Night Zero- Second Day

by Rob Horner

  Jennifer turned out to be the missus of the house, as round as her husband but with a hummingbird’s speed of motion and speech. She took one look at Jasmine, declared her to be prettiest thing she’d ever seen—”and with such beautiful skin! Why, you positively glow!”—and whisked her into the kitchen slash dining area for a hot cup of tea to take the edge off.

  Robbie could’ve used a little edge-shaving, but he didn’t say anything, not with beefcake Ed sizing him up like a training dummy, or whatever the Marines used when they were working on building their fingers to the size of summer sausages.

  Then the big man smiled.

  “Come on in and sit a spell. Bert says you had a helluva scare coming into town.”

  Sitting a spell turned into a night spent locked in a back bedroom, once Ed and Jennifer got to examining them.

  “Scratch on your ear is probably nothing; we’ve had a few folks what seem to be immune. But we’ve also had them what don’t show no lines right away and end up going batshit after a few hours.”

  Worrying about whether he was going to go batshit was what kept Robbie awake most of the night. Would he even know when it happened?

  The bedroom was nice, but small. Just a bed, a nightstand, and a small chest.

  “Had to turn the knob around once this all started,” Ed said, his voice apologetic even as his tone said there would be no option to refuse the Scriven’s hospitality.

  “Don’t worry about your lady friend,” Jennifer said. “We’ll keep her safe out here.”

  Robbie wanted to argue. He wanted to demand that Jasmine stay with him. But in the end, he couldn’t argue with Ed and Jennifer. If something happened and he went…batshit…it was better for Jasmine to be outside the room.

  It was crazy. He barely even remembered getting scratched.

  It must have happened in the car, when Desiree tried to grab me.

  Fast forward twelve hours and here he was, with one of the two Walthers in his right hand and an oversized Mary Poppins carpet bag slung over his left forearm. He was exhausted after a night spent worrying, but relieved to be all right. Ed offered to let him stay in the trailer—”Catch up on some sleep, like,”—but he couldn’t have slept knowing Jasmine was out in the town.

  That’s where they were, about to bust down the doors of the local Wal-Mart, him and Jasmine and a half-dozen other crazy fools.

  They had a four-truck convoy pulled up as close to the doors as they could get, though it didn’t look like they had anything to worry about. The lot wasn’t empty, but the only cars were stragglers parked so far out they had to belong to employees, unless they’d been abandoned by their owners. One zombie thing shuffled along the far edge, near where the signs directed drivers to Pull around for grocery pick-up. It didn’t appear to be paying them any attention, just plodding along.

  It’s gotta be a dream.

  * * * * *

  Angel smiled at his wife, Ann, as they entered the supermarket. The newcomers, Robbie and Jasmine—moved off to the right, both holding pistols and ready to raid the pharmacy. They had another Wilder with them, pistols on his hips and a shotgun in his arms. Angel smiled. He’d put his faith in Jeff over just about anyone.

  Except Ann, of course.

  The two were as unlikely a pair as anyone could imagine. He was the educated son of an impoverished family from Puerto Rico. She was a cancer survivor who ran a local bakery with her mother. They met on Facebook and the rest, as they said, was history.

  Getting into the place had been surprisingly easy. The doors slid open at their approach, like even a zombie apocalypse wasn’t enough for the twenty-four-hour store to close.

  More likely no one had been left alive to lock the doors.

  The thought was sobering, even more so because there was no crowd of undead meandering in the parking lot. For some reason, every dead person they’d seen was outside the high school, with the parking lot shuffler the sole exception to prove the rule. That didn’t mean there wouldn’t be some in the store.

  Unlocked doors were an invitation to all kinds of bad things, he thought, remembering the gangs running the streets of Jayuya during his childhood. Even back then, before the guns became so easy to get, a thumbscrew and a deadbolt weren’t always enough. Every low-rent tenement he’d ever lived in had one of those brace bars which extended from the floor to under the doorknob to prevent forced entry.

  The sharp rattle of concrete wheels and loose mesh metal sounded as Ann pushed a shopping cart at him before grabbing one for herself. She threw a smile his way, tossing her auburn hair over one shoulder.

  God, he loved that woman.

  Their target was the grocery section. Specifically, the canned goods aisle. There were a total of nine of them in the store. Four for grocery, them plus Alex Bailey and Tia Fanning. Three went to the pharmacy. And two others, Melissa Alexia and her best friend, Judy Keith, were raiding the gun cases. Two women with four first names, that’s how he thought of them. Angel didn’t know much about their backstory, only they made as odd a pair as he and Ann.

  They moved as fast as they could, but the aisles weren’t clear. No dead bodies, thankfully, but enough scattered merchandise to read like a scene from one of the videogames he loved so well.

  Knocked over clothing rack. Shoe boxes dislodged from the shelves, their contents scattered every which way like a bunch of toddlers coming in after an hour on the playground. Someone crashed through here. Not running, or there’d be more disturbed product. More like they were staggering, perhaps injured.

  But if they were hurt, where’s the blood?

  He felt like The Witcher and one of the detectives from the Resident Evil games all rolled into one.

