He could see Felix up ahead debating what to do in his lead cart.
“We can’t just sit here and watch,” said Victoria.
“I can’t help anyone, tied up like this,” said Halverson.
Before they could do anything, they watched in horror as the three creatures yanked the man’s head off his neck. Blood fountained out of the guy’s mutilated throat, soaking the zombies. They lapped it up like it was water and they were dying from thirst.
Victoria gasped and held her hands over her eyes.
Out of morbid curiosity, Halverson watched the creature that possessed the blood-splashed head. The thirtyish male creature was wearing a khaki flat cap and tan plastic-framed spectacles. The creature flung the head on the pavement, trying to crack open the skull and get to the brains. The head rolled under an SUV.
Frustrated, Flat Cap followed the errant head. The creature got down on its hands and knees to retrieve it. Realizing it could not fit beneath the vehicle on its knees, Flat Cap flattened itself on its belly, squirmed under the chassis, and latched onto the head.
When Flat Cap stood up with the head in its hands, the other zombies gathered around the prize, eager to devour fresh brains.
Despite having received a broken nose from the pounding it had taken on the pavement, the decapitated head remained in one piece.
Flat Cap started smashing the head against the SUV’s front bumper.
“Do we have to watch this?” said Victoria in disgust.
Halverson noticed that more and more stray zombies were streeling through the car wreckage. They were beating a path toward the motor carts.
Felix noticed the same thing. He peeled off across the intersecting street to the sidewalk that continued west on Wilshire. The other two carts followed him.
The zombies in the road blundered around in confusion, unable to pick up on the carts in the darkness.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Puzzled, Halverson saw Felix hang a right at the next intersection. “Where’s he going?”
“I don’t know,” said Victoria. “That’s not the direction to my house.”
“Better follow him for now. We need to hash this out and figure out where we’re headed.”
“I don’t want to follow him. I want to find my daughter.”
“If he sees us take off, he’ll come after us for the money.”
“So?”
“So, he’s got the guns. And I’m tied up, if you haven’t noticed.”
Victoria thought about it. “OK. I’ll follow him then tell him we’re looking for Shawna.”
Halverson nodded. “Let’s find out why he’s going here.”
As Victoria made a right turn at the corner they could see Felix and Becker driving into the parking lot of a rambling supermarket that occupied the corner.
Felix parked directly in front of the supermarket’s open electronic sliding plate-glass door.
Victoria parked beside Felix. “What are we doing here?”
“I can’t go any farther without eating,” answered Felix.
He removed his NVGs, dismounted from his vehicle, and strode into the store.
“I can’t believe he’s leaving his cart unguarded,” Halverson told Victoria.
“Reba’s staying in it,” said Victoria.
“Aren’t you gonna eat, Reba?” asked Halverson.
“Felix is bringing me back some food,” Reba answered.
“Well, I’m getting my own,” said Becker, angling toward the supermarket door. “Don’t let anyone hijack our carts,” he told Reba.
Reba rolled her eyes. “Nobody’s gonna hijack mine, anyway.”
Becker balked in midstride when he heard her reply, debating whether to leave his cart unattended. He turned around and gazed at Mannering, who still sat in Becker’s cart.
“Don’t look at me,” said Mannering and climbed out of his seat. “I’m not staying out here. I could eat a horse.”
Mannering strolled past Becker into the supermarket.
Becker thought about telling Mannering about the money, so Mannering would stay in the vehicle and guard it. But Becker decided against it. Too many people knew about the money, already, as far as he was concerned. The more you divided the stuff up, the less there was for him.
Becker shrugged. Allowing his growling stomach to dictate, he decided he would take his chances and leave his money behind. He followed Mannering into the market.
“We gotta keep up our energy,” Halverson told Victoria, sliding out of his seat. “This may be the last chance we have to eat for a while.”
She accompanied him into the store.
