There was Red Bull, Surge, Amp, Starbucks and a number of other products Sven wasn’t familiar with, except to the extent that he knew to avoid them. He considered resigning himself to drinking cold water, but that wouldn’t give him the zombie-killing jolt he now needed. Sven’s eyes settled on a drink, and he pulled it out of the cooler.
He rested the shotgun on top of the cooler, then opened the drink. Sven took a sip of the Starbucks Double Shot. Then he took another. Then he gulped down the remainder of the can’s contents and withdrew a second can. He downed the second one in three gulps, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Ivan meowed, apparently disapproving of the beverage.
Sven put his surgical mask on.
“Would you be so kind as to fetch me a Coca-Cola beverage?” Milt asked. “I trust there are some in yonder miniature refrigerator.”
Sven nodded, pulled out a bottle of Coca-Cola, and tossed it underhand at Milt. Milt clasped his hands together in an attempt to catch it, but missed the bottle completely. It hit the ground and rolled away from the big man on the red potatoes.
“Here,” Brian said. “I got it.” Brian got the bottle and handed it to Milt, who was muttering strings of long words about his failed attempt to catch the bottle.
While Sven waited to feel the energy drink’s effects, Brian visited the cooler, withdrew a bottle of water, and drank it.
“Still keeping healthy?” Sven asked. “Even today?”
“Always,” Brian said. “Especially today, gotta be at my best.”
Sven began to feel a jittery energy work its way through his body. He felt slightly less depressed now, and his mind began to click away at a rapid pace. It was time to clean this place up.
He picked up the shotgun and rested it on his shoulder, completely disregarding one of the main points of Jane’s gun safety lecture. “Let’s get this over with.”
Brian led the way, taking them up to the end of the produce section, which terminated into a bread section. Between the end of the produce section and the bread section was a gap that looked out onto refrigerator islands and wall refrigerators filled with dairy products.
“There,” Brian said, and pointed to the right, past the dairy islands, “they’re all in the meat section down there.”
Sven looked, but couldn’t see any zombies from his angle. There were noises coming from the area to which Brian was pointing—sloshing, churning, and ripping noises, and Sven could easily imagine what they meant.
Now feeling the full onslaught of adrenalin from the energy drinks and his fear, Sven took the shotgun off his shoulder and held it diagonally in front of his body, pointing up and to the left. “I’ll open up on them with this...and...” Sven wasn’t sure what came next.
Ivan meowed.
“And we’ll have your back,” Brian said, giving the baseball bat a swing.
“Agreed,” Milt said, removing his ridiculous-looking sword from its scabbard.
Sven’s only consolation at that moment was the presence of the machetes on his belt. If he got into a jam, or if the theorized shotgun assault didn’t take care of business...there would be the long, wooden-handled, wondrous—
He shook the thought off and walked out through the gap between the produce and bread, making no effort to conceal his presence...and then he saw them.
88
Sven understood at once what the noises were. The zombies were chomping, munching, crunching…
It was utterly disgusting. Sven felt the Starbucks beverages rumble in his stomach as he stood there, transfixed by the zombies and their attack on the raw meat.
“That is a decidedly revolting vision,” Milt said, coming up behind Sven. “If I may be permitted to say so.”
“Yeah,” Brian said. “Disgusting. Just how I left them.”
Sven didn’t want to come any closer, but he made himself approach so that he would have a better shot. He drew nearer, measuring his steps and raising the shotgun at the same time.
There had to be at least twenty of them, huddled around the meat refrigerators, ripping at all the raw flesh they could get their gnarled hands on. They pushed the shrink-wrapped pieces of meat at their mouths in feverish uncoordinated movements. Their arms and bodies jerked violently as they reached, grabbed, bit, slurped, and chewed. Their heads and necks were the worst to look at it—contorting with each snap and slurp and—
Sven had to turn away for a moment, on the verge of being sick in his surgical mask. The sucking and slurping noises were getting deep under Sven’s skin, making him nauseated in the core of his bones.
He didn’t have to listen to it much longer, however, because the zombies perked up and seemed to forget about the meat as soon as he turned back.
They turned to him, blood-stained faces splattered with bits of raw meat and gristle and bone, their mouths hanging askew, still full of half-chewed pieces of meat that were apparently forgotten in Sven’s presence.
There was a tall one at the front of the pack, closest to Sven—it had to be over six and half feet tall. It slowly lowered a shrink-wrapped piece of meat from its lips. The meat looked like a pork chop that had been gnawed in the middle, through the shrink-wrap.
The towering zombie’s arms jerked downward, hands losing their grip on the packaged meat. The pork chop plopped to the floor, meat-side down. Then the zombie’s head cocked to one side with a crunch, setting itself at an inhuman angle. Its eyes snapped open wider to gaze at Sven.
