I heard more approaching from behind us. I turned to face the house. Chef and Short Order were running out toward us. Short still hadn’t brought the utensils we dropped. They seemed to be too late to help. Then I saw the other zombies trailing them through the house. A couple more were coming around the outside up the drive.
“Are you okay?” Chef yelled.
Doc said, “Yes, thanks to Mutt.”
“We need to go now,” Short Order yelled as they ran.
Doc cradled his right hand against his chest as he closed the door to the storage section with the other. He tripped as he ran around the back.
Doc kept his balance and said, “Carry that knife with you all the time, Mutt, please and thank you.”
Everyone was getting in the truck. I ran back from my door to where Doc had tripped over the black bag. I grabbed it up by the strap and brought it with me as I jumped into the truck. Chef started it and raced around the house before the dead came back out to swarm us.
We hit the road with jarring force and kept going.
I set the bag down between the front jump seats.
“That was fast,” Short said. “They were everywhere.”
“Are you okay, Doc? Mutt?” Chef asked. “Are you bit?”
“No,” Doc said, “My hand may be broken, but no one is bit.”
“Did you try to punch one of them out?” Short Order asked.
No one said anything.
We pulled back by the service station in the dark. The three zombies were still feeding. They were down to scrapping the bones with their teeth. Bits of the meat were squeezing out of their bloated bodies from several splits and holes in their rotten flesh. The one with the sword through it was leaking fresh blood down the blade and was letting it drip off the hilt guard.
Doc said, “Stop here, Chef?”
“Why?” Chef asked.
“I have an idea,” Doc answered.
Chef pulled to a stop as Doc picked up his aluminum rod from the back. The zombies stood up as Doc stepped out on to the tarmac. He flexed his right hand several times as he gripped the weapon.
“I can’t believe he is doing this for a sword,” Short said.
“I can,” Chef said.
I leaned out Doc’s open door. My stomach tightened and I lost most of my undigested pasta.
Chef said, “We have to work on portion control.”
The shaft whistled as Doc whirled it through the air. He connected with the side of the woman’s head sending her hair flying as she fell. There was a dent in the side of her head, but she was still crawling. Doc brought the pole down three more times until her skull divided.
He whipped the weapon around shearing off the top of the next zombie’s head. It fell flat on its face. Its belly burst open and chewed up pieces of meat exploded out around its body. My stomach tightened again, but I held on spitting the taste out of my mouth a couple times.
The third one with the sword through its bloated belly lumbered toward Doc. He shoved the creature back using the end of his pole above the hilt of the sword. Doc grabbed hold and yanked the sword free. A wash of gore followed it out on to the ground. As the zombie wobbled forward again, Doc pierced the point of the sword through the head where it belonged. The corpse folded up onto the ground. The sword stayed impaled and the head fell to the side making the fine craftsmanship of the hilt ring against the concrete.
Doc left it and kept walking.
Short said, “It’s a shame zombies don’t all come with their own weapons sticking out of them like that.”
After getting my knife stuck in the zombie’s hand, I disagreed, but didn’t say anything.
“Where is he going?” Chef asked. “Doc, they’re coming up behind us!”
I looked back and saw the mob approaching. It was at least as many as the first night they surprised us, but more densely packed. Doc was walking into the gas station. He started fumbling around the racks inside.
“Hurry,” Short yelled.
Doc came out carrying several folded papers. I thought about the cards in my pocket and the folder he had brought out of the mystery house.
He stepped over the last body and pulled out the sword. He held the sword and bar in one hand and the paper in the other. He stopped again and knelt down.
“Hurry, Doc,” Chef yelled.
Doc stood back up and looked at us. Short was waving franticly. Doc held up the jacket and Short froze. There was a stenciled motorcycle on the back with The Riding Dead over it.
We could hear the corpses moaning behind us. He started to drop it and then stopped again. He brought everything to the truck. He dropped the jacket in the floor and set the bar and sword under his seat.
Chef was already driving before Doc had the door closed.
“What were you doing in there?” Short asked.