Emergency battery-operated strip lights on the ceiling kept the store illuminated with a dull glow. Too bad the A/C wasn’t working as well, decided Halverson, sweating in the stuffy store.
He still hadn’t figured out how he was going to eat without the use of his hands. He hoped Victoria would help him.
They followed Felix to the meat section.
“Everything’s probably spoiled by now without refrigeration,” said Victoria. “Why’s Felix going to the meat section?”
Felix swiped a pound of ground round from the nonfunctioning refrigerated meat locker. The meat had turned a greenish grey. Wincing while holding the package of meat with the hand on his sore arm, he tore off the cellophane wrapper with his good hand and wolfed down the raw meat directly out of the white Styrofoam pan. Finished, he tossed the package’s pan onto the floor.
“Is that stuff safe to eat?” asked Mannering, watching Felix in awe.
Too busy grabbing a side of green steak from the meat locker, Felix paid no attention to him. Felix clawed the shrink-wrap off the package of steak and gobbled down the raw meat in seconds.
Mannering approached the meat locker and took a gander at its contents. He picked up and squeezed a package of grey raw sirloin. He shook his head.
“This stuff’s warm,” he said. He watched with consternation as Felix scarfed down another raw slab of steak. “You could get a disease, man.”
Felix polished off five T-bone steaks in a matter of minutes.
“He’s gonna get sick,” Mannering told Halverson.
“I wouldn’t eat that,” said Victoria, examining the packages of spoiled meat in the locker and turning up her nose.
“I’ll stick to dry goods and canned goods, myself,” said Mannering.
He departed in search of said items, peering at the signs over the aisles to guide him in his quest.
Felix kept downing more raw steaks.
“He wasn’t kidding when he said he was hungry,” said Victoria.
“I don’t know where he puts it all,” said Halverson.
He watched Felix warily. Felix’s insatiable appetite for raw meat was more than likely a symptom of the plague he had contracted, decided Halverson. Felix might turn any time now into a ghoul. Halverson wasn’t about to voice his opinion while Felix stood in earshot—not as longs as Felix was the one with the guns.
“We better start getting food,” said Victoria.
“Make it quick,” said Halverson. “We have company.”
“What? Where?”
Halverson nodded toward the opposite end of the store.
A five seven twentysomething man was emerging from the storage room there. He had unruly, curly black hair about two inches long sprouting from his head and four days’ growth of black stubble on his face. He wore filthy blue jeans and a navy blue button-down shirt that had its buttons torn off and was hanging open to reveal a hairy caved-in chest.
“Is he one of them?” asked Victoria.
“I can’t tell from here, but we better get our food and scram.”
The guy was just standing there for the moment, Halverson saw.
Halverson took the opportunity to help Victoria gather food. Not that he was much of a help, considering his hands were tied.
She snared an abandoned canvas carryall off the floor, paraded down aisles, and tossed items into the baske
t.
When she realized the carryall was too small, she said, “We need a bigger basket.”
“I’ll get one,” said Halverson.
He found a metal cart on wheels at the front of the store near the cash registers. Without the use of his hands he had to steer the cart with his feet, which wasn’t easy. The wayward cart kept crashing into the shelves and knocking items down onto the floor, creating a mess and a racket.
At last he reached Victoria. She deposited the carryall’s contents into the cart and resumed collecting more items. She dumped a red cardboard twenty-four pack of Cokes into the cart.
Seeing that he was having difficulty managing the cart, she grasped its red plastic handle and pushed the cart herself.
Halverson struck off for the end of the aisle to take another look at their uninvited guest standing in front of the storage room.
His eyes staring blankly ahead, the guy was shambling into the store now, Halverson could see. Halverson pegged him for a ghoul. Where there was one ghoul, there were usually more not far behind, Halverson had learned from his earlier experiences with them.
As if on cue, another twentysomething creature shuffled out of the dim storeroom. Taller than its cohort by four-odd inches, this creature had a short, scraggly black beard, a round, puttylike nose, and a sneering, half-open mouth that secreted saliva. On its head the creature wore a raked black-and-white checkered ascot cap.
