Life After the Undead (Completed)

PART 9: A Thief's Consequences .5

Melissa's P.O.V.

Everything was easier now that Steve was in my life.

Getting out of a hick infested radio station that was being used to lure travellers to a very inconvenient death had never been easier. Granted I had never had to do it before, but I have a feeling being able to jump out a window and into Steve's awaiting embrace made it a lot easier.

It also meant we weren't chased.

We gathered supplies faster, hell we made it back to Toronto in record time, I mean, we were actually in the outskirts of Pickering but since the Shady house was in between Vaughn and Richmond Hill we were pretty much almost home.

Steve had dropped us off when the sun started to set.

I asked where he was going but Evelyn only shrugged and said something about how he was probably going to go hunt or something like that and then she immediately went about finding us a place to camp out for the night as I wouldn't be able to walk back to the Shady house in the state I was in.

She started by breaking into a house through a broken side window, opening up the front door and then disappearing in the shadows again. Within minutes zombies were fleeing the premise, skirting around me, ignoring me completely even though I was a prime target, injured as I was.

Once she got me inside and she thought me as safe as she could make me, Evelyn left again. She was going hunting for something for us to eat. And while I was left alone in the silence I got to think about my current predicament. Evelyn had taken me this far, but I had heard her on the Radio. She could be taking me back to sell to Jack, or to Dorian. Even though there was bad blood between them since the Fodder Flats incident, she had let him live.

Letting him live didn't mean she was working with him still, but I didn't know the status of her relationship with him yet.

I guess it depended on how mad she was with me, she hadn't mentioned anything about it, but it had been pretty hard to talk when we were travelling back with Steve.

If she was going to use Steve to evict the others in the house then they were as good as dead.

Would she sell them too? Or would she just feed us to her zombies?

These were questions I wanted to ask but I didn't want to at the same time because I was afraid of the answers. I wouldn't be able to fight her, not with Steve within calling distance. At least... I thought he was in calling distance, I was still more than a little upset that he hadn't stayed with us.

For about an hour I sat in the rapidly darkening shadows, jumping at every movement and sound, and while I saw zombies, in ever growing numbers shuffling out in the street, none of them ever approached the house, they wouldn't even walk on the lawn.

When Evelyn came back, she broke up a few chairs and, by the broken window she climbed in through in the first place, she made a fire. She helped me to the fire, and then she showed me what she had found.

Canned foods, mostly stews and soups, but the highlight was the fruit cocktail for dessert.

She pulled an old looking skillet out of seemingly nowhere and then put the unopened cans on it. She shoved the makeshift hotplate into the embers and then left it there to heat up before going about emptying her pockets. She had a can opener and forks and spoons, all of which looked like they had recently been cleaned, and then four water bottles appeared from inside her jacket which explained the clean utensils.

"I had to go through, like, the whole block to find all this," she said. "Everything was spoiled and rotten, zombies breaking into fridges to get to the produce. I hate the suburbs."