by L. ROY AIKEN
“I never caught his name,” I say.
“That’s Trenton,” says Krystal. “He wants everyone to call him Oni-bara now. Says it means ‘Devil Rose.’ More like Devil Dork! I never understood those anime freaks.”
The woman makes a course correction to intercept Devil Dork. An angry and wanting moan rises from her gore-crusted lips. Her companion adjusts likewise, rocking sideways, focused on the tall, pale young man wearing the long black coat in the middle of May in humid, sun-baked Kansas.
Devil Dork brings the blade down to one side of the woman’s neck. She falls to the asphalt in halves, her organs and entrails flopping wetly to the pavement. The man behind her hesitates. His head is back, sniffing the air. He’s backing away when the blade goes through his neck. His head tumbles from his shoulders to the parking lot. His body falls backward and lands across it, putting one shoulder up.
“Great,” says Krystal. “As if it didn’t stink enough out here already.”
I’m backing the truck up next to Randy’s at the loading bay. I kill the engine and we get out. Going up the concrete stairs along the side I see Randy’s flatbed already has fryers and frozen turkeys stacked in a spill of meltwater. Five cases of burger patties sit off to the side. It’s backed in over the lower steps so we have to climb under the rail to get up.
“Didn’t you have some shopping to do?” says Krystal. “Now’s your chance.”
“Yeah, I do,” I say, looking around the area. It’s a broad lot arcing over either side of the large graded knoll the Supercenter is on, Whatever comes up here will have to lean into the incline. It won’t be easy. But it won’t stop them, either. Worse, we won’t know we’re surrounded until too late.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” says Krystal. “We’ll be right here.”
Krystal goes to help the boys in the freezer. They’ve found a dolly and are using it to stack the boxes of patties and ground beef from the freezer. Wide puddles of water cover the floor but it doesn’t smell like anything is turned—yet. Then again, it’s hard to tell with the smell of dead people in the air.
“Where’s that chick I saw earlier?” I say, looking in on them.
“Marta’s s’posed to be bringin’ us some ice from up front,” says the guy in the trilby hat. “You might wanna go check on her.”
“Yeah, will do. What’s your name, by the way?”
“Timcat. Like ‘tomcat,’ but with Tim.”
Jesus. “Great.” I nod to the guy in the Chiefs hat. “You?”
“I’m Randy.”
“All right. Move fast. Oni-boner or whatever his name is just got two walkers outside. You can bet more are on their way.”
Randy and Timcat laugh. “I hear ya, boss! We’ll handle it!”
I push out the service doors into the main of the store. The heat, the stench, is gagging. Like Kansas City outside the hotel this stench has layers to it. Just when you think you’re getting used to it a fresh wave of putrefaction billows over and it’s all you can do to keep your stomach from turning inside out.
A grunting and shuffling to my right draws my attention to the man in the cargo shorts struggling towards me. His difficulty is exacerbated by having only one working leg. Apparently whatever got him worked one side; even his arm has had so much muscle chewed and sucked away it’s useless. He’s managed to pull himself up along the shelves on the back wall and hop-shuffle towards the sound of our activity.
I draw my panga and walk over to the half-man. Flashing back to Rebecca’s smooth motion with her gun, hitting her target along the sweet spot of the curve, I raise the blade and divest the half-man of his one good arm. The fine silvery deluxe claw hammer I found in a tool box in the garage is in my other hand; I bring the blunt end crashing between his eyes before he has a chance to drop. He goes over backward, cracking the back of his skull for good measure as he hits the floor.
These exertions don’t make this easy but I have to control my breathing, if only so I can hear what’s around me. I turn my head slowly to take in my surroundings, waiting for my panting to quiet. Eventually it’s enough that I can hear the stirrings down the various aisles across the store.
Goddamn it, let’s just get that underwear and get out of here!
Panga in hand, I jog down the wide aisle separating the grocery from the dry goods. There are display islands in the middle of this aisle. I’m come to the clothing section and the racks enclose the right side of the aisle like little banyan trees concealing the predators beneath.
