by T. Gault
“Give me the keys!” I yelled at him.
“But I need to reload...” Curtis said, half in a daze.
I reached my hand into his pocket and pulled out the keys. I shoved him away from the door and unlocked it. I climbed into the driver’s seat and climbed across to the passenger’s seat.
“Get in or I’m going to leave without you!” I yelled at Curtis.
He snapped out of his daze and jumped into the driver’s seat, but when he tried to pull the door shut I saw a decaying pair of hands reach in through the opening in the door. They grabbed onto him and started to pull him out of the van. I pulled out my Glock and tried to get a shot. Curtis started to flail his arms and scream. I saw a head pop up and I took the shot. I saw a splatter of blood on the driver’s door and Curtis fell the rest of the way out of the seat. I pushed the key into the ignition and started the van. I was about to slide into the driver’s seat when I saw a form stand up outside of the van door. It was Curtis, beginning to stomp the head of the corpse violently.
“Get in the van now!” I yelled at him.
He finally got into the driver’s seat and threw the gearshift into reverse. I looked behind the van and realized that there was an enormous crowd starting to form near the church. Curtis navigated the best he could through the sea of bodies, but we found ourselves inching our way through. I thought the van was going to get stuck at one point, but we slowly made our way out. When we finally made it past the edge of the large crowd I could hear that we were dragging something under the van. Curtis wanted to get the body out from under the van, but I told him to just keep driving. We could hear the grinding, thumping noise for several blocks until finally there was one last big thump. I looked in the rearview mirror to see what came out from under the van, but I really could not recognize it as anything. We both sat silent for a few minutes, just driving. But I couldn’t keep my mouth shut any longer.
“What the crap was that back there?” I said.
“What? It came at me and I...” Curtis started to say.
“You can’t do that. You could have handled that one without the gun. We just needed to unlock the van. That was it,” I said.
“Okay, how about you shooting at my head? What was with that?” Curtis said.
“Are you serious? I saved your life,” I said, glaring at Curtis.
“I had it under control,” said Curtis.
“Yeah, I could tell by the screaming,” I said.
Curtis sat quiet for a second. “I would have had it.”
“Look, just stay off the trigger for as long as you can. They are not difficult to shove away or to the ground. You just have to be quick,” I explained.
“Alright...I think we’re getting close to the drug store,” said Curtis.
The drug store looked like it had been turned into a spur-of-the-moment triage location. There were military vehicles around the building and civilian vehicles parked everywhere around. Both of us became very excited at the sight of government intervention. We saw a soldier in National Guard fatigues stumbling around the corner of the building as we parked the vehicle as close as we could with the cluster of abandoned vehicles. I could see that Curtis was anxious to see if the military had found a cure for the infection. I was more hesitant to approach the building. I had a concern for what the military personnel might do to defend their camp. Getting shot wasn’t part of the plan. Curtis started to get out of the van, but I grabbed his arm and pointed at his shotgun, with my eyebrows raised. He looked at me, confused for a moment, but eventually patted his pocket and pulled out two shells. He loaded his shotgun and I topped off my Glock magazine.
“Okay, remember, we are here to get the medicine. That’s all. We are not here to go shopping or to try to find out anything. This needs to be quick,” I said quietly.
“But they might have a cure or know what happened,” Curtis said.
We walked cautiously toward the camp. The military had put up some temporary chain link fences around the area. I could see the main gate to the enclosed area and an SUV had been rammed through the gate.
“We don’t even know if there are any people still alive here. I doubt there are. There would be more activity. There would be military personnel guarding the place. There would be...people...not empty cars,” I said.
“Psst, no shooting,” I whispered as I put my Glock away and pulled out my sword. “Use the butt of the shotgun.”
We quickly and quietly navigated our way through the discarded vehicles, watchful as we passed each one. Curtis glanced inside some of them when he walked past, but he was not very thorough. I slowed as we approached the military vehicles. There was a large amount of dried blood on the ground around the Hummers. I looked inside of one when we walked past and could see the body of a service member still strapped into the seat. Someone had put a bullet through his head. I could also see that he had been bitten on the neck at some point. I guess the military did have a plan for dealing with bites.
I continued past the Hummer and could finally see the front of the store. We squeezed through the gate between the SUV and the mangled fence. The front of the SUV was ripped to shreds by gunfire. The driver was still in the seat or at least what was left.
Most of the glass on the front of the store had been shattered. Curtis started walking past the front of the store to where the soldier had been walking when we pulled up. I kept my eyes on the store and followed after him. The camouflaged man was easy to spot, stumbling along in the distance. His clothing fit loosely, and he walked with almost no coordination. He was a carrier. The sight of him brought several different thoughts. By the look of the camp, I was doubtful that the government had found an effective cure. I also doubted that there were living people inside of the drug store. I put my hand on Curtis’ shoulder.
