There were three cash register lanes before them, not the dozen or more that Jess was used to seeing. Litter was scattered across the floor. It seemed the place had been raided relatively recently although perhaps by a small group. There still seemed to be plenty on the shelves. An ice cream container was upturned on the floor before him and a large pile of white cream had solidified into sticky gelatine that tugged at the bottom of his shoe. The only sound not coming from their slow steps seemed to be the whir of wind through what was presumably air ducts up above their heads.
When they were able to determine that there was no immediate danger, they sectioned off the store – three aisles each – and started out. Jess willingly took the lead, the young kid pulling up a little too closely behind, pushing a small shopping cart with one hand that also loosely held a flashlight while the sword was dangling from the end of his other arm.
When Jess had determined that the aisle ahead of them was vacant, he began pulling items off the shelf and was filling the kid’s cart.
Cans of pasta and fruit. Dried egg noodles in cellophane wrappings and bags of flour.
Toni would have been able to whip up something delicious with this stuff.
No one had really told them what was off limits but Jess knew enough to realize that the freezers weren’t even worth checking. Meat, eggs and fresh produce would have long since spoiled or been taken. Cans were their best option for radiation-free items.
It only took a few minutes to fill up the cart and Jess began to stuff the pockets of his jacket as well. When they got to the end of the first aisle and could carry no more, Jess turned and motioned with his hands that they should head back to the entrance and offload their finds.
The driver seemed genuinely surprised to see them back so soon. He unlocked the doors and Jess started scooping out items for the purpose of putting them in the back of the van.
“Don’t worry about that,” the driver said, almost seeming to wave them away with his hand.
Michael and the kid looked at each other, uncertain.
“What are you waiting for?” the driver said, closing the door so violently that it only missed the kid’s enquiring nose by an inch or two. “Did you run into any trouble in there?”
“No,” the kid said.
“Well, back at it, then. You can get another cart inside, can’t you?”
Jess led the way back inside and down to the next aisle, which held breakfast items like cereal, jam and dry pancake mix. It was hard to tell where the others were in the darkness. Movement could be heard in the store now but the general position of anyone not in clear view was difficult to pinpoint.
Jess was pulling a bag of oatmeal off the shelf when he thought he heard a sound; some sort of movement up ahead. He pointed his flashlight forward and thought he saw the quick blur of a shadow scurrying off out of sight.
He wasn’t sure at first if it was a trick of his mind, the various shades of black and grey having fun with his poor eyesight or if he had actually seen something but the sound before them was enough to warrant investigation. Something had fallen to the floor near the end of the aisle – a large bag of rice perhaps
.
He couldn’t think of anything else heavy enough to make that heavy thud of a sound. His flashlight couldn’t make out the details from where they stood. There were boxes and bags spilled everywhere and one abandoned shopping cart at the end of the aisle.
Jess again motioned to the kid, shining the light upon his own chest and pointing his finger with jabbing movements down to the end of the hallway.
They walked forward slowly and Jess pointed his sword out in front of him. At the end of the aisle, he drew his flashlight across the floor in repetitive waves as he walked forward, until he came across an open freezer. Perched on top of what must have been frozen meat – turkeys perhaps – was one of the other men from the van. The side of his head was bloodied and his stomach was red and opened, pieces of jagged and torn flesh exposed where they should not have been. Something was kneeling and eating him.
Jess steadied the flashlight and the face turned a little, like a curious turtle, smelling the air. It was the sunken, wrinkled face of an old woman.
The kid saw. He unintentionally slammed the shopping car into the glass doors of the freezer and several items fell from the cart, scattering across the floor behind Jess. When Jess turned, the kid was already halfway down the dark aisle, heading straight for the exit. Jess followed him with the flashlight and was about to yell out when he saw that it was too late. As the kid was about to round the end of the laneway, something came out into view.
A thin figure with abnormally long arms hanging limp at his sides.
The kid ran straight into the thing and both of them went down.
Jess ran immediately at full speed to catch up, hoping that they would become untangled. He made it halfway down the aisle when another body flung itself down upon the kid as he tried to get up.
Jess brought the sword down quickly upon the thing’s neck. It only went halfway through, and Jess had to tug at it to get the sword back out but it seemed to be enough to drop the thing, at least for the moment. The other one was getting up and Jess swung hard at the ankles and took one of his feet out from under him. Jess expected blood but all he really saw from the space where the thing’s feet should have been was an oozing black substance. It still moved, but seemed unable to make any forward movement without the propulsion of its foot. It was like a giant sickly thing writhing on the dark floor with its mouth open and glazed white eyes as wide as nickels.