A hand claws at me from beneath one of these and I miss a step, my foot coming down on that hand. But that gives the other hand a chance to grab at my boot. It’s a small blue hand, with stubby blue fingers and yet I can feel its death-rigored grip through the leather.
I pull my panga and swing but the child is wrapped around my boot now—a little thing with a yellow ribbon in her hair and the fatty child skin chewed away on one side of her face. An eyestalk hangs eyeless from one socket but the muscles about her jaw are intact and working. Her little baby teeth are bearing down hard on my boot. I lift up my foot and kick at the display in the middle of the aisle. A small ribbon of intestine trails beneath her waist; she has no legs, not even bones.
Her teeth bear down harder.
I pull my hammer and smack it into her yellow-ribboned hair. The pain in my foot intensifies and I snap-grip the handle in my wrist as if the hammer was a drumstick and her head the snare. Her little skull cracks open and her body falls limp.
Rigor clamps her little jaw fast to my boot. I shuffle towards the end of the center-aisle display. No one is in this food aisle to the left so I ease towards it, propping my backside against an end-cap shelf so I can figure out how to get little Brittney off of me.
I grab a fistful of her hair and try pulling her head back. I see the gaps in her front incisors; if her adult teeth were in—hell, even if her originals were still there—they would have broken the skin of this boot. I need thicker boots, steel-toed. And thick socks. Save for that strip of intestine (which has since slithered off the rib bone it was caught on) the girl’s torso appears to be hollowed out. No insides, no stomach to even hold her meal and yet she crawled along, with this sick, pointless hunger. How many more are scuttling along like this out there?
When I found this deluxe claw hammer in the garage I thought it might double as a convenient tool with which to break into things. I never thought I’d be fitting the broad tines through the top gap of a small child’s teeth. The rotten blood in her ruined gum runs down my boot, adding one of those special nuances to the boxed-in stink in the air that makes me gag.
It’s when I see the tracks of tears through the dirt on the good side of this child’s face that I unload my breakfast into the aisle. I jerk the claw-end up hard and snap this flesh-and-blood reminder from my boot, this notice of how our position on the food chain has adjusted. Just as lions think nothing of culling the young of a zebra herd, something got hold of this once-five-year-old charmer in a pink Disney Princess T-shirt and made a meal out of her. And in turn made her into this….
I let out a furious yell. Goddamn it, come at me, you ugly, fucked-up shits!
I push myself away from the endcap, stepping carefully to the side, not wanting to slip, not wanting to see the remains of the child face up in a puddle of vomit. Unable to rid myself of the sight of her remaining eye, the terror and agony of a little girl’s last moments sealed within its dry, dead glaze…
…Claire. Jesus. I think of my daughter Sibyl….
I listen and hear the slow shuffle-slide throughout the store, coming down any of the dozens of dark, hot, stinking aisles. I’ll have my chance with whoever-whatever killed this girl soon enough.
I’m jogging down the middle of the aisle, rounding the corner of the Men’s section. I find my size in boxers and grab five three-packs. I pick up some socks and colored T-shirts. I need something to carry this so I step out into the broad main aisle between the main goods and the checkout lanes
and look for the chrome tree with the cloth shopping bags. There’s one by the outside corner near the shuttered entrance.
Now I’ve got one arm free. Time to find Marta. I see movement in the pharmacy area. I jog down the aisle and find myself face to rotting face with the most distressed-looking dead person I’ve seen yet.
He’s in his late teens. I don’t see the terror of his death so much as he looks…green. His chin-to-crotch gore bib glistens with bright yellow gobbets like crumbs of wet rancid popcorn. He staggers towards me. I swing the panga but instead of taking off his upraised arms—which he doesn’t seem to have strength to raise—I slash his throat clear back to the spinal column. The rust-brown corpse gravy oozes thickly through the flap, his already discolored face paling visibly as it leaves his skull.
