by Bobby Adair
That was true. It didn’t take much brainpower to figure a box of cereal with a giant picture of Fruit Loops on the front might have something yummy inside. Then there was the meager effort required to find out.
“They’ve got some of those canvas grocery bags in there,” she said. “Grab one when we get there. Don’t overfill it. You want to be able to run.”
I knew how to handle the loads of things I needed to run with. I didn’t need Grace telling me. “Yes, mother.”
“That’s why you never get laid.” Grace turned and punched me in the arm. “You always say the wrong thing.” She hurried through the bushes toward the door.
A little too loudly, I called after her, “Or because most of the girls are dead?” I followed, muttering, “We do have this virus thing going on.”
Chapter 29
Inside, the dead lay on the floor as thick as they were in the veterinary science building. Plenty of live ones worked on filling their bellies from the corpses. We didn’t kill any of them. We were on a different mission than that. Instead, we went into the stairwell and climbed up to the second floor. More dead. Fewer Whites feeding. A handful down the hall near the other end.
Grace and I headed down the hall to the room that had been dedicated for the pantry. It was the first classroom on our right. The feeding Whites barely gave us a glance. That was hopeful until we neared the pantry door and I heard sounds from within. Whites were in there, and they sounded pissed.
Nodding to the door, I pointed at the knob, then raised my machete and stood to the side so I could ambush and kill any beast that sprang out when Grace opened it up.
She positioned herself behind the door, gave me a confirming glance and pulled, stepping far out of the way.
The noise from inside didn’t stop, at least not immediately, but after a moment of waiting, I was rewarded. A White ran out the door, right past me. I swung my blade at the back of his neck. He dropped as a second came out the door. I wasn’t in position to get her with my machete, so I jabbed at her throat with the knife in my left hand and shoved the blade all the way through the back of her neck. She crumbled, limp, gurgling blood through her breath.
I straightened up and stepped into the pantry. The last of the Whites—a wiry guy with a full sleeve tattoo on his naked arm—glanced at me and then went back to smashing a gallon-sized can against the floor, holding it up to look at the picture of sliced peaches on the label after every couple of tries.
I motioned Grace to come in. She followed, closing the door behind her. I headed straight for the White, deciding to take care of him so he wouldn’t become a distraction while we sifted through the mess to find some groceries.
The White, though, eyed me suspiciously and stopped pounding the can immediately after I started toward him. By my second step, he was on his feet and moving to the other side of a shelf.
Damn, a skittish one. Unusual.
I looked back to make sure the door was closed, set my feet, and raised my machete. “Here, Whitey, Whitey…”
The White looked at me but didn’t move.
“Come here, buddy,” I said. “I’m going to kill you.”
Still, he didn’t move.
To my left, Grace started to work her way around to the White’s other side. He got nervous, glancing back and forth between us, and stepping toward the far corner of the room.
Then I stopped. This was different. “Can you understand me?”
It looked at me blankly, still glancing between us.
“Hey,” I said. “Nod your head. Blink. Wave your hand. Say something if you can. Do you understand me?”
It stepped closer into the corner.
I sighed. It wasn’t a Smart One. It wasn’t a Slow Burn. It wasn’t as smart as Russell had been but it seemed relatively harmless to me. It didn’t wig out and attack me when I’d spoken. Killing it didn’t feel right. “Grace.”
“Yes?” she responded in a soft voice.
“Go open the door again, and stand out of the way.”
“Are you sure that’s how you want to handle this?”
“Yeah.”
“I think it’s a mistake.”
“Yeah.” I looked at her. “I don’t need any more guilt. Let’s let it go.”
Grace shook her head and stepped quickly to the door.
Once she had it open, I grunted a gorilla sound, raised my machete and charged the White in the corner, doing it slowly enough, and leaving him plenty of room to run along the windows, cross the room, and disappear out the door. All I heard after that was the sound of his feet running down the hall.
Grace came back into the pantry and closed the door behind.
“Easy enough,” I told her softly.
“We’ll see.” In the dim moonlight coming in through the windows, I scanned the room. “You guys had a lot of food in here.”
“They were stocked enough to last for a while.”
“Besides the flour Dr. Oaks asked for? What should we bring back?”
“Anything they can eat right out of the can.”
I asked, “Can’t you eat everything right out of the can?”
Grace looked at me, puzzled. “I suppose.” She started searching through the remains of flour, sugar, beans, and rice that had been stacked on a couple of pallets and shredded by the Whites. “Everything is mixed up.”
“Maybe there’s a bag of flour down in the pile that isn’t open.”
Grace continued to dig.
I found where the canvas grocery bags had fallen to the floor, and I pulled several out and shook them off. They all had big looped handles, and I slid one up my arm and wrapped the handle over my shoulder. I moved around, trying the bag on for size. If I didn’t put too much in the bag, I might be able to carry one over each shoulder and still keep my weapons in hand. It would make for awkward movement, but I liked the idea better than going out with a bag in one hand rather than a knife.
Grace stopped digging through the mess on the pallets and started looking through the cans and boxes on the floor.
