Evan’s hands had burst through the sleeping bag, and now were wrapped firmly around Lorie’s left shin. The boy’s hands were partially flayed, apparently having been ripped up by their journey through the sleeping bag’s durable, insulating material.
Evan moaned as he pulled Lorie toward him, gnashing his teeth and wriggling around in the sleeping bag that still had him wrapped from the midsection down.
Lorie screamed, and she brought her knife up, but then brought it down to her side. She didn’t stab at Evan, or even at his hands. Instead, she dropped the knife and began trying to squirm free.
Sven had begun to move toward the sleeping bag, intent on freeing Lorie, when the shot rang out.
Evan’s body went limp, though his hands still clung to Lorie’s shin. Lorie continued to struggle away from Evan, looking dazed and uncertain.
Then Jane ran to her, holstering her gun—the smaller one. She knelt in Evan’s blood and removed Evan’s hands from Lorie’s leg.
“It seems I have been vindicated,” Milt said. “Although I must apologize that I did not do him in properly. In my haste to save all of you, I must have neglected to dispatch the boy correctly, and for that I sincerely beg all of your pardons. And now, I must rest.” Milt turned to go.
Jane stood up, her lower half covered in blood, glaring at Milt. “How could you do this?!”
Milt turned back to face the group. “I would advise you to avoid the boy’s bodily fluids. They are certainly tainted.”
Then Sven watched, disbelieving, as Jane calmly removed the huge gun—not the one she’d just used on Evan—from her second shoulder holster. She raised it, obviously setting her sights on Milt, who shrank back into the vegetables, his face a mask of outrage.
The gun dwarfed Jane’s hand, and Sven guessed that she didn’t have to aim very well at this distance to put a gaping hole in Milt’s enormous body.
Milt seemed to collect himself, righting his body and distastefully picking a bunch of parsley off his shoulder, and tossing it onto the floor. “I am utterly bewildered. You now threaten to destroy me, after I have so selflessly removed a threat to your own well-being? Please clarify your position.”
Jane cocked the huge gun. “Clarify this. Give me your sword, or you die.”
“Thou dost not dare—”
A loud bang tore through the air, and the Romaine and collards to Milt’s left were suddenly transformed into a cloud of green mist. Milt fell to the floor, whimpering.
Jane swung the gun over and down, fixing it on Milt. “Give me your sword. Now.”
Milt raised himself onto his hands and knees, blubbering something about a fear of vegetables. He unhooked the belt on which the scabbard hung and tossed the sword and belt clattering across the floor toward Jane.
Then Milt let out a few more snivels, made his massive body vertical, trundled out of the produce section, and disappeared.
Sven let out a breath as Jane put her humongous gun away.
“What do we do now?” Brian asked, visibly shaken.
“That guy is completely out of control,” Jane said. “He stabbed a boy in the heart! While he was alive! Not after he turned, but while he was alive! We have to get him out of here.”
“He’s crazy,” Brian agreed. “But what are we gonna do?”
“Sven,” Jane said, “say something.”
“I agree he’s a problem,” Sven said. “But we can’t just push him outside to the zombies.” Sven paused, unsure of what to say next, and of the whole situation. “We need to keep an eye on him.”
Jane looked stunned. “Keep an eye on him? We need to get rid of him! He’s dangerous. He’ll find some other weapon in here and then we’ll be next. He’ll kill us while we sleep.” Jane looked at Brian, then back at Sven, as if searching for some support. “What about survival? What about what you said before, about surviving on our own, in the smallest group possible?”
“Look,” Sven said, growing frustrated, “I don’t know what to do, okay? I don’t have the answers, but kicking him out to die would be too cruel. I don’t like him either, but he wasn’t exactly wrong, and—”
“What?” Jane interrupted. “How dare you say that? You’re taking his side now?”
“I’m not taking his side, I just—”
“You just what?”
“I just…”
Mercifully, Brian stepped between Jane and Sven. “Alright, we’re all really upset right now, but this isn’t solving anything. Jane, I’m sorry but we can’t just go pushing people out to be killed. We’ll all keep watch and be careful around Milt.”
Jane glared, but said nothing.
Maybe she’s finally seeing some sense, Sven thought.
“Right now,” Brian went on, “we need to see about…about the kid’s body. We can’t leave him here like this.”
Abruptly, Lorie stood up, her face pallid and red from crying. “I can’t believe he’s dead…I can’t believe you shot him.”
Jane turned to the girl. “I…”
“I know,” Lorie said. “You had to, right? You had to?”
Jane didn’t say anything.
Lorie turned to Sven, and he found it difficult to look her in the eye. “Will you? Will you?”
“Yeah,” Sven said. “I’ll bury him. I’ll do it now, that’s what he deserves. Something proper.”
Lorie nodded, and then Jane led her away.
After they were gone, Sven and Brian found some blankets and a pair of shovels. They wrapped Evan’s body and wiped up most of the blood.
“I’ll help you,” Brian said.
Sven shook his head. “I want to do it alone.”
“What? Why?”
