Over the next couple of days I helped Andy move into his new apartment. After cleaning out the refrigerator and letting the apartment air out, I convinced him to move the former occupants’ personal items to a bedroom.
“You really care about your neighbor’s stuff?” he asked while taking a picture off the walls.
I shrugged. “Kind of. Maybe. They might come back.” I hadn’t really known them or most of my neighbors to be honest. A week ago I had broken into every apartment and taken all the food and drinks I could find but I hadn’t touched their personal belongings.
“It doesn’t seem likely.”
“Yeah but you got to have hope or why the hell are we surviving?”
“Continue the human race and repopulate the earth,” he said.
“Neither of which I can do.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I’m basically sterile either way, so I’m not going to be doing any repopulating.”
“Really? I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it. I accepted that I was the end of my ‘bloodline’ years ago. It’s not like it doesn’t happen to cis people too.”
“So you think there are more people out there?”
“There has to be more people. We can not seriously be the last two people alive. I hope we’re not the last two.”
“What you don’t want to spend the rest of your life with me?”
“Oh my Goddess. I just realized your ugly mug is the last thing I’m going to see before a zombie beats me to death.” I walked away with my handful of pictures.
“Wow, way to make a guy feel wanted,” he called after me.
***
We used a hand dolly from his store to move his supplies and stuff to the apartment complex in a few trips. After the second trip Andy had an idea.
“Hey, what if we took some of these shelves and blocked the entrance to the apartments with them. They’re pretty sturdy.” Andy grabbed on of the shelving units he had made his barricade in the store out of and shook it.
“How are we going to move them?” I asked taking a better look at one. The bottom shelf looked like it was part of the base as was the middle wall the shelves had attached to.
“We could use the dolly.” He took a couple of minutes to untie one from the rest and slid the dolly’s blade under the edge of the base. Pulling back on the dolly back just lifted the shelving unit but it lifted away from the dolly. Andy reached over and pulled the unit toward him. With my help we got it tilted toward the dolly. Once more he pulled back on the dolly and it lifted off the ground and balanced on the dolly until he tried moving it and it fell off to the side.
“Fuck, I thought this was going to work.”
“It’s a good idea. Maybe we can find a bigger cart in the superstore,” I said.
I hoped we would find something bigger than the hand dolly. The dolly could move more than either of us could carry but it would still take a lot of trips to get as much food and water out the superstore as I wanted to stock pile.
***
At the end of the day, we sat in Andy’s new living room taking turns working the foot pump to refill his air mattress.
“We should look for more people,” I said.
“Really ‘Ms. People could kill for being trans’, you want to find more people?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” Andy stood and I moved off the pump to let him take over.
“What if I had broken my ankle? Or you hadn’t been there to help me? Or what if a bunch of zombies show up? The superstore isn’t going to last forever. What then? Do you know where to find water? How to make it safe to drink? I don’t. More people means more knowledge. Means a better chance for survival.”
“You’ve been thinking about this for a while I guess?” he asked.
“Just a few days. Since I had my little breakdown after almost dying.”
“You didn’t almost die.”
“Because you were here. I needed you then. We are going to need more people in the future,” I said.
“Where do you want start looking?”
“I was thinking we could go straight south through the city on the main street looking for signs that people are still around.”
“How far south are we talking?”
“I don’t know. Maybe down to Red River. There’s a hospital a little farther south so the zombies might be a little thicker around there.”
“That’s only couple hours of walking.”
“If we just walk non stop, yeah but we’re going to have to stop to look for zombies. And unless we’re killing every one in our path we’re going to have to wait for them to move. If we play it safe it might take most of a day. We should plan to be out there for a couple of days at least. Pack water, food, first aid.”
“Maybe we could start looking close by,” he asked between pumps.
“I’ve walked through this neighborhood already a couple of times and I haven’t seen anyone. There’s a few houses with zombies in them but the rest are empty. Also anyone who was nearby would have gone to the superstore looking for supplies and no one has been there besides you and me.”
“Okay, when do you want to do this?”
“Let’s stockpile some food and water here and then we can figure out what we’re going to take on our trip,” I said.
“Sounds like a plan,” Andy said. He reached down and closed the valve on his mattress.
To be continued in Part Two (release date to be determined)
Author’s note: This is the end of the first part of Lisa’s Story: Zombie Apocalypse. When I started posting this series I had up to around chapter fifteen written and an outline for the rest of the story. The last few chapters I’ve been writing almost on demand so they may have been a little rough. I always knew I would end Part One right before they started exploring the rest of the city. Part Two has an outline, I just need to write it. I’m not sure how long that’s going to take. In the mean time I will still be writing stand alone short stories and working on some of my other series.