by Crane, J. J.
We took one more pass around the front of the stores; saw all the windows and doors on the pizzeria, shoe store, Chinese restaurant, dance studio, game store, and hair salon were secured.
“Looks like a good candidate,” Max noted.
“Surprising no one has tried to break in,” Linda offered.
“Either the area was hit hard with the virus or no one could figure out how to get through that glass,” Ted said.
“Couldn’t you shoot through it?” Dave asked.
“Bring a lot of attention to yourself,” Max answered.
“Could drive a car through it,” Linda said.
“That would be a desperate move,” Ted said.
“Desperate times… as the expression goes,” Max countered.
“Like Max said, this is an excellent candidate to come back to, close to home. We’ll figure out how to get in later,” I said. “Let’s move on to the next one.”
At the next pharmacy, about ten minutes away, we instantly noticed someone blew the front door open.
I looked at Dave. “Didn’t you and June say this was intact?”
“It was,” Dave said.
“Which means someone is alive and well,” Max said.
“And they have some of the same problems we do,” Ted said.
We sat parked in front of the pharmacy waiting to see if anyone would approach. After a few minutes, I suggested that Ted and myself check things out, to see exactly what was missing. The proposal met with tentative nods.
Ted and I only needed to take a few steps to peer into the store. The morning light streamed in, illuminating the interior well enough that we could see deep into it. Most of the isles that we could see remained intact.
“They went straight for the drugs and food,” Ted said.
“No doubt,” I said. “Want to go in?”
“Do we have to?” Ted asked.
I turned back to the truck where I saw Linda, Max, and Dave looking at us like we were walking on the moon for the first time. “Should we go in?”
“No way,” Linda said. “Get back in the car. This is a scouting expedition.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I turned to Ted. “You heard the lady. Let’s go.”
Our report to the community was simple. One pharmacy was intact the other, breached. The only thing left to do was assemble a team to go back to the first pharmacy. Everyone from the scout trip volunteered. Katie asked Dave to stay behind, and as much as I appreciated Linda coming out to scout, I asked she step back and let Jason fill her spot. Linda put up a mild protest, but her son Paul and husband, Steve, pleaded she stay behind. She relented. Peter Kenderdine asked to come, and lastly, we needed Doc. Without him, we wouldn’t know what to look for except the items written on the paper.
For this mission, we opted to set out an hour and a half before sunset and bring two vehicles. Any survivors that might be around probably were close to home or indoors with the onset of night coming. It was how we operated, and we figured the same natural reaction would apply elsewhere. As primitive as it sounded, night time brought about feelings of danger. Homes provided safety.
Dark clouds hung in the sky accommodated by a chilly breeze as we pulled into the strip mall. Max came to a stop well before the pharmacy. I followed suit. At first, I had no idea why. Then I spotted it. A small cluster of leaves caught up in a whirlwind, twirled around as if dancing a ballet across the desolate parking lot. The display lingered. It had a certain hypnotic poetry to it.
Doc snapped his fingers to grab my attention. “The matters at hand,” he said flatly.
“Absolutely,” I said, jumping back into reality. I pulled up next to Max. “When you daisies get done watching leaves can we get to business?” They laughed.
We pulled around to the back of the pharmacy. Getting out of the car, a different air set in. We became nervous. None of us had ever broken into anything. Not that we expected the police to arrive, but the notion of breaking and entering wasn’t something anyone ever conceived before.
“Someone should stay with the cars,” Ted said.
“Two people,” Max said. “Two sets of eyes to keep watch. You never know.”
Ted and Peter stayed with the cars.
With all the doors to the pharmacy locked, Jason, Max, Doc, and I looked for a window to enter through. The second floor had small ones but nothing we could access. We didn’t initially want to smash the front windows because of the noise. We tried prying the front and rear doors with a crowbar, but they didn’t budge.
“Shit,” Max said. “Well… we don’t have much choice. Anyone want to bet me I can get this handle off with one swing?”
