Love and Decay, Episode Seven

by Rachel Higginson

  “And during this excursion….?” He prompted.

  “By you,” I sighed. “Always by you.”

  “Now she gets it!”

  “You are impossible!” And he was!

  He turned around just before we walked into the back offices where everyone would be getting ready for the day and sharing a breakfast of looted chocolates and stale Wheat Thins.

  His blue gaze met mine and then he made me fall just a little bit deeper in love with him.

  “You know I wouldn’t ask you to feel anything for me that I didn’t already feel for you, yeah?”

  Oh geez.

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “I know.”

  And then he turned around and we joined everyone else. Haley raised her eyebrows at me but I just lifted one shoulder and shook my head. How to explain what just happened out there? How to even being to describe what he made me feel?

  We sat down around the big table in the conference room. It was a little weird to be around a big table family style, but it felt nice too. Everyone was a little more excited than usual this morning. It was probably the chocolate and the hope that there would be guns later.

  We really needed guns.

  Vaughan eventually started planning the outing and we all stopped chatting to listen. There was a yellow pages in the office and a map of the town thanks to the merchandise. Using those tools Vaughan had a little bit of an idea where we were headed.

  We were going to try a couple different gun shops first and if those failed us we were apparently hitting up the airport. This seemed like a lot of fuel-sucking driving, but we didn’t have much of a choice. It was decided that we would lock up this shop behind us and come back here tonight if we were cutting it too close to sunset.

  Nelson brought up the idea of staying no matter what and hitting all these places whether we made out big on the first run or not. He had a good point, just because it was scary to be in the position we were in—with so many of us and lacking heavy artillery.

  It was concluded- by the group as a whole- that we would play it by ear. It was hard to make these kinds of decisions when we might find nothing in any shop or airport.

  I actually didn’t get the whole airport thing, but Vaughan was very sure that they were great places to pick up guns because when people traveled and couldn’t take them on the planes, they’d just leave them in their cars.

  This seemed farfetched to me and a little frustrating. If this many people carried guns around then how in the hell did the Zombies take over in the first place?

  Of course, if all the firearms were trapped in cars in the middle of an airport long-term parking garage then maybe it made sense after all.

  Plan concocted, courage and determination gathered and some borrowed, we set off. There were a few Feeders off in the distance, but we made it to the van without having to kill anything and then we set off down the desolate streets of Tulsa, Oklahoma looking for a place called Ed’s and the promise of some salvation.

  Chapter Three

  Tulsa was empty.

  This was how we heard most big cities were actually. There might be people somewhere in the city but they were living like hermits if they stuck around a place this big overrun with Zombies.

  Settlements usually popped up around small towns because they were easy to defend. And I didn’t mean small as in moderately sized. I meant small, as in the kind with itty bitty historical downtowns that had one pre-war courthouse and one sheriff. And then of course the one Pizza Hut and Wal-Mart allotted town with a population under three thousand. The habitable towns were the kind of places where cruising the town square was literally what happened on Friday nights- or used to- and that people spent their entire lives trying to escape.

  So basically like the town I grew up in. Except my town was overrun with Feeders very early on in the game.

  Big cities tended to be virtual Zombie playgrounds. They were too impossible for the dwindling human population to defend and looked the most like war zones. They were ironically the places the government tried to defend the hardest- by destroying huge chunks of- and where people fled from first.

  The streets in Tulsa were no exception. Extensive masses were missing from roads and cars were left abandoned everywhere. It was like people just left them in the middle of whatever they were doing and either ran the rest of the way on foot or were abducted by aliens.

  Ok, they probably weren’t abducted by aliens.

  This made travel in our huge van a giant pain in the ass.

  One of the gun shops wasn’t that far from where we were staying but it felt impossible to reach because of how we had to drive to get there. Vaughan made good use of the empty sidewalks and medians but this was a nice vehicle that fit all of us comfortably. Nobody was in a hurry to beat the shit out of it and then leave it to become abandoned road art.

  Still, there wasn’t much of an option.

  We had half a tank of gas, but I was pretty sure if worse came to worst we could syphon from any of the surrounding vehicles. I just didn’t like how long this was taking. I felt like we were drawing attention to ourselves every moment we wasted trying to get around an overturned car or cement crater.

  The car was jumpy and quiet. Everyone was feeling the danger as it palpably filled the air around us.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I was in a big city like this. Haley and I had been avoiding them since the beginning- at first we were afraid of the people still living in them and then we learned how dangerous they were because of the lack of people. And the Parker brothers had never even suggested we stop in one before.

  That revelation alone shed light on how desperate we were for weapons these days.

  And food.

  The weird thing was I hadn’t seen a ton of Zombies yet. There were some off in the distance that kind of turned our way as we drove by, but there wasn’t the horde I expected like in the last semi-still- intact town we drove through.

  After several hours of driving, Vaughan finally pulled up beside a huge warehouse looking building. The structure was all white metal that seemed to stretch on forever. At one point there had been automatic glass doors, but they had since been bashed to smithereens. Decaying dead bodies lay littered all over the parking lot in various stages of deterioration. Birds pecked at their gooey remains and I was sure they were also filled with a healthy number of maggots and for sure smelled like the seventh circle of hell.

