Zombie Rules (Book 4): Destiny by David Achord

seat, eyeing them with a compact pair of binoculars.
    We were well into the first week of March and were still waking up to cold mornings. Although we had a warm spell toward the end of February which gave most of the roads a good thaw, it was cold this morning. The thermometer read twenty degrees when I fed the cows, so Kelly and I opted to take advantage and go on a scavenging mission. Rule number five, the cold slows them down, still held true.
    “Interesting,” Kelly remarked. I glanced over.
    “How so?”
    “They’re SUV is clean and even looks like it has a fresh coat of wax. He’s got some oversize tires on it too. I bet it’s a four-wheel-drive.”
    “Okay, how about the people?”
    “I only see two of them, a man and a woman.” She continued staring. “I’d say they’re in their twenties, and maybe Hispanic.” She dropped the binoculars and frowned. “Or maybe something else, I’m not sure.” I grunted in acknowledgement. They were about two hundred yards from us, well within range.
    “Is either of them pointing a rifle at us?” I asked. I already knew the answer, but I wanted her to start thinking tactically under situations like this one.
    “Nope, I don’t see any guns. The passenger is looking at us with binoculars. I don’t see their breaths, so they have the heater running and the windows rolled up.”
    I nodded silently in surprised acknowledgement. That was something I hadn’t noticed and it was a pretty good observation. The fact that they had their windows closed meant they were limiting their sense of sound. Not a big deal back a few years ago, but now it was unwise. I looked at her in admiration. I probably should have praised her or something, but for some reason I didn’t.
    “What do you want to do?” she asked. I put the truck into drive.
    “We’re not here to make friends,” I said gruffly. “We’re going to avoid them and move on.” Kelly continued watching them as I turned down a side street into a subdivision. I made a series of turns, entered a driveway and cut across a couple of backyards.
    “They started to follow us, but I don’t see them anymore,” she said. I gave a curt nod. Feeling confident we had lost them, I crisscrossed through various subdivisions and started looking for houses or businesses that might yield something of value.
    “These neighborhoods are all beginning to look the same,” Kelly said and gestured around at the subdivision we were currently in. “It’s amazing how much things can change in just a couple of years.”
    I agreed. The yards were no longer plush with thick fescue grass, they were mostly a mixture of weeds with lots of dead patches and the telltale signs of mole infestation. Broken tree limbs and trash was everywhere, windows were broken out, cars were wrecked or vandalized, and there were a lot of houses that were now nothing more than burned-out remains.
    “How in the world did all of these houses burn down? Did people do it?” Kelly asked.
    “People, a natural gas leak, lightning strike, it could have been anything.”
    “Such a shame,” she murmured. I agreed with a silent nod.
    We went through the routine all morning. Many of the homes had their front doors standing open. It was a good indicator they had already been searched. Nevertheless, we found a dead-end street where all of the houses appeared to be untouched. I pointed at the last house.
    "Do you see how the driveway goes around to the back of the house and there's access to another street?" Kelly nodded. "That'll be our escape route if someone blocks the street."
    “Okay.”
    Kelly and I worked diligently clearing each house. Most were either vacant or contained only corpses. After three years, the foul stench of decomposition was only a faint whiff now, unless we walked into a house with zombies still inside.
    It wasn’t until one of the last houses we entered that we encountered one. Actually, it was two, a man and a woman. They were trapped in a closet