After the undead were permanently dead, we went to each of the people they were eating and shot them in their heads, to save them from the fate that awaited them had we not. That was an existence that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies - even if it meant that I’d get to shoot them at some later date. We left the room with the door closed behind us, went back outside, and continued on.
42
Around ten minutes later, we eventually got to the back of the little strip mall that housed the local Blockbuster Video store and the H&R Block tax place, as well as a couple others. On the other side was 251, and a little bit further up a ways, with a few twists and turns, was Gus’s. The back door to the store closest to the edge was slightly ajar, so we decided to go through rather than going clear down to the end of the complex - to the Blockbuster - and around. This way, we figured we’d encounter less zombies and, once inside, have a clear view of 251 and beyond through the big plate-glass windows that the entire front side of the complex was made of.
I positioned myself directly in front of the door with my AR ready to rock - but eight feet back for safety - and Frank grabbed the handle and swung the door the rest of the way open and stepped back with his MP5 at the ready, to provide flanking fire if it was needed. Nothing lunged out at me from inside, but we waited another ten minutes where we were at just in case whatever was inside was slow at getting around. After we were fairly confident that the room was safe to enter, we did just that, closing and locking the door behind us. It was full dark by that point, and visibility in the room was next to none. I really regretted not taking a flashlight with me - I originally had one in my pack, but it got broke somewhere along the line - but I didn’t think we’d be out past dark. Shoulda known better.
There was a little bit of illumination coming from a red exit sign over the door, and we were able to identify the room as a supply room for the store - there were rows of racks with can after can of paints stacked on them, and over against the wall was a paint mixer. I remembered seeing some kind of paint supply store from my trips back and forth before, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember the stupid stores name. It fuckin’ pisses me off when I can’t remember a name or a place or something - I usually spend days thinking about that shit before I either figure it out, or just give up. And then it always comes to me in the stupidest moments after I do.
We made it through the supply room without incident, although I did walk face-first into a rack - the light from the exit sign only went a few feet, so from that point on it was pitch black in there. We got lucky there were no zombies in there, ‘cause we woulda been fucked and probably would’ve ended up shooting each other in the confusion. By feeling across the far wall with my left hand, I eventually found the door out and we did the same thing that we did upon entry, only with me being the door-puller and Frank being the bait.
And again, no zombies rushed out, and the room was free and clear. This time, as it was the actual store we were entering - with light coming through the big windows from outside - we were able to see everything in there and maneuver around without getting a black eye and a bloody nose (like I had gotten from the rack in the supply room). We carefully crouch-walked to the front of the store with our weapons at the ready, just in case there were any creepers or crawlers in there, and went to the big window to look out.
“Fuckin’ street-lights don’t do shit,” Frank said in a hushed manner, as there were a few meat-bags shuffling about within earshot. “Look at all those fuckin’ shadows and dark spots. We had a hard enough time going through those fuckin’ cars in the daylight - it’s gonna be a whole lot worse now.”
“Yeah, I know, man,” I said in an equally quiet tone. “Do you wanna crash in here then and make our way there in the morning?”
“Fuck. Not really, but I don’t feel like getting my ass ate off, either.”
“No shit. Would never be able to sit down in a normal chair again. Have to have thick padding and shit. It’d suck ass.”
Frank laughed at that. “Sure would. So, what do you wanna do?”
“Fuck… I dunno, man.”
I left him standing by the window went for a walk around the room. I really didn’t want to stay in a fuckin’ paint store when a nice and comfy bed was basically right across the road, but at the same time I didn’t want to be maneuvering around all the stalled cars out there in the dark, and get bit by one of those asshole zombies that like to wait under cars for food to go walking by - like a trap-door spider (Frank had a good point there). After a couple laps spent trying to figure out a safe way across in the darkness, I gave up and figured I should find a spot to sleep that was out of sight from the front window.
The only place in the store that really fit that description was behind the service counter where the registers and shit were at, so I went over to check it out. The spot looked good enough to crash in for the night, and it had more than enough room for the both of us to sleep without being cramped up in there. I told Frank my plans, and since he didn’t have any plan to cross either, he agreed. On my laps around the store, I came across a bunch of cloth paint tarps, and I went and grabbed a stack of ‘em and tossed them behind the counter, where I made myself a nice little place to sleep. I had just laid down and was about to fall asleep, when I rolled over on my side so that I was facing the counter and saw the one thing that we needed the most at that moment - a three-cell Maglite.
43
I snatched up that fucker faster than a pit viper strikes, and hit the button to see if the thing worked - with my hand cupped over the lens, of course. Slight illumination showed from between my fingers - and we were set. I got up from the floor and ran to Frank, who was still standing at the window, looking out toward Gus’s.
“Frank, Frank,” I hurriedly said to him in a hushed voice. “I found us a fuckin’ flashlight, dude! We’ll be able to see! We can make it across!”
“Fuck yeah! That’s awesome! Let’s get go… Man! …It’s a bad idea, Dave. The fuckers will see the light and come right to it like moths, man… They’ll still be in the road, hiding under the cars, too. And if we do make it across, we’ll be leading a whole pack right to Gus’s.”
