by T. Gault
I nod my head and trade Dad my shotgun for his Glock. I slide in through the opening in the door and quickly scan the room. I do not see any carriers. I look over by the carrier stuck to the chair and see a pair of revolvers lying on the floor next to him. I look to my left and see the hallway leading to the front of the store. I turn to check the door for a latch to open and see that there is a small bolt holding the door shut. The bending of the door has also bent the lock. I cannot open the lock.
“Door is jammed. Moving toward the front,” I whisper to Dad just before I start to slowly move down the hall. I hear a shuffling noise up ahead. I freeze and wait. I reach to my waistband with my right hand while holding the Glock with my left hand. I pull out a small hatchet. A female carrier stumbles out into the hallway. She has not seen me. I stand still and she starts to lumber toward me. I slow my breathing and wait for her to get into range. I quickly bury the blade into her skull. The hatchet is stuck and I let go as the corpse falls to the floor. I slowly walk backward and wait to see if another carrier heard the noise.
I do not hear anything. I keep my eyes on the end of the hallway and lean down to recover my hatchet. I place my foot against her head and pull. The blade slides out and I continue down the hall. I can see some of the room ahead by the moonlight coming in through cracks between the boards covering the windows. Slowly I lean my head into the doorway to see the rest of the room. I see the front door of the store and it appears to be dead-bolted and has several boards nailed into it to hold it shut. I can see the shelving where ammunition and gun supplies would be placed for sale. I can also see to my right, a wall with several assault rifles and shotguns mounted to it. The smell in this room is different. It’s more rancid and, for the first time in a long time, the smell is getting to me.
I hear a shuffle coming from behind the sales counter. The shuffle is not a staggering walk, but more like a struggle. I shine my dim flashlight behind the counter to five of them tugging at some unrecognizable fleshy mass on the floor. I slowly step backward, knowing that I would not have a chance if I took on all five of them with my hatchet, and I am not inside the store to use more bullets. They did not notice me poking my head inside. I walk toward the door that I came in through, keeping my eyes on the hallway. I stumble over something on the floor. It is the female’s corpse. I drop my flashlight to the floor. The clatter from the flashlight will catch the attention of the five carriers I saw. I quicken my pace toward the door. I see one of them limping across the hallway and slam into the wall. He has seen me. I need to get outside. I am standing at the door but the door is bent in a way that I cannot fit back through.
“Get on the other side of the door in the hall,” says Dad.
I pull away from the door just before one of them lunges at me. I swing my hatchet and sink it into the right side of the carrier’s head. Again the hatchet has stuck and is pulled out of my hand. I slide backward and see Dad’s shotgun barrel slide in through the opening as two more carriers start down the hall toward me. Dad blasts one of the carriers in the side of the head, but the second one makes it past the door before he can charge the shotgun for another shot. I pull out my Glock and fire. The shot strikes the carrier in the head, sending his body into me. He is heavy and I am having trouble getting him off of me. Another one is coming down the hall. The carrier stuck to the chair is only a couple feet away from me and I can hear him desperately tearing at the chair to get free. I see Dad blast the next one as it comes down the hall, but the shot only hits the carrier in the shoulder and throws it into the wall. It starts to get back up and I take several shots to hit it in the head.
I see the fifth carrier walking very slowly down the hall toward me. His head is very steady and I have time to line up the shot. The Glock only makes a click when I pull the trigger. I rack the slide and see the dud bullet come out of the chamber. The slide locks back on its own. The magazine is empty.
“Dad I’m out!” I yell and struggle to get free from the corpse on top of me, but it’s no use.
The narrow hallway and lack of a recent meal has left me weak. I hear Dad’s shotgun fire again, but he is not shooting at anything inside the building. He is defending himself outside. I hear the chair behind me topple over and know that the carrier in the chair is now free. The corpse slowly walking down the hallway is now only about five feet from me and I hear the one behind me getting closer.
I hear Dad’s muffled shotgun blast one last time before I see the face of the carrier in the hallway. It is Curtis.
CHAPTER 15 - Home...
I jerked to a sudden state of awareness and found myself pointing the Glock toward the tailgate of the truck. I also could hear something in the cab of the truck. The first light of the morning had started to seep into the bed of the truck, but my eyes were still adjusting from the rough night of sleep. The noise in the cab sounded slow, but deliberate. I peered over the edge of the bed and could see that a carrier had fallen in through the window and was repeatedly trying to get itself back up. It was lodged between the dashboard and the front of the seat and was not making any headway.
I looked out into the parking lot. Somehow, the crowd had disbursed. Then I heard it. At first I thought I was hearing things, but I heard it again. A muffled shotgun blast and it sounded close. I watched the last few carriers in the parking lot gravitating toward the back of the store. I turned and looked inside the store just in time to see a figure running into the store from the ladder. The person looked to be running toward the ammunition shelving. I saw a quick flash of light reflecting off of a bladed weapon as the individual decapitated a carrier standing in his way.
