We Are The Survivors

by Vanessa Marie

  It’s been forever since she left. She was checking on my uncle. Why hasn’t she come back?

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN-IT ISN’T A BATTLE IT’S A WAR

  Apocalypse: The Moment May Arrives at Zane’s Store

  “Are you kidding me?” I mumble to myself.

  Outside of the food store is a group of people with the same jackets on as Blake’s group. I grab my rifle and kill the people closest to the entrance. I make a break for the back door, hopefully there is one. I am met by a man coming out of the door who is taller than me. He has a machete in his hand. It has blood dripping from it. He charges at me. I shoot him in the leg. I grab his machete and hit him in the head. I open the door with both weapons in hand.

  Zane is in the middle of the store shooting men who are getting in the entrance. I run to him. The one girl I saw the first time I was here who was wearing the motorcycle jacket is holding her blonde sister on the floor next to him. The blonde has a deep gash across her stomach. A pool of blood is under her.

  Zane tries to talk the woman into leaving her. She keeps repeating that she can’t. He yells at her to get moving. She still doesn’t move. He tells her to move or she will die. He grabs her by the shoulders trying to physically move her but she won’t budge. She punches his shoulders repeatedly until he lets go.

  “Zane, where’s Kevin?” I ask.

  He turns to me. “On the roof.” He notices my rifle. “With that you better get up there. There is a ladder on the side of the roof, I will stall them from here, be careful,” he says.

  “The kids?” I ask.

  “Roof. Where were you all this time?” he asks while putting his hands up.

  “I found my family.”

  His face is red with anger. “Did you find my sisters?”

  “No, sorry.”

  Six men walk right in the front door. The men shoot at us. Zane takes cover dragging me with him behind a stack of pallets.

  “I will cover you. Run for the door,” Zane says.

  He shoots at them. I run for the back door. I open the door so fast that I trip and fall on the floor. I kick the door closed. I run to the side ladder. I climb up. The metal clanks, I hope that the ladder isn’t creaking. A man is leaning out from the side of the building on my left to shoot me. I aim my gun at his head. I put my arm through the rung holding on to it while aiming at them, I hold my breath and shoot him. I climb faster. Men come from both sides of the building. My rifle’s strap is slipping off my shoulder and clanking against the ladder. It slows me down. I reach the edge of the roof. A bullet hits the side of a rung a few inches from my hand. I move to the right side. I look down to find a man has a gun pointed to my head. I struggle to get my rifle.

  “Scared, are you?” he asks in a deep voice.

  His head snaps to the side and he hits the ground. Kevin is standing at the top of the ladder. He extends his hand. He helps me on the roof.

  Wilson is shooting people too. There is half of the group here including the kids. “Where are the others?” I ask.

  “These are the others. Half of them are dead,” Kevin says.

  “I found Gavin and Rain they’re okay,” I say.

  He gets a big smile on his face, “That’s great.”

  Wilson claps him on the shoulder. “Great. Can you help me here?”

  We take positions shooting. There is a brick wall on the roof that is as tall as my stomach. I move my scope to the front doors. I kill two men running in the store. Wilson shoots a few people; the bullets distract me from focusing on targets. What distracts me even more is that the kids are crying. I try to tune out the noise but it’s too much.

  My eyes close from the exhaustion of being awake all this time. Wilson elbows me. I zero in on a group of men climbing the gate. I shoot one when he gets one foot over it. Wilson shoots the other one behind him. Kevin gets the one that climbs the gate and runs across the parking lot.

  I kill a man who is about to throw a grenade on the roof. As he falls it lands next to him. I look away as it blows his body apart.

  “I’m coming up, cover me,” Zane yells from the ground.

  I meet him at the ladder. He is on the first few rungs. I kill a few people on the sides of him. My eyes tear due to the lack of sleep. He is sluggish too. He rubs his eyes in between climbing. I yell for him to hurry. He climbs faster. A man comes from the side of the building. He raises his own sniper rifle. Zane is at the top of the ladder. I grab his hand. I can’t get a shot from the angle I’m at. The man fires. Zane has a pained expression on his face. His hand slips from mine. He falls to the ground hitting his ankle on impact. I could swear I hear it crack. I’m standing there waiting for him to say something.