As Jess looked up and pointed his light, he noticed that there were at least a dozen other figures slowly shuffling toward him. The kid was gripping his wrist, a fair amount of blood showing beneath his tense hand. The creature had obviously got him with something – maybe teeth or nails or an unseen object.
Jess brought the kid to his feet by the collar of his shirt and dragged him to the exit. He whipped his sword at the air in front of the creatures but it didn’t seem to deter them. He took four outstretched fingers off the hand of one of them and it seemed to moan like a ghoul reacting merely to the pain of loss.
He kicked open the front door and the dull light outside practically blinded him. He was still dragging the kid behind and only let go when they were a few steps away from the van.
A few of the things were following them out the door and into the open air. Their arms were all raised, as though they wanted an embrace of some sort but the ungodly sound coming from their throats showed that it was a welcoming embrace that any of them wanted.
When they got near the van Roscoe and the driver, who seemed to be sitting on the back bumper of the vehicle, turned to look at them. Not a single item had been moved from their first cart.
Roscoe and the driver both brought their guns out of the holsters and began shooting the things one-by-one. Neither was a perfect shot, and some landed in the shoulders and necks of the advancing creatures and the electric bullets sent those they didn’t kill into writhing, intense spasms on the ground.
It was strange because the shot creatures showed no sign of being in pain exactly. Sure, the shook and exposed gritted teeth while the electricity passed through their bodies but they did not scream and as soon as it was over, they were getting to their feet as though they had merely slipped on something on the ground before them.
“Where are the others?” the driver said.
“Inside,” was all Jess could say. He wasn’t entirely sure where they were as he had only seen one body and it was definitely still inside.
“They must have heard the gunshots,” the driver said. “We’ll give them 60 seconds.”
He went back to the driver’s door, opened it and spoke to his smartcard in the dashboard.
“Engine on!”
“Engine on,”
the PAL repeated.
It was Orson.
The engine fired up and the driver came back, the rifle hanging from his right hand like a baseball bat.
The kid was leaning against the back door of the vehicle, still favouring his arm. Jess was trying to get a peek at the wound.
“There must be a first-aid kit inside, just let me see.”
When the kid let go and exposed the wound, the driver stepped in and aimed his gun at the kid’s head.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jess said.
“He’s been bitten, which means he’s infected. Stay back.”
“How do you know he’s been infected? You have a group of scientists who have determined that this is some disease that needs to be treated with a bullet?”
Jess put his arm under the barrel of the gun and pushed it upwards so that at least it wasn’t aimed at the kid.
Roscoe stepped up behind Jess and trained his gun at Jess’s head.
“Back away or you’ll join him. I don’t have a lot of patience.”
Roscoe was so close Jess thought he could feel the breeze from his voice on his neck.
There was a terrible amount of blood but the kid seemed more bothered by the gun than anything else.
“I’ve seen this before,” the driver said. “We had a guy in our first trip who was bitten twice by those things. It took him five hours to die and we left him in an empty room so we could decide what to do with him. In the meantime, he woke up like one of those monsters and killed four of our people with nothing but his hands and teeth.”
The driver brought his gun’s aim back down and had his elbows out to block any kind of resistance Jess might have felt like trying again.
None of them saw how close the creatures were.
Roscoe issued a startled yell as the things pounced on him. The driver turned and blew off the thing’s head. He then took aim at the ones in the front. He dropped about six of them and was making his way to the door of the van when one of them got hold of his jacket. Several more applied their weight and desperate fingers upon his body and dragged him down to the ground. It was like they were all coming from everywhere, not just the store.
The gun went off on a pile of bodies where Roscoe had stood and was then silent. One of them in the pile had been shot, and now they all shook, little blue streaks of lightning passed around the group
Jess threw open the back doors to the van and motioned to the kid to get up. The kid refused.
The kid seemed in shock, perhaps because of what had been said about his prognosis. Jess grabbed him by the back of the jacket and pulled him into the van.
He slammed the doors shut behind the kid and ran up to the driver’s seat, side-stepping the twitching group and hopped in, looking at the controls.
The device still sat in the dashboard.
“Orson?”
“
Yes, I am here.”
“Can you drive this thing?”
“
I can drive the car but without access to the transportation grid, I would effectively be driving blind. It wouldn’t be something I would advise.”
There was a loud thud against the driver’s window. Jess turned and saw one of the creatures, slapping his palm against the window.
“Alright, let’s see if I can figure this out.”
He got the car into gear and pushed down on the accelerator pedal. It screeched away, faster and more wildly than he had ever seen a car move before.
“How are you Orson?”
“I’m happy to know that you’re not dead.”
“No, I’m not, and I can’t let that happen until we find out how the boys are.”
A single streetlight, about twenty feet up in the air, blinked randomly, as if it was struggling to come back to life.