  From Women’s Clothing to Jewelry to Shoes and finally into the grocery racks, there was enough just off about everything to showcase how badly things were fucked up.

  “What about milk? Other perishables?” Ann asked, following close behind him. If he stopped suddenly, the front end of her cart would ram the back of his legs.

  “That’s on Alex and Tia,” he said. “Frozen stuff, too.”

  “Should be more of us,” she muttered.

  The small contingent was just a first foray, Ed explained. Despite the size of their trailer park community, their numbers weren’t great. A lot of the residents had been caught out when the…whatever happened, and shit hit the fan. Jeff described it as a crazy bomb going off, like someone yelling “Fire!” in a movie theater, and Angel could only be thankful neither him nor Ann were out at the time. He had nothing against guns, of course, but not minding something didn’t mean being comfortable enough to have one in the house.

  That all changed twenty-four hours before, he thought, feeling the weight of the small semi-automatic riding on his hip.

  Jeff was another prepper type, akin in spirit if nothing else to Bert, and that alone saved his ass when he found himself coming out of another store just as the doors to the high school burst open, disgorging a mass of dead people who ran through the streets biting and clawing, seemingly trying to get as many people converted as fast as possible.

  The food aisles were more a minefield than the clothing. Busted up jars of juice turned one aisle into a sticky, prickly mess, while the canned goods rolled everywhere on the next.

  In the center of the canned goods section was a dead person, still wearing a royal blue blazer over jeans and a t-shirt. His back was to them, his attention focused on a rolling can of tomato paste, like he couldn’t figure out if he should attack it or not.

  Angel saw him first, jerking his cart to a halt with a soft curse. He turned to tell Ann to back away, but of course she was too close. The lower rail of her cart struck his Achilles’ tendons with enough force to push a second oath out of him, this time much louder.

  The zombie turned, saw them at the end of the aisle, and broke into a run.

  * * * * *

  They were wading through the narrow spaces around the pharmacy counter when the first gunsho
ts cracked across the store, short and sharp. Crack and crack, like the sound of a whip from an Indiana Jones movie.

  “Figured there had to be a few in here,” Jeff said, his first words since entering the store.

  Robbie’s head jerked, whipsawing left and right, but Jasmine kept her eyes on the shelves, reading the names of medications.

  The gunshots didn’t repeat, and there were no cries of fear or pain. Even if there were, she had no intention of leaving Robbie alone.

  They didn’t have a grocery list so much as a “get a few of each of these” categories of medicine. The medical needs of The Wilds’ residents ran the gamut from diabetes to hypertension to COPD, but one of their number was a nurse practitioner who said a lot of the boutique drugs were just fancy combinations of more mundane pharmaceuticals. Bigger dose tablets could be cut into smaller doses, making their hunt even faster.

  Trouble was, the drugs weren’t stocked alphabetically.

  And, except for a few substances, they weren’t in small bottles like what a pharmacist usually handed the patient.

  Looking at the canvas tote bag slung over her arm, she said, “We need a cart.”

  Robbie held up a jug which probably held five hundred pills. “Here’s the amoxicillin.”

  Jeff grunted and leaped back over the counter. “Be right back.”

  Jasmine shrugged and continued looking. “Put what you find on the counter. He can add it to the cart when he gets back.”

  “Got it.”

  She smiled, finding a similarly sized container full of lisinopril, another of the items on the list.

  Robbie had been acting a little off, but she chalked it up to fatigue and probably a residual shock. The world as they knew it was completely changed. Yet, for some reason, she felt more alive than she ever had, while he was wallowing in grief over what was.

  She didn’t think it was any difference in their circumstance. Neither had any close relatives. Their independence from familial constraints was one of the things they bonded over.

  That and a desire to break certain stereotypes, she thought, watching as he bent down to retrieve another jug of something.

  “Looks like they’re organized by type,” he shouted, not realizing how close she was to him.

  His strong arms flexed, biceps knotting up nicely.

  Damn, he was sexy.

  Robbie didn’t talk about his parents much, but she knew they were old south racists, the kind who grew up thinking they were progressive, claiming nebulous friendships with people of color, but whose every conversation was peppered with racial jokes and innuendo. The one and only time they’d planned a dinner together, Robbie’s dad pulled him aside and said Damn son, you must’ve found the prettiest Half-rican in the country.

  Her face burned at the memory almost as much as it had when she was sitting there, a glass of wine on the table and a menu spread open in front of her.

  Robbie didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. His dad spoke loud enough for everyone in the restaurant to hear.

  Instead, he dropped a twenty on the table to pay for their drinks and calmly escorted her out.

  She loved him for that.

  He’d get it together. She had faith.

  And if he needed her help, she was glad to give it.

  His observation was correct. The medicines were grouped by class then alphabetized within each class. The hydrochlorothiazide was next to the lisinopril and only a few jars away from the amlodipine. Within minutes, the counter looked like a State Fair ball toss game, with big five-gallon containers lined up from one cash register to the next, just waiting for some teenager to start trying to win a stuffed bear.