Ivan hissed and began to claw urgently at Sven’s shoulder. Sven barely felt it. There may have been shouts from behind him—from Brian and Milt maybe—but Sven could barely hear them now. It was just him and the zombies…all those hungry zombies, slurping at the bloody meat, drinking the—
Sven jerked his eyes away from the tall one at the head of the pack. He looked at the rest of the zombies, now watching him with the intensity of a collective predatory being. Their black eyes seemed to open even wider to take Sven in, to the point where he thought the dead eyes were so loose in their sockets that they would tumble out. But the eyes flopped in place, held there by some rotten fleshy wire that Sven didn’t want to imagine.
The zombies began to move toward Sven, lurching and bobbing like a floating mess of rot. He could smell them now, the gut-wrenching, overpowering, nauseating, mesmeriz—
He pulled the trigger. The shot ripped through the air, shotgun jerking backward into Sven and sending pain into his chest.
Holes appeared in the tall zombie, the focal points of suddenly visible fissures in the zombie’s t-shirt. Then the tall one’s midsection seemed to cave in on itself and the zombie toppled forward, jaw snapping shut for the last time.
Two of the zombies behind their towering leader had also been hit by the scatter, but they continued in their dogged shamble toward Sven.
Sven took a deep breath through the stifling surgical mask, stepped back, and pumped the shotgun. He shot, pumped and shot, pumped and shot, pumped and shot, pumped and…nothing.
He pumped again and pulled the trigger.
Nothing.
And he pumped again and pulled the trigger.
Still nothing.
From where his mind was, he couldn’t understand what was happening. Why wasn’t it shooting? Why weren’t the zombies being ripped apart anymore?
Sven began to stagger backward, still pumping the shotgun and pulling on the trigger. Nine of the zombies had fallen to his five shots, ripped apart by the scattering Wolf Power pellets. Sven didn’t have the presence of mind to count how many zombies remained, but there were at least as many as were down, still standing, still advancing.
He finally understood what was happening—the shotgun was empty, he had to reload. He fumbled for the cartridges stuffing the pockets of his pants. He picked one out with a trembling hand, checked that the business end was facing away from him, and…fumbled it.
The cartridge bounced on the floor, plinking away from him, and began to roll.
Sven didn’t watch to see where it would go. He reached in his pocket for another cartridge, trying to keep his hand steady. He glanced up as he withdrew the cartridge and his hand began to shake again.
The zombies were gaining ground, their faces sickening masks of blood and gristle. Sven turned the cartridge the right way and dropped it too, cursing the spasms of disquietude gripping his body.
I can’t do this, he told himself, I mean, damn, I
can
do this.
I can,
come on Sven, come on.
He glanced to his left and saw that he had retreated deeper into the dairy aisle. He got his bearings, and reached for another cartridge.
This one’s the one, Sven told himself, and it was. He successfully loaded the cartridge into the chamber, and shot it.
Two zombies in the front of the pack fell backward in a mangle of zombie flesh, landing in the path of the undead behind them.
That gave Sven the moment he needed to load the shotgun all the way—four plus one.
When he was done loading, Sven pumped and shot, ripping the five cartridges of Wolf Power pellets through the air, and through the zombies’ putrefying flesh.
They fell in twos and threes, crumpling in on themselves and deteriorating into a mash of what Sven interpreted as pus-covered, clothed leather.
It only took eleven cartridges worth of Wolf Power to take out the contagion feeding on the meat section.
When the zombies all lay still, Sven made his trembling hands relax a little, reloaded the shotgun, and let the weapon hang down to the floor.
“That’s quite a device you got there,” Brian said, coming up from behind Sven. “You didn’t need any support from us at all.”
Sven turned around to face them. “I’ve never shot one of these before. It’s...it’s...loud.” He looked down at the Benelli SuperNova in black synthetic, and wondered where it had been all his life.
Then he felt a rustle on his back and heard Ivan meow as the cat clawed his way out of the backpack, and regained his perch on Sven’s shoulder. Sven figured Ivan must have hidden himself when the shooting started, and thought it unreal that the cat hadn’t run away during all of that loud noise.
Sven turned his head and looked into Ivan’s gleaming eyes. “You’re a very brave cat, you know that?”
Ivan meowed. Apparently, he knew exactly how brave he was.
Abruptly, Milt trundled past Sven and toward the carnage in the meat section, then stopped amidst the destroyed zombies. He seemed to linger there a little too long, and Sven thought he saw the man inhaling deeply as he stood over the carcasses, as if enjoying the odor...but that couldn’t have been right.
Then Milt waddled back to Sven and Brian, a strange look of wonderment on his face.
“Yes,” Milt finally said. “Fine, fine...all well and good, but I am allergic to felines.”
Ivan meowed.
He would be the type to be allergic to cats, Sven thought.
“That’s too bad,” Sven said, turning away from Milt and wondering why the man didn’t try harder to fit in.
“And, not only am I allergic to those wretched animals,” Milt waggled a well-padded finger toward Sven’s shoulder at Ivan, “but I am afraid that I must inform you that I am a sufferer of felinophobia, which is a clearly demarcated subset of zoophobia…I assure you that my condition is well-documented. I have a copy of my diagnosis in my home. That thing you have on your shoulder cannot remain with us. Please release it into the wild, where it belongs.”