the boards to either side of the one he was replacing too.

“Oh fuckme, fuckme, fuckme!” He said, rushing forward and setting the board sideways instead of lengthways to the hole. He quickly pounded the board in and smashed the fingers of the zombies trying to claw their way in. One of them had started to worm its way into the wide hole, getting so far as to push through to its shoulders. With little hesitation Phillip brought the hammer down on the things head. After three hits it stopped moving and he left it hanging in the hole, where it seemed to blocking the other zombies. Rushing to the scrap wood he selected several boards and dumped them at the hole in front of the garage door. Arms were clawing at him from outside and Phillip wasn’t certain he could get the hole cleared. Finally he decided not to, instead he just started pounding up boards over the arms and fingers and even the torso of the zombie in the door.

“That will hold you for a while.” He said when he was finished. It would hold them out, but the squirming wall of wood and arms, with the corpse dribbling brains all over the concrete pad behind the garage door was disgusting to look at.

His dad had plywood in the garage, several sheet of it. Shrugging, Phillip said aloud. “What the fuck else am I supposed to do?” As long as he kept busy he wouldn’t think and if he didn’t think he wouldn’t have to feel. Feeling was the enemy right now. With a will he set off marking and cutting two by fours, when he had them all cut he framed them up to make a false wall that he could lift in front of the garage door. The doorway was square, eight feet on a side, it turned out, which was exactly the same dimension as two sheets of the half inch plywood. By the time he was done he had lifted a new wall in place behind the garage door, it was nailed into the rafters above and secured below with heavy nails pounded directly into the concrete. It might hold them off forever.

‘Probably it will hold them off longer than the side walls anyway.’ Phillip turned on the television and tried the news channels, nothing, so he turned on the dvd player and moved to the finishing chapter of the canoe building tutorial. He mixed himself a drink and sat down to watch it while he waited for his epoxy to dry.

He’d watched the dvd three times before one of the fishing poles bent at an alarming angle and called him away from it. Another catfish, this time it weighed a good seven or eight pounds. He had caught it with the turtle guts and immediately cooked and ate it, feeling full for the first time in two days.

After another rum and coke he settled into the chair to nap away the afternoon. As he drifted off to sleep he thought about how the thumping on the walls was actually quite rhythmic and almost soothing.

Phillip hadn’t set the alarm and when he woke up it was dark in the shop. He’d turned off the lights and television and had no way of knowing if the power was on. The thought of having to spend the night in the boathouse in the darkness caused him to move quickly to check the lights. The bench light flickered on slowly, it still had power, but the old florescent tubes took a moment to light up.

From behind the new wall in front of the garage door came a loud ‘thump’. Not against the garage door, but against the plywood wall he had built in front of it. He checked the new wall, it was holding up good. When he built the new wall he was not able to set it flush against the garage door due to the appendages and other boards in the way. Phillip was able to angle his head at one end to see into the small space between and there was a huge patch of softer moon-lit plywood that indicated some of the outer planks had been ripped away. 

A half fist slammed into the plywood, leaving a stain on the boards as it quickly withdrew. An instance later it pounded the plywood again. This is what had woken Phillip up. The wall sounded like a drum when the boney half-hand hit it, an insanity inducing sound that was part finger nails on chalk board and part deep throated bass with every hit.

“Shit, that’s going to be annoying.” Phillip couldn’t think of any way to stop the pounding, “Aside from pulling down the wall and killing that guy.” Taking down the wall was not really an option, there were too many missing boards in the garage door now and he wasn’t sure he would be able to get the wall back up before the zombies got in.

Shaking his head he backed away from the wall and checked the fishing lines. One small scaled fish, he thought it might be a perch of some kind and the other hook was gone completely, only the float was left on the line, everything else had been stolen. He dressed the perch and tossed it into the small freezer compartment in the refrigerator. He had to make room in the freezer, which meant taking out the ice cube tray his father had left in there. When he moved it he found two chocolate bars and a small black bag that he missed before.