Roscoe’s thumb and forefinger tapped together when he was bothered by something. His wristwatch rang without answer.
He cursed to himself – the idiot in the tower had told him that the store was within range.
He tried again.
“Yes?”
“It’s Roscoe, what’s going on?”
“Oh, the usual, nothing but bills in the mail and the same old crap on the boob tube.”
“Stop joking around! I’m stuck out at the destination point without a vehicle!”
“What happened.”
“We had an attack. One of the workers took off with the van.”
“Christ.”
"What's the status outside?"
Their security office, as they called it, was a room on the second floor. It gave a full view of the surrounding land, and most importantly, what was happening at the fence that surrounded their lot. On a normal day, there would be a small handful of zombies out there. Maybe they were attracted by the smell of cooking food, or perhaps one of them saw something and called others, however they might achieve that.
At first thought, the growl or moan that came from their rotting throats seemed a simple primitive sound that any wounded animal might make at the sight of salvation. But the more Roscoe heard it, the more he thought those things were communicating. Simple communication perhaps, just a "I found something", but the way that moan carried on the wind and seemed to grab the attention of more of them seemed more than just coincidence.
He heard the sound behind him, another body trying to get to its feet. Roscoe shot it in the head.
The fuckers were dumb, that much he never doubted. He had walked up to plenty of them before and held an axe or sword before their melons for a few seconds before splitting their brains open. Not a single one of them ever registered any hint of realization regarding what was about to happen. But they made up for their lack of smarts by hunting in numbers and pack animals always send each other messages, no matter how simply.
"We're counting about fifteen of them at the perimeter. It might have been the van that made them interested," said the voice at the other end of the line. The building had been installed with a shortwave radio system with devices that could integrate with their smartcards.
Or the things can fucking smell us
, Roscoe thought.
"Take care of them," Roscoe said, "and get a vehicle over here within twenty minutes. I want my van back."
The van came roaring down the street about 10 minutes later, licking up a storm of dust and ash in its wake.
It was the tech guy from the tower.
“You’re my man today, Eddie?”
“If you’re okay with that.”
“Yeah, let’s go. You know where we’re headed?”
“Yep. The Eagle said you might find another PAL handy so he gave me this one. Said it’s an older model but the maps are working offline so it should be good enough.”
Roscoe snatched the smartcard away from him.
“We know where the fucking grocery store is. Let’s go.”
“It also says whoever’s holding the other one didn’t turn off their GPS.”
“Say what?” Roscoe said.
“We can track them,” he said. “The PAL is tracking them.”
Roscoe activated the screen with his finger. The face of a young blonde woman appeared
“What the hell is this?”
“You like that?” Eddie said. “I set that up for you.”
“Yeah, great. What am I going to do, kiss her?”
The bench seat in the front squeaked when they got in.
“Is that a wallet in your pocket?”
Eddie nodded.
“Where’s your smartcard?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You telling me you actually have cash in your wallet?”
Eddie nodded. “It’s safer than an e-purse. Can’t be tracked as easy.”
“How much?”
Eddie took a long look at Roscoe, trying to determine if he was serious.
“Just pull out a fucking bill and show me,” Roscoe said. “I haven’t seen money in ages.”
Eddie pulled out a red hundred dollar bill. It was translucent in parts, less paper than plastic. Roscoe slipped it out the slit of his side window.
“Hey!” Eddie yelled.
“You’re an idiot.”
“What?”
“I didn’t realize it until now, but you actually believe that society is going to go back to normal at some point and money is going to mean something again, don’t you?”
“I think most of us are hoping.”
“When’s the last time you saw a cop, or a person walking around outside our fence who didn’t want to have you as lunch?”
Eddie shrugged his shoulders.
“Idiot. Start driving.”
“Where are we going?”
“Where’s my fucking van?”
Eddie cleared his throat.
“What?”
“Check the fucking GPS! Make yourself useful!”
Eddie just shrugged his shoulders.
“Okay, okay.”
Eddie cursed to himself and tapped the smartcard. The blonde on the screen located the GPS tracker and pulled up the location of the first device. It was moving, already about 10 kilometres away, heading back into the city core.
“Start the vehicle. We’re going after them.”
“I didn’t bring any extra gas. How far are we going to have to go? Maybe we should go back and get some supplies for a trip like this. Bring a couple other guys so we can take turns driving if this turns into a big trip?”
“Hold on,” Roscoe said, and pointed at the smartcard screen to Eddie. “You see that?”
“What?” Edie stared at the screen.
“You see their location?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t have to worry, you’re not going there.”
“I’m not?”
“No,” Roscoe said. He put his gun against the man’s head and pulled the trigger, using up the last bullet in his gun.
“I am.”