Chapter Fourteen
The decision was made; although a few protests by Sean West and Lee Hayward were vocally thrown at Gary, Jack and Paul Parker, they had already come to the conclusion that if the village hall was going to be their home for a while, food supplies and medical supplies had to be stocked up, as although they weren't running short, they shouldn't be complacent.
With fourteen people in the group, the food supply was going to go down rapidly, and raiding empty houses wasn't going to keep them alive in the long run. Bread was no more, and Jack had informed the group that if they did somehow manage to get hold of some bread, it might be out of date and stale. Paul had told the group that two miles from where they were, was a supermarket on the outskirts of Rugeley.
Paul Parker asked Sean West and Lee Hayward if they were happy to hunt for food and live from hand to mouth, or munch on mushrooms and berries and drink stream water for the next few months. They responded with a shake of their heads, and Paul responded by saying that they should stop with their protests then. Paul told the group that they should be back soon with carloads of food, unless the supermarket had already been emptied or if it was swarming with the hungry fiends.
Gary, Jack and Paul took a car, not necessarily their own, and drove in a controlled convoy as Gary and Jack followed Paul who was driving Lee Hayward's Cherokee Jeep, although technically it wasn't really Lee's jeep.
One of the days, they had exchanged stories about their survival and what they went through when the outbreak was official on the Saturday evening/Sunday morning of that second weekend of June.
The usual horror stories had been exchanged, with horrific tales of families being infected, attacked, and unable to escape. Sean West and Karen West admitted that they ignored the screams of their neighbour, who was a single mother of two daughters, under the age of ten. When they jumped into their car to escape the event, they reversed the car out of their drive, onto the road, and left the street while their neighbour banged on her bedroom window in desperation for help.
Lee Hayward's confession was a tale that had probably happened a thousand times over the country. He and his nephew had spent the night drinking and watching the pay-per-view boxing match on cable TV, and passed out. They woke up the Sunday morning to find that the world as they once knew, had changed somewhat. This was confirmed as they put the TV on. At first they thought it was some kind of joke, and their soused state refused to believe the information that they were getting fed with. Then their phones went mental; they made calls; they received texts and surfed the net, including all three of their personal web pages. It was no joke.
Once they managed to get their bearings and had managed to get over the shock, they peered out into the street and saw three of the things that the TV talked about, stumbling around. They jumped into Lee's car and frantically drove out of Green Lane and decided to head for the countryside. They thought about Colton or Abbots Bromley, but Lee turned right at the Globe Island and headed up to Sandy Lane.
Once they passed the Pear Tree Estate and got nearer to Draycott Park, they saw a selection of cars parked on peoples' drives. With the street barren, they pulled their own Skoda up and agreed to try the vehicles that were in better condition than their own vehicle. Lee was informed by his nephew that another car was heading towards them. Lee picked up a rock and as they hid behind a bush, he threw the rock at the windscreen of the jeep; the jeep then veered off the road and crashed tamely into a brick wall.
Before the driver could escape, Lee pulled out a knife and pulled the driver out of her vehicle. She scratched his face and he retaliated by punching the young woman in the stomach. She was left alone, as Lee and his nephew drove off.
Two days later, Lee's nephew was killed by one of the creatures when they stopped off for petrol. His nephew was in the garage trying to find the switch to start the pumps, when he was grabbed from behind by two of them. A day later, Lee came across the village hall. With the exception of Gary and Jack, he was the last to join the group. It was a story that he was ashamed of, the group could tell by the tone in his voice when he spoke of it, and in return, a few disappointed eyes flashed his way also. But at least he was honest.
*
The three cars eventually pulled up at the supermarket. There were a few cars in the car park, but they assumed that they must have belonged to staff or consumers, who might have fled on foot or were still cooped up inside. Their cars were parked near the entrance and all three men were carrying the wooden homemade spears that Paul had made.
They were three foot in length, with a round circumference and sharpened at the end. Paul had joked previously that they would come in handy whenever the time they needed to hunt for animals that existed in the woods. Jack thought that they were only weeks away from that scenario anyway, unless someone could take control of the country; but with no information filtering through, nobody knew what was going on. No one knew if it was a global epidemic, or was simply a UK catastrophe.
They walked across the car park and noticed at least a dozen bodies, and assumed they were the infected, as a lot of them had no head as if a grenade had been placed in their mouth, or they had been shot in the head by a shotgun.
"So what do we do now?" Gary asked nobody in particular.
"Grab a trolley each," Jack answered. "Just use your head and fill the damn thing up, empty it into the car and go back again."
"What if some of those things are in there?"
"Then we kill 'em." Paul intervened. "Unless there are loads of them, of course. Then we run."
They grabbed a trolley each, rested their individual spears on top of the trolley, and casually walked into the establishment as if it was a normal shopping day.
They scanned the area and put their shirts over their noses as the effluvium hit them. It was an area Paul knew well. He, Jocelyn and Hannah used to spend their Saturday afternoon at the place. His wife would be by the side of him with her shopping list held out in front of her, and his daughter would sit in the trolley with the baby seat provided, and he would push the trolley.
A small swelling emerged in his throat as he thought about his wife and daughter.
He had to flee! He had to!
They weren't there when the beings engulfed his house. At first he thought that they might have ran out into the street or through the back door into the back garden, but there was no sign of them. Standing there and screaming out their names would only have got him bit. Although he didn't have a clue what was going on, he could tell by the creatures that something was amiss, and his only concern was for his family. He couldn't believe the strength of them as they surged forward when he made the appearance from his bedroom into the living room; and once they tried to bite him, his strength multiplied and somehow he had managed to fend them off before fleeing.