The chocolate was unusual, but the black bag went a long way towards explaining it. It was a diabetic kit. His father had suffered from adult onset diabetes and was supposed to stay away from most simple carbohydrates, like those found in chocolate and potato chips. “The old man was sneaking some candy where mom couldn’t find him out!” Phillip said, laughing to himself. He guessed the kit was in case his dad over dosed on the chocolate or maybe it was just for emergencies. Regardless of why it was there, Phillip left it along and wedged the fish in beside it.

After getting the tackle back on the pole he tossed fresh bait out into the lake and checked the walls. Everything was holding up well now, no holes that needed to be repaired yet.

Checking his phone, which was useless for making calls, but still told him what time it was, he found that it was close to nine in the evening. He had slept almost five hours. Checking the canoe the inside was still slightly wet, but not runny, so he flipped the canoe and coated the outside with marine varnish. That stuff was quick drying and should be ready to use in only a couple hours, but the instructions on the can said he should wait twenty four hours to give it a thorough drying period.

Ignoring the steady thumping on the new wall Phillip looked over the partially built seat on work bench. His dad had strung together a wooden frame and filled it with a mesh of woven yellow rope. This was fine, but there was no obvious way to attach the seat to the bottom of the canoe. Thinking back to the other canoes his father built he tried to remember how the seats were attached. The method escaped him and the dvd only covered the shell construction, with only a short section on trimming the edges and putting supports inside the open hull.

Flipping through a couple of the canoe books Phillip finally found a few photos of canoes with their seats installed. It looked like they were attached directly to the bottom of the canoe to him. ‘But how?’ They weren’t screwed to the bottom, the wood was too thin to handle a screw. ‘Glue?’

Phillip didn’t want to wait another twenty four hours for the glue to dry. He didn’t think he was going to make it another four hours for the varnish to dry up. The thumping was too much, worst of all was the occasional crunch as the zombie’s finger bones broke from the constant pounding. ‘Maybe it will disintegrate and the noise will stop?’

He knew that wouldn’t happen, the best he could hope for was that the bones wore down to the point that there would only be a fleshy thump instead of the booming sound when the zombie’s bones were pulverized in that arm.

Phillip needed a new task something to fill a few hours while the varnish dried or he was going to start thinking again. He came up with the perfect task; figuring out what he was going to take with him. He made a pile next to the dock inside the boat house, and then looked to the rafters to find something to hold all his gear in. His dad’s old navy duffle back was stuffed and full like an overripe avocado waiting to be picked. He brought the heavy bag down and set it in front of the workbench to go through it.

Maybe there would be some useful gear inside of it. In fact the rafters probably held a plethora of camping and survival stuff he could use. He knew there wouldn’t be any guns, he mother hated the things and his father never saw the need to keep one around. This was why the first thing he found in the old duffle bag was a surprise. It was a revolver.

“What the hell, dad?” The next items were puzzling as well, there was another small bag, wrapped with thin plastic grocery sacks and tied off neatly with a granny knot. Phillip used the utility knife to cut through the bags until he was holding a sealed rubberized bag in his hands, it felt like the bag was flexible and mushy in his hand, cautiously he unzipped it, inside were baggies, eleven of them.

At first Phillip didn’t know what he was looking at, then it came to him; one was an ear, another was a finger, a third baggies held two small toes. Human body parts, most mummified, but three of them were moist and rotten. Phillip sat down hard on the ground, trying to come up with a logical reason why his father would have eleven baggies of human body parts stashed with a gun up in the rafters of his boat house.

‘On a positive note I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the goddamned thumping now.’He said. Numb he pulled out the next item in the duffle bag, it was a notebook. Almost involuntarily he opened it and looked at the contents. Polaroid pictures. Most old and faded, but a few new ones near the end of the album. Pictures of people butchered so badly that they looked like they had been taken on the set of a horror film.

“Dad?” Phillips voice squeaked out. The pictures only took up about half the album. There was another album inside the bag. His fingers opened it of their own accord. Newspaper clippings. He read a few; they were in order, corresponding to the photos in the album. A couple places, where one of the dead was lying in a field and another where the child picoted was in a wooded setting just had blank pages where there should have been an article. The last few pages had been printed from internet news sites.