“Just do it, Hercules,” I said, no time for betting games.
He lifted his rifle above his shoulder and drove with all his might the butt of the weapon onto the doorknob of the back door. It crashed with a loud metallic thud. The knob ripped off the door and spun around on the ground like a top, much to our astonishment.
“Wow, you did it,” I said.
“I’m surprised myself,” he shot back.
Doc looked at the door, put his hand in the hole where the knob was and pulled. “Shit,” he groaned. “Dead-bolted.”
“What?” Max yelled.
“The deadbolt is still holding the door shut,” Doc said as he reached in and felt around. “And the bolt isn’t any easy turnkey.”
“What are we going to do now?” Jason asked.
Max positioned his rifle as a battering ram. “I’m going to smash the front window in, enter and come to the back. Once I open the door, we’re gonna empty this place out.”
“That’s the spirit there, Jesse James,” I said in hearing how Max expressed himself with his over the top confidence.
“Got a better idea?” he quipped.
“Nope,” I answered right away. “Do what you gotta do.”
“How about giving me cover while I do this?” he said to me.
For a second, I froze. I never provided ‘cover.’ I had no concept of what that reality could even entail outside of movies.
“Let’s go, cowboy,” Max snapped.
Max tried smashing the front door window with his rifle. The thickness of the glass repelled his efforts, nearly throwing him to the ground as the butt of his weapon came flying back into his face. He asked for my shotgun.
“What do you have in this thing?”
“Buckshot, slug, buckshot, slug, combination,” I replied.
Max smiled. “Nicely done. Perfect for what I need.”
We stepped back no more than ten yards. Max aimed and fired two rapid shots. The sound of thick glass shattered like soprano pitched scratches across a blackboard. I winced at the noise. When silence once again took over, we cleared the debris, then entered the store. Weaving through the deserted aisles, shelves intact, full of inventory, we found the back door. A key coded bolt kept us from opening the door. Shouting through the door, we warned the others to stand back. Max fired three shots with his rifle into the bolt area of the door before it finally gave enough that we could open it.
“That was easy,” Max said, happy with himself. “Loud, but not as hard as I thought.”
Doc entered, scanned the area where the pharmacists worked. He jiggled the door handle to the pharmacy section. To all our surprises it opened. “Let’s get this done,” Doc said.
I gathered shopping baskets, and garbage cans then passed them around to Jason, Max, and Doc. Doc handed Max a handwritten list of items to take from the shelves in the pharmacist’s area and pointed to where he wanted him to start.
Doc then turned to Jason and me and instructed us to grab as many aspirins, ibuprofens, vitamins, cough/cold syrups, eye drops, creams, bandages, compresses, as much as we could from the over-the-counter section of the pharmacy including any devices that looked like they were for testing blood, urine,
or stool.
With frantic sweeping motions, we cleared off the shelves
and ran the goods out to the
car, dumped them in and ran back. The book and newspaper section happened to be across from the vitamins, and so I grabbed everything there, knowing people would want something new to read. We even took every tampon product we could find and anything that looked like it had to do with feminine hygiene.
My eyes then widened like a seven-year old on Christmas morning. Food. I couldn’t believe there was an entire aisle of chips, soda, and candy. Almost frantically, I cleared off the shelves into one garbage can, then found another and pulled as much stuff until both vessels were overflowing. I knew as vital as it was to get all the other supplies, this find would go over with the greatest of joy when revealed to the neighborhood.
After about another twenty minutes of clearing the shelves of other items, like razors, toothpaste, soap, and shampoos, Doc asked me to shoot open another door that had a padlock keeping it secure. With one blast of the shotgun, the small lock and hinge broke apart. The door opened with ease.
Doc smiled wide at the extra supply of more expensive antibiotics and painkillers. There was also a refrigerator containing vials of insulin. A backup battery power source next to the fridge must have only recently died because a slight chill remained inside.
“I hope this stuff is still viable,” Doc said as he began carefully organizing the bounty.
