Aftermath (Book 2): Chicago Calling

by Duncan McArdle

  Both men now looked back to the store in front, and John led them in disembarking from the truck, and beginning the cautious walk towards the windows ahead. John had brought along his trusty Ruger, his blade, and most importantly his M14, given to him by the not-so-honourable guards of the Stillwater bridge a few months earlier. John had loved using the rifle whenever possible, and always preferred its semi-automatic firing to that of the various automatic choices the camp had procured from the numerous National Guard members that had lost their lives in Milwaukee. But rarely did John get to fire any weapon, especially not one that was long ranged, and so as he neared the window and thus reduced the distance between himself and a potential target, he slung the rifle onto his back, and took out his much smaller pistol in its place. Harvey did the same, himself having preferred the M16 until now, before switching to his own sidearm.

  The two men arrived at the windows in front at more or less the same time, and began peering inside through the dirtied glass. John was pleased to see what appeared to be a lack of undead inside the store, but his heart sank upon laying eyes on the closest aisle to them. Underneath a sign that read “DRINK” was a series of shelves stacked atop each other, not a single item remaining between them. Harvey too saw what John did, and proceeded to scan the rest of the store, where the story was much the same. Like so many other places, the supermarket had been picked clean, and even its floors were devoid of loose items they might find a use for. This location, like many that had come before it, was a bust.

  “God dam it”, John called out upon coming to the same conclusion.

  “You still wanna’ head inside?”, Harvey asked.

  “Why bother”, John replied, before pulling away from the glass and once again surveying the area, looking for somewhere else worth raiding.

  “You’d think they would have sent more trucks towards the end and racked up their prices, bet they could have made a fortune with all the panic buying”, Harvey pointed out.

  John paused for a moment, a particular part of Harvey’s statement catching his ear. “Trucks”, he said out loud.

  “What about ‘em?”, Harvey asked.

  Without another word, John began walking along the building’s wall and towards its rear. The store wasn’t huge, but the walk took a few moments nonetheless, until eventually, John slowed down as he approached the corner, and then cautiously rounded it, pistol first.

  “Bingo”, he said, causing Harvey to wander forwards wondering what he’d found.

  What stood in front was a huge eighteen wheeler, the company’s logo branded across the side and its rear backed up into the loading bay that fed directly into the building. The truck had been unloading when everything went to hell, which likely meant that it had at least a couple of things left inside, if nobody else had gotten there first. Unfortunately, the trailer was reversed inside the bay, and fitted almost perfectly into its grasp, which meant that the only way in was from inside.

  “You think we could drive it forwards?”, Harvey asked, watching John walk closer to the find.

  “Unlikely”, John replied as he dropped down to the floor and rolled underneath the rear of the trailer, attempting to see if there was any way in from the outside, “Probably just as dead as everything else round here”.

  “So, looks like we’re headed in then?”, Harvey questioned, talking at this point to the side of the trailer and the pair of feet protruding out from underneath it.

  “Looks like it”, John replied, before climbing back up onto his legs and making his way slowly over to the truck’s cabin.

  Taking a deep breath, he placed his left hand on the mirror, and then pulled his weight upwards, swinging him into eye-line with the insides of the cabin, gun drawn in his right hand and ready to fire. But nothing stirred in front, save for the slight swaying his own body weight had generated.

  The truck had nobody at the wheel – dead or alive – and the store itself seemed reasonably safe. If the trailer turned out to have anything inside, this might just turn out to be one hell of a haul.

  * * *

  Back at camp, Andrew was filling his on-duty time by playing eye spy with his daughter. It was just about the only game he’d been able to think of that didn’t take his eyes off the job, and better yet allowed him to keep the young girl occupied. In addition, Hannah’s joyful nature also helped keep Andrew’s spirits up, a side-effect he was more than happy with.

  “I spy something beginning with…”, Hannah began, her eyes scanning around the area for something to pick, “C!”.