“My father was a serial killer.” Phillip muttered. The details were fascinating, the descriptions of the deaths were absorbing read and Phillip took almost an hour to go through and read the details of nine of the eleven victims.

‘What else is in the bag?’He decided he didn’t want to know, so he grabbed the base of the bag by the bottom and upended it onto the floor without taking the time to look at each item. Phillip took the shop broom and shoved the whole mess over into the corner by the trash bin.

He took up the revolver and tried to figure out how to use it. After a few minutes he was able to get the cylinder to open up and he could spin that around to count how many bullets he had. It was an easy count.

“One.” Phillip said out loud, “This wasn’t for defense; he was going to shoot himself with it if he were found out.” Phillip knew with certainty that was what the gun was for. He knew without looking that there wouldn’t be a box of ammunition in the mess he has swept over to the trash bin and he didn’t even bother to look. The reality of just about everything crashed down upon him and he let out a scream of anguish and rushed over to the small sink, he turned on both faucets and started scrubbing his hands with the soap and small brush next to the sink, he progressed up his arms until he reached his shirt sleeves, then soaked his face and soaped that up too, including his mouth.

He had to get clean, he felt tainted and dirty. He felt…sick. Leaning over he threw up into the toilet. Very few bits of fish came up, most of that was long past his stomach and deeper into his guts. “No, no, no, no, no!” Phillip heard the voice saying the words as he knelt by the refrigerator and pulled it open to get the bottle of rum. He suckled at the bottle for a few minutes, drinking down half of the contents until he had to throw up again. The alcohol burned his throat, mouth and nose as it exited into the toilet again.

“How could I not have known? How? How?” reeling inside he still fought for another solution to the items he found. The evidence was too strong, to overpowering. His father killed people. Reconciling that with the man who hugged him, slipped him fifties every time he left after a visit and spoke to him gruffly, but with affection, on the phone from time to time was impossible.

Slowly he pulled his face away from the toilet. The dry heaving had stopped and the pounding along the walls was at an all-time high in terms of volume. He dragged himself back to the still open fridge and pulled up the bottle of rum. This time he took one long pull of the liquor and sat back on the floor of the boat house. The refrigerator door swung shut, leaving Phillip basking in the pale light of the florescent tube hanging above the bench.

Twenty minutes later the bottle was down another quarter and Phillip leaned backwards until he was laying on the floor, moments later he passed out.

Once again the pounding woke Phillip up, his head was hurting terribly and the sun was up outside. One of the fishing poles was broken. The line on the broken pole was still taunt, pulling against the frames he had built around the handle, the other line seemed to be tangled in with the first, they pulled down together and let up with a synchronicity that was too close be coincidence.

A quick glance around showed that he was going to have to repair a section of the wall where the zombies were clawing their way in, but first, he had to throw up again. This time he didn’t make it to the toilet, but he did vomit out over the water, the clear bile that poured from his mouth left a foul taste and went to the refrigerator to wash his mouth out with the last of the coke from the first bottle he had opened.

He washed his face off, tried to steady his hands and took a long piss in the toilet before turning his attention to making the repair to the wall of the boat shed. Finally, that done he looked at the mess that the fishing poles had become while he was out.

His head still hurt, the pounding was still long and he felt like…’I feel like death would be a better option than this.’ For a moment he considered it. Just plunge into the lake and swim to shore somewhere with zombies close by, it couldn’t be worse than he was feeling right now. ‘No. Fuck that. I’m a survivor. Like my old man.’ Phillip tried not to think about it.

Slowly he reeled in the line on the broken pole. It was the longer of the two poles and had snapped in half between the second and third eyelets that the fishing line passed through. At the end of the pole was a monster catfish. ‘That thing must weight twenty pounds!’ He thought as he struggled to get the beast onto the floor of the boat house. ‘I’m surprised the line didn’t snap.’ To complicate matters there was a fish hooked on the other pole too, both lines were tangled together and when the monster catfish came up so did another of what Phillip thought of as the lake perch.