Meanwhile, outside, Peter and Ted kept an eye out. The gunshots made them jumpy that someone heard the blast and wanted to investigate. Ted walked a small route to the front of the pharmacy and back, making sure he could see all the angles around the strip mall. Peter stayed back and watched the vehicles.
On one of Ted’s rounds where he walked out of sight from the cars, Peter noticed, to his horror, three people emerge from the woods, right in front of him, not thirty feet away. He didn’t hear them at all, not a crack of a twig or leaf-crumble underfoot. Two women and a man dressed in camouflage gear made their way from the top of a small berm behind the back of the pharmacy and down onto the pavement. All of them wore green, brown, and black face paint smeared sloppily as if applied with their eyes closed. The man stood in the middle with the women flanking him. He didn’t take his eyes off Peter. The two women scanned the area, looking more like zombies, their sunken eyes wide and unblinking.
“Whatcha all think you’re doing here?” the scraggly, long-haired, bearded man asked. He held an old beat up looking rifle in his hands, ready to swing it into action.
Peter stood stun struck before finally speaking. “We have a friend who’s sick. We needed a place to get drugs to treat him.”
“Yeah, we saw someone come around looking earlier this morning. That wouldn’t happen to be you, folks?”
“No,” Peter stuttered, not sure how to answer.
The taller of the two women, an emaciated blonde, produced a phone and showed it to the man, all the while keeping her eyes on the scene.
The man gave a glance at the picture she produced. “Like hell. This looks just like the car we spotted earlier.” The man’s face turned gruff. He appeared to be in his forties, tall, over six feet. “Just so you know… this is my area. I’m claiming it, and you and your friends are trespassing. So now unless you got something to trade, you ain’t leaving here breathing.” The man raised his gun up to chest level and pointed it at Peter.
“We don’t have anything. We have stuff back at our houses.”
The man chuckled. “I ain’t never been the smartest man in the room, but I’ve also never been the most stupid…you must think I’m some kind of fool.”
“No, sir.”
“Sneaky bastards. I don’t like sneaky bastards. Never did. Do we?”
“No, we don’t,” the girls said in near unison.
“If you shoot me, they’ll come out. They’re armed,” Peter stammered.
“And, they will come through that door, and we’ll shoot each one of them funneling through. You see, we have lots of ammo. Besides, let’s see, two cars, I’m guessing three of you… no probably four or five if you were smart.”
“Sir. With all due respect, we came because someone close to us, my father, in fact, is frightfully ill. He needs insulin, or he may die,” Peter said, tears beginning to stream down his face.
“A weeper,” the man howled, his back arching as he let out a loud whoop. “Boy, your team has got to be real proud of you. I bet that gun you’re barely holding onto is the first weapon you’ve ever held… ain’t it?”
Peter said nothing. He stood, shaking in place. He hoped Ted or someone would come out and help him.
“Why don’t you put that rifle down nice and easy, so nothing stupid happens,” the man said.
Peter placed the rifle on the pavement without a moment of protest.
“Now give it a shove away from you,” the man said.
Peter complied.
“Missy, why don’t you take the weeper’s gun. Can’t have too many of these,” the man said, nodding for the dark-haired woman to pick up the weapon.
“New,” she said eyeing it and weighing it in her hand.
The man gave the weapon a glance. “Probably never been fired before. Probably not even yours.”
I opened the door to bring out more supplies with Doc right behind me. “Whoa….” I cried out stopping short just beyond the door at seeing the three new people. “What’s going on?”
The man and the blonde woman pointed their weapons right at us. The other woman fumbled a bit to hold two rifles.
“Just keep yourself right there,” the man said. “And your friend who’s right behind the door, he should show himself as well.”
Doc stepped out, followed by Max. We all had weapons slung over our shoulders while holding large white rectangular plastic containers filled with medicines.
“Three of you, that makes four, it’s what I figured,” the man said satisfied with his guess.