  Great.

  As it turned out a gun shop during an Apocalypse was like a regular Zombie- buffet. People flocked en masse to grab protection and then met their untimely end before they even got through the broken doors.

  It made me especially nervous to go in there. I looked at Page with a mixture of dread and heart-aching fear. This was not a good scenario for any of us, but especially her.

  She wasn’t even all the way better yet from her bout with strep. She still tired easily and seemed to be dragging most days.

  But what choice did we have?

  And Hendrix was right, we weren’t splitting up again. There were too many variables and no way for us to communicate with each other once we were separated.

  Freaking cell phones had ruined me for the rest of my life. Unless I perfected the art of pigeon carriers, I would forever be tainted by what used to be.

  “What’s the plan?” Nelson asked from the bench seat in front of me. Haley was sprawled out with her head in his lap. I had been watching her all but twitch as we drove through the city until eventually she laid her head down and closed her eyes. She was focusing on breathing so I knew her mind was racing- probably coming up with our unbeatable odds and freaking herself out.

  “We’re going in,” Vaughan said firmly. He was another one I could count on to have already gone over the probabilities of survival. He had weighed the risk, held it up against the outcome and decided that we had no other choice.

  King handed out empty looting bags that we had collected randomly. We all had our own, even Page. Our sh
opping bags.

  “There might not be anything left in there,” Tyler pointed out.

  Vaughan shot her a scathing look over his shoulder. “You’re right. But then again, there might be a lot in there. We have to find out. We don’t have a choice.”

  Tyler shrugged casually, but all the blood had drained from her face. I reached back and squeezed her hand. “Stick close to us, we’re not going to let anything happen to you,” I whispered.

  She nodded and then grabbed Miller’s hand. He was staring intently at the back of Page’s head with an expression of mingled determination and fear. She was our biggest risk today. Everyone knew it.

  “When we get in there,” Vaughan continued. “I want everyone to hang out in the front, except Reagan, Hendrix and me. We’ll loot the store. The rest of you stay with Page, Miller and Tyler and protect them.”

  “I can protect myself,” Tyler bit out.

  “No,” Vaughan said slowly, “You can’t.

  And he was right.

  My stomach clenched with knots. We had too many weaknesses. We were losing four of our biggest assets to protect the most vulnerable. Which was great because I wanted everyone to remain alive, but it was frustrating and dangerous.

  Tyler and Miller- although he was getting more proficient by the day- were just as vulnerable as Page and at times more so because they didn’t listen as well.

  Hendrix looked back at me from the front passenger’s seat and locked eyes with me. “Yeah?” he asked quietly.

  “Yeah,” I breathed. I felt like we were sharing the same brain just then. We had similar fears, shared anxiety for the task ahead, but we were in this together. By him. By each other. He would make this alright- he would keep us safe.

  Vaughan shut the engine off but left the keys in the ignition. There weren’t any Feeders milling about the parking lot, but it wouldn’t take much to draw them out from whatever dark places they were hiding.

  All at once Vaughan let out a steadying breath that seemed to fill the entire vehicle with sound and then he opened his door and counted to three. We followed suit- each of us with a bag to fill with goodies and a weapon of some kind. I had a wooden baseball bat that was still clean. I wasn’t exactly anxious to break it in.

  Harrison slid open the side door and we all piled out carefully. I gripped Page’s hand tightly in mine and let her carry her golf club and canvas tote in the other hand. She looked up at me with her big blue eyes and I tried to be strong for her- forced myself to be fearless. But it was the courage I found in her trusting eyes that gave me the confidence it would take to get through this. She trusted us to keep her safe, she believed we would get out of this alive.

  The doors of the van were closed and then we set off toward the store.

  The parking lot was filled with cars parked haphazardly as close to the doors as they could get. A few had even been run into each other. We had to crawl over a line of them that were stuck trunk to hood through a line of five of them. People had apparently given up a vehicle for the prospect of a semi-automatic.

  That was the debate. Was it better to be able to run away or fight them off?

  The debacle with our last van and being stranded on the side of the road lent to the argument that it was better to be able to fight. But then again we’d been completely overrun and if the van hadn’t been such a piece of unreliable shit we could have left those flesh-hungry Feeders in our dust.

  So the debate went on.

  It wasn’t exactly quiet inside the store. The sounds of low moaning grew louder the closer we got to the entrance. A sickly panicky feeling washed over my skin and I glanced back at the van. I wanted to stash Page away in there and lock the doors until we were finished. But I knew that would be a bad move. While we were shopping in a windowless building, completely focused on the task, Page could be being eaten alive just a couple hundred feet away without us having any idea.

  We stuck together- close enough so we could always hear each other scream.

  We stepped over dead bodies, all of us struggling not to gag. The blood that painted the sidewalk was at least dried so we weren’t slipping through it. I refused to look down at half-eaten faces and gutted bodies crawling with maggots and other insects. The birds didn’t even fly away at our approach, just hopped to a different body or eyed us hungrily.

