~continued~
Before I left each house, I piled
the salvaged goods near the entryways so they would be easy to retrieve once I chose
a new home. I made little marks on the outside of the doors with silver nail
polish so that when I returned, I would know which places had been cleared. These
marks always went in the same place on every door, and they were subtle enough
that they wouldn’t be easy to detect, assuming anybody else was even alive to
see them. Paint would have been too obvious, and I had tried magic markers, but
they just didn’t show up well on some of the doors. The nail polish worked perfectly
on everything so I stuck with that. I had plenty of it, and I no longer had any
use for it.
I returned to the car, and it
started right away which was fortunate since I wasn’t parked on a hill. It was
still early in the day, so I decided to check out some other parts of town,
driving around for almost half an hour before I finally hit pay dirt. It was a
newer part of Whispering Springs, and it wasn’t even on the map, though Patrick
and I had driven through once before to look at the new houses.
There was a street that circled
the town’s only golf course, and there were also a few cul-de-sacs that ran off
of it. The one that caught my attention had a park in the center of the loop,
which must have covered at least an acre of land. There was playground
equipment as well as a fountain and lots of dead grass, which could easily be
converted into a nice, big garden.
The whole cul-de-sac, park and
all, would be safe to move around in if I were to close off the entrance with a
couple of big trucks or buses. It was hard to believe that nobody had done it when
the plague had first started, since it was the perfect place to make a stand. I
drove around a few times, looking for movement inside the houses or anything to
let me know that someone had gotten there first, but there was nothing. My problem
was going to be finding large vehicles and getting them moved. It wasn’t likely
I’d be able to roll a bus down a hill and pop the clutch. I remembered seeing an
RV farther down the street, and I wondered if I could jumpstart it with my car.
It was one of those big square- looking rigs and it seemed perfect for what I
had in mind. It wouldn’t span the whole distance between the two walls, but maybe
I could find a second one to finish the job.
~to be continued~
