by Rich Baker
He hops out and goes to check it out. He opens the door and drags the dead zombie out of the driver’s seat and pulls it over to the side of the road. Since it’s no longer wedged against the other car, it would be easier if he could just drive it away. Holding his breath, he gets in and turns the key. The engine protests, cranks a few times, and turns over. He throws it in reverse and backs it up, guiding it around the Jeep and parking it next to the first car.
It takes him another 20 minutes, but he gets enough of the rest of the cars moved so the motorcycle can fit through.
Carmen shoulders the backpack and starts walking toward the Jeep.
“Where are you going?” D-Day asks.
“I’m getting the Jeep,” she says. “If we get in a tight spot, we can ditch it and go on the bike, but I think we’re better off having two vehicles, especially with one that has solid doors and ground clearance that gets the windows above most of the zombies we’ll see. Besides, I’m tired of wearing this bag.”
“Okay,” D-Day relents. “But you should know that the driver had been turned. I think the thing that got him climbed in the open back end. So, it’s far from secure, and it stinks of dried blood and – what did you call it? Jamba juice?”
“Everything kinda smells that way now,” she says. She throws the backpack in the rear of the Jeep and climbs in. She starts the engine and rolls down the window. “Lead on, Mr. Day.”
They head up the road toward Longview, weaving around cars, and, in one spot where cars are knotted in a snarl, using the jeep to push a small Chevy pickup off the road so they can pass.
At the edge of the town, they find a Wal-Mart and D-Day stops in the middle of the road. Carmen pull the Jeep up next to him. A quick scan with the monocular reveals it to be overrun with zombies, both inside and out, with the ones closest to them heading their way. Looking around, D-Day sees a sign in front of a huge white building to their right.
“I know it’s still early in the afternoon, but we’ll need to find someplace to stop for the night, and where ever that place is, we’ll need time to secure it.” He pauses for a minute while Carmen looks at him. “I think we’ve gone far enough for today. What do you think?”
“I agree, but, I think there’s too many of them in and around that store for us to try and stay there.”
“I have a different idea,” he says.
Fourteen
The door creaks open, and D-Day peeks his head through. The only thing moving is a zombie with a black backpack on, and it’s just milling aimlessly. He pushes the door open a little wider and slips through, leaving Carmen to ensure the spring-loaded door doesn’t slam shut and alert the zombie. D-Day aims the .22 at the back of the creature’s head and fires twice. It collapses straight down, its loose joints giving way and snapping like twigs.
Carmen lets the door shut and hustles after D-Day.
“Was I right, or what?” he asks, waving his arms at the expansive warehouse floor. Twenty-foot-tall shelves stretch the length of the wall, a hundred yards if it’s an inch. A series of similar shelves run in rows across the interior of the warehouse, with fifteen feet in between them.
“I’ve never heard of this place,” Carmen says. “It’s amazing!”
“I worked at one in south Denver for a few months,” D-Day explains. “The trucks show up with an entire trailer full of, say, laundry detergent. They unload that, and then they load the trailer with an assortment of stuff for one of their stores. It’s just a central distribution hub. It’s really efficient when you think about it. No truck shows up empty; no truck leaves empty. There’s way more stuff here than at the store across the highway.”
“How does no one know about this place? I mean, I would think people who worked here would be here, at least.”
“Well, they may be some of the zombies we just killed. And it’s not like it’s easy to get around, as we’ve found out. Plus, we don’t know that we’re alone. There’s still a lot of warehouse left to search, and those emergency generators were low on fuel, so we need to do this quick before the lights go out.”
They continue their search of the warehouse, finding and killing a few more zombies. They locate the offices, and more zombies are inside them, doors locked from the inside. D-Day kicks the doors open and kills them before they know what’s going on.
“How did they get turned?” Carmen asks as she looks one of them over. “I don’t see any bites, and there’s no psycho bitch here to inject them with Jamba juice.”
“I don’t know. Let’s focus on securing the entrances and then we can worry about what happened here.”
They find the sporting goods section, and after digging through a few plastic bins, they find bicycle cable locks. They thread them through the handles on the doors, effectively locking them.
“That won’t keep someone out forever, but it’s better than nothing,” D-Day says. “I don’t think the zombies can get through those, and people would have to come prepared with bolt cutters.”
“Which if they’re out scavenging they’re likely to have,” Carmen says. D-Day looks at her, and before he can say anything, she says “I don’t have any better ideas.”
He smiles and says, “I do.”
He runs to one of the propane-powered forklifts, starts it up, and drives it over to the doors that lead out to the offices. He grabs a pallet of lawn mowers and puts it in front of the doors, then adds another next to it, then stacks two more pallets on top of those. With that doorway blocked, he grabs another pallet and moves it to the doors that lead to the locker rooms and changing areas. There’s just one more door at the rear of the warehouse, by the dock. He backs the forklift up to the door and parks it so no one can get in.
He walks back to Carmen, who has been reloading the magazines they’ve emptied during the day’s battles with the undead.