“Matt?” I said quietly as I stared in disbelief.
The figure also stopped by the gun case and picked out a handgun and loaded it into a rucksack. I slid toward the tailgate and carefully opened it. I didn’t know if it was Matt and I also didn’t know what they would do if they saw me. They started to move toward the open area around the truck and the sunlight washed over his face. It was Matt. Just as I caught sight of him, he noticed me standing next to the truck.
“Good, you’re not dead. Get your crap. We’ve got a hike ahead of us,” he said with no emotion.
I quickly walked up to the passenger’s side window and grabbed hold of the legs dangling out of the broken window. I pulled the corpse out until its head was in range. Matt jabbed his machete into the carrier’s neck and twisted until the head fell to the ground. I dropped the remains to the rubble next to the truck and reached under the seat. I felt a relief like never before when I grasped that video camera. The information on that tape was one of the only glimpses of hope I could find.
“Okay, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover and a whole lot of walking corpses between us and where we want to be,” said Matt as he walked out into the parking lot.
I remembered what I tried to tell Jim just before the walkie cut out, “I told Jim that I would be at the Game Stop or at least I tried to. This stupid thing kept cutting out. What if they come looking for me there?”
Matt stopped walking and let out a breath, “Do you know for a fact that he heard you?”
“No I can’t guarantee he heard me,” I said as I recalled the conversation. “I could barely understand anything he was saying when I responded.”
“Look, I remember the way to the church,” said Matt. “If we can just find a car or something, we’ll get there before they even come looking. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want to go wait at Game Stop hoping someone will come.”
I nodded and gathered the rest of my things, “You’re probably right,” I said as I started to walk with Matt.
As we quickly but carefully put distance between us and the sporting goods store, I turned and looked back one last time. I almost felt the same sense of loss that I had felt about my own home. We had only been there for a couple of days, but it became home.
Matt and I came to an open stretch of road between the sporting goods store and the church. There we
ren’t many carriers in the area and the few we did see were easily avoided or quickly taken out.
“So, Matt what happened back there? I thought for sure you were dead,” I asked.
Matt stopped and raised his eyebrows at me, “Really? After all the crap we’ve made it through, you thought that was it for me?”
“Well, I knew you were behind me, but then you were gone and the van left. What was I supposed to think?” I said.
Matt continued to walk and said, “I thought they had knocked you to the ground and that was it for you.”
“So you saw me fall and you didn’t try to help?” I asked, becoming annoyed.
“Look, you know me somewhat by now. I’m not into taking unnecessary risks. I saw you fall, they were all around you, and they were all around me. If I ran in there to get you and you had already been bitten or worse...then I would be standing in the middle of the crowd with nowhere to go and no reason to be there,” said Matt.
On one hand I could understand Matt’s logic, but on the other hand…I would have gone in after him. I wasn’t happy about the fact that Matt didn’t try to help me, but I was happy to be making the trip back to the church with him watching my back.
“So, what did you do since you didn’t come after me and you didn’t make it back onto the van?” I asked.
“I tried to make it back to the van, but Curtis just doesn’t have any patience. Although, if I’m honest with myself, I would have left the parking lot the second someone got out of the van. I wouldn’t have even waited as long as Curtis did,” said Matt.
“Like I said before...what did you do?” I asked again.
“The rope. I climbed the rope and I camped out on the roof all night. It was actually kind of peaceful. I wish I had done it before we lost the store,” said Matt.
“Oh, well, I had the pleasure of sitting in the back of my truck surrounded by carriers and was woken up by one crawling in through the window,” I responded.
“Eh, stop being a baby. You’re alive and not bitten,” Matt said with a smirk.
It was funny to think about how quickly we could have made the trip to the church if we had a car, but on foot the handful of miles seemed to take all day. While we walked I thought about the video camera in my bag. I hadn’t tried to view the video at all since I had taken it from my house. I had found the charger for the camera, but the power was already out at the church. I had no idea when or even if I would come in contact with a working power outlet. Most of the modern video equipment was all memory cards or disks and I doubted that anyone would have anything capable of playing a digital videotape. I wondered if the content of the video would be anything more than Thomas telling me about what had happened to him and slowly drifting away. I couldn’t think like that though. I had to believe that there was something important he wanted to tell me.