Doc passed him the papers. Short looked at them.
Chef asked, “What are they?”
Short answered, “Maps.”
Doc answered, “Local maps … we need to start looking for something instead of just wandering. We need to find where people would go to live permanently. We need to search.”
“What about the jacket?” Short asked.
No one had an answer.
Chapter 6: The Morning We Lost the Shopping Spree
We started driving west and stopped more often. There were a number of locations that were worthy of searching. We covered less ground in a day. Each warehouse we searched was abandoned, each stronghold was burned to the ground, and each site was thick with zombies.
We went by a prison, but the fences were down and it was overrun. They were built for keeping people in, but did a poor job of keeping the corpses out. Also, they had used a bunch of high tech gadgets to keep the prisoners contained which did not work without power and were not effective against zombies.
The raider’s jacket revealed nothing. It had the same stencil on the back as the one in the Complex. The shoulder bar read, RD Nomad. There was nothing in the pockets, but a plain, silver lighter. Short kept the lighter and we eventually dumped the jacket. We didn’t like looking at it. We came up with a hundred stories of how the lone raider ended up out alone, but they were all guesses.
Short Order looked for a town called Nomad, but he didn’t find one listed in the atlas or in the site maps that Doc had picked up from the gas station.
The sword was intricate and Doc was sure it was some sort of museum piece or from a private collection. None of us knew enough to interpret any of the details. We developed stories wherein the raider had the sword and also where it might have come from somewhere else.
Then, we arrived at the diner.
The Silver Bullet Diner was on the main road outside the next town. It wasn’t that far from where we had been, but we were taking longer and stopping more as we searched out specific locations along the way.
It had a neon sign that was off, clear, and cracked above the curved, sliver siding of the building. There were several orange cones washed into a pile near the storm drain on one side of the parking lot. Yellow tape flapped from a stake in the grass at one end of the diner.
Doc insisted we stop and search inside.
“Why,” Short Order asked, “You think there is a colony inside? That’s their thin, yellow flag flapping in the breeze over there.”
Doc said, “No, but there could be cooking gear better suited for travel meals than our high end stuff. We left a few utensils behind at the mansion of doom. There might be something in the grease trap we could use for fuel. We don’t know unless we look. There might be commercial sized cans of food still in storage. Also, this place is isolated and I don’t see it swarming with zombies.”
Chef said, “I guess we’re stopping then, aren’t we?”
He pulled us up backward to the door. Doc opened the storage door to the truck as we walked by the back. Chef pushed on the door to the diner and it didn’t move. He pulled and it came right open. A tiny bell over the door rang as a clip at the top pulled over it.
“Welcome to the Silver Bullet,” Doc yelled.
Chef shook his head and we walked inside. Short Order stood by the door and watched outside. Chef pushed open the doors to both bathrooms and shined the flashlight around. He gave the thumbs up after each one.
Doc looked in the jukebox as Chef was checking the bathrooms. He pushed a couple buttons, but it was dark and nothing happened. Doc went around behind the counter. He lifted cast iron skillets and a couple spatulas from the grill and set them out on the counter.
He said, “Let’s start loading this stuff up.”
Chef said, “We haven’t checked the back.”
“I’ll check the back,” Doc said.
I walked behind the counter and saw Doc standing straddle over a mummified body wearing a Silver Bullet work shirt. There was a black bullet hole in the center of the emblem. I wondered if that was part of the symbol or if it was an actual bullet hole. It was hard to tell on a dead body. Its blackened skin was drawn tight causing the mouth to stretch open in an eternal scream. It looked like the body was getting ready to sit up and bite Doc in the crotch. That wasn’t farfetched in this world.
Doc was still standing over the body as he felt through the plates in a green, plastic rack sitting in the dish washing basin. The plates clinked quietly as he looked. He took hold of the handle to the hood for the dish sanitizer. He lifted it open to reveal it was empty and then slowly closed it back again.
He was smiling.
“Doc?” Chef said as he picked up the skillets off the counter.