  Andrew looked around, a big smile across his face at finally getting to spend some father daughter time that wasn’t so dissimilar to what they might have done before the end of the world.

  “A car?”, he asked.

  Hannah shook her head, her brown hair swinging from side to side.

  “Uhh”, Andrew thought out loud, his eyes heading back out in search of another object. “A Caterpillar?”, he asked hopelessly, unable to find anything else.

  Again Hannah shook her head.

  “Hmm”, Andrew pondered, “Oh I give up, what is it?”, he asked.

  “A cone!”, Hannah said excitedly, pointing to a left over traffic cone left crumpled by the side of the road.

  “Oh! That’s a good one!”, Andrew replied, “Well done you, now you get to go again!”.

  Hannah smiled profusely and began searching for the subject of the next round.

  “P!”, she said excitedly.

  “Pigeons?”, Andrew asked.

  “Nope!”, Hannah replied.

  “A plane?”, he asked hopefully, to which Hannah once again shook her head.

  At this point, Sonja wondered over, herself currently off duty.

  “Pens? Pencils?”, Andrew guessed, “Paper, paint, plant, plate?”.

  Again Hannah shook her head.

  “Okay go on, what is it?”, Andrew asked.

  “People!”, Hannah declared.

  The hair on Andrew’s arms stood up, readying his M16 he peered out into the distance, knowing that being told people were nearby was rarely a good thing.

  “Not out there Daddy, in here, making lunch!”, Hannah announced.

  Andrew’s heart-rate slowed once more, as he turned inwards and glanced at the group of residents preparing the day’s lunchtime meal, Hannah happily giggling away.

  “Think you might have scared him a little there”, Sonja pointed out, herself having found the incident quite funny.

  “More than a little”, Andrew pointed out, “Why don’t you go find your Mom, food’ll be ready soon”, he said to his daughter, who happily ran towards the stairs and disappeared in the direction of the floor below.

  “Kids huh”, Sonja smiled.

  “Yeah, Kids”, Andrew agreed.

  “Any sign of them yet?”, Sonja questioned, herself clearly worried about the scavengers having gone out as a twosome.

  “Not yet”, Andrew replied, “Wouldn’t expect them back this soon though, especially not in that heap of junk they took”.

  “Hey it has its perks, it’s a nice colour”, Sonja smirked sarcastically.

  “You call brown a nice colour?”, Andrew laughed.

  “What?”, Sonja asked, “It’s red!”.

  “The only way that thing was red is if I was drunk when I saw it, and I’m pretty sure it was too early for that”, Andrew replied, still laughing it off as if it were a simple misunderstanding.

  Sonja’s voice suddenly turned very stern.

  “Andrew”, she began, “They went out in the red pickup, the Nissan”.

  “But…”, Andrew tried to comprehend the situation, adamant that he knew what he’d seen, “I saw it way up north right after they left”, he explained, “I swear it was brown”.

  Sonja shook her head, much like Hannah had been doing in that exact spot moments earlier.

  “Oh shit”, Andrew said lowly, before looking north in the direction John and Harvey had left the camp in the hours prior, “Then
I think they were followed”.

  Chapter 23: Discount

  Inside the supermarket, dust was the most prominent thing in sight, having built up and accumulated over several months of no nearby movement whatsoever. Shelves were mostly empty, floors were dirtied but not ruined like some, and perhaps most importantly, there were no people – dead or alive – in sight. For the most part, it seemed to be one of the calmer parts of Milwaukee, a welcome sight to anybody more used to the overrun and ruined sorts of places that seemed to be everywhere now.

  Suddenly however, on that chilly and overcast November morning, for the first time in some months, the sound of silence was broken. The noise of metal scratching on metal slowly filled the room, ended only by the sound of a crack, and then the sight of the once electronically operated sliding doors being prised open. The large glass fronted objects slid loudly along the floor in opposite directions, and a light gust of wind slowly flooded in, rattling various magazines left by the entrance and throwing dust into the air.

