The Survivors (Book 1): Summer Read Online Free PDF Page B

attached en suite.  It was just right for one person, maybe two if they didn’t mind getting a bit cosy.
    For me all on my lonesome, it was perfect.
    The bad news was that the dust was just as thick everywhere else as it was in the living room, and the kitchen was a disaster area of a whole other stripe.  The good news was that when I tried a light switch, I discovered the place was still attached to the power grid, and the grid was miraculously still going.
    Thank you mysterious heroes, whoever you may be.
    I was going to have to invest a substantial amount of time in getting the place clean, but it was water-tight, wired, and very secure.  There was no sign of rats or roach infestations, which was a blessing.  I hated rats.  While I was immune to Ebola-X, that immunity did not extend to all the other diseases that could be brought by pests – and if something were to happen to me, where would I go for treatment?
    Being a survivor meant being self-sufficient, but it also meant being a bit of a neat freak.  It was just better to stay healthy to begin with than to have to try and pull myself back together after a nasty bout of the flu – or worse.
    As soon as I had finished my inspection and judged the place fit to be my new domicile, I went back down to retrieve my backpack so that I could leave it somewhere safe while I cleaned.  No time like the present; the sooner I got started, the sooner I’d be finished.
    I discovered a small vacuum cleaner hidden in the back of the linen cupboard, but my inner survivalist was loathe to give away my position over something as minor as a little dust.  Our world was a silent place now, without the drone of traffic and human voices; the noise of a vacuum cleaner would carry over half the township.  As far as I was concerned, there was no reason to assume that I was safe and alone just because I hadn’t seen anyone yet.  After the pain that I’d been through, I chose to err on the side of caution.
    Luckily for me, it seemed that Benny had been a rather fastidious fellow in his former life, and kept the place well stocked with cleaning supplies before his untimely infection.  In no time at all, I had the windows open to let the apartment air out and I’d tossed the worst of the dust right back outside where it belonged.  In some places, the dust was so thick I didn’t even need to use a dustpan; I just picked it up with my fingers and it all came up in one big wad of filth.
    The spiders were another story.  They were a little territorial.  Thankfully, any arachnophobia that I might have once suffered from was a distant memory.
    " Sorry, mate, but this is my house now," I told one particularly large daddy longlegs as I swept him off the ceiling with my broom, and shook him out the window.
    Good thing that spiders were also immune.  Could you imagine a zombie tarantula?
    That thought made me chuckle, even in the face of so much horror.  I figured that you had to keep up your sense of humour, or you'd go crazy.
    I suppose when you had spent the better part of the last ten years alone, it didn’t really matter if other people thought you were crazy, did it?  All kinds of things stopped mattering when you no longer had society watching and judging you, and from what I’d seen it seemed to be different for every person.
    For some survivors, personal hygiene seemed to be one of the first things that they abandoned, but I still considered it vitally important.  Perhaps it was because I’m female, and we were just more sensitive to that kind of thing.  I hated that unspecified itchy feeling when your skin was all filthy and sweaty, and I loathed being able to smell myself.  Most of the male survivors that I’d met didn’t seem to care.  I could only guess that they couldn’t smell their own stench the way I could.  
    Yet another reason to avoid them, as if I needed any more after what had happened the last time I saw another living human being.
    I let the broom head