“You should stay here, watch over everyone. I don’t like the way we left things just now. Not with Milt, with Jane, with Lorie, with anyone. This is all going wrong. Just keep an eye on things okay?”
Brian looked uncertain, or perhaps unwilling.
“Ok?” Sven repeated.
Brian sighed. “Okay.” He put his shovel down next to the blood-sopped towels with which they’d wiped the floor. “And you’re right. Everything is going to hell.”
Sven picked up Evan’s wrapped body. “Everything’s already there.”
96
The vegan was halfway through his fourth pack when he saw it. The silhouette of the Wegmans was unmistakable, representing a certain reprieve from the soulless ghouls. The vegan scratched at his handlebar moustache with his free hand, fingered the cross at his neck, and redoubled his hobbling.
Dusk was rapidly enveloping the road, and the vegan didn’t want to be stuck on the open road at night, his companions the hungry ghouls that had been unleashed on the sinning planet.
After what seemed like fifteen more minutes of limping, the vegan turned right onto
Monument Drive
, the access road into the Wegmans parking lot.
He walked up the drive and around it to enter through the vehicle exit, cutting through to the Wegmans entrance without going all the way around through the rear of the parking lot. As he entered the lot, the vegan noted that the low, spasmodic drone he had become used to that day—the irregular scraping of the zombies trapped inside their cars—grew louder.
The sound was unsettlingly stronger in the Wegmans parking lot than it had been anywhere else on the vegan’s route that day.
It had to be on account of the large number of cars parked there, he figured, and because he hadn’t stopped off in any large parking lots until that moment.
Tapping at his cross with a finger, the vegan reminded himself that he would grow used to the louder scraping, and that the ghouls were trapped, immobilized.
I have to focus on the positive, he told himself, and looked up at the finish line toward which he’d been striving for so many hours now. The vegan savored the sight of the Wegmans edifice looming like a glimmer of hope over him. He had made it to safety at last.
It felt like a safe place, in part because the vegan shopped at this particular Wegmans regularly, appreciating its relatively wide selection of animal-free products.
The first thing he planned to do once inside was to find a Newman’s Own Peanut Butter Cup in Dark Chocolate, and devour it. In spite of the absurd amount of cigarettes he had gone through on his journey, the vegan was famished.
As the vegan hobbled toward the familiar Wegmans entrance, he caught sight of something in the parking lot that unnerved him.
It can’t be, he thought. He tried to make out the shapes in the increasing gloom, then, hesitating for a moment, he turned his back to the Wegmans and its promise of a wide range of Newman’s Own products. He faced the center of the parking lot directly, and began to advance at a slow limp.
The ghoul smell—the now-familiar harbinger of the damned—grew stronger as he approached. It was a strange smell, remarkable in its complexity and impossible to pin down. The vegan tried to sniff out its components, but his mind blanked when he tried.
When he got to the very edge of the pile, the smell was so strong that the vegan had to breathe completely through his lit cigarette, instead of mostly through it, as he normally did.
Cringing with fear and wondering why he’d consciously made himself walk up to the pile, the vegan turned around. He felt some relief at having the pile out of sight, though he also felt worse in a different way, now that the soon-to-be-moonlit ghoul parts were behind him.
Looking back toward the Wegmans, the vegan noticed something that he hadn’t seen on his hobble toward the center of the parking lot. There was a crusty trail from the dead ghouls that led to the Wegmans. Curious, the vegan began to follow it, tracing its path with his eyes. He followed it all the way to the curb in front of the Wegmans entrance.
There he looked down to where the trail broke in a sloppy multitude of directions, and spotted something else that he hadn’t noticed before. Lying at the point where the curb met the street was a mop, the business end of which was crusty, seemingly with the same stuff that made up the trail.
It struck him that the crust had once been a thick, stinking liquid...the power source of the ghouls.
The power source of the ghouls? The vegan caught himself, wondering what the hell he was thinking about.
It’s too early into the apocalypse to be losing my mind, he told himself. He stomped out his cigarette, dug out a fresh one, and lit up.
Then he looked at the mop again. The mop head’s grey yarn looked stiff with the crust, a mass of sticking scabs waiting to be picked off. The vegan shuddered and stepped closer, looking down at the thing. An acrid odor hit him, weaker than that emanating from the pile of ghouls, but unsettling all the same. He took a step back, considering the mop, and took a hard pull on his cigarette. Then he followed the crusty trail back to the pile in the center of the parking lot.
So I won’t be in the Wegmans by myself, he thought. And why should I be? What had I been expecting anyway? That I would come here to hide and be the only person to have that idea?
Still, it wasn’t ideal. People always made things so complicated. People and their stupid ways. If only Rainee were still here, the vegan reflected. Rainee was good people, as the saying went, and of course, as often happened to good people, Rainee had fallen prey to the unknown ghoulish agenda, had become a part of it.
The vegan took another hard pull and told himself to stop it. Then he made himself peer into the ghoul pile’s depths. The moon was becoming more visible now in the dimming light, and it began to play off the ghoul parts, glinting off them, as if whispering its ancient, evil orders...commanding the parts to rise and—