Getting the big fish up into the boat house wasn’t the end of the fight either. The fish flopped its way back into the water as Phillip left it for a moment to grab the sledge hammer, the only tool he felt would put a quick end to the giant. He reeled it in for a second time and holding the line with one hand he took out his frustrations on the fish with the sledge in the other. Finally dead the fish let out a gassy belch that filled the boat house with foul air. The perch flopped weakly as it slowly suffocated next to the dock. Phillip grabbed it, pulled the hook out of its lower jaw and tossed it back into the lake.

“I’ll probably regret that later, but I’ve got more than I can eat. And now I am talking to myself. Before you know it I’ll be killing people and collecting their body parts.” The joke fell flat and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, ‘fuck it’ and moved to get the knife to gut and dress the fish. An hour later he had once again eaten his fill and had much of the rest of the meat cooking over his small fire tin. There was too much meat and it tasted soft and mushy, not like the other catfish he had caught at all.

‘Maybe it’s just my hangover.’He thought as he forced himself to eat a few more bites. Shaking his head he tossed more scraps on the fire and turned his attention back to the canoe. It felt dry inside and out. Turning it over he set the seat into the bottom about where he thought he would need to sit. Sighing heavily he broke out the epoxy and glued the seat to the bottom of the canoe. Using the saw he cut trim for the edges of the canoe and put in the wood he had cut to make air pockets at both ends of the canoe. All of this trim was glued in with the epoxy, but no fiberglass. It should be a strong hold, but wouldn’t have the strength of the canoe bottom. Once the final piece was in place, including two wooden cross pieces, he varnished the whole thing with a final coat.

‘Now I just gotta wait twenty four hours. What do I do until then?’ Phillip eyed the rafters warily. His thoughts from yesterday involved looking for more camp equipment to take with him. After the discovery in the duffle bag he was dead set against delving into his father’s space again.

Finally he decided to concentrate on cooking the fish and packing the gear he had. He added a selection of tools to the mix, including the small hand ax and the sledge hammer, which had proven useful on several occasions so far. His father had a box of trash bags over near the bin and he used those to wrap the fish in, stowing it into the refrigerator as it finished cooking. There was one thing he thought he needed to get from the rafters, a small cooler.

Reluctantly he moved the ladder so he could snag it. Phillip was more than half afraid the small thing would be heavy and that upon opening it he would find someone’s head, or other body parts, but it turned out to be empty and smelled slightly musty. He rinsed it out in the sink and set it by the fridge. After that he cleaned up the remaining fishing pole and got the line ready to use again. He did not cast it in, but prepared it for traveling down the lake. Finally everything was packed and the canoe was almost dry. He fiddled around with the television, trying to get any stations to play for a good half an hour before giving up. 

He didn’t think he could sleep anymore. Phillips head was till aching though and he did lay back on the chair with a wet rag over his face. The thumping seemed inconsequential now. Trying not to think too hard he focused on the thumping, listening for the sound of wood crumbling or being torn away. He had decided that when the next section of wall gave out he would put the canoe in and paddle away. The afternoon wore on and his headache faded as he dozed. Finally in the early evening he came fully awaked and was feeling much better, good enough that he reconsidered not taking the full bottle of rum with him. He stowed it away in the top of the duffle bag and then gave the canoe a final check.

It was dry and looked like a finished product. Phillip took a moment to bask in the pride of his accomplishment; he had built a canoe, by himself, no less and under extremely trying circumstances. ‘Zombies be damned, I’m going to live!’

He lifted it and carried it to the water. Before setting it in he tied ropes to both ends in the holes he had left for that purpose; he didn’t want the canoe floating off without him. Carefully he lowered the canoe into the water and frowned at how much of a gap there was between the dock and the bottom of the canoe. He was going to have to be extremely careful how he got into the small craft. Phillip had paddled around in each of his father’s canoes in the past and knew that getting into one in deep water was difficult.

