by Paul Hetzer
I slid behind the counter and with the help of the flashlight, quickly located a stack of twenty round boxes of ammo for the ARs.
“What do I need?” Kera whispered from over my left shoulder.
I shined the light around until I illuminated the section that held the shotgun shells. I told her to grab several boxes of double-ought buckshot in twelve gauge to load her three Saiga magazines and stuff as many as she could carry in her shirt pockets.
I had only four thirty-round magazines left for the two Colts and sat down to load them with the fifty-five grain rounds that the store had available. I dumped as many extra boxes of rounds as I could fit in my BDU pockets. I inserted a full mag into each of the short barreled rifles and then took a box of forty-fives for the Sig. When I was finished loading its single magazine I eyed the long glass case holding an array of handguns in different calibers, sizes and finishes.
My light illuminated a pair of Smith and Wesson semi-auto handguns. One was an S&W M&P45 and the other an M&P9. They were reliable handguns that would fit our needs perfectly.
I thought I heard a noise from the front of the store and switched off the light. The storm was still raging outside, adding to the cacophony of the nasally droning sounds of those Loonies that were snoring.
I paused there in the dark, watching as flashing lightning highlighted shapes up front. Thankfully, none seemed to be moving. After a few moments I switched the light back on. I tried to slide the glass door to the handgun case open, but it was locked.
“Can’t we just break it open?” Kera had silently walked over to kneel next me.
“Sure,” I replied, a little too testily. “If you don’t mind fighting every Loony in this store.”
I shined the light around the area surrounding the cash register hoping to see a set of keys. There were none in sight. Breaking the glass was just too much of a risk with those creatures sleeping only a few dozen yards away. The handguns may as well have been locked in a safe.
The long guns in the racks were also inaccessible. A thick steel cable ran through all their trigger guards. We would have to make do with the firearms we had brought with us.
As quietly as possible we chambered rounds into our long guns, then stood up and, keeping the light cupped in my hand to limit the escaping illumination, walked over to the blue steel double doors.
Kera had her shotgun at the ready while I tried the latch release and quietly pushed one of the doors open. A dark stockroom stretched to our left and right with boxes and other merchandise stacked neatly in designated sections, some to the ceiling high overhead. I motioned Kera in and closed the door behind me, listening as it latched shut.
I un-cupped the light and scanned the large room with it. Shadows jumped and stretched, but I didn’t see any evidence that the infected had ever been in here. We cautiously walked around its length, making sure the loading dock doors at the back were secured shut and that the trash compactor leading to the outside dumpster was sealed.
“We can crash here tonight.” I said, relaxing a little bit.
Kera grimaced slightly and was squeezing her legs together. “I gotta pee,” she said sheepishly.
“I wouldn’t try to make it to the bathrooms out on the floor. Just go over behind those boxes by the loading dock doors.”
“Okay. Will you shine the light over there but not look?”
She hastily strode toward the large garage doors. I kept the light pointed in her general direction as I looked at the racks and boxes that lined the room. There had to be stuff we could use here. There was also a water fountain against the front wall that still dispensed warm, but clear water.
“Better?” I asked when she approached after relieving herself.
“Better.”
“Come on,” I gestured with the light, “let’s see what we can find in here.”
We quietly searched through boxes and shelves, tearing open boxes and packages looking for anything useful. We each collected a sleeping bag and small day packs, plus some cheap LED headlamps to supplement my good handheld one which was getting near the end of its battery life.
We also lucked into several boxes of trail mix and almost immediately sat down and tore open the top of the cellophane bags, stuffing our faces with the mix of fruit and nuts. I didn’t realize how hungry I was until I smelled the mix.
After wolfing down a bag and a half, illuminated only by one of the cheap lights sitting upright on the concrete floor, I lay back on the rolled sleeping bag.
Kera was daintily picking through her second bag of mix, pulling out the chocolates and raisins. Overhead there was dead silence. The storm had pulled away and only the occasional burst of thunder could be heard far in the distance.
Thoughts of Holly began creeping back into my mind, threatening to cause the grief that I had been suppressing to burst forth again. I forced my thoughts to return to my son, and to my plans for finding him. I stood up and walked over to the double doors that led out onto the retail floor and the horde of sleeping Loonies. I looked around for some way to secure them better and settled on a wooden pallet, wedging it against the door.
It made me sad to think that we had all been together just hours ago the last time we did this. I walked back to Kera and sat down, untied my combat boots, removed my sopping wet socks and laid them aside. My feet were bleached white and wrinkled from the moisture.
I took a pair of sweatpants that I had pulled out of a nearby box and walked down to the garage doors and relieved myself against them, then removed my holsters, BDU pants, boxers and ruined tee-shirt and donned the sweats. I was already feeling warmer. I carried my wet clothes back to our makeshift camp and hung them up nearby to drip dry. Kera had changed into an oversize set of sweatpants while I was away and had crawled into her sleeping bag.
I made sure the rifles and handguns were ready and in easy reach and slid into my bag. I reached to switch off the light.