“Nah, c’mon man, that won’t happen! All’s we gotta do is set up a decoy or a distraction or something, draw them away from whatever path across we decide to take, cross using the flashlight, then go dark once we’re past the cars - the rest of the way there’ll be a breeze.”
“Hmm… sounds like it’ll work, but what do you plan on doing for a ‘distraction’? ‘Cause my ass isn’t going out there.”
“Well…” I turned and looked around the store, searching for inspiration. My eyes came upon the shelves of spray paint, and I had it. “Okay, here we go… We gather a bunch of those spray cans there, take them up to the roof - there’s gotta be an access hatch in here somewhere, you know, for maintenance and shit - and toss those fuckers as far away from here as we can, where they’ll crash into shit and make a lotta noise. It seems like one way the zombies hunt by is sound, so we should be able to get them moving away easy. And I bet the fuckers’ll be too dumb to realize no one’s there - they’ll just keep on looking for the source of the sound. They might not even see us crossing.”
“I don’t know, man… I mean, we can’t be sure they’ll all go and see what’s making the noise, and all it takes is one to fuckin’ kill you. You saw it earlier, those fuckers didn’t come out till we were right in the thick of ‘em. And we got lucky then. We get one little scratch or a nip from a crawler that didn’t want to or couldn’t go, and we’re fucked… But at the same time… I don’t wanna stay in this fuckin’ place overnight. Soooooo… Fuck it! Why not! You can take point this time, though.”
“Hah! All right, that’s cool, I can hack it. Ain’t no thang, chickenwang. Let’s get ready, then.”
We got some plastic sacks we found behind the counter and filled them with as many paint cans as they could carry, then went on a search for the hatch to the roof. I k
new there had to be one somewhere in there - if not inside the building, then there at least had to be a ladder to the roof somewhere outside. There wasn’t any trap door in the main store, but, using the flashlight I found, we ended up finding the hatch in the supply room.
After we got all the sacks of paint cans up there, we went to the far end (the north end) of the complex, above the Blockbuster Video, and set to picking the place to start tossing them at. We chose a spot in the southbound lane of 251 where there was already a few zombies standing around at - which was, coincidentally, near the spot we had crossed over earlier in the day.
We spent a quite a bit a time up there (I don’t know how long ‘cause my new-ish watch got broke somewhere earlier on), throwing cans into the cars and bouncing them around - and made a whole shit-ton of noise. Instead of just throwing them, we made a game out of it. Before a crowd of zombies got built up - one eventually did, a big one - we challenged each other to see who could hit certain things; we’d pick out the windshield of this car, or the tire of another, shit like that, and see who could hit them the most. After the zombies started showing up to see what all the racket was about, we challenged each other to hit certain zombies - and only head shots counted, none of that body hit bullshit. We tossed so many cans of paint, we made two more trips back into the store before we called it quits. When there was a fairly massive number of the pussbags milling about in the “landing zone”, as we had deemed it, we went back down to the store to the front door out.
“Looks clear out there,” I said, “whattaya think?”
“Ummmmm……” Frank answered, “Yeah, looks clear enough, I guess. Ready to roll?”
“Yeah, as ready as I’m gonna get, I guess. Wait a minute…”
I took off my pack and got a roll of electrical tape out of it, and went to taping the Maglite to the handgrips of my AR. I didn’t wanna have to keep stowing the light and getting it back out every time I had to use it, and attaching it to my weapon solved that problem. Sure, it made the weapon a little heavier, but it was way more convenient. After I had the light so it wasn’t in the way and I was comfortable enough with it (so that the index finger of my left hand rested naturally over the Maglite’s power button as I was carrying the weapon in a normal grip), I stowed the tape back in the pouch, put my pack back on, and stood up.
“Now I’m ready.”
Part Tre’
The Long Way Home…
“Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey,
at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.”
-James Madison
“Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve.
He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.”
-Leonardo da Vinci
44
Since Frank didn’t want to be point crossing the road in the dark - it had to be at least one in the morning when we left the store, and dark as fuck - I was the first one out the door. The parking lot in the front of the store was completely free of the undead, and it looked like the route we were gonna take across 251 was clear as well. We bolted through the lot in a crouching run, Frank right at my back - so close that if I had had to come to a quick stop, he would’ve collided with me - and got to the first row of cars that was half out of the ditch on our side.
I didn’t have the flashlight turned on as we were approaching the rows of stalled cars, as I didn’t want to alert any of the zombies that we had lured away to our presence - the streetlights had up to that point provided us with more than enough illumination. Once there, I raised my left fist over my shoulder - signaling I was stopping, as we were back to running silent - got down in the prone firing position so I would have a clearer view underneath the cars, and tapped the power button on the flashlight a few times, shining the beam under the cars in our chosen path.
Seeing that there weren’t any crawlers under the cars or zombies standing between them (I would’ve seen their feet), I got up off the ground, tapped Frank on his shoulder - who was pulling rear security while I covered the front - and we both made our way through the maze of dead cars to the median. At the median we repeated the same steps, and got to the opposite side of 251 without a hitch. All of the time without being seen by, heard by, or even killing any zombies. It was a fucking textbook road crossing. Textbook.