Tieing off the canoe he carefully loaded it with his supplies. Looking around he couldn’t think of anything else he needed. He felt like he was missing something. A lifejacket. His father had always cautioned his children to wear life jackets on their excursions into the water. Looking around he didn’t spot any safety equipment at all. It should have been in the trunk, where all the water toys went…

That truck was sitting up on the back porch now, out of reach and Phillip realized he would be going without on this trip. Shrugging he grabbed a few finger lengths of fish from where his fire had died out, it was still warm and tasted the best of all the fish he had cooked so far, almost leathery and dry compared to the earlier mushy stuff he had eaten. The cooler was in, the fishing gear was in, the tools and other stuff in the duffle bag was in. He was ready to go. But how to get himself in?

The rafters proved to be the solution. He tossed more rope over two of them and then swung out over the water like the king of the apes, slowly he lowered himself into the canoe feet first, stretching out carefully before sitting himself entirely down on the new seat. From the boat he could untie himself from the dock and once that was done he gave a slight push to provide himself with some moment to get into the lake.

The canoe worked perfectly, he glided into the lake barely leaving a wake behind him as he went. Phillip dipped his paddle into the water and came around so he could view one side of the boat house. He had been expecting to see hundreds of zombie pounding on the walls, instead he counted only eleven. ‘There’s that number again.’ He couldn’t see the garage door side of the boathouse and he comforted himself that the number of undead was higher than his father’s body count.

‘Why does it even matter? I’m free.’This thought was followed immediately by ‘Where am I going to go?’ Phillip thought about what he was going to do. Finally he decided to see if the zombies would follow him away from the boathouse along the shore.  Paddling the canoe parallel to the shore he shouted a few times and drew their attention. After that he started up the shoreline, staying thirty or forty feet away from the zombies. The zombies were stupid, they came at him in a straight line and waded into the lake to get him.

‘Can they swim?’A moment later the zombie were underwater, not swimming at all. One, a fat woman with pale gray skin was floating, she was unable to make any headway when she got in over her head and just flailed at the water, looking for all the world like she was drowning.

‘Of course she never will. I can lead them up the shore and circle back to the boat house.’ Phillip had a plan now, he could get back into the house instead of fleeing down the river. At the far end of the lake. A car would take him away from this plague. ‘Where will I go?’ It always came back to that. He had no place safe to escape to. The spotty news over the last few days was a good indication of that. No one was in control anywhere.

There were a couple of islands near the north end of the lake, he remembered his sister telling him about them, she had camped on one with an old boyfriend one night. ‘I can at least go get a quick nap there before coming back. Some peace and quiet without all that damned pounding all the time.’ The more he thought about that plan the better it sounded. Setting paddle to water he started the journey up the lake.

It took him almost three hours to get to the islands, he chose the smaller one for two reasons. First his shoulders and arms were aching and it was closer. Second it would easier to walk around and check for the dead to make sure it was clear. Phillip pulled up onto the muddy shore and made a quick circuit of the island. Walking felt good after sitting in the canoe for so long, ‘My ass feels like someone has been working on it with a jackhammer.’ He thought as he stretched out. The island had a rocky top that was only about twice the height of an average man, it was surrounded by pine trees. Boulders from one side of this small peak spread down on the side closest to the shore, giving Phillip a good view in that direction. He could see a couple dozen lake shore homes with docks, but no movement. The trees blocked out about three hundred degrees of the view, but walking around the island had proven that it was empty.

Phillip went back to the canoe and pulled it up onto the shore a little more to make sure it would not drift out into the lake. From his supplies he grabbed the bottle of coke and the rum. ‘Finally I am safe, I might as well have a nightcap, or would that be a nooncap?’ He chose a spot not too far from his canoe under the boughs of an old pine tree. Beer cans littered the base of the tree, along with a few used condoms and their wrappers.

‘I wonder if this is where sis had her rendezvous?’Phillip used a beer can to clear the worst of the rubbish out from under the tree and then sat with his back against the base. Uncapping both bottles he took a swig of rum with a coke chaser.  He alternated bottles slowly for a few minutes before he realized he was crying. He hadn’t cried yet, not really. He had bottled up his thoughts from the last few days and kept a lid on them. Now they poured out of his skull in the form of sobbing and tears.

