Preview: Homeless, Part 3

Here's the next excerpt from Homeless.

About Homeless:
Humanity has been decimated by a violent new species that nests in any enclosed spaces, and slaughters everything unfortunate enough to come indoors. Mitch is a 'Wall Banger', an explosives expert who 'cracks' buildings, exposing them to air and sunlight to kill these invasive organisms. When a friend of Mitch's asks for help tracking down a murderer, Mitch recruits Cori, a 'Shadow Runner' who races through infested spaces to gather supplies and saleable loot. But this terrifying contagion isn't the only danger, as their world descends into a harrowing marathon against oversupplied militias, murderous gangs, self-righteous survivors, and all-out starvation.

Previously:
Homeless, Part 1

Homeless, Part 2

Homeless, Part 3

“It killed me,” he says, “to leave her like that, but I knew she was dead, or at least that I couldn't help her if I was bleeding out beside her. So I ran, out onto the front lawn. I took my phone, and I called the police. Nobody picked up. That seemed strange- that I'd never heard of. And that was when my ears pricked up, and I heard the screams. All around the neighborhood, people were screaming.”

“I wanted to be useful, run door to door warning people who maybe hadn't been hurt yet. But my legs were jelly, my spine a jam. I collapsed in the grass, in what I was pretty sure was ground zero for my neighbor's shih tzu. And I couldn't move from there. One of my neighbors found me in the morning, in the same damn spot, staring at my house, weeping. I wasn't blinking, just staring straight ahead, sobbing.”

“I got my garage open that next day, fetched out as many of the supplies as it was safe to get, and this tent- this goddamned tent.” He kicks it, and dislodges one of the poles from the spikes. “Sorry,” he says to me. “I'm used to being able to take out my frustration on this damn thing without it hurting anybody else.”

“It's all right,” I tell him, and bend the pole enough to get it attached to the spike, though if he kicks it again, I'm in a mood to kick him in return.

“It was hard to remember all the things they said on TV, the new rules,” he says bitterly. “We lost about half the neighborhood that first night. And in the days after, we lost another quarter, while we figured out the things we’d forgotten. That it isn’t safe inside, no matter how bright it is outside. That you have to take down the tents, every day, or they get infected, too. And the cars, too, unless you got a moon roof,” he remembers it all, now, and recites it out of habit, because his wife and neighbors paid for the knowledge in blood.

“Because of Jo’s squirreling, I had more supplies than most. I kept that fact a secret, because in those early days many good men took to looting. But I helped my neighbors, as I could. Because… it was what Jo would have done. She loved having neighbors, having their children in our yard. I’d complain to her, that I spent all that time and effort and money fertilizing, and planting, manicuring and mowing- and that I didn’t go through all that to have our yard trampled by brats I wasn’t even related to. She laughed at me. And said yards belonged to children; they existed for them to play on.”

“She wasn’t guilting me, you understand, or trying to shut me up, reminding me that it was as close to children as we would get. She just… she loved having neighbors- community. She went to neighborhood meetings. And volunteered at the school. And I… I had more food than I thought I could ever need. But we- all of us presumed this too would pass. Convinced ourselves that science or government or god would root out our problem and burn it out.”

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