A tense silence befell the room.
“Hey, it made buying Christmas presents a lot easier!” she said, smiling and wiping her nose with the back of her hand.
“Hey, what do you guys think of these?” Paul asked, shutting the hall closet door.
Dan and Wendy turned and laughed.
Sophia frowned. “What is wrong with you?” she asked, staring at the faded, red Crocks he was modeling.
“I think I could run a lot faster in these suckers,” he said, high stepping in the loose plastic boats.
“Even the ZIPs wouldn’t be caught dead in those things!” Wendy laughed.
“Why would you put somebody else’s shoes on like that?” Sophia asked him, twisting her nose like something in the room smelled rotten.
“I have socks on.”
“Paul, you’re going to get athlete’s foot,” his wife said.
His eyes slowly dropped from Sophia to the nasty Crocs and he quickly kicked them off.
“Throw those socks away too. We’ve got bags of new ones here,” she said, tossing him a bright white pair of Wigwams.
“Bet your feet smell like tuna fish now,” Dan said. “Hope you’re happy.”
“I still can’t believe people wore those shoes around,” Wendy said, dropping her brush into her bag.
Sophia took a drink of bottled water. “I know, and grown adults too!”
“They’re like the worst fashion trend since jeggings!” Wendy said, drinking some water.
“Really?” Sophia said. “Because I kinda like those.”
“I do too. Especially when they’re on Marissa Miller,” Dan smirked.
“Or how about parachute pants?” Paul asked.
Wendy’s eyes grew thin. “What pants?”
“Ya know, parachute pants. From the Michael Jackson days,” he said to her blank stare. “No? Never heard of...”
She shook her head. “How old are you anyway?”
“Mentally or physically?” he asked.
“In dog years, he’s a hundred and twelve,” Dan said, checking his gun again.
Chapter Sixteen
Not much smoke had been billowing from Dallas. Not like it had been back in Kansas City. Paul figured the unattended fires would have slowly gobbled up entire towns like they were a bowl of charcoal Junior Mints. Burning at will and dancing with the wind, from one vacant building to the next.
He turned the cruiser off Highway Nineteen into a small town called Crockett. The sun was already fading and this would be a good spot to ransack a grocery store and call it a night. Now that they had the camping stove, they could heat up some soup, oatmeal, coffee, even instant pancakes if they wanted. As long as it was hot, they didn’t really care what it was.
Very little action crossed their path during the day’s trek. At one point, Dan tossed out the premise that perhaps the walking dead were beginning to starve to death, as ironic as that sounded. Paul replied that was probably wishful thinking. But who knew how long those things could really last? At least the fires didn’t seem to have much staying power.
The grocery store he pulled into had a large rustic sign in the shape of a cowboy boot with the word Beecher’s running down it. It definitely had never lit up at night. After checking the locked back doors, he drove around to the front and quickly found rock star parking. A handful of cars sat parked in the store’s lot along with some stray shopping carts and white plastic bags doing lazy circles in the light breeze. There were even fewer cars in the strip mall parking lot across the street. It was quiet.
They exited the Missouri State Patrol vehicle and gently shut their doors. Every little sound made a wincing echo. They exchanged glances and casually approached the grocery store’s front entrance.
“Hey, what’s the difference between an Iowa zoo and a Texas zoo?” Dan asked, between steps.
The three returned blank stares at him.
“In Iowa, the zoo has the name of the animal on the cage. In Texas, it has the name of the animal and the recipe.”
The blank stares kept coming.
Dan shook his head and opened his mouth. “Get it?”
A snort escaped Paul.
“Why would you ever know a stupid joke like that?” Wendy whispered.
“Long story,” Dan said, stopping in front of the store’s glass doors that no longer opened electronically.
“He dated a zoologist one time,” Paul said.
Wendy’s mouth hit the floor. “Seriously?”
“No!” Dan retorted.
“Yep, he did,” Paul said. “They adopted a baby panda together too.”
Wendy and Sophia muffled their laughter with their hands.
