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“Holy shit. Harlow could still be alive.” I breathed in deeply, and I stumbled to my feet. The world was spinning from the alcohol and my shock, and I had to grab onto the chair to keep from falling. “I’ve got to go.”
“Lazlo, you can’t just go,” Nova protested.
“If they have her, she’s been alive, waiting for me to rescue her for weeks. I can’t leave her there!” I shouted, and my voice cracked. “What would you do if it was your sister?”
“I would wait until I’d come up with a better plan than running off drunk, in the night, on a bum knee, for a two day trek,” Nova said, looking up at me reasonably. “I’m not trying to stop you from rescuing Harlow at all. I’m only stating it can’t be right this instant.”
“So when, and how?” I asked.
She motioned to my chair across from her. “Sit down, and we’ll figure this out together.”
22
Lazlo
Sometimes, Nova had to venture further than a day or two to get supplies, and so she had come up with a system of automatic feeders for the animals. It was a bit more complicated with Sage, but Nova made sure that she was very secure and safe inside her enclosure.
Even with all that, I was surprised when Nova insisted that she and the wolfdogs go along with me to the Loth ranch.
“You don’t have to join me, you know,” I reminded her as we packed up before we left.
“I know,” she contended. “But I also know that you don’t know where you’re going, and you won’t make it on your own with your knee, and I’m not about to let you take my mule by yourself. So either I go with you, or you don’t go, and that seems cruel and unfair, even by end of the world standards.
“Besides, I wouldn’t have let anyone stand in my way if the Loths had Sage, and I doubt you would, either,” she said finally.
With the aid of Vince the mule, we traveled for two days and one night. As we approached our second night, we still hadn’t reached the Loth ranch.
The clouds were dark until just before the horizon, letting the sunset through to bathe the world in red. For the past half mile, the dogs had moved closer to us, flanking the mule on either side, and we’d begun hearing the distant mooing of cattle.
“Smell that?” Nova asked in disgust, and I inhaled deeply through my nose and instantly regretted it.
The crisp spring air was nearly obliterated by an overwhelming stench unlike any other I had ever smelled before. It was shit and piss and sour milk and metallic blood and sweet rotting meat. It was death and despair compounded into a single scent.
The mule stopped short, letting out a disgruntled bray.
“Vince knows better than to go any further.” Nova patted him on the neck, then she carefully swung her leg over and hopped down off the mule. “We’re travelling on foot from here, but we’re almost there.”
The sights and sounds had greeted us first, but the ranch itself was impossible to miss as soon as Nova and I reached the top of the hill. It was located in a valley, with vast rolling fields fenced all around the property.
From our vantage, it actually looked like a small town. Roads were winding all across fields, and in the center were a mass of buildings. Homes for the family, buildings for equipment, barns for livestock. It looked mostly intact, likely appearing roughly the same as it had when the ranch had been fully operational before the virus.
The new fortifying survival barriers were immediately obvious. All along the outer edge of the homestead and buildings were two tall fences made of high tensile steel mesh woven with barbed wire. The interior of the two fences ran around the perimeter of all the buildings and equipment, while the outer one was maybe half-a-mile away from the other.
Between the two fences was a vast enclosure that created something of a moat, except instead of water and alligators, this one was made of grass and zombies.
There had to be hundreds of them there, if not thousands. The ranch was completely surrounded with a horde of zombies, most of them groaning and milling about.
Beyond that were the overgrown patchwork of pastures that filled the valley. At one time, they’d likely been used for the cattle, but apparently, the zombies didn’t need as much room to roam.
The only way into the ranch was a wooden bridge that ran over the “moat” of zombies. Locked steel gates blocked the entrance and exit of the bridge, and zombies were chained up on either side, like some kind of guard dogs.
“When the general store is open, they unlock the gates, and one of the boys restrains the guard zombies so we can get by,” Nova said. “They’re not going to do that for us though.”
“So how are we gonna get by?” I asked. “You and I can climb over the gate maybe, but the dogs won’t be able to do that.”
“My plan sounds more dangerous but it’s actually much easier,” Nova insisted. “We need to find a gap in the zombies.”
Most of them were congregating on the east end of the property, around the bridge and closer to the house and the general store.
