by Paul Hetzer
“Do you see anything?” I asked Holly as she strained to make out details across the street.
“Huh-uh, you?”
“No,” I replied.
“Where to Papa?” Jeremy asked.
Holly and I looked at each other, quizzing each other silently.
“You better make up your minds quick, bro, there’s more of those motherfuckers filling up the parking lot behind us,” Frank said urgently from behind me.
There were a couple of cars parked in the lot across the street as opposed to the empty one surrounding this place. I could only hope that that meant someone had had a chance to open up the place for business before people became too sick.
“Let’s try that building,” Holly said, indicating the restaurant we had been watching.
We set off across the parking lot looking for any movement in the shadows. We dropped down onto the street and quickly ran across. Our footfalls seemed to echo too loudly in the quiet of the night.
On the other side of the street Holly and I both dropped to a knee and scanned the parking lot around the restaurant with our scopes. It seemed to be empty. I got up and continued at a fast pace through the lot to the glassed in front of the square building. Nothing was moving. When we were all together I pulled out my flashlight and shined it through a window around the interior of the place. It looked empty.
“I’m going to try the door. Cover me,” I said. I clipped the flashlight to the holder on the rifle then flicked on the light again, scanning the immediate area on the other side of the entryway. When I was satisfied it was clear I reached down and pulled on the door. It silently swung open spilling the stale smell of the interior out and around me. There was also a faint stench of decay.
God, don’t let any Loonies be in here.
I slid quietly into the building. I shined the light around the dining area of the restaurant, the place was a mess, chairs and tables were overturned and shattered table settings littered the floor.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Something had gone wrong in here. Holly slipped in behind me, followed closely by Jeremy. Her rifle’s flashlight beam soon joined mine in scanning the room. I could see a dark stain on the floor back by the doors leading to what I assumed was the kitchen. My spidey-sense was tingling like mad. Holly and I moved forward, each choosing a separate aisle as we stealthily advanced toward the dull stainless double doors.
I looked over my shoulder and motioned Jeremy with my hand to stay where he was.
There were two small Plexiglas windows set at eye level in the doors. I approached one and Holly the other, our rifles at the ready, the light beams looking like a set of approaching car headlights. I could see the brownish-colored smear on the tiled floor under my feet. Something had been dragged through the swinging doors into the kitchen. I nodded to the floor with my chin and Holly’s eyes widened when she saw the smeared dark stains of what was probably blood. She was gnawing at her lower lip when she looked back up into my eyes steadily, letting me know she was ready.
I kicked the doors hard at their juncture sending both swinging open and exposing the dark kitchen to our lights. The sight hit me before the smell, two bloated bodies ten feet in front of us on the floor, one lying across the other. Holly gasped and backed up. Then the doors rebounded, blocking the view. The smell of putrefaction hit us like a hammer, even after the doors were closed.
“Were they dead?” Holly asked quietly, taking a couple of steps back from the door. Jeremy had run up and was trying to look past us.
“Something sure smells dead,” he said, holding a hand over his nose.
“I think they were,” I replied, trying to will my heartbeat back into the normal range.
I tentatively stepped forward and pushed open the door with the toe of my boot. The beam of my light fell on the bodies and I tried not to gag on the powerful odor of rotted flesh. They had been dead for some time by the state of their decomposition. The head of the woman on the bottom was canted at an obscene angle and her mottled gray legs sticking out from her blue skirt had large sections of meat missing. The dried blood trail ended beneath her. It looked like the lady on top had been feeding on her when someone had taken the top of her head off with a gunshot. Several more shots had been fired into her head and neck. Dried gore carpeted the tile around them adding to the grisly spectacle. I traced the light around the interior of the kitchen, but there was no one else there.
On the other side of a large metal cook-grill were two doors placed along a back wall. The large stainless one was probably the walk-in freezer and the other maybe a storage room. Both doors were closed tight. I thought to myself that I would have to check both of those rooms out before we could settle here for the night. I backed out of the kitchen, thankful for the less tainted air in the dining room.
Kera and Frank had entered the place and were with Holly and Jeremy.
“What ya got, bro?” Frank asked when I came into the room.
“Two women long dead, at least one was infected. Another survivor must have been in here. The Loony was killed with a gun.”
I wanted to get away from that smell of death, except I knew I had to get back in there and finish the search.
“I’m going to go check out the offices and restrooms,” Holly said. She turned to Kera. “Grab a couple of the tablecloths to cover the bodies up with.”
Holly started toward the other doors while Kera scrounged around the tables.
“I’ll come with you, Mama,” Jeremy said, falling in behind her.
I looked at Frank, he shrugged his shoulders at me. “I guess I’ll keep a watch out the front doors.”
I smiled at Kera. “Looks like you and me get to do the dirty work, kid.”
She tossed one of the red tablecloths to me. “I ain’t no kid,” she muttered, hefting the Saiga to her shoulder and tucking a rolled-up tablecloth under her arm.