Behind this creature was yet another creature traipsing out of the storeroom. This one was a black portly female with a rope of black, conked hair draped over her gore-coated primrose yellow blouse. Gazing up at the ceiling with gibbous brown eyes coated with white film, the creature waddled into the store.
Halverson saw Felix pick up on the zombie infestation as the third one entered the store.
Felix hurried gorging on another gamy raw steak. He withdrew his Glock from his waistband, aimed the pistol at the fat creature, and seemed to pause in thought, as if reluctant to fire. His demurral did not last long. He fired. Three rounds ripped into the creature’s chest, slowing its advance for no more than a few seconds at the most.
“Shoot at the head,” said Halverson.
How many times did he have to keep telling them? he wondered.
Felix blasted the fat creature’s head. The ghoul dropped like an overstuffed bag of potatoes. Assorted scavenger insects crawled out of the thing’s mouth and scuttled across its bloated belly.
Felix fired more rounds at the other two zombies, dropping one of them with a head shot that blew the creature’s occipital bone off. Fragments of skull crashed into the wall behind the creature and smeared it with gobbets of brain matter.
Felix scooped up a bunch of steaks from the meat locker, cradled his haul in his arms, and bucketed back toward the motor carts in the parking lot.
Attracted by the gunshots, a pack of zombies moseyed out of the storeroom into the store.
Halverson took a powder down the nearest aisle. He pulled to an abrupt halt as he realized he was standing in the kitchenware section of the store. Spotting a fruit knife for sale that was hanging from a metal prong, he backed toward the knife. With his bound hands he contrived to glom onto the knife and insert it into his rear waistband.
He then pulled his shirt from out of his jeans to cover the knife from view.
Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed three ghouls shambling down the aisle toward him.
He skedaddled, collecting Victoria as he fled.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Victoria jogged toward the parking lot steering her loaded shopping cart before her.
She pushed the cart out of the store into the parking lot. When she reached her motor cart, Halverson helped her unload the food supplies into the back of the motor cart. There wasn’t much spare room on account of the moneybag stashed there, but he and Victoria managed to stow all of the items around the bag.
Loaded with moneybags, the two other motor carts had even less storage space for supplies.
Felix stuffed his steaks into the rear of his motor cart like a man possessed.
Hearing Felix groan, Halverson turned toward him. Halverson watched Felix tear the bloodstained sleeve off his wounded arm.
Reba, who was closest to Felix, gasped and flinched in her motor cart’s passenger seat when she saw Felix’s exposed arm.
The entire arm and hand had turned black all the way to the shoulder with greenish yellow pus oozing from the necrotic flesh.
His face flushed, Felix pried open his plastic bottle of amoxicillin and poured half a dozen pills into his mouth. He could barely move his wounded arm.
He retrieved a can of Coke from the back of the cart. He struggled to pop open the can, which he had trouble grasping with his sore arm’s hand. At last he opened the can, spilling Coke on his pants as he did so. He took a pull of the Coke and washed down the pills.
“You’re taking too many,” said Reba. She felt his forehead. “My God, you’re burning up!”
“It hurts,” said Felix, lifting his wounded arm up in front of him.
“Maybe we should amputate that thing,” said Mannering.
“Hank’s right,” Reba told Felix. “The gangrene is spreading throughout your entire body. We need to stop it from spreading.”
Halverson watched a six six bespectacled creature in a criminally tailored brown suit stagger out of the supermarket’s entrance. Over an inch of the ghoul’s white shirt projected beyond its silk-and-wool jacket’s sleeves. Not only that, the ghoul’s trouser cuffs reached all the way to the bottoms of its scuffed leather shoes’ heels.
Drooling, the creature was hanging its mouth open, flaunting its jagged, rotting teeth. The creature raised its arm, displaying a stainless steel Tagheuer chronograph on its wrist.