“C’mon, let’s get that medicine,” I said quietly.
“Yeah, let’s go,” said Curtis.
I watched the parking lot while Curtis tried to find a good placed to get inside. We didn’t want to walk across the broken glass, because any of them inside the store would hear us coming. After circling the building, we found a door on the back of the building that appeared to lead into a storage area. There was a huge pile of burned bodies behind the store. The fire looked like it had gone out a long time ago. Nothing was left but bones.
The back door had been breached at some point and it was impossible to shut it. Curtis stood on the side of the door and pulled it open while I stood ready with my sword for anything standing inside. The door squeaked slightly, but there was nothing waiting for us on the other side. While we were moving into the camp, we hadn’t noticed the rain clouds starting to blanket the sky. The rain started coming down and increased the urgency of making our way inside. We quickly went inside and out of the rain.
We pulled the door closed again as much as we could and made our way into the store. I could see the light coming from another door leading to the main sales floor. We made our way there and it didn’t seem that any corpses had made their way inside through the back door. The door to the sales floor was locked, but it looked like the doors opened inward to the store. Curtis and I looked at the lock and tried to think of some way to unlock the doors quietly, but we both decided that we were going about getting into the store all wrong. We went back out the rear door to the store and decided to carefully go in through the broken front windows.
Neither of us was happy about standing in the rain and really just wanted to get the medicine and get back to the church. The noise from the rain muffled the sound from our feet on the shards of glass as we crept into the store. I could see where they had moved most of the shelving out of the sales floor area and had crammed as many cots inside as they could comfortably fit. Most of the cots still had bodies lying in them. Each one had been shot in the head. A few of them had IV bags hooked up to them. The bags were partially filled with a greenish-brown material. I thought it was most likely just rotten from being connected to the dead bodies. But I loo
ked closely at the corpses on the cots and noticed that the same color sludge had been draining out of their mouths.
Curtis didn’t even look at the bodies for a split second. He was too focused on finding the medicine for Frannie. I still wasn’t sure how we were going to figure out what to give her or how much of it. We couldn’t search for it on the Internet. There wasn’t enough time to stop by a library to look for medical books and we wouldn’t even know what we were looking for to begin with.
Curtis walked right past several areas of the store we hadn’t checked yet. His eyes were locked on a shelf behind the pharmacy counter. I tried to catch up to him before he crawled over the counter, but he had too much of a lead on me. Just before I reached the counter, a carrier dressed in a hazmat suit lunged at me from my left side. She latched onto my left forearm with her boney fingers. She immediately started trying to pull it into her mouth. I jerked and pulled to get free, but her fingers had been worn down to the bone from clawing at something. The jagged tips of her fingers ripped into my sweatshirt and cut into my arm.
I couldn’t get a good bladed stroke with my sword in my right hand. I punched her in the face with the butt of the sword several times with no results. She held on tight. I looked at the counter and saw Curtis jumping back over. He swung the butt of his shotgun and beat her in the head until her body went limp and fell to the ground. I grabbed the fingers of her left hand and pried them out of my arm. I was enraged and thankful to Curtis at the same time. I wanted to shoot him for rushing into the store, but she had not bitten me. I was scratched, like Frannie. I looked at the still twitching military woman on the floor and began to kick her head repeatedly and stab her with my sword randomly.
“Dude, calm down,” said Curtis from behind me.
Curtis’ statement only enraged me more. I had put up with a lot from Matt and Curtis over the last couple of days. I felt a surge of dark thoughts begin to flow through my mind. I looked down at my sword and thought about hacking him in the head. I was so unsure about what was going to happen to me. Was I infected or was I just going to get sick like his sister? I didn’t want to go through either. I stared at him thinking about how I could just kill him and head back to the church and tell the others whatever I wanted. There would be no investigation. No one would go looking for his body. None of them would question my story.
Curtis began to look uncomfortable as I stared at him, “We’re at the pharmacy now. We can get you something to help with your arm. They’ve probably got bandages and everything here,” said Curtis.
He was right. Panicking and overreacting would get me killed quicker than any infected cut would. Now this search for the right antibiotic was personal.
“You’re right,” I said as I took a deep breath. “First let’s make sure there are no more in here. Then we can gather everything we can find.”