“But Dan refused to change little Bobby’s messy diapers, so one dark day the girl and the panda left him. Now he can’t even go to Panda Express anymore without crying. It’s really pretty sad. I’d be careful if I were you,” he said to Wendy. “He’s on the rebound.”
Dan rubbed his face and exhaled. “You done now? Anything else you want to make up?”
“They also had a cat together named Mr. Wiggles,” Paul said.
Wendy laughed even harder. “Dan, I didn’t know you were such a nature freak.”
“Wow,” Dan said. “That went way too far. Now stand back,” he said, cocking his Browning shotgun with authority.
“Dan, what’re you doing?” Paul cried.
“I’m going to blast this door open so we can go get some groceries, dude. ‘Member?”
“Oh yeah, forgot about that part,” Paul said, politely ushering Sophia and Wendy safely off to the side and nodding at Dan.
Dan took aim at the glass doors, closed his eyes and unleashed a thundering blast that shattered jewel like fragments all over the inside of the aged market. He turned back to the others and cocked his head towards the door.
“What? Not going to pretend like shrapnel sprayed your face again? But that’s one of my favorites,” Paul whispered, gliding past him and stepping through the door first, glass crunching beneath his Adidas as he went.
The setting sun lit the place up through the wall of huge store front windows facing west. The stench was overpowering. They covered their faces, reality dropping back onto their heads like an anvil. It smelled like a morgue that lost electricity weeks ago. A huge igloo built out of dozens of white cases of Diet 7-Up - for $3.99 each - greeted them when they entered the store. One side of the igloo had spilled onto the floor and a few loose cans had made a respectable escape attempt, rolling all the way to the stacks of metal carts.
Paul heard himself swallow. His anxious eyes swept the entire store from right to left and back again, his adrenaline pumping faster in the ghostly stillness. Images of famished lions and bears eating each other inside zoo enclosures suddenly slipped through his mind. He blinked and shook his head.
“Okay, this is really nasty,” Sophia said with her arm across her nose.
Wendy began dry-heaving, but didn’t puke.
Paul and Dan traded glances.
“Could just be the spoiled food, but stay frosty,” Paul said in a low voice.
Dan gripped the shotgun tighter and crept forward.
Sophia stepped over a can of Diet 7-Up and pulled a bent metal cart from a long stack. As she pushed it, one wheel spun uselessly in the air while Wendy regained her composure and began plucking items from the shelves with one hand, covering her nose with the other.
“Suddenly I’m not so hungry anymore,” she whispered to Sophia.
Cans of soup, tuna, and corn eased into the cart with light plunks. Instant oatmeal, pancakes, syrup, crackers, chips, peanuts and cookies soon followed. Coffee, pickles, pinto beans, tortilla shells, toilet paper, deodorant, chapstick and three small first-aid kits quickly joined the loot. They skipped the rotting hot-dogs, yogurt and unfrozen pizzas and passed the brown steaks, pork and chicken with their noses plugged and their eyes watering.
Wendy dry heaved and fanned a hand in front of her face.
“Ooh
, here we go,” Sophia said, turning down an aisle.
They followed her to the other end where she grabbed a paperback copy of The Notebook from a rack stocked with books and magazines.
Wendy snatched up the latest - and last - issue of Us Weekly with the most recent bachelor on the cover.
“Umm, this isn’t a library, ladies,” Paul said, leaning in.
“I just want to grab a couple of books real quick,” Sophia said, dropping the book into the cart.
“Wow, this magazine is already almost as outdated as MySpace,” Wendy snorted.
Dan laughed and leaned his shotgun up against a rack of greeting cards. “Now, People is going to have to do the Sexiest Man Not Alive award every year.”
“Isn’t it funny how movie stars got bumped from the covers of magazines by a bunch of cheesy reality stars?” Wendy asked, skimming pages.
“Not if you saw MacGruber!” Dan said, snagging a copy of Sports Illustrated.
“That’s probably why this whole nightmare started in the first place,” Paul said, looking around. “A reality star was about to become President.”
