Read The Infected (Book 3): Nightfall for Free Online

door so they wouldn’t have to see the two dead bodies in the
backyard. Karen kept her focus and moved straight for the garage.
     
    Leon followed her and
tried to gauge her mood. He struggled with being so somber for this long. He
knew it was only a matter of time before he said something silly and
embarrassed himself. He wanted so badly to impress her and hoped that she
appreciated how well he had taken care of Troy and the girls. Karen left the
door open to the garage for him and she fired up the lights.
    He got to see the full
view of the packed garage. “Wow, look at all this shit,” Leon regretted the
words the second he said them, but as far as silly things to say it wasn’t the
worst. Over the years he had definitely put his foot, his leg and even his
whole body in his mouth.
    When’s the baby due?
Oh, you’re not pregnant. Sorry.
    Excuse me, sir, that’s
the lady’s restroom. Oh, pardon me, Ma’am.
     
    Karen handed Leon a fully
loaded tool belt. He wrapped it around his body and cinched it down to fit his
slim waist.
    Karen pointed at five
sheets of inch thick plywood that leaned against the garage wall. Next to it
stacked on the concrete was a pile of two by fours and two by sixes, “Mama
miscalculated when she ordered the lumber for the chicken coop. She ended up
buying twice as much wood as she needed and by the time she noticed her mistake
it was past the store’s thirty day return policy. She kept it and had planned
to build another coop to keep rabbits in.” Karen heard her own voice. It
sounded like a computer. Regurgitating facts, but there was no emotion behind
what she was saying. She was in shock. No doubt about it.
    “We should be able to
block up most of the windows with this stuff,” Leon said as he looked over the
area. Penny had purchased a bunch of top of the line gear to build that coop
outside. She had a battery powered handsaw and drills, plus a box of about a
thousand screws.
    “They don’t have to look
pretty. They just have to be strong enough to keep a gang of the monsters out.”
Karen pointed at her wrist. “I’m not going to be much help, but I’ll try.”
    Leon pulled off his suit
jacket and said affirmatively, “Let’s get to work.”
    “Front windows first.
There’s the kitchen window and one in each of the two bedrooms. Those three are
facing the street and the most likely to be hit.” Karen helped him carry the
tools into the kitchen. Then the two of them hauled as much lumber as they
could out of the garage.
    Leon measured out the
window in the kitchen. It was big and would need one full sheet of plywood
itself.
    “Use a set of the two by
fours on each side of the window. If we secure them to the wall it would give
us a better place to mount the plywood to.” Karen was already working up
another sweat.
    “Then we can use the two
by sixes to reinforce the plywood.” Leon picked up the drill and climbed up
onto the counter. Karen helped hold the chunk of wood in position. Leon stood
on Penny’s new granite counters and worked quickly to find a stud in the wall
to fasten the two by four to. In only a few minutes he had the anchors in place
and the two of them worked the large length of plywood behind the sink’s
faucet. Karen handed him screw after screw as he got the big piece up and
blocked out the window.
    “We need to fill as many
containers as we can find with water,” Karen said as she looked around the
kitchen.
    “The human body needs a
gallon of water a day to function correctly. We also need about a gallon a day
for food prep and to keep ourselves clean.” Leon rattled off this tidbit of
info as he pulled a two by six up onto the counter to start building a frame
system to fortify the window barricade.
    Karen crunched the numbers
in her head. Five humans times two gallons of water each day, minus the fact
that the girls didn’t need as much water meant they needed about sixty gallons
of water stored just to last about a week.
    That’s a shit