Wanderer (Book 1): Wanderer

It was touch and go for a couple of days. She drinks the water, but she still hasn’t eaten anything. She’s dropped a few pounds at least, and with our already diminished frames it shows quickly.
She sleeps most of the day and I have to take her outside at least once an hour to use the restroom. It was hard for her. She’s weak and she trembles when she squats down. A few times I had to hold her up so she wouldn’t fall into her own urine.
Soon after she was finally able to hold some food down. I gave her some cream of chicken soup. It’s not exactly solid, but I thought it might be better to work her up to solid foods.
Once she was able to walk again I decided to shift some of my attention back to the hot tub. There was a lot of water pouring out that first night. I had put a rag in the crack to slow some of the leaking, but at just a little over a week later the water had drained to about a foot and a half of water. Considering the hot tub is only about four feet deep that is quite a bit. I’ve done what I could to slow the flow of water, but it still seeped through the rag. To make things worse it hadn’t rained in weeks and we don’t have any more water bottles. If I can’t fix the hole before it rains, we’ll be dead in no time.
Mandy is doing much better now. She follows me around the house again and no longer needs my help eating, drinking, or using the bathroom. She does her best to help out, but all she really does in lie around.
I scoured the garage looking for anything and everything I might be able to use to seal the crack. My dad was pretty handy so if I ever needed anything it was going to be in here, and if it wasn’t, well, I would have to venture out, and I wasn’t looking forward to that. After about an hour I had gone through each and every drawer and cupboard and have come up with nothing. I found a piece of plastic that I might have been able to use to patch the crack, but I found no glue or epoxy.
I still didn’t feel comfortable searching through the neighborhood houses. I didn’t have much time to sit around and debate with myself, the water was draining faster and faster. The hardware store was my only option. They would probably have something there I could use. It was already too late to leave today so I would need to leave first thing in the morning.

Entry 13
I was a little paranoid about leaving the house. The last time I went to the library I was almost killed by one of them and I swore I would never be stupid about leaving the house again. I also told myself I would die before I would become like them.
Mandy seemed to be doing better than expected so I decided to take her with me. Before we left I stuffed a fresh rag into the crack of the lining to slow the leak. By now only about a foot of water remained. Hopefully I could make it back with something before all of the water drained.
I went into the closet and pulled out my holster containing my 45 caliber 1911 semi-automatic pistol. It didn’t offer the stopping power of the revolver, but it was fast and held more ammunition. It was funny, my father abhorred violence, yet I found two guns and about a half a dozen knives under his bed. Food stores, disaster supplies, weapons, must have been the paranoia.
I slid one of the large hunting knives into a sheath opposite the pistol. The last thing I did before I left the house was strap on my hiking boots. Sneakers won’t do much good out there.
The latch to the side gate is rusted shut so I had to hop the fence to get out front. There’s still fur and blood on the fence, it looks like I got the wolf after all.
The front of the house looked different to me. I hadn’t seen it in a few years. My truck was still in the same spot I left it, parked in front of the garage, blocking it. The tires are gone now, the rubber long since rotted away. The windows were gone too, and the white paint had been replaced by a layer of rust and oxidation.
The tree that sat in the middle of our u-shaped driveway had overgrown terribly and the roots had started to push through the cement.
The street didn’t even resemble a street anymore. I only recognized it because of the derelict cars spread about up and down the street. I could see the library of the school at the top of our street and the bell tower raising its head over the roofs of the other houses.
The radio tower still sits defiantly at the top of the mountain behind the school. If they do broadcast from there, I wonder if they’re up there right now.
I let Mandy take a minute to sniff around.
Our street ran about six hundred feet to the west before it crossed the main street that led north to the freeway. The hardware store is about a mile south following the main street and it’s all uphill. Not knowing what the road will look like I started out early giving myself plenty of time, I don’t want to be stuck out here when it gets dark. Taking the main street is more dangerous, but it’s a lot faster, and time is a luxury I didn’t have.
The streets are pretty bare, most of the cars are trapped on the freeway, but it’s still hard to walk through what cars are there. It was quite a site seeing all the families trapped with all of