Doc nodded. He started walking toward the back of the restaurant leaving the worker’s body in the floor. He pushed the swing door open to the darkened back room. He immediately looked down to his left. There was the receiver to an old phone lying on the floor with a coiled wire coming up from the end. He picked it up and hung it up on the wall inside the back room. It made a long, pinging noise.
Doc said, “Sorry, boss, your call cannot be completed as dialed. I will tell them you rang though.”
He walked back into the dark. The swing door rocked back and flapped a few times before it went still again. Chef and Short both looked at each other and back at the door. We all waited. Chef walked around the counter and back to the grill. He stopped at the body briefly. He stepped over and continued toward the swing door. I stepped aside and let him go by me.
Before he reached the door, it burst back open toward him. Doc seemed surprised to see Chef standing there. Doc was holding two large cans. He held them out. One was navy beans. The other was succotash.
Doc said, “There’s a lot back there. We can pick and choose. I couldn’t see real well, but it is clear of zombies. There’s another body by the door, but he is ‘dead’ dead. I’m not opening the freezer.”
We began moving cooking gear and various cans to the truck in boxes. Chef was going through the shelves in the backroom with a flashlight. There wasn’t enough room to take everything.
I passed Doc going out to the truck as I was coming back into the diner. I went around the counter and then stepped back into the backroom for the first time.
I looked to the left and saw it in the combined light of the dining area windows and the back light of Chef’s flashlight. The body was slumped in the tiny closet that served as an office. There was money scattered around the counter and floor where the body was propped beside an overturned cash tray. This body was in a little worse shape than the worker out in the main room. The skull was showing through the bits of blackened skin still clinging to the bone. The long phone cord dangled down over one of its straightened legs.
The office body’s Silver Bullet emblem did not have a bullet hole in the middle. The center of the shirt was blotted out with dark muck.
I walked by the body and over to Chef.
He said, “I think we are about full out there. I’m going to take this last box. If you see anything that catches your fancy, Mutt, grab it. I want you to lead out on more of the cooking here soon, so consider this a shopping spree challenge.”
He patted my back and handed me the flashlight. Chef picked up the box and headed out of the backroom. On the way, he passed by the bank of lockers. The top locker fourth from the end was open and he elbowed it closed. He kicked a piece of plastic that was lying in the floor near the base of the lockers.
I looked over the cans. I pulled one marked dumplings and another marked cabbage. I wasn’t confident in what I was going to find when I opened them. I stacked them on one arm so I could carry the flashlight.
I shined the light out on the work shoes sticking out of the cash closet. I shined it up on the lockers as I walked by them. It was like reading the tombstones again. Each one represented a dead soul. Some might still be walking around or even stopping by to eat, but they were just as dead as the two Silver Bullet employees lying on this floor decaying. Maybe they were not just as dead, but they were still decaying for sure.
The lockers read, John Burgess, Alan Campbell, Sherri Campbell, Tobin Donavan, Bubba “Big Boss Man” Doyle, Carrie Falk, Allison Hadder, Tori Simpson, Collin Trasker, Cory Ward, Donna Williams, and Xaria Zimmerman. I didn’t read the set along the bottom.
I kicked the plastic along the floor just like Chef had. I shined the light down and saw the empty package. The torn paper attached to the inside read, Pretty Pony – Ms. Lavender.
I stopped over it and pictured Doc coming out of the woods with the toilet paper and a purple, girl’s toy pony that looked like it had just come out of the package. I shined the light back up on the locker that Chef had elbowed closed. Collin Trasker was on the card.
I tried to pull it open, but it was a combination lock. There seemed to be a lot of Traskers on our trip. This combination lock had been left open or had been reopened. Whatever had been in here might not be any longer. I wondered if someone could open a combination lock in nearly full darkness.
I pulled the card off its dry, Scotch tape from the nameplate rectangle. I added it to my pocket of cards and papers.
I walked back out with my two cans, Chef’s flashlight, and another secret. I expected Doc to be staring at me like an evil wizard searching my soul. He was walking out of the bathroom with rolls of toilet paper.