  “I broke my legs! I broke my legs!” he yells. He slips the rifle off his shoulder and shoots the man.

  I climb halfway down the ladder. I jump down the other half. His ankle is pointing awkwardly in the wrong direction.

  “Take me in the store. I won’t make it to the roof. I got shot in the other leg,” he says. I pull him to the back door. I open it and pull it in. A blood trail streaks behind him while I drag him in an aisle.

  “Shit. There’s nothing I can do,” I say meaning his leg.

  “Grab me a suture kit in one of the aisles with the First Aid,” he says.

  I see men walking in the store clearing out people. I can see by looking between the shelves that the woman holding her sister was shot in the head. She is lying by her sister. I sneak by them and run to the shelf across from here. I knock over a box of cereal on the pallets in the middle of the store.

  I crouch in the aisle. The men are walking over here. I grab the kit so fast that I drop others in the pile. I run to the aisle where Zane is. The men spray bullets while I’m running. Realizing that I can’t perform surgery here, I grab a rope on the shelf. I tie it around Zane’s chest and I climb to the second shelf with it in hand. I pull him up using the rope. I pull him on the shelf when he dangles in front of me.

  “I’ll handle this. Go help the people on the roof,” he says.

  The men are walking in the aisle. “First I have to help you. You can’t stitch yourself,” I say.

  I kill all the men in the aisle. I hear more people yelling to each other in the store.

  “Leave me the gun. I’ll handle myself, go,” he says.

  I climb down the shelf. I sneak slowly past the aisle to a stack of pallets. I hide behind them. The men are walking closer to me. There is a table next to the pallets labeled ‘Clearance Garden Tools.’ I grab a shovel. I hit the man who walks past me in the head with the shovel. He blacks out. I drop the shovel and grab his gun. I kill the two other men.

  I run outside to the ladder. I climb it skipping rungs. I get on the roof. I take my position with my rifle, which I left here.

  “Are there any more?” I ask.

  “Not that I can see,” Kevin says.

  I shake my head in disgust. “They’re looking for a battle, let’s give him one.”

  Wilson looks away from the scope, “It isn’t a battle, it’s a war.”

  I search the parking lot for anyone. I get startled by the sound of gunfire from inside the store. It echoes off the walls. The kids scream and cry at the gun shots.

  I try in vain to focus. My eyes are strained by looking in this scope for so long. I rub them. Wilson elbows me again to wake me up.

  A car plows into the gate. The impact knocks the gate off the chain link fence into the parking lot. We had just gotten that gate fixed a few days ago. I shoot the driver through the windshield. The glass shatters and his head falls on the steering wheel. Ten guys open the car doors and start shooting. The three of us shoot at them. They take off towards the parked cars.

  Two of them run to the right side of the building. Wilson and I focus on them. Kevin focuses on the others who run to the left side of the building. We shoot missing them because they weave away from our gunfire. I get a clear shot on one of them. I pull the trigger, it clicks. Wilson doesn’t have
ammo either.

  There are boxes of ammo on the roof by our feet. We begin reloading our guns.

  Skylar screams. I turn to see a man holding him at gunpoint. The girls are on the right side of the roof crying while holding on to each other. I drop my gun in surrender. Wilson and Kevin surrender too.

  “Leave or I kill him,” he says.

  “Calm down here,” I say.

  He rolls his eyes. “What’s it going to be? We already killed half of you. You’re going to stay?” he says.

  The man’s red hair is cut so short that it is barely an inch from his scalp standing straight up. Razor stubble is on his cheeks and chin. His face has that look of evil on it. I don’t know how to describe it but he just looks pure evil. His blue, maybe brown eyes, I can’t see the color in the dark, are blank.

  He has no reaction to holding a gun to a child’s head. Then again, this isn’t unusual to him. This was his life before and will always be.