  It was super creepy.

  The only respite from the level of ominous doom filling the air was the warm spring sun beating down on us. It seemed so oddly out of place I could barely reconcile the bright, sunny day with our surroundings and objective.

  Page clutched my hand tighter and I squeezed back. She was being unbelievably brave as we walked through the parking lot turned open graveyard.

  It was amazing she was holding it together since even I wanted to just curl into a tight ball and cry out hysterically. Her little hand gave me nerve, she was squeezing courage into me and I clasped onto it, holding it tightly to my aching heart.

  We finally made it to the glass doors and stepped carefully through the jagged borders of the shattered windows. The ceiling was lined with skylights that filtered in the bright sunlight. It was amazingly visible in here- but that only meant we had a clear line of sight of the masses of Zombies waiting for us. The moaning was even louder inside the entry way- the Zombies were just on the other side of a half wall. I could hear them. I could smell them. I could feel their closeness like a shroud of fear.

  I gave Page one more tight squeeze and then passed her off to Nelson. We connected with a weighted gaze for three seconds before we were through and into the main part of the store. He was telling me not to die and I was telling him to keep my best friend and his little sister safe.

  There weren’t words in these scenarios- just meaningful looks and life-saving purpose.

  And then everything was happening at once and I didn’t have time to think about fear or death or what could happen. I was thrown into the fray with only a baseball bat between being alive and a gruesome, gory death.

  It would have to be enough.

  My duffle bag was slung over my shoulder and I moved to Hendrix’s side as the first wave of Feeders hit us.

  They were wandering around aimlessly until they caught our scent and then they attacked in one unit. There were ten of them at least, but my counting skills weren’t exactly accurate with all the flailing limbs and bodies moving about.

  Harrison grabbed Page and Tyler and shoved them under a cash register and then preceded to play home-run derby with a Feeder’s face and his tire iron.

  I looked away once they were safely tucked in and dealt with my own Feeder. It happened to be a she in her mid-ish thirties, if I had to guess by her tattered clothing and what was left of her face. She was clawing at me, her blackened, oozing teeth gnashing in my direction. Her eyes were blood red and she reeked of Zombie-rot. Oh god, she was disgusting.

  I took my baseball bat and swung at her. I hit her on the top of the shoulder and she wobbled to the side, but righted herself soon enough.

  Here was the thing about the bat. I didn’t know this weapon. It wasn’t my usual style. And while I was surrounded by guns, none of them were loaded and the bullets would be kept in a different place than the guns.

  I realized we would have no choice but to clear this store before we could shop. It wasn’t like we could just grab everything and hope it matched up later.

  The good news was that there was definitely a surplus to pick from.

  Which meant, there were probably a hundred Zombies in here, going by how many cars were out in the parking lot. There clearly hadn’t been any successful looting attempts thus far.

  Awesome.

  As long as they didn’t all converge on us at once…

  I swung again- this time harder, with as much force as I had and connected with her skull. The bat sunk through her softened bone but still managed a loud crushing sound. Gray, bloodied matter exploded from the point of contact with the tip of my bat and her smooshed face led her
down to the tiled floor.

  I stifled a gag and then spun around and swung my bat- two handed- again. This time I got the chest of a taller, male Zombie. He was very skinny, with a concaved stomach and baggy tan shorts that were not all that frayed. He must be a new recruit.

  Sorry, buddy.

  He was just as famished though and his teeth snapped at me like a rabid dog, spraying white mucousy spittle all over his chin and the front of his t-shirt. His eyes were dead but focused at the same time- just barely red- further evidence he hadn’t been a Feeder for long.

  A twinge of sadness swept over me right before I brought my bat down directly on the top of his head. His bone structure wasn’t as decayed as the other one so even though I knocked him good, it wasn’t even enough to split open his head.

  I quickly hit him again- this time in the side of the head- before he could get his bearings but he just kept coming for me, never even registering the pain. I let out a screaming grunt and hit him harder.

  My arms were already aching and with each connection to his solid head I felt myself wobble from the force of it. I needed him to die.

  Or I was going to.

  Vaguely I heard a Feeder fall at my feet behind me and realized my life had just been saved, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it because the kid in front of me refused to die.

  I hit him again and again and again. I was savage with my attack, completely out of my mind with the struggle to survive. It almost felt surreal- like I was watching this happen from outside of my body.

  I detached myself completely from the medley of emotions threatening to take over my mind and body. I couldn’t feel the overwhelming sadness I felt whenever I was forced to kill something- even if it was a Zombie. I couldn’t let the panic and hysteria that threatened to choke me take over. I couldn’t allow the depression and hopelessness for our situation to weigh down on me or I would be dead before I took another breath. I shoved it all down, piled it into an unbreakable emotional strongbox and locked it.

  I would deal with those feelings someday.

  Possibly I wouldn’t open that Pandora’s Box until therapists existed again and I could get a prescription for PTSD.