Chapter Twenty - Free Time

During that same afternoon, Winston was tinkering with the truck, checking the oil and the screen fluid, while wiping muck he could from the sides with a damp cloth. He'd not been a mechanic in the days before, he'd been a construction worker with Dexter, which is how he'd come to know the man, but he'd always loved his truck and tried to take care of it.

As they couldn't bring the truck in the grounds without compromising the security of them (it would require breaking the magnetic lock, which for some reason, still worked), Paul was with him, sitting on the high wall with a gun in hand. However, so far, they'd not come across any wandering zombies and the herd was staying away, possibly seeking easier prey. It wouldn't do to become complacent, yet at the same time, it was difficult not to relax when the danger felt so far away.

"It's hard to imagine right now," Paul mentioned in passing, "that it's the end of the world."

"Know what you mean," Winston replied, wiping his hands down along his jeans. "Unless you consider the lack of people, cars and overall noise. I haven't even heard birds song for months."

Paul chuckled, a little before asking; "Did you ever think that we'd have to suffer the 'zombie apocalypse' ending though?"

"Nah," Winston admitted, opening the door to the truck. "I always thought we'd all go with a nuclear war or something?"

"Oh, I thought you'd be in the 'rising of the machine' circle," Paul said. Winston threw him an incredulous look. What was the point of this conversation again? With an inward sigh, he glanced in the truck before stepping back as a number of flies flew in his face.

"What the fuck!" He exclaimed.

"What is it?" Paul asked, jumping down from the wall. Winston reached in and produced a carrier bag from beneath the seat of his truck. It was oozing slightly and small flies escaped as he opened it. "Dammit that stinks! How did you not know that that was in there?!"

"The smell of several sweaty blokes maybe?" He drawled. Water was thin on the ground with only Tyler as their source and the guy tended to only provide enough to drink for a few days. Admittedly, they now had Nathan on their side, able to produce water, but he preferred to use it to water his garden and neither man could produce a great amount anyway. Washing was something that had become a luxury.

In fact after Ren Zexian had coaxed Nathan to partially fill a bathtub for him just yesterday, the other men had fought to use the cold, soapy left over water to wash their own bodies clean. (With the exception of Tyler, who would never lower himself to use someone else's waste water.) Patrick had managed to win the rights first, after an intense round of rock, paper, scissors and Paul had been next. The others had followed Tyler around the main house until, fed up with their antics, he had half-filled another bath and left them to fight over it.

"What do you think it was?" Paul asked him, making Winston think back for a bit, while he considered where he could toss the mess.

"Ah! The rotten fruit we last collected!" Winston said, having an epiphany. They had collected these for the seeds. He had no idea if the seeds would be of any use now, but surely it wouldn't hurt to try. He looked into the black-green and furry result of leaving already rotten fruits in a carrier bag in a hot, metal truck. Actually, he wasn't sure he wanted to find out...

Actually, no one was really interested in rescuing the seeds from the rotten fruit, not even Nathan, who had many packets of seeds ready to grow already. So the mess was buried in a spot near the front of the property and forgotten about.

*****

Inside the main property, there were many rooms, some were ones found in any property, but as this place could quite be considered a small mansion, there were a few others as well. Take, for example, the basement which had been converted into a wine cellar.. this was a most pitiful sight for Tyler to view; the zombie that had lurked between kitchen and this room had destroyed much of the sacred bottles of wine, their contents spoiled or staining the concrete floor.

There was also an entertainment room, which, now there was no electricity, was not very entertaining, a room with a pool table and darts board, which was and a library. This library was Tyler's favourite find and while others were 'futilely practicing that new age shit,' gardening or whatever they wished to waste their free time upon, he was usually found in here. There was a mix of books to read. A fair few were encyclopaedia's and educational books useful from small child to older student. There were autobiographies, modern romance novels and fictional crime novels as well. And possibly most unsurprising, there were a large array of books regarding gardening.

Tyler was an avid reader, he used to secretly favour fantasy novels with dragons and knights and the like... not that he would ever admit to that, even upon his death bed. However, that sort of book was not available in this library, much to his chagrin. So he had skimmed through a few autobiographies, bothering to guess whether these once most famous men and women were a) alive, b) had abilities or c) were wandering rotting corpses and no longer as beautiful or noble as their photoshopped images.

As he was giving up and leaning towards the crime novels instead, he happened to notice a worn out gardening encyclopaedia aimed at children. Pulling it out, he gently teased apart a rather sticky first page and noticed the childish writing scribbled on the first page; "This belongs to Nathan Tobias Matthison." Tyler smirked, so the kid did have a cute side.

Little did he know that the former nanny and gardener took more than two hours to encourage a serious little boy to write these words for their own satisfaction. Nathan himself had never understood the point of it.