I don’t want to step up to him without first taking off his arms and he won’t hold them up for me. Dropping my bag I put both hands to the handle of my panga and swing a hard chopping blow between his shoulder and elbow on either side. His limbs tumble to the linoleum, rank blood splatting from his stumps. Instead of charging me in a rage, though, he backs off, moaning miserably. I draw my hammer, switch hands with my panga. I do the same snare drum snap with the hammer as I’d done with the girl. He falls to his knees and maybe I’m seeing things but his dead mottled face looks relieved,
“Another one of those, huh?” says a sharp-toned female voice behind me. I turn to see Marta, carrying a cloth shopping bag of her own. “I dropped four of them on my way here. Looked sick as dogs.”
I’m looking around the pharmacy area. It occurs to me I might need something while I’m here.
“Don’t even think about it,” says Marta. “I got all the good shit.”
“Good for you,” I say. I go to the vitamins and start scooping bottles of Vitamin C supplements into my bag.
“What the hell you want that shit for?”
I go to the aspirin aisle and scoop the shelves there. I consider getting another bag, maybe a cart. On the other hand, there’s plenty of places to loot between here and Colorado Springs. We really need to finish this up and hit the road….
“Wait!” Marta says as I turn to go. I stop and she runs up to me. I resume walking as she catches up. “Look, you don’t have to be all anti-social and stuff. I’m not gonna give you grief like those other little show-offy shits.”
“Nice to know. I take it you’re not bothering with the ice?”
“Fuck that! Old Man Kerch got plenty of ice and everything where he is. We’ll get the runty and the rotten and the leftovers down at the high school, like since we got corralled in there.”
“You’re telling me this?”
“C’mon. Everyone knows you don’t wanna be here. Including Kerch, I imagine. Better watch your shit, is all I’m sayin’. By the way, was that you hollerin’ a few minutes ago?”
“I thought all you were saying was I’d better watch my shit.”
“Hey, look, those four I killed? I’m not sayin’ I took ‘em on at once. I mean, I’m not sayin’ you—”
“Shhh! Listen!”
It’s a heavy flop-slide, flop-slide. A clattering as the thing gets caught in one of the circular racks of clothing.
“Oh, God,” says Marta. “That thing sounds huge.”
The morbidly obese woman pushes aside the racks like a squat Tyrannosaurus Rex pushing aside trees to get to its prey. Her curly white hair is a nauseous pale yellow from the dead scalp showing beneath but at least the rest of her looks more or less normal. That is, normal about her head. Discounting the red, gore-clotted teeth and mouth, and the rage to rip, rend, and feast in her face.
The rest of her as seen through the streaming rags of her muumuu is a horrible sea of red-yellow holes in a wide ocean of pale, quivering flesh. Globs of rank, yellow fat fall from some of the wounds, especially the one opened in that broad, naked fleshslide flopping over her privates.
“God, no!” and now it’s Marta’s turn to give up her breakfast.
I bring the panga up and slice it hard through the middle of the woman’s skull. It goes in but not deep enough; it’s sticking. Her arms reach out for me and I lean into the blade and push her back. The blade slices further down the middle of her face, squeaking through the groove it carves through her skull. Finally all 300 pounds of this woman spill over. We jump back barely in time as glistening fatty tissue like bright yellow corn kernels in red gelatin bursts forth from all those bite wounds, ripped wider by the heavy woman’s impact to the floor.
Marta is coughing and spitting. “Goddamn zombie shit!”
“Yeah, that explains the sick ones,” I say through the hand cupped over my face. We’re already moving away from the massive spill on Aisle Get Me the Fuck Outta Here.
“Huh?” says Marta.
“The sick ones with the yellow down their fronts. They’ve been eating the stuff they shit. Off that fat woman.”
“What?”
We hear the gunfire from outside. “Goddamn it,” I mutter under my breath. Mindful of yellow zombie droppings we run down the long aisle to the back of the store where the service doors lead to the prep area and the loading dock.