‘I should eat.’The thought hit him as he sat babbling, but he didn’t act on it. He drank some more and finally, after an hour of sobbing quietly he slumped over and fell asleep.

Phillip’s dreams were nightmares, the first one he had since this horror had started. He dreamed he was stalking a child in the woods. He had scared the kid away from his family, like a wolf separating a young caribou from the herd. Ahead of him he heard the child crying softly, the noise enraged him, he had to stop it. Blundering through the brush towards the noise he came upon the child who raised its small arms up as if saying ‘pick me up’. Phillip grabbed the child by the hands and flung him off into the woods out of sight. Loping after the kid he found it at the top of a small rise, the very rise that was on the small island at the north end of the lake. The child was broken and bloody and moving.

Slowly the kid pulled itself up on broken legs, its mouth opened wide, its teeth emerging as fangs. It turned towards Phillip and stumbled towards him.

“No!” Phillip screamed, waking from his slumber. It was late afternoon on the lake. He had several hours of daylight left before dark.

“A dream. Just a dream.” He was sweating and the still air was full of gnats. “It’s okay. I’m okay.”

A sharp crack sounded from the woods above him, towards the direction of the rocky peak where he had thrown the child in his nightmare.

“No-no-no-no!” He whispered gathering the two bottles and looking for their caps. More sounds came from outside of his tree bough shelter.

Leaving the bottles Phillip crawled out from the base of the tree. On his hands and knees he saw them. They were stumbling down from the top of the island. They were rounding the edges along the shore closest to the lake houses. They were everywhere…except in the direction his canoe lay on the shore.

Phillip ran towards his canoe. ‘It’s not far! I can make it.’ He bounced off of a zombie he barely saw and fell back into the bushes. ‘Where the hell did he come from?’

Scrambling back Phillip struggled to his feet. The zombie closed in. Running back to the tree he had been laying under Phillip circled around it, trying to lead the zombies to one side so he could use his speed to dart passed them. It worked and he almost made it to the canoe when an adolescent boy reached for him, the kid was wearing speedos and a white t-shirt. Phillip dodged the kid but stumbled into the front of the canoe. Involuntarily his hands reached out to use it to break his fall. The canoe slid out from under his hands, the force sending it into the lake.

“No!” Phillip cried, stumbling after it. The canoe continued on its way out of his reach and he was up to his knees before he plunged off of an underwater ledge into water over his head. He managed to get one hand on the front of the canoe, behind him the zombies came after, trudging through the water to fall one by one over the ledge over their heads.

‘Okay, I can manage this, all I need to do is swim to shore somewhere using the canoe as a float.’Phillip was sure he couldn’t get into the canoe without swamping it, filling it with water and possibly sinking it. He thought he could just hang onto the front end and push it to shore. ‘Maybe to the larger island, that’s closest…’

A hand grasp his ankle underwater, Phillip kicked violently and in his surprise he let go of the canoe, which glided away to the south. Franticly Phillip struggled, but another hand joined the first and pulled him down. It was all he could do to keep his head above water with the extra weight and the zombie didn’t let go, with one hand it reached further up onto Phillip’s leg and pulled itself up. A dead hand latched onto the top of his shorts, a boney finger scraped a furrow beneath his naval until it hit the waist band of his shorts. A set of teeth closed about his calf, tearing a chunk from them and sending a cloud of blood into the water.

Another hand locked onto Phillips other leg and this one pulled him under the water, with a violent surge he managed to reach the surface once more before being pulled under for good. More blood and bits of flesh surfaced in the minutes that followed, the water churned as the zombies fed, then, abruptly, it was over. Underwater a mauled and dead Phillip opened his eyes once more.

The canoe was pushed by the slight lake breeze south until the faint current of the river caught it and pulled it out of the lake, an abandoned, miniature Marie Celeste floating downstream.