by Sam Sisavath
Damn, he was starving. What were the chances he could stumble across some beef jerky? He’d have to check the checkout aisles. That was usually where the store kept its nonperishable junk food. Right now, he was so hungry he’d settle for a roll of Mentos.
And some bottled water wouldn’t be so bad, either.
Smith picked up the shotgun and grabbed some shells for it. There were other weapons in the back, including crossbows and machetes. Smith had no use for them but did find a knife to fill his empty sheath. It was a good blade, but it wouldn’t be the “right” kind until he could coat the sharp end with silver. The same went for the guns and bullets. Nothing was right without a silver payload. That mantra had been driven into his brain ever since basic training.
He couldn’t believe how much better he felt with a gun at his hip and another one behind his back. The shotgun slung over his shoulder was a good backup, but if he had to use it, it was probably his first clue that he was in trouble.
Now for those replacement Merrells…
The building was much darker the second time he went through it, which was probably the reason Smith was almost running, the shotgun bumping against his back. He continued sniffing the air to make sure he wasn’t sprinting headlong into a ghoul nest like an idiot. God only knew he’d been an idiot most of the day—
He slid to a stop, the soles of his shoes squeaking loudly against the polished tiles. Smith looked to his left, toward the front doors. There was still enough light—not very much now compared to the last time he’d looked—that he could make out the entrance.
Alarm bells were ringing in his head, because he’d stopped for a reason.
Voices.
He’d heard voices coming from the front doors.
And he’d just made a loud sound, alerting whoever was over there, when his shoes squeaked loudly against the floor just seconds ago.
Sonofa…
Eight
…bitch!
There were three of them, and for a second Smith thought Allison and her children had found him. He wasn’t sure if he was happy or annoyed by that possibility. This time he was armed, and there was no way they were going to get the drop on him, so maybe it was more of the former rather than the latter.
But that was all a moot point anyway, because it wasn’t Allison and her kids. He knew that, because they were all much too tall, and although he could only make out their silhouetted outlines thanks to the fading sunlight, he could tell there wasn’t a kid among them.
Two women and one man. It was a guess, but he was pretty sure he was right. The shoulders, hips, and waistlines gave the genders away. They hadn’t come on foot but had arrived at the Archers on horseback. Two were handling the animals outside the building while the third—one of the two women—stepped through one of the outer doors and unslung a rifle.
Yup. She definitely heard me.
“What is it?” the man asked.
“I heard something,” the woman who had come into the Archers said.
The biggest of the three figures—the man—handed the horses’ reins to the other woman and hurried through a door, drawing a pistol from a holster as he did so. He had his own rifle slung over his shoulder but hadn’t gone for it yet.
“What was it?” the man asked.
“I’m not sure,” the woman said.
They stood side by side, weapons in their hands, and though he couldn’t see them, Smith guessed they were sweeping the middle part of the Archers with their eyes. He didn’t think there was any chance they could make him out from all the jeans hanging off the rack in front of him or the thick working clothes around him. He’d gotten down and slid behind cover as soon as he realized he’d squeaked his way into being noticed.
Smith had the P220 already in his hand, hoping he didn’t have to use it. Three against one wasn’t terrible odds—he’d taken out the three Bozos last night without much of a problem—but there was no telling how many more riders were out there that he hadn’t seen yet. Mostly, though, Smith preferred not to kill someone unless he had to.
“You see anything?” the woman was asking the man.
The guy shook his head. “No. You sure you did?”
“I didn’t see anything, but I heard something.”
“What was it?”
They were still too far, and it was too dark (and getting darker) for him to make out what they looked like or what kind of weapons they were carrying.
“I’m not sure,” the woman said.
“Haven’t seen a soul since we made it into the city,” the other woman, still outside, said. She was holding onto the reins of all three horses just beyond the outer doors. “You sure, Mags?”
“Yes,” the woman named Mags said, even more confident this time.
“Animals?” the man said.
“Maybe,” Mags said, but Smith didn’t think she believed it.
“Guys, it’s really getting dark out here,” the second woman said. She sounded slightly younger than the one called Mags, and she was slimmer and shorter than the other two.
The man glanced back at her, before saying to Mags, “We gotta make a choice.”
Mags didn’t, at least not right away. It took about ten seconds before she nodded, though Smith noticed that she hadn’t lowered her rifle.
“I’m going to look around,” Mags said.
“Let me—” the man began.
“No,” Mags said, cutting him off. “It’s getting dark. We have to secure the doors.” Then, in a softer voice, “Okay?”
The man nodded. “Be careful.”
Mags returned his nod and stepped into the store. The man went back outside to help the other woman with the horses.
Their intentions were pretty clear to Smith: They were going to bring the animals inside with them. That was smart, and something Smith had done himself back when he’d had a horse. That was before the animal decided it didn’t need Smith nearly as much as Smith needed it and took off one morning while Smith was looking for supplies. Horses, Smith had found, could be pretty damn insightful.
