Haven: A Novel of the Zombie Apocalypse by Brian Switzer

Author:Brian Switzer [Switzer, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Learned Pig Publishing Company
Published: 2018-01-20T22:00:00+00:00

Jiri

* * *

Jiri glided across the quarry with the effortless grace seen only in athletes who’d performed at high levels and professional dancers. He headed for tunnel eight and thought about clothes.

He had been a clothes horse before the outbreak. Life as a single man with a six-figure salary, plus the sizable inheritance his parents left him, provided significant discretionary income. He spent a healthy chunk of it every year at a pair of conferences in New York City. He always flew out and stayed at the Library Hotel, a beautiful building with over 6,000 books, where each of the ten floors represented a segment of the Dewey Decimal System. He kept a standing reservation for room 800-002; in the Dewey, 800 represented literature, and the hotel designed room 002 around a ‘classical fiction’ theme. The pictures on the walls were a rotation of authors such as Steinbeck, Dickens, Austen, and Hemingway. Among the classic books that filled the built-in shelves, he’d once found a rare volume by Victor Hugo in the original French. Early in the morning and late at night he roamed the hotel’s spacious and well-lit reading room, never failing to find and delight in an obscure text he had never seen before.

He attended the workshops and lectures, but the real reason he made the semi-annual trip was to shop. He haunted obscure boutiques with names like Topman, Cadet, and Gentry, as well as the better-known shops like Georgio Armani, Burberry, and Saint Laurent. His preference was for Italian suits by Kiton and Desmond Merrion, suits from Savile Row, ties by Salvatore Ferragamo and Versace, and shoes by Berluti and Barker Black. Jiri shopped in the morning, made his purchases, and arranged for their delivery back to Kansas. He’d take a cab back to the conference site and spend the afternoon attending lectures and workshops.

The group had suffered so many privations over the previous seven months that something as trivial as wearing the same grime-encrusted clothes day after day barely registered. Except for Jiri, who bore a disadvantage when it came to clothes- his size.

When they scavenged a home or after they cleared a house to set up camp for the night, they followed a familiar routine in the master bedroom. The guys formed a loose group around the bed or near the door and waited. Somebody, usually Coy, would pull a handful of shirts off the hanging rod and read the sizes off the labels. The men who wore that size smiled and exchanged high-fives and picked through the closet and the drawers for a change of clothes and extras to store in their packs. The women repeated the process with the clothes from the wife’s side of the closet. That way everybody in the group had a steady supply of clean clothes free from dirt, grime, blood, and gore.

Except for Jiri. Whatever tiny percentage of the population shared his six-foot-eight-inch frame didn’t live in the houses the group passed through. His clothes grew older and rattier and the blood and guts became harder to clean.

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