  Skylar squirms in the man’s arms. One of his sisters, I forget their names, moves closer. She has a holster with a handgun in it. I step closer to make her stop so she doesn’t get hurt. Me moving closer makes the man pull tighter on the trigger. I freeze. She aims it at the man’s head. She fires. I close my eyes. When I open them, the man is on the floor. Skylar is hugging his sisters.

  I load my gun. I go to the ladder side of the roof. I kill the men climbing it with headshots. Kevin takes care of the other side. The little girl guards the ladder without being told to. I let her. She’s a good shot and she might as well learn to protect herself.

  I hear gunfire still in the store. It stops after about six shots. Zane probably emptied his clip. The front doors need to be blocked. “I’m going to barricade the front doors. I’ll see if I can fix the gate too,” I tell the men. “I don’t know your name but just make sure that no one gets on the roof,” I tell the little girl guarding the ladder.

  I slide down the ladder with my hands. I rub my palms on my pants to make them stop hurting. I run into the door. I run in the aisle where Zane is. There is a pile of dead bodies in the aisle along with a ton of blood. The freezers are covered in blood splatter. Zane is holding the gun in his lap. Blood has soaked through the bottom of his pant leg.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  He sighs. “Yeah.”

  “Stay here. I’ll block the entrance. Throw me the keys to the door though. I lock you in here,” I say.

  He throws them to me. I put them in my pocket.

  I grab the shovel behind the pallets and break a pallet with the tip of the shovel. I take the boards and grab a hammer and box of nails down the hardware aisle. The glass doors have been shattered completely. There are bullet holes with spider web like cracks in the glass. I nail the boards to the doors. I put the boards close together so there are no spaces in between each one. I put one board after the other on the doors until they block my view from the outside. There are windows up high to the ceiling that no one is going to be able to fit through. They don’t need to be boarded up.

  I hear yelling outside. I drop the shovel and slip my rifle in my hands. I open the front door. No one is within aim. I get to the gate. There isn’t any fixing this. The parts for it to slide back and forth are busted. The track is twisted too.

  I run inside. A man raises his gun to my head. I have my rifle in my hand. He moves closer to me. I’m so tired I must’ve forgot to lock it.

  This guy has brown hair with bangs that are falling into his eyes. He has a leather jacket like the rest of the group does.

  The members are all about forty years old. They all were probably in this for years. The loyalty to Fred and his son is unbelievable. How could you have so much loyalty for people like this?

  “There is more of us. You can leave and make this easier,” he says.

  I shoot him in the head. I lock the doors. I take his gun and count the bullets. There is five left. When I find Blake, I’ll kill him myself.

  I meet with Zane. “Your leg is fixed?” I asked.

  He pulls up his jeans to show me his wound above his ankle is stitched.

  I think of going to the roof but that hasn’t been the best way to kill them. We need to eliminate them all. We need to draw them to this place, get them in here then shoot them all.

  I announce I want to make a deal. They come in and we kill them.

  I go to the ladder. “Get down here I have a plan,” I say. They climb down. The only reason I can think of why they don’t argue is that they’re exhausted. I tell everyone to get on the shelves and aim. I leave my gun in the aisle with Zane.

  I walk to the parking lot. “We’ll give you the store. We’ll leave it to you. Come in and we’ll pack and go,” I say aloud.

  A group of guys come out from their cover behind cars. They spin me around and push me in the doors.

  “Now!” Kevin yells.

  I run to the aisle where Zane is. I grab my gun and climb the shelf. I get to the end. I shoot eight of them to start with. More of them come through the doors. I count twenty men. I yell that twenty of them came in the door. The other group is yelling stuff to each other too.

  The whole time I’m killing these people I’m thinking about seeing my son and niece again. They’re at least sleeping in peace by now. In a safe place where they can finally rest. Those kids are my entire life; all I have left aside from Kevin. I wonder if these men are thinking about anyone they love excluding their precious leader.

  “Zane, how are you doing?” I ask.

  There is a pause that makes me a wary of whether he is okay. “I’ll be dandy once we kill these people and have what’s ours,” he says.