He focused on the woman, Mags (What kind of name is that?) as she walked past the display counters up front. He appreciated the way the woman held her rifle, like she knew what she was doing. But he also felt good about his position. It wasn’t exactly pitch-black where he was hiding, but the area around him was definitely very dark. Unless the woman had lights—
He heard the click, followed by a flashlight beam shooting past his line of sight.
Of course she’d have lights!
Smith wasn’t feeling quite as good about staying incognito as before, but he didn’t panic just yet. There were too many clothes, too many racks, and too many shelves for her to pick him out across the distance between them.
At least, that’s what he told himself.
While he kept one eye on Mags as she stopped to run her light along the gym side of the Archers, Smith turned his attention back to the man and woman as they led the horses inside. The animals were a little skittish, or maybe they didn’t like all the glass scattered across the floor. Most horses were unshod these days since horseshoes were simply too bothersome to put on and replace every four to six weeks after they had worn out. Most people didn’t even know how to make a proper horse—
A beam of light flashed across Smith’s eyes, and he jerked his head back in alarm.
Shit. Had she spotted him?
“There’s someone in here!” Mags shouted.
I think that’s a yes, Smith thought as he crawled backward out of the circular rack and picked himself up, just before he heard the first pop-pop-pop of gunshots ringing out.
Smith was up and running when he nearly lost his footing as his Merrells slipped on the slick floor. Ironically, that was probably what saved his life as rounds zipped over his head, about the same spot where his actual head had been mere milliseconds earlier.
He scrambled back to his feet and darted behind a series of shelves as bullets slammed into them from
the other side, some punching through and flicking splintered wood at him in waves of whistling missiles.
Damn, damn, damn!
Smith never considered stopping and returning fire. He had two pistols and a shotgun, but they had rifles, and that gave them too much advantage with the distance. Besides, given how the woman was shooting—the continuous pop-pop-pop of her shots ringing off the Archers’ walls and ceiling like thunderclaps—he didn’t like his chances in a stand-up gunfight. Especially when the man and the other woman started pitching in. They hadn’t yet, but—
The rapid-fire brap-brap-brap-brap of another rifle unleashing on full-auto nearly made Smith go deaf. The sudden burst overpowered even Mags’s semiautomatic shooting. It had to be the man, joining in on the fun.
Brap-brap-brap-brap!
Too bad they didn’t invite me to the party! Smith thought as he ran as hard and fast as he could even while clothes shredded and more shelves exploded, even more chunks of wood and plastic flicking around his head like bees. A few might have found their mark along the length of his arms, but he didn’t stop to find out.
Brap-brap-brap-brap!
Brap-brap-brap-brap!
Smith slid to a stop and turned left before diving headfirst into the camping aisles. He landed on his chest, grunted with pain, but ignored it and quickly rolled over onto his back. He was on his feet and retreating toward the back seconds later, even as the echoing sounds of magazines being changed echoed all the way across the store.
Thank God they’d run out of bullets! Well, not run out, but good enough!
He made it to the rear of the store in one piece and took temporary refuge behind a shelf of igloos, half of which were already spilled on the floor even before his arrival. Smith made sure not to kick any of them as he waded his way farther toward the back of the building. He also made damn certain he didn’t squeak again the entire time.
After the barrage of gunfire, Mags and her companion hadn’t let loose again. He was hoping that meant they couldn’t see him, though they probably knew where he was—or his general area—since they’d been pretty good about throwing rounds in his direction during his mad dash to safety. Smith thought about lying in wait for them—should they decide to pursue him, that was—and take them out, but decided it was probably a better idea to look for another way out of the Archers. He had what he needed, after all. Maybe not everything, but he could go a day without food if he had to. And it was starting to look as he was going to have to, tonight.
The problem was that he couldn’t find an exit anywhere in his current location. That left him with only one option: return to the gun section and use the back hallway next to it, which led into the restrooms and doors marked employees only. One of those doors might give him access to the warehouse next door; or, if he was lucky, a way out of the building.
Smith slid the SIG back into its holster and unslung the shotgun. He liked its spreading power better and had a feeling if he got into a gunfight it was going to be at close-range anyway, with so many shelves and aisles in the way. In those kind of conditions, the lethality of a buckshot-loaded shell was augmented.
He was still slowly—and carefully, not to mention quietly—picking his way from aisle to aisle, shelf to shelf, when a new burst of thundering pop-pop-pop sent him lunging to the floor.
Smith smacked face-first into a pair of rubber boots and got the barrel of the shotgun tangled up in a fishing net as he landed before skidding across the floor. All of that, and no one was even shooting at him.
The action was coming from the front of the store, he realized.
Who was doing the shooting, who was being shot at, and why?
He scrambled back to his feet and hurried over to a shelf carrying fishing rods. Smith moved toward the other end and leaned out. He peeked past the cash registers and racks of clothing—Christ, there were a lot of racks—and toward the front entrances.
