The Zombie Apocalypse with MCR (Complete)

Cleaning Up

Tracking down and collecting the rest of the bodies takes up the afternoon.

When we've thrown the last mangled corpse onto the pile, I soak it all in lighter fluid and throw a match.

"Best leave before the smell hits us." I warn Frank, waving him back to the car.

I offer to drop him back to the bus, but he insists on staying with me. The only thing I have left to do is give the house a scrub-down. I carry bleach in the car - for occasions such as this - but there's some leftover cleaning products in the kitchen.

"Let's just..." I look around the cluttered kitchen, with rubbish on every counter and blood splatters on the tiled floor. "Let's do walls and floors. Tomorrow we'll make a proper start."

"I'll take floors." He offers, filling two buckets with warm water and pouring copious amounts of bleach inside. "We should open every window in the house too. It smells like rot in here."

We work in companionable silence. It's methodical, easy, normal work. It's nice to imagine that we're just normal people cleaning a normal house. Of course, we're cleaning blood and brains and broken furniture away, but still. The work isn't dangerous, and Frank works just as hard as me. We move from room to room together, and if I'm finished on the walls before he's done with the floor, I help with his job and vice versa.

There's a lot of rooms to check, and we get a good scope of the house while we're at it.

It's everything we need.

There's a massive kitchen with pleasant white walls and wooden cabinets. There's a big table in the middle of the room. A separate dinning room, with a massive oak table and double doors that lead out onto a patio. Beyond that concrete patio, the back garden is absolutely huge. Just a field, basically, which gives way immediately to woodland. The bedrooms are all reasonable sizes, with one gigantic bedroom decorated with duck egg blue.

"Might as well pick a room." I encourage him as we make it to the second landing, downstairs completed. "Get first dibs on one of the big ones."

"The perks of actually doing some work, huh?" He waggles his eyebrows, lip ring flashing as he smirks.

"Exactly." I chuckle.

The second floor is just one long corridor, really, with all the rooms branching off. There's one massive bathroom with a deep tub, but four other bedrooms have en suites. Frank and I claim one each.

We finish quicker than we anticipated, so we decide to clean the kitchen and bathrooms. The essential rooms that can be wiped down quickly.

"Lucky," I mutter, as we check everything is working in the main bathroom. "Plumbing is one thing I haven't managed to become an expert in."

"How dare you slack in such a horrific manner, Dailey." Frank gasps, hand clasped dramatically to his chest.

I throw a wet cloth, and he yelps as it wraps all the way around his face.

The kitchen is certainly a state, and needs a deep clean rather than a simple once over with sponges and mops. We clear the rubbish away and do a light sweep, and decide to start again in the morning.

We return back to the bus, Pandora trotting ahead of us, tongue lolling out of her mouth.

The guys are relieved when we walk in, and Gerard greets both of us enthusiastically. He drags us in for hugs after checking we're in one piece with no injuries.

Dinner is ready ten minutes after we arrive home. Ray and Mikey had already started it in the hopes we'd be home as the sun started to set. We eat together in the living room, and we tell everyone about our day and the house.