“Leave it on, okay?”
I crawled deeper into the bag and fell nearly instantly to sleep.
There was a loud noise. I don’t know how long we had been asleep, my internal clock told me it was early morning although there was no indication of this from the darkened stockroom. The small flashlight must have drained the batteries sometime while we slept because my eyes opened to pitch blackness. Had there really been a noise that had wakened me or was it a dream? My right hand slipped out of the warmth of the sleeping bag and closed around the cold steel of one of the Colt rifles and I lifted it onto my chest. I held my breath, listening.
I nearly jumped out of my skin when a loud banging reverberated through the large space. Someone or something pounded twice on the garage doors of the loading docks.
“What is it?” Kera asked in a small, frightened voice, sitting up next to me.
“I don’t know,” I replied, my hand finally finding a band of one of the headlamps. I thumbed the switch, bathing her in its beam of white light, causing her to cover her eyes with her arm. The banging started up again, this time more urgently. I pointed the light down toward the doors.
“Do you think it’s someone like us?” she asked hopefully.
“I don’t know.”
I unzipped my bag and stood up into the cool air, holding the rifle by its handgrip. I slid the light around my head with my other hand and started walking toward the doors.
“Wait for me!” Kera shuffled out of her bag and grabbed her shotgun and the headlamp she had looped around its stock. We both padded barefoot across the cold concrete toward the large corrugated steel doors where the pounding continued.
A thin veneer of light leaked under the door’s threshold, letting me know that it was daytime outside. I glanced at my watch, 0720 hours. I could see a shadow moving from under the door.
“Who’s out there?” Kera called, making me flinch.
Whoever was outside froze for a moment at the sound of her voice, and then the pounding began again in earnest, accompanied by a loud, wailing growl. It wa
s a Loony. Kera sucked in a sharp intake of breath when she heard the growling.
“Fuck!”
“Well, I guess they know we’re here now,” I chastised her.
“Well, Steve,” she replied snidely, “did you have a better idea on how to figure out if they were friendly or not?”
I had to admit that I didn’t.
More shadows were moving around outside and the chorus of fists on the metal door increased in tempo and number. The door was rattling loudly as more and more hands began beating against it and soon its twin was receiving the same treatment.
“Do you think they can get through?” Kera asked, sounding like a scared child again.
“I don’t think so,” I answered honestly. I walked over to an exit door that probably opened onto the loading dock and made sure it was tightly closed.
“Let’s get out of here,” Kera said, spooked by the tumultuous drumming on the doors.
I started backing away from the doors. “Yeah, let’s.”
We hurried back to our makeshift camp and stuffed our sleeping bags into the small daypacks along with some extra trail mix. My clothes were still damp, but I needed the pockets and all the supplies that were in them, along with the holsters they supported. I dressed as quickly as I could, wet boots and all. I shoved the handgun into my hip holster and donned the pack and the two rifles.
Kera dropped the sweatpants around her ankles and stepped hurriedly into her stained white shorts, pulling them up and buttoning them. She then pulled the sweatpants up over her shorts and slid her bare feet into her muddy tennis shoes. She threw her pack over her shoulder and was ready to go, rolling back and forth on the balls of her feet in her urgency while she waited for me to finish.
We rushed over to the double doors through which we had entered the stockroom from last night, the lights from our headlamps bouncing crazily off of walls and boxes as we ran. The garage doors were shaking so violently with the beating they were taking that I was afraid they would come off their tracks.
We reached the doors and I tossed aside the pallet that was jamming them closed. I pushed open a door and shone my light out into the aisle beyond it. The shadows were alive with movement and as I turned my head I illuminated a group of infected who were traipsing through the store looking for the source of the noise that was echoing through the building.
Seemingly as one they turned toward my light and several let out a menacing snarl then sprinted down the aisle. I pushed Kera back into the stockroom and slammed the door just as they hit it from the other side. The latch held it firmly closed, but it still shook from the force of the body ramming into it. Soon the growls and wails from beyond the door joined the chorus of those behind us.
“What now?” Kera screeched in panic, backing away from the door.
I leaned my body against the door to help brace it. “Grab the pallet!” I ordered her, feeling my heart trip-hammering in my chest.
She rushed to where I had discarded the pallet and dragged it over to me. We jammed it back under the doorknobs.
“Shit!” I spat out, running my hands through my hair nervously.
“H-how many are out there?” Kera stammered fearfully.
“Enough,” I responded. I backed away from the door and brought one of the rifles around to the ready then shined the light around the dark room. “We need to find another way out of here.”
I started walking around the perimeter letting my headlamp illuminate the walls, Kera keeping pace with me.
“How about that door?” she asked, indicating the loading platform door with her light beam. The door was separated from the loading dock garage doors by about ten feet.
I considered it for a moment. “Too close to the other doors, we’d never get away.”
We continued walking, looking for any way to escape.
“There!” I yelled over the din of the fists pounding on metal. I pointed the light toward a skeletal metal ladder attached to a side wall that climbed up to a hatch in the roof high overhead.