  The rest of the night can only be explained as a blur, from my perspective, of blood, gunfire, bodies on the floor. I’m so exhausted that I’m scared of dropping in the middle of the fight. I don’t even count the shots. I know that I empty my clip within a few minutes.

  There is a pile of bodies on the floor. I kneel on the shelf. That’s all of them. It has to be. The very last. Kevin climbs up the shelf. He grabs my shoulder.

  “Can you drive me to where they are?” he asks.

  “I’ll give you directions. We’ll go together.”

  We tell Zane where we are going. He asks us to clean this place up first and get him on the floor. I lower him the same way I put him on the shelf. I take the rope off him. He tells us to drag the bodies to a supply truck and drive it somewhere else. The others can clean the store. He asks us to grab a wheelchair for him.

  “You did good with the defenses,” I tell him.

  He laughs. “I defended everyone else, I didn’t get do a good job defending myself. I was stupid.”

  I touch his shoulder. “You got shot at. It wasn’t your fault. You covered me. You saved me.”

  He puts his hand on mine. “I won’t be able to do a lot here. That’s up to the other people, you included if you want to help.”

  “Yeah. We should go,” I say.

  “We need you rolling as soon as possible.” Kevin smiles.

  “I need someone else to lead. I can’t go on runs, or even outside the gate for that matter. It won’t be permanent but I need someone,” he says.

  I shake my head. “I couldn’t do that. Even for a few days or so. I’m not that responsible. Being a leader you must carry a lot of burdens, take people into account, decide what’s best for everyone. I couldn’t do that.”

  His demeanor tells me that I guessed wrong. “No. No offense, I wasn’t going to put you in charge. This person needs to show me they are capable. You could be, I’ll keep you in mind. I have to decide carefully.”

  Kevin raises his hand, “I could be the leader.”

  “As leader, for tonight, I ask for a wheelchair and clean-up crew, now,” Zane says jokingly.

  He gives us the key for a truck. We get going. We drag the bodies outside, around the side of the store and in the truck. We lock the back of the truck. We decide to leave the truck at the hospital, making it convenient.r />
  The hospital is thirty minutes away from the store. Kevin drives since I’m exhausted. The outside has the appearance of any hospital. I know we aren’t in New Jersey but it gives me the impression that the crazy doctor will at us at any moment.

  We leave the truck where the ambulances use to park. Kevin suggests driving an ambulance. It would provide a better transport.

  I slide open the automatic doors. Inside the hospital it’s completely dark, luckily we brought flashlights. It smells, like I predicted, of death. I hear flies buzzing in here. I swat at some flying near me.

  I shine the light in the lobby. There are a few Munchers walking around in the lobby. Some of them have doctor’s coats on with scrubs underneath. There are nurses in scrubs and patients in their hospital gowns walking. There is a good amount of them.

  We hide behind the nurse’s station right in the center of the room. Kevin peeks at them, he raises his gun to shoot. I pull his arm down. Gunfire will attract more.

  There is a wheelchair right by the door. I grab the wheelchair and roll it out. Kevin walks with me. He opens the door for me. I hear the dead growl and their shoes clicking on the floor. We pick up speed.

  Kevin leads me to an ambulance where our truck is. He gets in the driver’s seat and scrambles for the key. The Munchers break the glass entrance doors. They growl, they are grabbing at the air. They are slow but we aren’t going that fast. “Hurry up!” I yell.

  “Sorry, I can’t find a key,” he says.

  Zombies jump up and bang on the windows in the ambulance. “They’ll have it,” I say. He opens the doors. One of them grabs his arm. He pushes it away. He shoots both quickly. He puts the bodies on the ground. He finds the keys on the second one he checks.

  A growl turns my stomach. On the Gurnee is a woman Muncher. I pull the Gurnee to the pavement and put the wheelchair inside. The zombies are a step away from me. I tell Kevin to get in. I get in the back and slam the doors. The dead bang on the windows smearing bloody handprints on them.

  Kevin speeds away. I get thrown into the side of the ambulance. I yell for Kevin to watch it. I sit down to sleep.