I put a grocery bag on my other shoulder and turned around to face Grace. “What do you think? Stylish?”
She laughed and put a hand over her mouth to keep the sound in. “You look like an idiot.”
I grinned. “But it’s functional, right?” I waved my machete and knife to demonstrate.
“Hey.”
“What?” I tensed.
Grace knelt on the floor, reached down, and lifted a clear plastic jug full of something white. “Baking powder. We don’t need the flour. This will be perfect.”
I stepped closer. “Is there another one?”
Grace found a second jug.
I tossed her a grocery bag, and she loaded them in. “You think two will be enough?”
“We can make another trip if we need more.”
It took a few more minutes to get our food loaded up along with our baking powder for dusting the academics in white before taking them out of the veterinary sciences building. Just before we left, I asked, “Do they have an armory in here?”
Grace pointed down. “On the first floor.”
“You think we should go down and pick up a couple of guns and some ammo, just in case?”
Grace shook her head, deciding instantly.
“I’m not saying it’ll do any good in the long run,” I explained. “I was just thinking they might feel—I don’t know—hopeful, having a weapon in hand.”
“I think putting a loaded gun in their hands is a mistake,” she countered. “They haven’t been out among the infected like you and I have. We’ve seen enough people learn the hard way that noise draws the infected in. With the naked horde everywhere, if one of the academics gets nervous and fires, then they’re all dead—all of them—whether they’re hidden in a stockroom, walking across the campus, or in their new hiding place.”
“You’re right,” I sighed. “Let’s just take what we’ve got.” I pushed the door open and peeked into the hall. Not
hing but the Whites far down, still eating. I led the way out and crossed over to the stairwell, opened the door slightly to listen, peek inside, and proceeded. It was clear as far as I could tell. Grace followed me silently down the stairs, avoiding the slipperiest spots where the blood was thick and hadn’t yet dried.
At the bottom floor, we paused again at the door that led out of the building. I pushed it open a little and listened. No unexpected sounds. I opened it wide enough to slip through and stepped out with Grace right behind.
She gasped and froze.
My machete was immediately up as my head snapped right, then left, looking for the danger.
She nudged me with her elbow and pointed across the grass.
A line of jogging Whites, twenty or thirty of them, was winding its way toward us. The first White in the line had a full sleeve tattoo on his left arm, and was looking right at me.
“Motherfucker!” I pushed Grace back inside.
Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!
I should have killed that fucker in the pantry. He was a Smart One. He was smart enough to play docile and stupid when he saw my machete, and now he’d rounded up some of his motherfucking naked White buddies to come and get us.
Dammit.
“What do you think?” Grace asked, urgently.
I shrugged the grocery bags off my shoulders, and bounded over to tuck them beneath the staircase. I planned to pick them up later, tattoo-sleeve asshole Smart One or not. “Leave your stuff there with mine.” I pointed up the stairs. “Run. Back to two.”
Grace shook her head. “That’s stupid. They’ll find us.”
“Go.”
I bounded up the stairs after Grace. At the landing, she wanted to continue up, but I stretched an arm out to stop her. I whispered, “Go up if you want to. I’m going to make my stand on two.”
“Not even you can kill them all, Zed. Not with a knife and a machete.”
“I don’t need to kill them all. I just need to kill one.”
“What if they don’t come to two? What if they don’t fall into whatever stupid little trap you’re planning?”
“That’s why I want you with me,” I told her. “I don’t want them to skip over two and find you first. I know you can’t kill them all, either.”
Grace closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and huffed. She looked at me with a steely glare. “You better not fuck this up.”
We ran onto the second floor just as the Whites slammed into the outer door at the bottom of the stairs.
Chapter 30
Across the hall from the commissary, I swung the door open on a room full of supplies that I glanced at too quickly to identify. Nothing moved. That was the important thing. I pointed and told Grace, “Inside.”
Grace resisted. She wasn’t one to take orders. She wasn’t one to shirk. “Whatever you have in mind, we’ll do it together.”
I shoved her through the doorway. “No time.”
Whites were running up the stairs. They were in pursuit mode and the Smart One had worked them into a hunting frenzy.
I looked Grace in the eye and said, “Another person won’t help. Don’t risk yourself for no reason. But get inside or do exactly what I do or you’ll kill us both.” I spun around, planning my next move, leaving it up to her to choose.
A white-skinned corpse, one of dozens in the hall, lay just feet away. I dropped to my knees beside it, sliced its belly open with my knife and tucked my machete beneath its leg. With my empty hand, I scooped a palm full of blood and splashed it over my head. I scooped more, drenching my skull and face in dripping red. I shoved the hand with my knife gripped tight into the gaping wound, burying my fist in the decedent's innards. The knife punctured the intestine, releasing a fume of stink. I reached under the leg and grabbed the handle of my machete and lowered my face to the wound to pretend like I was feeding.
The door to the room where I tersely told Grace to hide clicked closed with her inside. She’d made the right decision.
