Hunting Season: A Zombie Survival Story

by Stoesen, Chris

  “Supply run. Trying to see if there are any non-perishables left at the grocery store.”

  “Ah, I was in there two days ago. It stinks to high heaven. Some moron cut the power to the building by driving his car into the electrical box outside the building. The power is still on in the rest of the town. Not sure why? First you have the stink of the rotten fruit and vegetables. The stink of the meat cases and the stink from the now thawed freezer cases. That is bad. To make it worse, there are about fifteen dead bodies in there. The flies are thick throughout the whole place. You will need a gas mask or something to filter out that stink. It clings to you. It’s beyond nasty. But on the bright side, they have tons of canned goods on the isles. The parts that are empty are the sodas, beer, wine and chips. I guess some of the survivors couldn’t live without their Lays.”

  All three of them laughed. Marty disappeared from the window and shut it. A few seconds later, he appeared on the fire escape. We got our first good look at Marty’s complete wardrobe. He had his helmet that covered his whole head with just slits for his eyes and a slit to breathe. Next, he had a red scarf around his neck. This was tucked into a chain mail shirt with sleeves that extended just past his wrists. The shirt extended down to his knees. Under the chain mail was a red shirt of an indeterminate type. Heavy leather gloves protruded from the sleeves of the chain mail shirt. He wore skinny jeans tucked into some tall steel toed work boots.

  There were scratch marks across the boots and gloves. There were stains on the armor as well showing he had been fighting for a while. He had his shield strapped across his back. It was a large round shield. Well it looked large. I know guns not swords and stuff. His sword was a classic long sword. He looked every bit the paladin except for the skinny jeans. I needed to remember to make fun of him for that. Skinny jeans of all things. What was he, a closet hipster or something?

  He opened the door to the back seat and took a seat.

  “Marty, what have you been doing since the start of this?”

  “I was home when it started. A neighbor pounded on my door begging for help. She'd been bitten, and I had no idea what was going on. I was cleaning her bite when she passed out. Called 911 and couldn’t get through. There was gunfire outside, and I kept trying 911, but never got through. That's when my neighbor turned. She moaned and stood up. I asked her if she was OK but all she did was moan. She started towards me. I knew something was wrong.”

  At this point he took off his helmet. His sweat matted hair matched his red cheeks from his earlier efforts. With a deep breath, he continued.

  “I hid in my room. She banged on my door. Looking out the window I could see that the town was turning into chaos. People were shooting at others and there were zombies eating others. I then understood what was going on. I grabbed my short sword, opened the door and drove the blade into her head. After that, I checked on the other apartments. There were about 20 people still in their apartments. Within a few days, no one was left, and I had to barricade the building.”

  We all took a deep breath. All of us had quite a hard time since this started. Marty was very fortunate to have survived.

  “As I found the undead, I was tricking them into chasing me into the stairwells and then running to the roof to the other stairwell. I trapped about 30 in there. I did a supply run two days ago. They wandered up and down the stairs until I could address them. You saw how well that went. At least the building is clean now. I have enough supplies from other apartments and the grocery store to last me another week. But that is it. How are y’all doing?”

  Sharon and I looked at each other and sighed.

  “We are running low too. We have three others back at my house. A vet, a little girl and a wounded police officer.”

  “Not bit, right?” It was touching to hear the concern in his voice.

  “Nah, he was shot. We patched him up.”

  “What, with the vet like some mafia don?”

  “Yeah.” I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “We are thinking of heading to the Legion Hut to try our luck there.”

  He looked sheepishly at the two of us and then asked, “Can I please join you? I have been so lonely.”

  Sharon was quicker to answer than I was, “Of course, Marty, we are glad to have you.”

  He gave us a relieved smile.

  “Look, why don’t we get my supplies to add to yours. I have most of it packed already in case I needed to flee. It won’t take up that much room. Can I go get it?”

  With a nod of my head we left the truck to gather Marty’s things. We took fifteen minutes to get his equipment and food down to the truck.