I grabbed a couple of large green cloth napkins from a place setting on the table next to me and tied one bandit style over my nose and mouth and gave the other to Kera. Hopefully they would block some of the stench.
“After you,” she said impertinently, motioning to the kitchen doors.
“Yes, ma’am.” I saluted and turned to enter the stinking kitchen again. When I got to the decomposing women I opened the tablecloth and laid it over the corpses. Kera had entered into the darkened room behind me before I could finish covering them up.
“Ugh, that’s nasty!” she choked then rushed to the deep sink along the side wall, ripping off her mask and vomiting into the basin.
I went over and grabbed the tablecloth from under her arm so I could completely cover the bodies. After draping them with her tablecloth my light illuminated the cleaning supplies under the sink and I spied a bottle of spray disinfectant among the supplies. I grabbed it and poured its strong smelling contents over the covered bodies while Kera rinsed her mouth out with water. The smell of the disinfectant overpowered the stink of rot, although I wasn’t sure the foul smelling combination was any better.
“Are you okay?” Her face half illuminated by the glow of my light looked a bit green. She nodded, even though she was still fighting a battle against her rebelling stomach. She walked over to me, her eyes avoiding the reeking pile on the floor.
I grasped her reassuringly by the shoulder. “I need you to open the freezer door while I stand ready. Just back away with the door as it opens.” She tried to smile, instead it came across as a grimace.
We walked over to the large stainless door of the walk-in freezer. I listened at the door for any noises then backed away and nodded to Kera. She grabbed the long handled latch and jerked it open as I aimed the rifle and light into the interior. The putrid smell of rotting food wafted out to mix with the malodorous fumes already assaulting our nostrils. I surveyed the interior with my light and once convinced that there were no surprises hiding within its confines told Kera to close the door. That left the dry storage locker.
We moved to t
he next door and repeated the procedure. The room was empty except for a myriad of foodstuff on the shelves and boxes on the floor. Another metal door was embedded in this room’s back wall with a bar latch across its length midway up from the floor.
“That probably leads outside.”
“Can we get out of here now?” Kera asked, still fighting her nausea.
“Yes, we’re done.” I closed the storage door and backed out of the kitchen, closely followed by the girl.
Holly was waiting outside the doors when we returned. “God, it smells awful in there.”
I kept my rifle and light pointed to the floor to try and reduce the amount of light escaping the building, and Jeremy and Holly were doing the same.
“The kitchen’s clear,” I said, removing the makeshift mask from my face.
“We can stay in the office for the night,” Holly said. She reached out and touched my hand and I grasped hers in response. “There’s room for all of us on the floor and someone can take the couch. The smell is not near as bad in there.”
“We checked out the bathrooms too, Papa,” Jeremy said in his adolescent voice, but sounding very grown-up. “The water still turns on and the toilets flush.”
I smiled down at him. “That’s good, Jeremy.”
I looked over to where the dark silhouette of Frank stood by the glass double doors, staring out into the night.
“Anything out there, Frank?”
“Nothing close by that I can see,” his deep voice reverberated back across the room.
I walked over to a booth and literally collapsed into the seat, pulling Holly in beside me. Jeremy slid in opposite us. Kera remained standing, cradling the shotgun in her arms. Holly took out some matches that she had found in the office and lit a candle on the center of the table. Its dancing warm glow enveloped our haggard faces. I switched off my weapon light and motioned for Frank to join us. He lumbered over and squeezed in next to Jeremy.
“We need to plan what our next moves are going to be,” I started. “We left all of our supplies in the truck, plus my lab notebooks. I think we need to try and get back to the truck in the morning.”
Holly shook her head. “No, Steven, those notebooks aren’t worth our lives. There’s probably no one left besides you who would even know what to do with the information they contain. It may be centuries before we have the kind of working technology needed to combat this.”
She put her arm around my shoulder and hugged me tight. “We need to get as far away from that horde as possible. We already lost one today.” She shot a quick glance up at Kera, who seemed oblivious to the mention of the loss of Amanda.
I wanted to be furious at Holly, she knew all that I had to endure to get the data I had generated, she should be supporting me on this. But I couldn’t, not when I looked into those familiar green eyes and saw the love and worry expressed in them.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “My lab is still intact. Maybe at some point in the future I can get back there and finish what I started, find a cure for this disease. Without that data out there we would be starting from scratch.” I looked at the faces around the table. “If we don’t find a cure for the zombie virus we may never be rid of it, humans may never have a chance to bounce back.”
“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m damn low on ammo,” Frank chimed in. “I don’t see us getting too far on foot with what we have left.”
“We can find stores that carry ammo,” Holly countered. “Food, clothing, everything can be had on the way.”
“But, Hon, how many of those creatures are we going to have to fight through to get to what we need, and if we run out of ammo before we can get to more, what then?” I asked, taking Frank’s line of thought and running with it.
She looked at me, pleading with her eyes. “Steven, we could run out fighting our way back to the truck, then what do we do when we are out of ammo and nothing left to fight with but our hands against hundreds of those raging maniacs?”