The door to the stairwell swung open, and the tattooed Smart One ran onto the floor with his troupe of rabid White monkeys in tow. He sprinted straight for the door to the pantry, grabbed it and swung it open. The Whites fell over one another pouring into the room, screaming for blood as they did.
When the last of them passed inside, the Smart One held the door wide and stepped around to get a view of the coming mayhem. His back was toward me. And why not? At the moment I was just another cannibal feeding on a dead brother. He was hunting two loquacious Slow Burns.
I pulled my legs beneath me so I could pounce—the sound of my feet sliding across the messy floor must have seemed odd to the Smart One because he turned to look, confident and slow.
Too bad for him that his earlier skittishness had been an act. Otherwise, he'd have dodged away from the unexpected sound and might have had a chance.
I jumped as I raised my machete high.
His eyes went wide, and the tattooed arm came up to block my blade.
Silly White. That never works.
My machete came down with all the force I could bring to bear.
His tattooed forearm separated and spun through the air. His bald White skull split down through the forehead to the bridge of the nose and blood exploded from the wound. His body stiffened. His eyes turned dead glassy, and his mouth froze. That fucking asshole of a Smart One was dead, and he fell over with my machete jammed in his cranium.
Null Spot, motherfucker!
With his dead hand off the doorknob he'd been holding, the door closed, for the moment, trapping his new posse. They were busy denting cans with pretty labels and knocking over shelves. They didn't notice the door.
I stepped on tattoo boy’s face and pressed his head to the floor with my foot as I wrenched my machete free.
I heard a noise behind me, and I swung my blade as I turned, ready to cleave whatever it was sneaking up from behind to do to me what I'd just done to tattoo boy.
Grace's eyes went wide, and she froze in the open door.
My machete and body were carrying too much momentum to stop, so I redirected up, burying my blade in the side of the thick, wooden door above her head. The loud thunk got the attention of the feeding Whites down the hall. They all stared.
Grace blinked, caught her breath, and stepped into the hall beside me. She brandished her knives at the Whites up the corridor, and I guess they decided she was too badass to fuck with. They went back to eating.
I wrenched my blade out of the door, looked at Grace, and nodded toward the stairwell door.
She ran. I followed.
We collected our bags at the bottom of the stairs, and exited the building, taking care to stay behind the bushes that had concealed us when we'd first arrived. We made our way to the end of the building and paused to take a good look around before exposing ourselves. Of course, we were white-skinned and naked, but carelessness was what got people killed more than anything else. We were alive because we'd developed good habits for staying that way in a world full of unpredictable predators.
Grace gently grabbed my arm just as I was about to step out of the bushes.
I looked at her and mouthed a silent, "What?” I snapped a look all around me to see what I'd missed.
“Sorry,” she said softly.
“For what?”
“I thought you were trying to be a hero. I didn’t know you had a plan.”
“I always have a plan.” It was only half a lie.
She tapped her temple with her finger. “But you have that hero thing going. You know that, right?”
I nodded. Everybody knew that about me. It was a terminal character flaw I'd managed to live with. So far.
“I almost ruined it. I almost got us both killed.”
I stepped closer to the wall of the building and looked over the bushes for listening ears and white skin. None. “We haven’t done this kind of thing together enough to know each other. We don’t have that teamwork thing yet. You don’t know to trust me fully, yet. Yo
u think I’m a half-cocked whack job.” I smiled, even though I was starting to wonder how much that last part was pure truth. “I’m still alive. I’m good at what I do. Murphy and me, we’re good at it together because we trust each other. Like you and Jazz, I know what to expect from him and he knows what to expect from me.”
“But you didn’t bring Murphy with you.” She looked at me hard, searching for a deeper truth than I was admitting.
Why not put it all on the table? “I think maybe Murphy is coming to the end of what he can deal with.”
“Murphy?” Grace looked across the street to the veterinary science building. “Murphy seems like he’s adjusted to this better than anybody.”
“Maybe he’s finding his limit. I don’t know. He said some things.”
“Like?”
“Stuff. I’m worried about him now. I think maybe I’ve dragged him through too much shit.”
Grace laughed. “Everything isn’t about you, Zed. We all have to deal with this world whether you’re around to make it worse or not.”
“Worse?” That hurt. It was bad enough when I thought it. It was painful when someone else said it.
“Sorry.” Grace put a hand on my shoulder. “I didn’t mean to say that.”
I stepped out of the bushes. “You ready to go?” I jogged toward the street, knowing Grace would follow but not looking back to make sure she did.
Chapter 31
Things had gone well in the veterinary sciences building. Murphy had to kill a pair of Whites working their way up the stairs. They’d probably heard the professors making too much noise and were hoping for a meal. I guess even Whites’ plans tended to go awry.
The academics had emptied the stockroom of most of the boxes, jars, and old, useless junk that it had accumulated through the years. Instead, they stored what they could of their work and the work of their dead colleagues, notebooks, samples, and whatnot. Getting those things together in a safe place seemed to be more important to them than their personal safety, though more than half of them had taken the time to scavenge weapons from their dead defenders. That was a problem.