  By the time the last few items were loaded, the undead rounded the corner and approached us. We climbed back into the truck and drove. Two of the undead stepped in front of my truck and we didn’t slow down. Both disappeared under the hood and we bounced slightly as they were run over. I cringed at the damage that was building up on my poor truck.

  In a few moments we were back on the road and ready to go do grocery shopping.

  Chapter 14: Grocery Shopping

  There were five cars left in the parking lot. Each was its own story without a narrator to tell it. The first one, in the center of the lot had been set alight at some point and had burned itself out. Another smashed through the front doors of the store and was left abandoned in the entrance. A third had taken out the transformer box near the street and electrocuted its occupants still inside. The other two were parked normally as if they were waiting for their shopper to return.

  I would need to think about those two. We might get some gas out of those vehicles if we have time.

  There were only two zombies wandering around the open asphalt and who knows how many were in the store. Of the ones we could see, one was a young woman while the other was an older man. The woman was walking while the man was dragging himself on the ground.

  “I’ll deal with the two in the parking lot,” Marty said as he gripped his long sword.

  I nodded my head but Sharon gripped my shoulder and pointed with her other hand.

  “That’s Mary Stuart. She was on the cheerleading squad. I sat next to her in Chemistry class.”

  Mary didn’t look good. She had large wounds to her left arm and neck. Her head lolled to the left due to the neck wound. She was still dressed a little slutty like she always did. A short skirt and a tight sweater was her standard fall wardrobe, or that is all I ever noticed.

  “I don’t think Mary is with us any more.”

  Marty gave a derisive laugh. “You know, of all the people that picked on me in school, Duke Warner was one of the worst. Remember him? He was on the wrestling team and a big, mean son of a bitch.”

  Sharon nodded, “Yeah, I remember him. Not the brightest of guys and rather full of himself.”

  “That’s the one. I saw him three days ago. Cut his head clean off.”

  “Huh, you would think he might have been able to avoid becoming a zombie.”

  “I didn’t say he was a zombie.”

  Both Sharon and my eyes went wide, and we turned to stare at him.

  “Just kidding. He was missing most of his right leg and part of his stomach. Something had eaten him up before he turned. Go figure that I would end up doing him a favor. Oh, crap, Mary is getting close. Let me deal with her.”

  With that he jumped out of the truck and ran straight to her. Lifting his sword in both hands above his head, he turned at the last second to not run straight into her and brought the sword down as he passed her. Marty's sword split the cheer leader’s skull in half at the bridge of the nose. The top of her head jumped up in the air as Marty ran past.

  Crawling on the ground was the second zombie. It was an older gentleman that was missing a leg. Marty turned towards him and slashed his sword down ending the zombie’s misery. Two zombie kills in under ten seconds.

  “Sharon, do you want to go into the grocery store with Marty or guard the truck?”

  “I’m still not
past his joke about Duke. I’ll stay in the truck. Please be careful. I’m not sure I trust him.”

  “Marty’s fine. I’ll go in with him then.”

  I reloaded my pistol and made sure that the second magazine was full. Hopping out of the truck, I moved up to the car that had crashed into the doors. I adjusted the white breath mask on my face. It wouldn’t be that helpful against the smells that Marty warned us about but it was better than nothing.

  I moved to the car. Marty stood beside me. The driver wasn’t there. The seats were all empty.

  “We need to move this out of the way, if we will get anything out of there.”

  Marty tilted his head to the side thinking, “If we crawl over it, we can push on the front of the car and maybe get it out of the way.”

  “OK. Lets try it.”

  I ducked down to look under the car. There it was, a zombie pinned underneath the vehicle. It couldn’t move but its arms could reach out and grab anything that stood in front of the front bumper. Whoever drove this into the store front, hit the zombie on the way in.

  I motioned to Marty. He ducked down and saw it. With a nod, he climbed over the car and looked around. He lay down on the hood. As he did, I heard the zombie hiss beneath him. He raised his sword and thrust it down into the things head. With a twist of his wrist, he pulled his blade free again.