“Get a load of Beau Brummell,” cracked Mannering.
“Isn’t anyone paying attention?” said Reba, visibly upset. “We need to amputate Felix’s arm.”
“Wait a minute,” said Mannering, his body stiffening, flabbergasted. “I know that guy. He’s a fucking lawyer for dope dealers.”
“Not anymore,” said Halverson.
Mannering shook his fist at the creature. “Fucking shyster!”
His mouth hanging open wider, Beau Brummell stumbled toward Mannering, gravitating toward Mannering’s shouting.
“You’re making too much noise,” Halverson told Mannering. “You’re gonna bring an army of them down on us yelling like that.”
“Listen up, people!” cried Reba. “We need to amputate Felix’s arm!”
“We can’t do it now,” said Halverson, glancing at Beau Brummell shambling toward them. “We gotta go.”
“Give me a gun so I can kill it,” Mannering told Felix.
Felix shook his head. “We’re splitting.”
Halverson didn’t know what was holding Felix up. By rights the guy should be dead. In any case, Halverson knew Felix couldn’t last much longer. Cutting Felix’s arm off wouldn’t save him. Nothing would.
Felix put his night-vision goggles back on and clambered into his motor cart’s driver’s seat beside Reba.
A male creature shuffled out of the grocery store into the parking lot on leather sandals, holding its arms akimbo, its head down. The thing wore khaki Bermuda shorts, a yellow T-shirt, and a tan ball cap.
Halverson could see that beneath the cap the creature had medium-length grizzled black hair.
The creature seemed more appalling than any of the others near it, decided Halverson. Even its fellow creatures seemed to shy away from it.
Maybe, decided Halverson, its dire hideousness derived from the fact that both of the creature’s ears were missing, leaving shredded, scabby holes in their places, lending a sinister, serpentlike aspect to the creature’s worm-eaten face. Too, the creature’s forehead had been flayed by bugs, leaving the thing’s skull exposed. The creature raised its head as if sniffing the air for the scent of humans.
Felix fired his motor cart’s ignition. He
drove out of the parking lot, using his good hand to steer, putting distance between him and the others.
The other two motor carts followed. Halverson and Victoria brought up the rear.
“I need to get my satphone back from Felix,” Halverson told Victoria. “We’ve got to make contact with other survivors. It’s our only chance to get through this nightmare.”
He needed that phone to contact the Agency. If anyone knew what was going on with this plague, the Agency would, he figured—if there still was an Agency.
“What do you want me to do about it?” she said.
“We need to keep up with him. Don’t let him out of our sight.”
“Don’t worry about it.” She paused a beat. “But once we get to 26th Street, I’m taking off for my house to find my child, phone or no phone.”
They drove two blocks. Then Felix’s vehicle ground to a halt.
“Why are we stopping?” Halverson asked Victoria.
“I don’t know. This isn’t 26th Street.”
Along with Becker and Mannering, Victoria and Halverson pulled up behind Felix’s vehicle.
“What’s going on?” Victoria asked Becker.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” answered Becker.
“There could be creatures lurking around here,” said Halverson, surveying the gloomy cityscape.
Most of the buildings here were smoldering as they were elsewhere in the city, he saw. Threads of grey smoke unraveled from the scorched ruins into the night sky.
“It’s not like we’re on a sightseeing tour where we make stops to take in the view,” said Becker.
Halverson noticed that Felix’s seat in the front cart was vacant. “Where’s Felix?”
“He told me to stop,” said Reba. “Then he upped and left. He muttered something about needing to use a restroom.”
“That figures,” said Victoria. “He probably got sick from all that spoiled meat he ate at the store.”
“Not to mention his infected arm.”
“I need that satphone,” Halverson confided to Victoria.
“Which way did he go?” Victoria asked Reba.
Reba pointed north toward the smoking remains of buildings in a strip mall.
Zombie Apocalypse Page 40