Paul could see that the smell was coming from some of the rotting food in certain aisles; he called out to the men that they should concentrate on tinned food. The aisles were only a quarter full, as if many people had been here before them. Jack had almost filled his trolley and reached a staircase that led to the clothes department. He looked around and decided to walk up the stairs to see if there was anything of interest. As he reached the top of the stairs, Paul bellowed from the ground floor. "Food! We can get clothes another day!"
Jack nodded in agreement and accepted his reprimand, and he turned to go back down the stairs. He looked to his left to see a cluster of bodies slumped together on the first floor as if they had been involved in some kind of massacre; beside them, lay dozens upon dozens of empty handgun shells. He couldn't fathom how this incident had come about. They must have been infected, otherwise, why would someone shoot a group of human beings? For the food? He couldn't tell by the faces if they were initially infected before they were shot, but he assumed that they were, as every one of them received headshots, which was starting to become common knowledge that this was the only way to put these things down.
He trotted back down the stairs, feeling the nausea develop in the middle of his chest once the images had digested in his brain. He couldn't make up his mind what was worse: the stench coming from the food on the ground floor, or the smell from the bodies on the first floor. He took his trolley and met up with his other two colleagues. "Are we ready to go then?" Paul quizzed.
"You guys are not going anywhere?" a voice from behind one of the aisles bellowed out.
Paul, Jack and Gary turned to their left and were greeted with a man pointing an old-style farmer's shotgun at their frames.
Gary raised his hands slowly, and protested weakly. "Come on, there's enough food here for all of us."
"I don't give a shit," another voice spoke out, and emerged from the aisle behind them. There were now two men present, standing side-by-side one another, and Paul Parker, Gary Jenson and Jack Slade now had two shotguns aiming at them.
Chapter Fifteen
"You okay in there?"
Karen had been standing next to the bathroom door for the last ten minutes, and although there was no sound coming from behind it, she knew that Pickle was in a bad situation.
Pickle replied, "Go away."
Karen didn't go away; she remained outside the bathroom door, knowing that her friend wasn't feeling well. She never heard him being sick, but would gladly not hear such an action anyway, as she wasn't feeling the best herself.
"Yer still there, aren't yer?" Pickle scolded, "Leave me alone."
"Once a nurse, always a nurse," Karen said, trying to justify her irritating behaviour of lingering around.
"I don't need looking after."
Karen and Pickle's first sleep in a proper bed had been a complete anti-climax for the pair of them. Karen was constantly kept awake by Pickle's sudden coughing spurts. Apart from the coughing, Pickle was disturbed by the family that lay dead above him, and couldn't get them out of his head. Both were exhausted, Pickle especially. As the bathroom door finally opened, Karen could see that Pickle's face was drained from all colour and his eyes were sunken. The smell from the bathroom also suggested that his bowels were feeling somewhat fragile, and she realised why now he was agitated by her presence.
"That's it," she snapped with a serious tone. "I'm getting you back to bed."
Pickle never had the strength to fight off Karen, as she escorted him back into the room. Pickle shivered like a senior citizen in an unheated room as he slowly trudged to the bedroom where he had little sleep the night before. She sat him on the bed; his head was lowered and Karen bent down to pick his legs up and swung them onto the bed. As he lay on his back, Pickle puffed out a breath of angst, and wiped the cold sweat off of his glistening forehead.
He asked, "What do yer think is wrong with me?"
Karen shrugged her shoulders. "Probably just a fever, nothing to worry about. I'll get you something to drink, and then I'm off to get some medical supplies, hopefully a bit of food as well to stock up what we have left in the van."
Pickle's quavering hand grabbed Karen's T-shirt gently and gave her a smile. "Don't forget to lock the door."
"I'll try and remember," she teased, and pulled her brown hair over her ears. "Once you're on your feet, you can give me a hand moving the family from upstairs."
"Good idea. I think we should stay here."
"In your condition, it's not like we have much of a choice." Karen nodded. "Even if you were hunky dorey, we should stay anyway. The more we run, the more petrol we use up. This place has a bit of food, and we're armed. Just need to barricade a bit more downstairs. I'm happy to stay here; it's reasonably quiet, and there ain't many of those things about...for now, anyway."
Pickle smiled at Karen, and patted her hand like her granddad used to. She took out one of her Brownings from the back and checked if it was loaded. It was fully loaded and she snapped it shut. She then handed the gun to Pickle, and he took it with no hesitation.
"Don't worry," she said. "Nothing will happen. But if it does, you're better off with that, than that big ole shotgun sitting under the bed."
Pickle grinned, looked at the pistol and put it by his side.
"See ya later, partner." Karen winked, a trait Pickle was usually associated with.
She shut the bedroom door and headed for the front door. She had taken the house keys and put them into her pocket. She then pulled out the other key for the van, got inside, started the engine and pulled the vehicle off the front garden without making any observations in either wing mirror. She didn't really see the point in looking at them as drivers were non-existent, and if they were pedestrians about, they were usually of the dead variety anyway.
The van purred out of the street and without indicating to go left, taking up a normal driving position and making the usual observations when usually emerging from a T junction, Karen allowed the van to zoom out of the junction in third, while keeping half an eye on the road and simultaneously picking her teeth with her left pinky.
Noticing the van was struggling and begging for another gear as it hit forty, she slipped the van into fourth and came to an unmarked crossroad. She knew exactly where to go. She needed to turn right, as she was aware that a further half a mile away was a chemist. Whether it was empty or not, was another thing.