  From outside the building entered John Parker, pistol drawn and at the ready, knife still clutched in one hand as a precaution. John’s M14 hung limply on his back, its barrel pointing up into the ceiling. Little else was evident on John’s body, save for a look of slight nervousness, and a walkie-talkie pinned to his belt. Slowly he stepped forwards and into the embrace of the store, quickly scanning from left to right, and then halted to wait for Harvey, who promptly caught up from the rear.

  The two stood there for a while, eyes darting from dark corners to piles of boxes, waiting for the slightest sign of movement to present itself. But none did, and quickly both men began to realise that this was not a typically overrun building.

  “Clear”, whispered John, who then began moving forwards once more.

  Harvey followed close behind, covering the rear as well as the sides, as they attempted to snake their way slowly around the store, conducting their first two-person raid.

  The dynamic of the situation was altered fairly significantly by the reduced numbers. Normally they were able to move around independently, covering much larger distances whilst knowing that with three people, each was fairly well covered from all sides. But now, moving as a single unit of two, they were more prone to becoming trapped in corners or dead ends, and so had to be as certain as possible that no threat was around to push them into such situations.

  Occasionally John gave Harvey a gentle pat to indicate a stop off, and repeated the gesture when ready to move again, maintaining what was as close to silence as possible. On numerous occasions John stopped briefly to inspect one of the few remaining items. He of course knew that it wouldn’t be a big win to return with one can, but he also knew that any supplies were useful nowadays, even if they only helped one person for one meal. As far as John was concerned, if they made sure the place had been picked clean, they could at least cross it off their list.

  Luckily for both men, the shelves at the store were below head-height, which meant there was much less chance of running into any surprises, such as those that had plagued the camp’s raid of the hardware store a few weeks earlier. Even better however was the overwhelming presence of light, brought in via the numerous floor-to-ceiling windows on one side of the store. John did wonder if this had helped rid the place of the undead – by giving them the ability to see outside, where they might see something they liked the look of and chase after – but this was only a theory. The simpler reality might just have been that without any stock to scavenge, there’d been no customers in the store in the first place, and thus less of them to turn into the undead. The latter did at least explain why no windows and doors had been broken.

  Before long the duo had covered the entire customer-accessible section of the store, and reached a large red door at the back of the building. Just like so much of the supermarket, the door was in good condition, no obvious signs of it being forced open present anywhere on its exterior. Unlike the rest of the store however, it was marked “STAFF ONLY”.

  “Ready?”, John asked quietly, without actually turning to face Harvey.

  “Yeah”, Harvey replied, his own gaze still stuck to their rear, safeguarding their passage back out in case it was needed in a hurry.

  John moved towards the door quickly and kicked it clean open, raising his pistol straightaway, ready and waiting to defend himself should he need to do so. But nothing of interest came into view, only a short corridor leading into a darkened loading bay, and a few empty boxes lining the right hand wall.

  “Clear”, John announced, before starting to walk down the corridor.

  Up ahead the loading bay began to take shape. It was a large area, a series of shelves and storage containers placed wherever they could fit, a couple of seemingly empty sorting rooms off to one side, and finally the rear of a trailer, reversed into a gap just barely big enough for it to fit inside of. Luckily for John and Harvey, the slight gap around the trailer was allowing just enough light in to highlight the key parts of the room, and unluckily for them, there was the unmistakable sight of three bodies, lying right in the middle of the floor.

  John approached cautiously, his pistol trained on the nearest body for the duration of his movement, whilst his eyes darted around the room searching out any potential threats. Upon arriving, he nervously nudged each of the bodies below with the toe of his boot, but found no reaction in any. All three had a series of what appeared to be gunshot wounds dotted across them, so John was not at all surprised when none stirred, but what he was concerned about however, was just how they’d come to sustain their deadly injuries. Gripping his pistol tight, he signalled for Harvey to take note of the situation below, and then made his way over to the two empty sorting rooms.