Curtis and I checked every possible place inside the store that might have a corpse hiding and—lucky me—I had been attacked by the only one inside. We found a couple large lunch boxes for sale inside the store and Curtis filled one with all the pills he could stuff inside. I told him to get everything with “-cillin” in the name and also some pain relief medicine. Somehow he was able to name more pain medicine than I had ever heard of. I went to the first-aid aisle to gather gauze bandages, medical tape and hydrogen peroxide. I pulled back my sleeve and dumped most of a bottle over the cut on my arm before we left the store. I wrapped the wound and we carefully wove our way back through the vehicles in the parking lot.
We put the lunch boxes in the van and I started to get in. Curtis hesitated and stared at me.
“There is more stuff inside that store we could use,” he said.
“Yeah, but we need to get back to your sister, remember?” I said.
“You know there are all of those stores out there and we are probably the only people still alive for miles around. None of us have changed our clothes since day one and I don’t know about you, but I really want to,” said Curtis.
I looked down at my gray, dirty sweatshirt and my muddy, bloodstained jeans. “Yeah, I would love to change my clothes, but we need to get back.”
“I mean, I wasn’t saying we should do it right now. I was just thinking...you know,” said Curtis as he climbed into the driver’s seat.
We headed back to the church and Curtis was driving slightly more aggressively than he had originally. I was anxious to get back and finally be able to rest, so I didn’t tell him to slow down. I could ask someone else to make the next couple of supply runs. I tried to think about other things, but I could not stop thinking about my arm. The cut burned and I thought about playing it safe and doing what Tracey had done for Sid. I just couldn’t shake the thought that Frannie had lasted way longer than any bite victim and she didn’t seem to be going through the same process as they did. I didn’t feel sick. My arm just hurt and I felt hungry again. I was, most of all, angry at myself. I should have been watching for threats to myself before I worried about what Curtis was doing.
As we closed in on the church I could see that the noise Curtis had made when we left the church had drawn quite a crowd. Curtis slowed to a stop about a block from the church.
“So what now?” Said Curtis.
I thought for a moment. “I guess if they followed the sound once, they will do it again.”
“What...shoot my shotgun again?” Curtis asked.
“Yeah, but shoot into the crowd. We might as well take some of them out. You know, so we’re not really wasting the ammo,” I said.
“But what are we going to do when they start surrounding the van?”
“We’re going to have to move further down the block. What we need to do is make sure there is another route to the church before we start this though,” I said.
We drove around and found that there was a street that looped around to the other side of the church. That road was more littered with abandoned vehicles and the houses in that area appeared to have suffered from a fire that had made its way from one house to the next. Curtis and I set up on that side of the church, hoping that the carriers would get partially trapped in the maze of derelict cars. Curtis stepped one leg out of the van and shot off one of the shells. I could see the aimless lumbering of the crowd change into a more focused effort to locate the source of the noise. I could see Curtis starting to panic slightly. I held up my index finger and told him to wait. We needed the crowd to start to weave into the cars before we tried for the church. When the carriers started to come through the cars and were able to move more quickly toward us, I pointed at Curtis and he fired his second shot. The crowd began to surge toward us and Curtis quickly slid back into the driver’s seat and pulled his door shut.
Curtis drove around the block at a fairly slow pace to make sure the carriers were going to keep following us. He maintained that pace until the church was back in sight. I told him to gun the gas and get us there. There were only a few slow carriers left in front of the church as we rolled into the parking lot. I could see Matt on the roof, looking down at us, as we stopped and got out of the van. The others inside of the church had heard the shots and seemed to have figured out what we were doing. Curtis and I got out of the van with the lunch boxes of supplies and ran for the front door of the church. The door popped open just before we reached for the handle. Rev stepped out and watched for any corpses trying to follow us inside. Curtis and I ran into the open door and Rev stepped in behind us.
Beth was standing just inside the door along with Rev, Sid, and Jim. They were all trying not to look Curtis in the eyes for some reason. Beth looked like she had been crying. They all looked like there was something they needed to tell him, but no one wanted to say it. Finally Beth couldn’t hold it in any longer.
“I’m so sorry. I...I checked on her a little while ago and she...wasn’t breathing,” she said, holding back more tears.
Curtis just stared at her for a few seconds. “She needs her medicine...I got it for her.”
Be
th let go and the tears started flowing. She stepped toward Curtis to hug him, but he pushed her back and took off running down the hall. The rest of us stood still. I had so many thoughts running through my head. I couldn’t believe that we just went through all of that for nothing. He almost died. I almost died and I got scratched just like Frannie was. Now she’s dead. I wondered what would happen to me. Would I get sick like that and die? It was all for nothing. I had to know and see for myself if she was really dead. I ran down the hall after Curtis and found him standing outside the room. He had his hand on the doorknob, but wouldn’t open the door.