“I thought you said they sleep at night like we do, Papa. Why don’t we get the truck back then?”
We all looked at Jeremy in astonishment.
He was correct. They were still diurnal from what I had observed. I hadn’t thought of that.
“We could try tomorrow night,” I suggested.
“I don’t know, Steven. I still think the risks outweigh the benefits,” Holly argued from a weaker stance.
“Seems that we know what we have to deal with at the truck, beyond that is the unknown,” Frank said earnestly. “I would much rather deal with something I know than something I don’t.”
Holly looked up at Kera. “How about you?” she asked. “What do you think we should do?”
Kera looked down at her for a moment her expression hard. She swiped dark hair away from her blue eyes and looked out the window into the darkness beyond. “Fuck them things.” Her voice was as hard as her expression. “The ones out there killed Amanda. Let’s go for the truck.”
Holly sighed. “I guess I’m outvoted.”
“The truck’s trashed, but drivable.” I said. “We’ll have to find another soon to transfer our stuff into before we go too far.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem with all the abandoned vehicles around. Worse case we pick up one at a dealership,” Frank said, stroking his beard as he talked. “I say we just stay here till tomorrow night.”
I nodded in agreement. “There’s food and running water and we know what is, or should I say isn’t inside.”
Holly reluctantly agreed. “Okay, although we should have someone watching out while the rest of us sleep, and for God’s sake, keep the noise down and lights dim, we don’t need to be attracting any unwanted guests!”
“Right. Remember, someone killed one of those things in here,” I added, “so there may be at least one survivor running around out there. If someone comes to the door looking for help, don’t automatically assume it’s a Loony.”
We decided that we would each stand a two hour watch through the night while the rest of us found whatever place we could to get comfortable and try and sleep. Frank took the first shift while Holly and I curled up on the blue carpeted floor of the office. Jeremy laid down on the small couch and fell instantly to sleep.
My mind was in overdrive as I lay there with my wife’s head cradled against my chest. I thought I would never fall asleep. I replayed all we had been through the past week and was so thankful that my family was now together, unlike our new companions who had lost so much. Guilt still gnawed at my gut over the death of Amanda. I played it over and over again in my mind. What could I have done differently? Fear and adrenaline had overwhelmed my thought processes as I had fought to save her. I should have jumped into the back and physically fought them off of her and pulled her free. I knew I hadn’t acted quickly or decisively enough. Her death would haunt my consciousness for a long time.
The next thing I knew my son was shaking me awake from a deep sleep for my shift at 0200 hours. Frank was snoring away loudly on the couch, his legs overhanging one end. When I got up Jeremy laid down in the warm spot I had just vacated next to his mom.
I grabbed my rifle, slinging it around my shoulder as I walked out into the dining area. Kera was curled up on the seat of a booth, sleeping soundly with the shotgun nestled in her arms. It was warm and stuffy in the building and the faint stench of decomposition still lingered in the air. The only light was from the waxing moon and the much fainter glow of Hosteller’s comet as it sped away from both the sun and the Earth after reaping its devastation upon the people of this planet.
CHAPTER 12
In the morning Holly and I braved the sickening reek of the kitchen to forage around in the dry storage locker for food items that we could survive on for the day. Most of the bread was still edible, as were the cheeses from the walk-in freezer. We pilfered the few canned goods that we could find and exited the place before our stomachs revolted completely.
We continued our wat
ch cycle during the daylight hours when the infected were most active. So far none had come close enough to the restaurant to cause us any worry.
Kera spent the morning sitting on top of one of the tables adjacent to a front window and would point the Saiga through the window and simulate shooting the Loonies whenever she spotted them, making ‘pop, pop, pop’ noises with her mouth. Jeremy watched her for a while from a distance, then joined in with his P556. Soon they were giggling together, pretending to take out the infected that they spotted walking in the distance. Frank napped on and off during the day while Holly and I sat and just enjoyed being together and talked about our future at the farm.
The sun climbed higher and the building was stifling. We tried to limit our movements as much as possible and were constantly drinking tap water to stay hydrated. Groups of Loonies, sometimes in large numbers, moved out on the surrounding streets and sidewalks. Many were hunkered down in the shade of trees and buildings trying to avoid the broiling July sun. They were in various states of undress, from completely nude to business attire. Most were filthy.
Early in the afternoon a dark-haired man who must have been in his early or mid-thirties, wearing a stained white button-down short sleeve shirt and dark tie but naked from the waist down, walked along the edge of the parking lot sporting a raging hard-on. He approached a younger female Loony lounging in the shade of a tree and jumped on her, brutally flipping her over and tearing at her dress while she tried to get out from beneath him. He was finally able to tear her clothes away and mount her. She fought his act of copulation savagely until he was finished.
He stood up and walked off to sit down next to a tree and she just rolled over and sat there as if nothing had happened. The man was bleeding from several long gouges where she had caught him with her nails.