“That should keep us safe for the night,” he says. “We can get up early and move at first light. We’ll load the Jeep up with supplies. It looks like someone did come through here because a lot of the bottled water and canned food has been ransacked, but there’s way more than enough for the two of us.”
“D-Day,” Carmen starts, “what if we didn’t push north right away?”
He doesn’t say anything, just looks at her, so she continues.
“I mean, we got this place locked down pretty fast. We’ve got the Jeep and your bike hidden between trailers at the dock so no one just passing by can see them, and you’re right, some of the stuff has been ransacked, but there’s still a ton of food here.”
“Well, there’s a few things that concern me. One, the power from those generators is very limited. We’ll be without power dark soon, and I don’t want to spend all our days in the dark. Second, someone is bound to know about this place and come looking for supplies, and when they come, they’ll be armed. And there’s the zombies. The population is centered heavily around the Denver metro area, but eventually, they’re going to spread out, which means more and more will be coming here. We’ll be better off the farther from population centers we can get.”
He can see she’s not convinced.
“Okay, let’s do this,” he says. “We’ll go through the warehouse and get supplies ready to load into the Jeep. That way, we’re ready to go if we need to. Then we can look at what we can do to secure the building better, scrounge fuel for the generators, and we can stay for a few days and see how it goes. Sound agreeable?”
“Yes,” she says.
Fifteen
They have two of the plastic tote boxes full of canned food and several cases of bottled water by the door to dock number three. The Jeep is parked directly in front of the door, and the Victory is parked in from of the Jeep.
The dock is on the back side of the building, with nothing but farmland to the east and north, so their activity is hidden from any eyes, living or dead. With Carmen watching his back, D-Day siphons diesel fuel from two abandoned trucks, filling five ten-gallon cans for the generators. He also fills t
hree of the cans with gasoline from cars by the side entrance to the warehouse. They fill the gas tanks for D-Day’s bike and the Jeep and put the rest in the back of the Jeep for use on the road.
D-Day takes the diesel fuel for the generators to the roof and empties one of them into the tank. They’re only running some of the lights so five gallons should last a while, a few hours at least. When he gets back to the main warehouse, he finds Carmen on the top of a set of shelves with a mattress set up for them. He climbs the rolling staircase that she used to get up to the penthouse level. She’s got a complete bedroom setup going – sheets, comforter, pillows, the works. She’s wearing a short satin robe.
“Hey, I’d like to book a room at hotel Bustamante!”
Carmen gives him a warm, inviting smile.
“You’re in luck, sir. We happen to have a suite available. There’s just one requirement.”
“What’s that?”
“Formal attire is required.”
“I don’t think there are any tuxedos in this place, Carmen,” D-Day says, not sure what her game is.
“I beg to differ. It’s June sixth. You have your birthday suit.”
“Oh shit, I forgot!” he says.
“I didn’t. Now come open your present.” She flops onto the mattress and rolls over, facing him, and he can see that she’s not wearing anything under the robe.
D-Day smiles and climbs onto the mattress.
* * *
“That was definitely gunfire,” D-Day says. He hands the binoculars to Carmen and puts the monocular scope to his eye.
They’re standing in the shade of the generator bank on the roof of the warehouse where it's harder for any people to see them. Another crack echoes through the air.
“There,” Carmen says. “That empty field just past the houses.”
D-Day follows the direction her finger is pointing and spots a single figure walking through an undeveloped field that runs through the middle of a subdivision a mile to their northwest. He brings her into focus.
“Jesus, she’s naked,” he says.
“And covered in blood and Jamba juice. What the hell is she doing?”
They watch as she raises the gun, and another zombie falls to the ground. A few seconds later a trio of gunshots echoes over them.
“I wonder if she has anything to do with that alarm we heard earlier?” Carmen says. “Seems an odd coincidence that the first real signs of life we’ve seen are on the same day just – what – an hour apart?”
“Yeah, that’s odd alright,” D-Day replies, his eye focused on the girl with the gun. More shots echo over them. “I’ve counted twenty shots so far, and I haven’t seen her reload. I wonder what she’s shooting.”
“I wonder what the hell happened to her. And should we try to help her?”
“By the looks of that horde starting to surround her, whatever is going to happen will be over before we get there.”
As they watch, a horde of the undead is getting closer to her. D-Day can’t tell how big the horde is because she’s walking closer to the houses and soon she’ll be out of their view. She keeps walking and shooting, and at last fires the gun empty, its slide locked back. The woman holds her hands out like she’s ready for the dead to descend on her, but they hesitate. Then they start to drop. One after another, the ones closest to her fall to the ground.
“What the hell is that?” asks Carmen.
“There’s someone else there shooting. There has to be,” D-Day surmises. He waits for the report of the gunshot, but here’s no additional gunfire sounding through the air. “And they have suppressed weapons. That’s interesting.”
“Why? So do we.”
“Yeah, but you have to get approval from the ATF to get one, and you have to spend money to get that. Most people would rather spend fifty dollars on hearing protection than two hundred on a suppressor.”
Carmen does some mental math. “You mean you spent a thousand bucks on suppressors for our pistols and rifles?”