We got to the bushes that line the road and ran down them, away from the zombies, until we found an opening (as just busting through would’ve made some noise and possibly alerted the zombies to us), went through and into someone’s back yard, and then crouched down behind the bushes for a breather.
“Hey…” I said, “Ummm… we got any beer left? I emptied my packs a while ago…”
“Um… yeah… I think there’s still a couple in my pack. But… can’t ya just wait till we get to Gus’s? I mean it is right over there.” Frank said, gesturing towards Gus’s, which was indeed right over there. “We can be over there in like five minutes, you know…”
“Eh… yeah… I guess. I have a problem, ya know, I can’t help it… I just love beer…”
“Well… so do I, but I can wait five minutes… If you really want it now I can get it out?”
“Nah, it’s cool, don’t worry about it. It’s just… well, this might sound stupid, but now that our little adventure here is all most over…….. Eh, I really don’t want it to end, you know? I mean, I’ve really been having a good time - as bad as that may sound - but, yeah, I’ve been having fun here, and I kinda wanna… keep doing this… I mean, I’ve never been happier…”
“What, you don’t wanna go to Gus’s?”
“Of course I do! It’s just that… I dunno… well, remember earlier when I said I had something I was thinking about, that I wanted to tell ya, to tell all you guys? (he nodded) Well, it’s this…” And I told him what was on my mind.
What I had been thinking about, was going to Streator to be with my friends there - Tom and Bob - and killing as many zombies as I could before they eventually killed me. You see, way before the dead started walking around, this was (strangely enough) myself and Bob’s dream. The Zombie Apocalypse. We both talked about it constantly - it was something that was always a subject, no matter where we were at or what we were doing. We’d be at work, at a bar, at some restaurant, and we’d be talking about zombies, zombies, zombies. How we’d kill them, where we’d kill them, what would be the best weapons……. Shit, man, it went on and on.
Now that it was a reality and not some drunken fantasy (or some stupid wet-dream that I had wanted to happen ‘cause I was unhappy with my crappy and pointless existence), I wanted to be in Streator with Tom and Bob taking care of those zombie motherfucker’s like we had spent years and years talking about - not hiding out in a house with a group of people (the fact that they were good friends didn’t really matter to me, as bad as that may sound), spending day after day waiting for things to get better, and not doing anything about it - just waiting for the end.
Which is exactly what I saw myself doing at Gus’s, and was the main and real reason why I was thinking of leaving. I just couldn’t see myself sitting up there day in and day out doing the same old fucking shit: watching movies every day, waking up and going through the same old monotonous routines, talking about the same old things, seeing the same three people every fucking day (that sounds bad, too - real bad - but I actually liked being able to go out and see and talk to new people every day, you know… before), and only going out into the world when we absolutely, positively had to. Just existing, you know? I didn’t really have a problem with that concept or whatever, but it just wasn’t for me. Maybe before - yeah, who didn’t want an easy-going, predictable life like that? (I know I did) - but not now. With the times, I myself have changed.
While I was explaining all that to Frank (quietly, using a shit-ton of expletives and bad, bad grammar - as putting my inner-most thoughts and feelings out to the world wasn’t my strong point, and was a very hard thing to d
o), he had taken his pack off and gotten the remaining beers out of it - the last three - and we drank them as I talked, halving the last between us. I talked for a good fifteen minutes or so, with Frank interrupting every now and then for a question or a comment - and a couple times a zombie or two went by on the opposite side of the bushes, where we just fell silent till they passed - and by the time I was done, so were the beers.
“So there ya go,” I said. “There’s a little bit more, really personal shit that I’m not gonna get into - with anybody - but that’s the gist of it.”
“Well, shit Dave… I don’t know what to say… Some of that shit you said is pretty hurtful… Fuck… You know we don’t want you to leave, right? I mean, not to sound like a fag here, but we like you being here with us, and all that…”
“Yeah… yeah I know, and I’m sorry if some of what I said hurt your feelings, but that’s just how I feel about this whole situation here… And, well… you know I like being here, too, but I feel that I need to leave if I am going to be happy. I don’t see myself being truly happy if I stay here. I’ll cope and be okay and shit, but I won’t be happy. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is…”
“Fuck… you fuckin’ dick…” He was so pissed he couldn’t even look at me - he just looked at the ground, the sky, a zombie stumbling around in the cars - anything but me. “Okay, so when you gonna tell Gus and Sue?”
“I don’t know. When I’m ready. Just do me a favor and don’t tell them before I do, okay? I mean, I don’t plan on leaving right away, and don’t want the other two to be all pissed off or bummed or whatever. And I definitely don’t want anyone hounding me and trying to change my mind (by that I meant Sue). ‘Cause that’s not going to happen. My mind is made up. So…?”
“Yeah, okay, I won’t tell anybody. But you better fuckin’ tell, and soon… If you don’t say anything within the next few days, I’m gonna say something…”
A.K.A. No Time for a Love Story (Book 1): Just Another Day Page 16