  “Okay,” Robbie said, “I found the antibiotics and the anti-arry…the antiarithmati…the heart medicine.” He paused while she giggled. “Hush. You try to say it.”

  “Antiarrhythmics.”

  “Hmph. Yeah. Those. Smart ass.”

  Her giggle became a full laugh.

  “Anyway, I can’t find the diabetic stuff, the insulin.”

  “I’ve got the pills,” she said, pulling a bottle of metformin off a shelf. “I think Luna said the insulin would be refrigerated.”

  “That’s right; she did.”

  “I’ll get it,” Jasmine offered, spotting a set of stainless-steel double doors toward the back of the pharmacy. “You find the pain medicine.”

  Robbie gave her a scrunched-up face, which she read as Do I have to? She knew how he felt. His older brother got hooked on pain medicine after a car accident popped half the tendons in his knee. He died of an accidental overdose after a two-year battle with the stuff. Still, it had to be done. They had some oldsters in The Wilds, with Granny Lee perhaps the loudest of the bunch. And if finding a bottle of low-dose pain medicine kept her from cawing about her ‘rheumatoid’ every time the wind blew, well, that would be a blessing for all of them.

  Jasmine moved to the refrigerator doors while Robbie ducked and bobbed, reading labels and checking them against his “shopping list” as fast as he could. The rattle of a shopping cart started up a little distance away, coming closer. Probably Jeff returning.

  “Found a locked cabinet with a list taped to the outside,” Robbie reported. “Looks like the pain medicines are all inside.”

  “Can you open it?” she asked, one hand out to grab the fridge door.

  “It’s a padlock. We might have to do without.”

  “Just shoot the damned thing,” Jeff said.

  Robbie muttered something else just as her hand closed on the door handle. She jerked the door open.

  A face stared out at her.

  Jasmine jumped back and screamed.

  * * * * *

  “Th’ hell?” Angel asked as someone screamed from the other side of the store.

  “No gunshots,” Ann commented.

  The scream died away and wasn’t repeated.

  “We should go, babe,” Angel said. “No gunshots ain’t necessarily a good thing.”

  Ann shook her mane of red hair, her way of getting an errant strand out of her face. It was one of the little things about her he found fascinating. Any other woman would just raise a finger, maybe tuck it behind her ear. Not his Ann.

  “You think we got enough?” she asked.

  Neither of them wanted to talk about the dead man on the floor.

  Is it right to call him dead? Angel wondered. He was already dead, so is he double dead now? Like refried beans or twice-baked bread?

  Sometimes he wished his mind didn’t wander so much.

  “Earth to Angel.”

  Their carts were full of just about every kind of canned good they could scrounge, from vegetables to fruit cocktail, beef stew to ravioli, Vienna sausages to corned beef hash. If the zombies didn’t kill them, they could always count on a slow death from sodium and preservative poisoning, at least.

  She reached out and gave him a shake. “Quit looking at him; it’ll give you nightmares,” she said.

  Startled, Angel realized he’d been staring at the double-dead zombie on the floor, though his thoughts were on the food in the carts. Something she’d said flashed in his mind and he answered, “Yeah, I think we’ve got enough. Let’s get out of here.”

  They maneuvered the carts in a U-turn, avoiding the Wal-Mart employee face-up on the floor. When he’d charged, they’d both drawn their weapons and fired, one atop the other. Angel didn’t know which of them scored the hit on the man’s head, and he didn’t want to. Bad enough thinking about shooting at someone, regardless of whether they weren’t alive anymore. He didn’t want to believe he’d ended a life. Or a second one.

  Fuck it.

  The carts were harder to move now, loaded down as they were. Every imperfection in the Flintstone concrete wheels vibrated through the frame, jarring his wrists. It was hard to judge direction from a single scream, but he thought it had come from the front and to the left. A part of him wanted to ignore it and just rush for the doors, get their stuff loaded in the pi
ckup and jet back to The Wilds. That part was the scared kid who huddled on the floor of the apartment when the gangbangers drove by, too terrified to even check out the window to see who they were shooting at. He hated that kid. He brought himself up, studying when his friends got into drugs, going to college interviews while they were partying and stuffing babies into the bellies of young women who had no concept of any way to make money other than off the government, a little more each month for every baby they pumped out. He left home to escape that kid and that dirty floor, and now a single scream threatened to bring the kid back out, like he’d never left and never outgrown it.

  “Hey, slow down,” Ann said. “Where’re you racing off to?”

  He wasn’t sure, but he couldn’t say that. Instead, he slowed enough for her to catch up.

  “I thought the scream came from—”

  Another scream interrupted him. This time from much closer.

  Another cart barreled out of the Sporting Goods section, with Melissa behind it pushing for all she was worth. Judy stayed close, but was half-running backwards, a pistol in each hand.

  It was Melissa who screamed.

  The guns barked.

  Four or five—zombies—people in shredded clothes and in various states of…

  Holy crap, that guy’s arm is missing!

  …disarray tumbled out of the aisle after them, moving fast.

  Melissa screamed again as Judy fired.

  One of the creatures fell, but it immediately began to rise.