  Slowly John moved into the first one, pistol still raised and trigger finger ready to work. The room was of reasonable size, tables lining the walls and piles of packaging neatly stacked in one corner. Crucially however, there was nothing that presented any threat – or any potential benefit – and so he quickly moved to the second room, where within a matter of seconds he found the same result, and was finally able to lower his weapon.

  Upon establishing that they were empty – and thus that the building in its entirety was devoid of any real danger – Harvey quickly made his way over to the trailer.

  “Be careful”, John whispered as he saw the excitable man heading for the closed doors of the large trailer that was quite literally blotting out the sun.

  But Harvey was far too preoccupied. After briefly checking that the doors were unlocked, he flung them open and braced himself to uncover whatever supplies remained inside the huge metal box.

  What came first however was a large mass, rolling out and on top of Harvey, immediately pinning him to the ground. John took aim with his pistol and prepared to fire, but quickly made an important realisation, which in turn replaced any concern evident on his face with a smile and a laugh. He watched Harvey shake and squirm his way out from underneath the dead body, no sign of life remaining inside of its bloodied shell.

  “It’s already dead”, John pointed out as Harvey scrambled to his feet and took aim with his own weapon.

  “Jesus!”, Harvey exclaimed as he tried to catch his breath.

  John meanwhile continued to laugh, as he himself moved towards the rear of the trailer. Upon catching his first glimpse of its contents however, he found himself similarly shocked.

  “Yeah”, he said, “Jesus sounds about right”.

  Harvey turned to see what John was talking about, only for his jaw to drop open as he laid eyes on what appeared to be a huge stash of various products, ready and waiting to be unloaded, stored away in an almost half-full trailer.

  “Holy shit”, he concurred, “They must have been unloading it when these things came in”.

  “Actually”, John remarked, looking back to what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound on the most recently discovered body, and a similar uniform on all three of the previous undead, “I’m thinking
it was the people waiting to unload it who turned”.

  “Who cares”, Harvey said excitedly, himself now climbing up into the truck to inspect the haul, rubbing his hands together as if preparing for the world’s biggest meal.

  At the front of all the boxes were bags of snacks, chocolate bars, assorted candy and all manner of things that whilst far from a necessity – and at least partially expired – might do morale back at camp a world of good. There were bottles of fizzy drinks, rotten bread that was thankfully still bagged up, dishwasher tablets, DVDs and light bulbs. For every decent, usable item, there was another that was either completely useless, or so long out of date that it would be dangerous to consume.

  Soon John joined Harvey in rummaging around the stash and began helping split up the good and the bad. Various rotten fruits and vegetables were creating an almighty stench, and had to be separated out quickly, and plenty of packaging was piled high behind the first set of products, used to make sure things didn’t move around the trailer too much when driving. Before long, the duo had almost completed the first section of items, and in doing so had assembled two fairly large piles of items, one good, and one bad. John was happy with the haul, and knew that they were already verging on filling up the Nissan. But he also knew there was more to come, and so began removing some of the cardboard separating them and the next section of the trailer.

  “Holy…”, he struggled to say.

  “What?” Harvey asked, before himself realising what John had uncovered.

  In front of both men, behind the stock they’d already been ecstatic to find, were huge boxes filled with neatly stacked cans, and bottles of water lining the sides right up to the ceiling. It was an incredible find, and one that both men couldn’t quite believe they were actually staring at.

  The supermarket had obviously been in the process of shipping essentials out to be sold, but had chosen to hide them behind less sought-after items in a bid to stop people from trying to steal from the trucks. The reality of the situation was that this had probably been the company’s last efforts to get people food and water, but having been interrupted mid-unload, this haul of goods had simply been sat here, ripe for the taking, yet wasting away.