“Listen, sir,” I said. “We have a friend who’s ill. We needed to get some medicine to treat him.”
“I know the story. The weepy one you left in charge to watch your vehicles told me. Is your friend a junkie?” the man asked.
“No, not at all,” I answered, puzzled by such a question.
“Then I wonder why you’re cleaning out the whole store. You folk’s druggies?”
We had no clear answer for his question. It was a stupid accusation. Silence followed. We weren’t sure what to do. Any answer we gave would get twisted out of our favor.
Ted then yelled out from the side of the building; his rifle trained on the man and his two cohorts. “Drop your weapons or the ladies get a first-hand look at this idiot’s brain matter.”
The man held his composure, holding his weapon steady while the two women switched their attention to Ted.
“Or…we could just have ourselves one nice little bloodbath after all,” the man said as a mad grin crinkled across his weathered face. “I mean there’s a good chance we’re all going to die sooner than later anyway… so if sooner is the choice, well it ain’t no big deal to me.”
Ted had no patience for the man. “I’m gonna count to three, and when I get done, you’re the first one going down. Unless of course, you want to lower your weapon, back off and we can talk this out… your choice.”
The man paused, staring at Ted then us. “Ok hero. I see your point. I’ll put my weapon down as long as they put down those medicines. That’s my property you’re stealing.”
“Put it down boys,” Ted said, never taking his aim off the
man.
Doc, Max, and I placed down our bins. Before we could stand back up, an ear-crushing explosion ruptured the air right behind us. Jason ran out from behind the back door and unloaded two shotgun rounds. The man and the dark-haired woman staggered backward before stumbling to the pavement. The blonde woman fell to the ground dead, catching the brunt of the fire.
Ted came out from the side of the building, rifle up. He could see the man and the dark-haired woman still alive, trying to scramble for cover. The man desperately clawed at the ground to
pull himself away from the scene. Blood flowed from his chest onto the pavement. The dark haired woman, managed to make better progress, crawling more rapidly back up the slope to escape into the woods.
Ted yelled for her to stop. She didn’t. Ted got closer, to within fifteen feet when she swung around with her rifle to fire. Ted pulled his trigger first and flattened her to the ground with a direct hit to the chest.
“Noooo,” howled the man who raised himself up onto his knees. “Kiera!” Using the last of his strength, he tried to aim his shotgun at Ted.
With a war cry, Jason charged, wielding a hunting knife he had taken to carrying, and leaped onto the man, driving the long blade deep into the man’s neck. The man died instantly as a stream of blood initially sprayed out before spilling slowly over the ground.
I looked at Jason with a strange awe, numb. I never expected anything like that from him. Jason always presented himself as a mild-mannered guy, reserved. Even he seemed stunned by his actions as he stared at the dead bodies with a bewildered glare.
Doc checked the man and two women. He confirmed their deaths. He looked back at us. “Get the medicines in the car.”
“I think we should go in case anyone else is on the way,” I offered staring in disbelief at the bloody scene.
Max disagreed. “Keep watch if you like, but we’ve got a bunch more of these bins to load, it’ll only take a few minutes then we can leave.”
“What if someone else comes?” Peter asked.
“We’ve got a taste for killing now. We have to do what we have to do from here on in,” Max said. “I’m not betting on the police showing up anytime soon.”
“Get it done,” Jason said. “I’ll check out the woods to see if anyone is lurking about. You guys keep your eyes open.”
As quick as he said it, Jason gathered his shotgun and knife, ran up the berm and disappeared into the woods.
“What the hell is going on?” I said trying to make sense of the events unfolding around me. I looked at Ted who stood motionless overlooking the carnage, his rifle loosely dangling from his grip. It seemed as if he was still trying to process what took place. In a matter of minutes, I went from being uneasy about breaking into a building, to witnessing the killing of three people and being satisfied with the results. My mind swam in an array of confusion as my eyes darted across our landscape looking out for others we might deem hostile.