  He stepped down from the car and looked around. I put the pistol in the back of my pants. Next, I opened the driver’s door and put it into neutral. I then climbed over to join Marty. The smell was bad outside but in here, it was one of the worst things I have ever experienced. There were swarms of flies in the produce section. The air was thick with them. The checkout aisles in front of us were all abandoned. Two of them had their registers broken open as if money would help anyone now.

  So far, we saw no undead. I placed my hands on the hood of the car and pushed. It didn’t move. I tried rocking it back and forth. This didn’t produce any results either. I tried pushing it again when Marty joined me. There was a cracking sound from the undercarriage and then it rolled free. The car had hung up on the zombie’s rib cage. It rolled a few feet and came to a stop. There was now enough room to get a cart through. The frame of the door had been thrown onto the checkout lines. Broken glass covered the whole entry area.

  I got a shopping cart and then took one of the hand wipes from the container and wiped off the handle.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “What does it look like? I’m getting rid of the germs on it. Do you want the flu during the apocalypse? Have to stay healthy.”

  “Seriously, dude? You need help, man. Does Sharon know about this side of you?”

  I scowled and threw the too dry to have been helpful cleaning cloth on the ground and pushed the cart. We went through one of the checkout lanes that was least affected by the door frame and was lined up with the canned food isle.

  We pushed the cart forward. The darkened building would have been impossible to navigate at night. With what little sunlight came in through the front doors, it was bad enough. The sound of the buzzing insects was maddening. The only other sound was the squeak of the right front wheel of the cart as it shimmied from side to side or rotated around in a circle.

  Whispering, Marty asked, “What are we looking for?”

  Not sure why we were whispering, I replied in kind, “Canned meat first. Then some vegetables and fruit. Maybe some dried pasta last. Then take another cart and grab any bottled water that's left.”

  We went to work by the canned tuna. Next to it was canned chicken. As we loaded the cart, we heard a noise of a thumping step. Around the corner appeared a huge fat man. He wore this short sleeve button up shirt that at some point was white. A short blue tie that didn’t extend to even half his belly sat there with stains of unknown origin. The man’s hair was crew cut short. He had an apron around his waist and a name tag affixed to his left breast pocket. I noticed that it said Earl. His shredded pants may have been a brown corduroy at one point. It looked like his arms and left leg had bite marks on them. The face was the part that frightened me the most. The eyes were red. There were no whites left. The mouth was open far wider than it should be and the skin on either side had torn to allow him to open it to a ridiculous size. There had to be at least three days growth of beard on his face that was a mottled greenish gray.

  Marty’s hands were full of canned foods. I dropped what I had and reached for my pistol in the back of my pants. Marty tried to dump the food into the cart. Earl raised his arms and started forward.

  I jerked on the pistol and the front sight snagged on the back of my underwear and as I pulled, I gave myself a massive wedgie. I pulled hard enough that by the time the pistol was to the side of my hip, I could see the underwear on the tip of the barrel and felt the intense squeezing sensation of the wedgie. The elastic pulled the pistol back to my rear end, and I fell backwards.

  I squeaked out something incoherent at a very high octave. This caused Marty to look down at me and shout out, “Oh, shit. Get up, they are behind us too!”

  I arched my neck and saw that at the far end of the isle there were two zombies moving towards us dressed as checkout clerks. They wore the same green uniform. One was an older lady who must have worked here since the early sixties. She had her blue tinted hair in a large beehive hairdo.

  I jerked on my pistol again and once again reinforced the pain of the wedgie but this time the fabric ripped and the pistol came free. It also gouged a shallow two inch cut on my back from the front sight. I grunted in pain as I raised the pistol up above my head and pointed at the clerks.