We reached the base of it just as the stockroom door crashed open, sending the splintered remains of the wooden pallet skidding across the concrete and into a pile of boxed goods. The infected poured though the opening and into the room, turning toward our light-beams and immediately giving chase. Their growls increased in crescendo as they dashed toward us.
“Go up!” I screamed at Kera, pushing her toward the ladder. I turned with the rifle and without aiming I fired off a handful of rounds at the rapidly approaching Loonies. The fireballs that erupted from the end of the barrel with each shot temporarily blinded me, nevertheless through my ringing ears I heard several bodies fall to the floor. I cinched the rifle to my body and followed Kera up the narrow ladder, trying to blink away the bright spots in my vision.
Kera was at the ceiling, her arm securely through a rung of the ladder while she pushed vainly at the dark trapdoor in the roof. I climbed up and over her legs, careful not to lose my grip and fall into the horde of creatures now mobbing around the foot of the ladder twenty feet below.
“I can’t move it!” she cried in desperation, struggling against the door.
I couldn’t see very well past the pack on her back and the shotgun hanging in my face. I glanced down at the enraged mob below us. Several had their hands on the rungs and were trying to pull themselves up. Their bodies were pressed too tight together and they were clawing and clinging to each other trying to get up the ladder to their prey— us. Just as one began climbing another would grab hold of it, trying to climb past and both would be dragged down. We were running out of time and options… again.
“Can you scoot to the side of the ladder so I can get by you?” I asked her as I tried to do the same. She twisted to her left and nearly fell when one of her tennis shoes slipped on a rung. She let out a loud squeal before her foot found purchase again. She hugged herself to the side of the ladder tightly, not looking down.
The Loonies grew more agitated at her cry and renewed their efforts to pull themselves up. One finally broke free of the mob and began climbing after us.
I deftly moved to the opposite edge of the small ladder from her. The full pack and two rifles strapped to my body made it an even more precarious move on the narrow metal bars. I crawled up the edge of the ladder until I was even with Kera. Her face was sweating in the warm air near the ceiling and I my hands were becoming slick with sweat also.
I glanced down and saw the Loony, a heavy set middle-aged woman naked from the waist down, nearly halfway up the ladder. Holding myself to the rung with my left hand I drew the Sig and pointed it down at the climbing woman. She was looking up at us as she climbed, her mouth pulled wide in a rictus, toothy grin, snarling.
I shot once, the sound was deafening near the ceiling. The bullet slammed into her shoulder at the juncture of her neck and she toppled backwards into the crowd below, crushing a tall, thin man when she landed.
I looked back up at the trapdoor after reholstering the pistol, my headlamp illuminating it brightly.
“There are two snap latches!” I laughed out loud in relief. “They’re not locked!” I carefully reached up and undid one, then the other latch with an audible snap.
“I’m sorry,” Kera apologized with a grimace, “I didn’t see them.”
I pushed with all I was worth at the square fiberglass door. It flew open on a hinge and banged against the flat roof of the building.
Sunlight flooded down and around us and we blinked our eyes at its brilliance. The Loonies let out a new chorus of growls and wails when they realized we were escaping. One dark haired man with an ear torn off and dried blood down to his shoulder was slowly pulling himself up the ladder, one rung at a time. I reached around and grabbed Kera by the back of her sweats and helped push her up and onto the roof then silently followed her out into the fresh morning air.
We knelt around the rim of the boxed entryway and peered down into the darkness. The torn-eared man was over halfway up the wall, carefu
lly pulling himself up the ladder, another man following at his feet. I loosened the rifle and aimed it point-blank at the lead man and fired. His head erupted in a spray of gray and red and seemed to collapse in on itself as the bullet over-pressurized the skull and blew it apart. His spasming body hung tenaciously by one hand for a moment before his lifeless grip slid free and he fell backward, falling into the Loony several rungs down and sending them both crashing into the crowd beneath them.
I backed away from the hatch and Kera slammed shut the trapdoor with a thump.
“That won’t hold them for long,” I lamented, looking around the large expanse of the flat roof. Metal structures and vents populated its surface along with water from last night’s rainstorms which lay scattered about like small, shallow lakes. The rising sun in the clear crisp blue sky was already baking the asphalt roofing, sending heat-waves radiating upward. I strode to the rim of the back wall and cautiously looked over the edge.
“Damn!” I muttered when I saw what looked like a hundred or more Loonies gathered around the loading dock doors, many still futilely pounding on it in their desperation to get in.
I heard a loud bang behind me and Kera let out a frightened yelp.
“They’re trying to get up!” she screamed at me, backing away from the trapdoor with her shotgun pointed at it.
I rushed back over just as the door bounced up and then loudly settled back down onto its frame. Not knowing what else to do, I sat on it and felt one of the infected below strike it another blow.
“Shit!” Kera cried, her face tight with building panic. “What are we going to do? You can’t sit there forever!”
“Look around,” I instructed her, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice. “See if you can find something loose and heavy that we can pile on top of it.”