He couldn’t see Mags or her companions from back here, but he could hear the volley of gunfire—semiautomatic rifles and pistol fire—mixed in with the clatter of glass falling and rounds pinging! off metal frames just fine. Those shots hadn’t come from inside the store, but outside. Which meant it was now Mags and her companions’ turn to see what it felt like to be shot at.
Smith had to grin at this latest development.
Nine
Mist City hadn’t looked very active when Smith first saw it from a distance, but things had certainly picked up in the day or so since he’d been in the place. Not that that was a good thing. Getting captured and almost killed—or whatever Allison and her kids had planned for him—hadn’t been “good” at all, and nearly getting his head shot off with rifles just now had been even less “good.”
Still, he had to admit, things were getting interesting, and it had been a while since Smith had “interesting” to look forward to. The last time his adrenaline was pumping this wildly was during the action in the days after Darby Bay, when Black Tide soldiers were scouring the Texas countryside for remnants of Buck’s Mercerian army. Or what the bastards were calling an “army,” anyway.
Darby Bay. Mercerians. A flood of ghouls that seemed to have come out of nowhere.
All those things seemed like another lifetime ago, now. They were also ones Smith would rather forget.
He inched out of his hiding spot, as careful not to make any sound now as he had for the last ten minutes or so. Mags and her friends were concentrated around the inner doors of the Archers, clearly trying to keep whoever was out there, well, out there. Smith could hear the tap-tap-tap of nervous horses on the smooth store tiles all the way from across the store, filling in for the sudden silence. The noise would have been even louder if the animals weren’t unshod.
He assumed the trio at the front wouldn’t forget completely about him and probably had one of them looking out just in case Smith tried to sneak up on them. Which was exactly what he was doing. He stopped briefly and wondered if finding out what was going on was worth the risk, but decided that it was.
If nothing else, at least it’d make the night less boring.
Smith stopped alongside a shelf filled with baseball caps. From his angle, he couldn’t quite see all of the front entrance, but there was enough of it to make out the bobbing heads of two of the three that had entered the store after him. The man was easy to pick out just from his outline alone, and one of the women, the one who had been outside when Mags tried to kill Smith, was blonde. Mags, a brunette, was nowhere to be seen, but Smith assumed she was near the doors if the other two were further back using the counters as cover.
The blonde had been given lookout duty for Smith, which explained why she had her back turned to the other two and her eyes on the rest of the store while they paid attention to the parking lot outside. So he’d been right about that. They hadn’t completely forgotten that he was still in here with them.
He couldn’t hear anything from outside the Archers, but could just barely pick up the trio in front of him whispering back and forth. It was mostly Mags—whom Smith still couldn’t locate—talking with the man. The blonde seemed to be out of the loop and was scanning the Archers with what looked like intense concentration. Looked like, anyway, because he couldn’t really see much of her face. He couldn’t even be certain if she was armed, but what were the chances that she wasn’t?
That’s as unlikely as me going back to the Private Store-It and sweeping Allison off her feet.
Whoever was outside the store hadn’t come in peace. From what Smith could piece together from the little information he had at his disposal, Mags’s people had fired first, and the newcomers had responded. And now the two sides were locked in a stalemate, neither firing again after that brief but hellacious back and forth.
The whole situation was amusing to Smith, even if he was certain it wasn’t so much for Mags and the other two. But hey, they had tried to kill him not more than ten minutes earlier, so he couldn’t quite muster the sympathy for them.
He
was still pondering his next move when he heard the faint tap-tap-tap of footsteps—except it wasn’t coming from the horses like last time.
He glanced to his right, away from the trio at the front of the store.
There. Movements—very, very quiet movements, but not quite quiet enough—coming from the back of the store.
Footsteps.
Soft, deliberate footsteps.
Human footsteps.
He turned back toward Mags and her friends. Their shadowed outlines remained calm, oblivious to the newcomers. Well, the man and the blonde’s outlines, anyway. Smith still couldn’t make out Mags anywhere.
Smith tried to get a better look at the blonde, but she had chosen a good spot next to the counter. If not for the color of her hair, Smith wouldn’t have been able to convincingly assume she was a woman at all.
He refocused on the back of the store, which was closer.
The footsteps were still there—as quiet as before, and still not as completely silent as whoever was making them thought they were being. Smith had to admit, they were doing a damn good job of advancing while staying undetected by the blonde. Whoever they were, they’d found a way into the store that he had missed. Either that, or the entrance was somewhere on the other side of the building that he hadn’t had the chance to search yet.
Smith couldn’t make out how many of them there were. It could be just one or two, or more. But that was just a guess, because they were still too well-hidden even from him. He wondered who was going to spot them first—him or the blonde?
The answer came when Smith glimpsed two shadowy forms emerging out of the pitch-dark back half of the Archers. His eyes picked them up as they appeared in his line of sight and crouched next to a shelf filled with Levi’s. They couldn’t have been more than twenty meters from where Smith sat, as silent and still as a popsicle mouse. He might not have even seen them at all if they weren’t almost exactly parallel to him. They were also closer to the front doors than he was at the moment.