  Marty had his own problems with Earl. Now free of the canned goods, he had to redraw his sword. The problem was he lacked the room being stuck between a heavy shopping cart and the opposite isle. Instead, he opted for a knife he kept on his left hip. He held the knife in front of him and slashed outwards at Earl.

  The knife blade cut into the white shirt and opened the zombie’s belly. This did nothing to enhance the subtle aromas that the store already possessed. Earl’s extended arms reached out and grabbed Marty by the shoulders.

  “Oh, Fuck, he’s got me!”

  Was what I heard behind me. My eyes were watering from the wedgie and I was having trouble getting a bead on the two clerks. I decided that beehive lady would be the first to go.

  Bang. The unsuppressed twenty-two might as well have been a cannon going off in the quiet store. Beehive lady kept coming. Crap, I must have shot the hairdo. I spared a glace for Marty. He was in trouble. Earl was pulling him closer while Marty was wailing away at the zombie’s body with his foot long blade. Seeing the knife, all I could think of was the line from Crocodile Dundee, “That’s not a knife, this is a knife.”

  It was almost enough to make me laugh. I pulled the pistol forward and fired at Earl. My eyes were still watery, and I wasn’t sure of my hit. I saw Earl’s head snap back. But did I see sparks? Both Marty and Earl toppled onto Earl’s back.

  I switched aim back to the ladies. Damn, they moved faster than I thought. They were within ten feet now. I fired faster. Three shots at beehive and four at the second. Both clerks fell within a couple feet of me. I ejected the magazine and slammed home a new one. The spent magazine went into a back pocket. I could feel my underwear hanging out of the back of my jeans. It hurt to walk but was better than being dead. I needed a holster.

  Standing, I moved to Marty. There was a crease of blood on the side of his head. I checked him and there were no bite marks. But I had shot my friend. Fortunately, it was just a graze, and the bullet took the giant Earl just below the right eye. I tried to pull Marty to his feet. Encased in armor, he was heavy as hell. He left his helmet in the truck. He had some chain mail hoodie thing going on that was bunched up on the back of his head. That must have been the spark that the copper jacket of the bullet made before it hit him.

  It took four tries before I got him up and draped him over the shopping cart. The cart was half full at t
his point. With Marty KO’ed I didn’t feel that we should press on. I picked up his dagger and wiped it off on Earl’s clothes. Man that freak was huge. Popping the blade back into its sheath, I tried to turn the cart around but ended up knocking down a bunch of canned peas with Marty’s sword scabbard. Giving up and pulled it.

  That is when the clerk sisters were in the way. I had to roll them to the sides to make room for the cart to get through. This was a real pain in the ass. Actually, given the wedgie, it was a pain in the groin. Pushing the cart past the end of the isle, I looked both ways before crossing to the checkout. A couple more zombies had stirred from their wanderings to investigate all the noise. They were still far away. The disturbing one was the fly covered little girl. I guess she was hanging out in the produce isle. I pushed the cart on through the checkout and whacked Marty’s head against the gum display and it knocked loose all the candy. Some of which fell into the cart.

  I tried to hold his head and push through and finally made it out. Getting a running start, I plowed through the broken glass and was clear of the building. While racing towards the truck with the cart, I summoned my inner twelve-year-old. I jumped up and put my feet on the bottom rung of the cart and went sailing across the parking lot. To slow the cart down, I jumped off to make sure I did not slam Marty into the truck.

  Sharon had turned the truck around so that the bed was facing the door. This helped as it allowed for quicker loading. Opening the tailgate, I rolled Marty into the back of the truck. Then emptied the contents of the cart. I had to close the bed again to keep the round tuna cans from rolling out.

  Sharon opened the middle window on the rear of the truck and said in a quiet tone, “What happened in there? Is Marty OK? Hurry, there are a bunch of them coming down the street.”

  It took another minute to finish unloading. Huffing and puffing from the run, I didn’t have the breath to talk and work at the same time. Pretty sure that I held up a finger in a one minute gesture but I can’t remember. I hope I didn’t hold up a middle finger or I would regret that later.