We burst through the swinging doors to find the freezer door still open and Randy and Timcat on the loading dock fighting off the former citizens of Natalia, Kansas. The stinking mob is pressed against the lip of the five-foot concrete dock, reaching and grasping. The white truck backed against the stairs makes it difficult for them to come up at us from that angle, but not impossible. The Goth kid in the long black coat swings away at their exposed arms. He flips the blade and backswings to take off their heads. Yeah, definitely more than three at once.
But there are so many of them. Their combined moaning is so loud we can hardly hear one another.
“Reckon we shoulda minded the time, huh, boss?” Timcat yells over the racket.
I run to the edge of the dock and begin swinging through their upraised arms. I have to swing deep enough into the horde so I can hammer at the skulls of the ones up front without getting grabbed by ambitious outliers shoving their way towards me. Hammering at their skulls requires my getting on my knees to reach over and pop them and I don’t like that as a defensive position at all. They swing at me with their oozing stumps, snap at me with their foul teeth. I wish I had two hammers; it’d go a lot quicker.
The bodies fall, and now the rows behind them have something to stand on. I’m able to take their outstretched arms off closer to the shoulder. When this new row falls backwards it knocks down the former citizens coming up behind them. It’s hard standing on a corpse, with the skin slipping and ripping beneath their feet. Once the bodies get two rows deep towards the back, a pale thing in a tracksuit attempts standing on the fallen ones furthest back. He pitches forward and cracks his forehead open on the concrete lip of the dock before I have a chance to do anything with him.
I take advantage of the buffer of fallen bodies to stand back. “This isn’t getting any better,” I say. “We’re either going to jump in our trucks and go, or plan to be stuck here until our arms wear out.”
“Whatchoo think we oughta do?” says Timcat.
“Who had the gun? I heard gunfire.”
“Ain’t nobody here got a gun,” says Timcat. “Someone was horsin’ around there at the bottom of the west side of the parking lot. It’s drawin’ all these things to us!”
“I got a gun!” says Krystal.
“What?”
“Right here,” she says, pulling a 9mm Glock from her purse. “It was in the glove compartment of the truck. I’m sorry.”
I take the Glock from her. Just like the one I had in Kansas City. Might well be same one, I don’t know.
“There was an extra one of these that went with it,” says Krystal, handing over a magazine. Thank the dark gods, it’s full.
“Good job, Krystal. Here, take these,” I say, handing her the truck keys. “I’ve got an idea.”
“If this don’t work we’re fucked,” s
ays Timcat.
“Shit, ya think!” says Randy.
Goth kid cries out. His arm has been caught by an alert young woman who brings the full unrelenting force of rigor mortis into her bite. He drops his katana; it’s seized by pale blue grasping hands and pulled into the swarm.
“Goddamn it!” I run down the steep loading dock steps. I have to chop through a forest of fingers and hands clawing from the rail. I backslash off the woman’s head and pull Goth boy away, careful to hug the wall on our way back up.
“Marta! Timcat! Somebody mind this gap! Whoever’s got the keys to the white truck, have ‘em ready!”
I pull Goth boy out just as a little boy crawls up the stairs in his filthy pajamas. Marta takes the boy’s head off with her machete and kicks it towards the crowd at the lip of the dock. It hits a white bearded man in the face, knocks him back before tumbling into a dark forest of dead, shit-stained legs. Marta turns towards the stairs where the only thing holding back the mob is their sheer numbers trying to get over and around the flatbed of the pickup and cram onto the narrow stairs.
“Whatever the hell it is you think you’re doin’ please do it quick!”
“Randy! Timcat! Who’s driving the white pickup?”
“I am,” say Randy.
“Don’t drive your load to Kerch’s place. Take it directly to the high school.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so! Unless you don’t like eating! I gotta go!”
One thing about our focus towards the stairs is that the mob is massing at this corner. This gives me room to make a run for the far corner of the dock. I’m not a young man, I can’t action-hero jump this thing. But I doubt I’ll have time to butt-scooch over and let myself down nicely. I’ve got to move. And pray I don’t break a leg doing this….
20