He doesn’t miss that the weapons are now ‘ours.’ He smiles, then says “More. The cans for the rifles cost a lot more than the ones for the pistols. Hey, look!”
In the open field, a golf cart appears from the cover of the houses on the southeast side of the field. The driver circles the woman, talking to her. He stops the cart and reaches out toward her, and she finally gets in the cart. The man wraps a blanket around her, presses the gas and the cart disappears again.
“That was interesting,” Carmen said. “Do you think he knows her?”
“No idea, for sure, but she came from the opposite side of the field, so my gut says no. And there were others somewhere we couldn’t see because I saw several other zombies drop while he was getting her into that cart.”
“Hey, over there!” Carmen points again, this time to the fence that borders the subdivision on its south side. A walking path weaves its way through the houses along this fence. A second golf cart with two younger men drives rounds the corner, hops the curb to drive on the path, then turns sharply, crosses a short expanse of unkempt grass, aims down an alley and disappears. Seconds later another horde of zombies rounds the same corner in hot pursuit of the cart.
D-Day pans to the right and watches the next street, just visible between the houses. A few seconds pass, and the cart zips past, crossing the street and remaining in the alley. He scans farther to the right. The next street borders on several vacant lots and exits the subdivision. There’s no sign of either cart exiting that side of the street.
“Well, we’ve narrowed down where they’re holed up,” D-Day says. “We know there are three men, and at least one woman who…well, I don’t know what her deal was.”
“Do you think she’s in danger from them? I mean, like, a sex slave or something?”
D-Day looks at her, thinking. “I don’t think so. I mean, we’ve been here for five days now, so it’s been what, almost four weeks since the world ended? I can’t see the suburbs descending into some version of I Spit on Your Grave this quickly. Can you?”
“I told you, Longview has a reputation. It may be suburbia on the surface, but it’s got a seedy element to it.”
“Well, that guy took the time to cover her with a blanket, which is an unusually tender thing to do when you have zombies breathing down your neck. The other two guys were risking their lives Pied Pipering the zoms away from them so the first guy could get her in his cart. And we still don’t know who else was shooting the zombies in the field. It had to be at least two people, maybe more, at the rate the dead were falling. I think they’re holed up in a house and couldn’t stand watching this woman get torn apart when they were right there and could stop it. That would put them solidly in the ‘good’ column.”
“How would they keep the hordes out of a house?” Carmen wonders aloud. “I mean, the windows and doors in a house can’t be that secure.”
D-Day considers this for a moment. “I have no idea. But this gives us something interesting to keep an eye out for.”
“So, what do we do now? Up until today, we didn’t know there were other survivors. I figured if there were, it would be all Road Warrior, feudal lord type stuff. If these are just good, normal people, do we have an obligation to help them?”
“If they need help, and we’re in the position to do something, maybe. My first obligation is to you and me, and our path ultimately lies north. I know we’ve gotten pretty comfortable here, but we have to be ready to go at a moment’s notice.”
“Then we can be ready to help them at a moment’s notice too,” Carmen says. “I don’t want to be in a world where we stop helping each other.”
“We’ll keep an eye on them. If they need help, and we can provide it, we’ll do it. Okay?”
“Okay. Thanks, D-Day. I know this isn’t what you had planned, but if we can keep someone else’s family members from being killed, it will help balance the scales for me. I don’t expect you to understand, but I need to know we’ve done what we can for other su
rvivors.”
She hasn’t brought up the loss of her parents directly since they left the apartment building, but he understands what she’s saying. She feels like she let her parents down and she wants to erase that debt. He doesn’t say anything, but her pulls her close and puts his arm around her shoulders.
Sixteen
“Where did it go?” D-Day asks.
Carmen points to a bike path just beyond the railroad tracks. “They jumped the curb there and drove over those bushes, then crossed that little bridge, and I lost them in the neighborhood.”
“How many of them were there?”
“I only saw two. It was a small car, and quiet. I think it was one of the tiny electric ones. Nissan, maybe?”
They’re looking over County Line Road, which runs along the west side of the warehouse and the eastern end of the subdivision. A hundred zombies are lurching up the road, now passing the spot where D-Day sees the magnified image of the damaged bushes that denote the path of the car Carmen saw driving past.
D-Day uses the binoculars to scan north to the next cross street, and the only one providing an exit on this side of the subdivision. The intersection, like so many others, is a snarl of smashed up cars, body parts, dried blood, and Jamba juice. A burned-out sedan rests on its roof in the field on the east side of County Line. A minivan went through the guard rail on the west side of the County Line, its nose disappearing into the brackish water of an irrigation ditch. The spider-webbed cracks in the windshield show that the occupants weren’t wearing seatbelts. D-Day wonders what happened to them, if they got away or were turned.
“Holy shit, D-Day, check that out!” Carmen is pointing to the empty field where the Good Samaritans rescued the woman a few days earlier.
D-Day turns the binoculars to the path of her pointer finger, and he sees six people walking across the field. They move in a slow, deliberate way, to the northwest of where the man in the golf cart was the other day. All six are covered with what looks like ponchos. Some carry shovels; others carry rifles. Suppressed rifles.