Wendy lowered her magazine. “And that would’ve happened too.”
“Can you imagine The Situation as President?” Dan snickered.
Sophia laughed. “No, I can’t,” she said, trading a book for another.
“Next thing ya know, the President would be doing commercials for Burger King and Wranglers,” Paul said.
Their chuckles faded into a thick silence. It made the flipping pages seem louder.
“Only commercial the President is going to be doing now is for guns and bibles,” Dan said gravely.
Wendy and Sophia stopped turning pages and looked up at each other, then to Dan.
“Jeez Dan, you really know how to bring a party down,” Paul said, taking a thick paperback of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from the shelf.
It was breath taking how the gravity of the situation could suddenly come crashing down at the weirdest times. It would trip you, punch you, and wake you from your moment, from your hope, grounding you in a pool of swirling doom.
Paul’s eyes caught the cover of a women’s magazine promising the latest spring fashions and Easter decorating tips inside. He stared at the taglines for budget getaways, the new iPad and workout tips. He turned away. There was nothing to look forward to anymore. No holidays, no vacations, no family reunions. No more celebrating a big graduation or promotion. Not even a mellow Friday night at home with dinner and a movie after a long week at the office. And even if there was something small to look forward to, like a hot bowl of soup or a cookie that hadn’t gone stale yet, gravity wouldn’t rest long enough to let you look forward to anything.
Sophia carefully placed a copy of The Time Traveler’s Wife into the cart. “So, was MacGruber really that bad?”
“Yeah, it was.” Paul said, tossing the thick Harry Potter paperback into the cart, where it landed with a crunch on top of a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.
“Hey!” Sophia said, gently setting the thick book off to the side.
“Come on, let’s keep moving,” Paul said, squeezing past the girls.
“I don’t know about you,” Wendy whispered to Sophia. “But I wouldn’t mind if this guy was President.”
Sophia stared at the bachelor on the cover Wendy held up. “Sure would liven up the State of the Union Addresses,” she smiled.
“I can hear you!” Paul said as he walked. “I heard everything you just said!”
“And we don’t like it!” Dan said.
The girls looked at each other and began giggling.
A blood-stained white apron flapped about the bloated stomach of a butcher who exploded around the corner of the aisle behind them with scary stealth. It was like he was floating on thin air as it snatched Wendy’s long blonde hair before she even knew what hit her. Her head yanked back and she screamed. Dan spun around and took aim but couldn’t get a clear shot. Paul sprinted to her and stepped into a hard kick that landed squarely in the festering butter-ball’s fat gut. The thing stumbled just enough for Dan to fire a shell into it, violently jerking the thing backwards into a defunct cooler of eggs and bacon. It took a handful of Wendy’s hair with it and she screamed again.
The inflated butcher scrambled free from the cartons of broken rotten eggs, dozens of yokes mixed with blood oozed from him in slow moving globs and splattered to the floor around his black boots.
Paul didn’t see the pharmacist in a bloody lab coat slink up behind them and sink his teeth deeply into Sophia’s left shoulder. She threw her head back and screamed to the ceiling, sending an ear-piercing echo bouncing off the deserted store’s walls and windows. Paul whirled around to see the decaying druggist clamped down on his wife and everything went into slow motion. He ran to her, but felt like he was running on a rug that kept slipping into folds beneath his feet.
The butcher let out a wet sounding roar and charged Paul, who was nearly to Sophia’s rescue. Dan blew it sideways into an end cap of hot dog buns. The rolled to the ground and landed on its belly. Packages of buns slid from the shelf and bounced onto his back.
Sophia squirmed free of the pharmacist’s death grip and Paul shot him four times with his handgun just before it reached her again. It back flopped onto the floor, covered in blood and eggs.
“Come on!” Paul shrieked, taking Sophia in his arms and helping her to the front doors. “Get back to the car!”
Wendy hesitated, and then began pushing the cart, trying to keep up with Paul and Sophia while Dan provided cover.
A piece of jagged glass slit Paul’s arm as they dashed out the front door. He didn’t notice and flung the rear car door open. Gently, he eased Sophia into the back seat, blood covering both of their new coats.