Neither of us had had any water that day, and the sun was surprisingly hot for the fall season. We kept walking as quickly as we both could move, but by the minute that pace became slower and slower. I was ready to sit down and rest when a yellow flapping strand caught my eye up ahead. I stopped and rubbed my eyes thinking I might be seeing things, but I saw it flap up into the air again. There were tree lines on both sides of the road ahead of us. I pointed toward the object and tapped Matt’s shoulder. We had learned over the hours of walking, it was better to avoid talking, as much as possible. The carriers all seemed to pick up on us talking and come at us faster. Matt and I tried to pick up the pace, but it didn’t boost our speed much. As we neared the place where I had seen the yellow strip, I realized it was tied to something on the side of the road and there were cars and trucks all in a heap nearby. It was a strip of caution or crime scene tape. Matt and I didn’t know whether to be excited about it or to try to stay away from it. We both decided that there might be supplies somewhere around it.
As we stepped up to the tape we could see that the tape had been ripped on both sides. That was what I saw flapping in the wind. I could see tire skid marks on the pavement on the far side of the scene. I couldn’t tell if the scene was something that happened prior to or after this all started. I walked around the side of one of the vehicles and saw the lower half of what appeared to be a police officer and noticed blood streaks and small bits of flesh all over the highway. The officer didn’t appear to have been eaten. It looked more like a truck hit him. I stood on the hood of one of the vehicles and could see a truck about a mile up the road. The truck had slid into a ditch on the right side of the road.
It looked like the police were already investigating something in that area and that truck came flying through the scene. The cars looked like they had been moved from their original position, but there was no way to tell if they had been beside the truck or moved after that. I looked down into the ditch near the left shoulder of the road and could see the mangled police vehicle buried in the mud. The trunk was deformed but still intact.
Matt looked at me and shrugged his shoulders, “You know what...cops carry a lot of supplies sometimes. Not that I know personally, but I would assume they might have guns in their trunks.” He walked toward the vehicle.
“Alright, take a quick look, but I don’t want to hang around here for too long. I’ve got a bad feeling about the woods out here,” I said, turning to look at the opposite side of the road.
“I know, but if there is a rifle in here, like an M-16 or something…I just can’t pass that up,” Matt said as he walked around to the front of the car. He reached inside and appeared to be trying to find a button or something.
“I seriously doubt the trunk release will work. Look at that thing,” I said with a nervous chuckle, as I continued to scan the area.
Matt stepped away from the door and threw a plastic bottle at me. The bottle was only half full of water, but even the sight of that much water was exciting. I quickly reached down and picked up the bottle. It was dirty, but at the time I didn’t care. I opened the bottle and took a sip, and to my surprise the water still tasted okay. I put the water into my book bag and returned to watching the area. Matt looked like he was starting to get pretty mad that he couldn’t get the trunk open. I looked around the scene for anything that might help. I looked in the back of a pickup truck sitting on the scene and found a shovel in the bed. I handed the shovel to Matt and he jammed the spade into the small opening on the trunk. He pried and strained to get the trunk open, but didn’t seem to be having any success. The noise he was making made me nervous too.
“Okay, I think it’s time to let it go Matt,” I said.
“But I’ve almost got it,” replied Matt.
“This isn’t like you. I know it would be nice to have a machine gun or whatever, but I have a feeling we are going to have some company in a minute. This is taking a risk for something we don’t even know is in there,” I said.
Matt stopped and looked at me, “You know, you’re right. I don’t know why I’m doing this.” He threw the shovel onto the ground and started to climb back up out of the ditch.
“Do you think any of these cars still have the keys?” I asked.
“Well, I’m going to bet they don’t. Most people would probably keep their keys,” said Matt.
“I think we should look inside all of them just in case,” I said.
I walked over to an old, beat-up sedan. I couldn’t even tell what the make of the vehicle was. Matt aimed a little higher and walked over to a Mercedes. I chuckled to myself as Matt walked toward the luxury car. I opened the driver’s-side door and checked under the floor mat and checked the sun visor, but did not see the keys. I glanced down at the ignition and there they were. I pulled the keys out and stepped out of the car. A jingle noise from Matt’s hand let me know that he had also found the key to his car. I looked down at my worn set of keys and dropped them to the ground.
“Lucky you. Let’s get out of here,” I said as I walked toward Matt.
“Let’s head back to the church in style,” said Matt with a grin.
I wal
ked around to the passenger’s side and opened the door. The corpse of a man sat in the seat. In the top of his head was a gaping hole. I stepped back and could see a dent in the roof from the bullet.
“You could have said something,” I said.
“Ha, yeah, I could have,” said Matt as he walked around to the passenger’s side and pulled the corpse out onto the ground.
A large revolver was lying on the floorboard of the passenger’s side. Once the body was outside, it was clear to see that the man had shot himself, but with the open road and the keys to the car still in the ignition, I couldn’t see why he would have done it.
Matt sat down in the driver’s seat and gripped the steering wheel. He reached over and put the key into the ignition. Nothing, not even the click of the starter. The battery was completely dead or there was something else wrong with it.
“Style, huh?” I said, smirking.
“Well, I guess we know why he shot himself. I wouldn’t have wanted to leave this car sitting here by itself either,” Matt said as he got out of the car.