Dan popped the trunk and hurriedly helped Wendy dump the cart’s contents inside.
Sophia clutched her shoulder and pulled her hand away. Her eyes doubled in size when she saw all of the blood.
“No, no, no!” Paul screamed, instantly regretting his panic.
Terror filled the watering eyes staring back at him.
“You’re going to be fine,” he told her.
Dan slammed the trunk shut and hopped in behind the wheel as Wendy jumped into the passenger seat. He turned the key and punched the engine, leaving swerving skid marks shrouded in white smoke behind.
“I’ll be alright!” she tried to say confidently with her voice cracking. “It’s just a cut.”
Wendy poured some peroxide onto white gauze from one of the first-aid kits.
“Let’s get your coat off,” Paul said, carefully helping her peel back the red jacket.
Sophia screamed again.
They hadn’t seen anyone escape with just a bite yet and had no way of knowing if an infection could spread, but they were about to find out.
The farmhouse they quickly descended upon was nowhere near as old as the others had been and wasn’t a farmhouse at all. Not in the traditional sense. Pictures of brightly colored abstract art, painted on large rectangular slabs of canvas, adorned the meticulously painted gray walls, accented with baseboards coated in a rich pearl white. A new mint colored sectional sat perfectly positioned to enjoy the fireplace, giant flat screen, and large living room bay windows at the same time. The L-shaped sofa was enormous but didn’t overwhelm the spacious living room with its vaulted ceilings and dark wood floors. There were no trinkets littering the room either, or as Sophia liked to call them, “clutter”. This was no farm house. This was a house in the country.
Paul laid his wife down onto the couch, quickly ruining it with her blood.
He sat down next to her. “Here, let’s change that,” he said, gingerly peeling back the tape on the blood-soaked gauze bandage. The bite mark in her shoulder had left behind a very clear imprint of the pharmacist’s full set of teeth. He had good dental insurance before all of this.
“I’m gonna be okay, right baby?” she asked, suddenly not so confident anym
ore.
“Of course you are, hot-stuff. We sterilized it real good,” he said, sweat running down his face.
“Why won’t it stop bleeding?” she asked, looking down at the wound.
“It will. We just have to keep it clean and keep some pressure on it,” he said, pouring more peroxide onto the ring of jagged punctures. She gritted her teeth and squeezed his leg with an iron clad grip. “You’re gonna be fine. Just hold still for me. Okay?” He tried to flash her a reassuring smile but his eyes wouldn’t let him.
Outside, darkness had settled in.
Inside, Wendy stood behind them with her hands covering her mouth.
The next morning, the sun slowly crept its way into the room and Sophia wasn’t looking so good. Paul’s heart sank the moment he saw her in the light. Sitting in a leather armchair and watching her from across the room, he hadn’t slept a wink all night. At least he didn’t think he had. The visions of the pharmacist attacking Sophia and Paul’s mom turning into one of those things, revolved in his head, one after the other. Even though his mom wasn’t bitten, he convinced himself that Sophia would be okay.
He sat down next to her on the couch and brushed sweaty hair from her ashen face. She cracked her eyes open. They were bloodshot and sunken.
“How are you feeling, babycakes?” he asked softly, pulling her blanket up to her chin.
“Better,” she lied, dark rings surrounding her frightened eyes.
“Yeah? You look better,” he lied right back.
She started coughing up red mucus and Paul dabbed her face with a kitchen towel.
She pushed his hand away and took a deep breath.
He bent over and kissed her forehead.
She rested her eyes. “You remember when you crank-called your mom at her work, pretending to be some guy name Mike that she worked with, asking her out on a date?”
Paul’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah?” he said, remembering the call well. He had recorded it and played it back on the air many times, as he had done with all of the phone calls he had placed to her. His mom had been good material. She would always forego the embarrassment he would ultimately end up bringing on her just to get her church lady message across to his listeners.
COLD FAITH AND ZOMBIES Page 10
