by Lukens, Mark
And now Miss Ruth was alone in her apartment while society broke down all around them. She wondered if Miss Ruth was going to have enough to eat and drink. She wondered if she should take the old woman to the store with her. Of course it was against company policy, and other employees might argue that they should be allowed to bring their loved ones to the safety of the store.
It couldn’t hurt to at least check on Miss Ruth, make sure she was okay. With the recent surge in crime, Jo wondered if someone had broken into Miss Ruth’s apartment. Maybe she was hurt and needed help.
“Miss Ruth?”
Jo moved closer to the doorway, her overnight bag hung over her left shoulder. She had a thousand dollars in her bag and it was probably foolish to be standing out here in the doorway if there were desperate criminals inside the apartment. But she couldn’t leave without knowing that Miss Ruth was okay—it just wasn’t in her DNA to leave the old woman alone.
“Miss Ruth?”
Jo knocked on the open door.
There was a scuffing noise inside the dark apartment, like someone was moving around, perhaps feet shuffling along the floor. It could be Miss Ruth making those noises, or it could be the burglars.
You don’t know there are burglars in there—Miss Ruth could’ve just left her door open.
“Miss Ruth, are you okay?”
Jo took a step inside the apartment. The doorway led into a short hall that branched off to a living room on the right and the kitchen and dining area to the left. She had to walk all the way down the hall to see the rooms. It was dark in the apartment. All the lights were off and it seemed like all of the curtains and blinds were drawn, shrouding the place in shadows.
When Jo got to the end of the short hall, she stopped cold. She saw someone in the gloom in the living room, a short and stooped figure. It was Miss Ruth, had to be, but she looked like she was crouched down.
“Are you okay?” Jo asked her.
The old woman didn’t move. She was whispering something, but Jo couldn’t make out the words.
“Miss Ruth?”
Something smelled bad, like raw meat and the coppery scent of blood, the smell of something rotten, and a sewage smell, like a backed-up toilet. Now that Jo’s eyes had adjusted a little more to the darkness, she could make out that Miss Ruth was kneeling in front of a large object on the floor.
“Miss Ruth, are you okay?”
The old woman was definitely whispering something. Jo could make out a few of the words. She thought she’d heard the words bad moon.
“Are your lights not working?” Jo asked. She made out the light switch on the wall in the gloom. It worked either the lights in the hall or the lights in the living room. “I’m going to turn on the lights, okay? I want to make sure you’re all right.”
Jo flipped the light switch and the overhead lights in the living room came on, shining a spotlight down onto the horror in front of her. A dead man was lying on the floor and Miss Ruth was kneeling right beside him, facing Jo, the body between her and Miss Ruth, only ten feet away. Miss Ruth’s face and hands were smeared with blood, with bits of flesh stuck to the blood. There were more bits of flesh stuck in Miss Ruth’s teeth and in her gray hair that had come loose from the bun she always wore it in, thin strands hanging down in front of her bloodstained face.
Jo wanted to ask what had happened—it was the first natural reaction that came to mind. But a more primitive reaction was overriding that one, the urge to flee. It was fairly obvious that Miss Ruth was eating the person in front of her. Most of the person’s face was gone, just chewed bits of meat and gristle stuck to a skull, the eyes deep black holes, the mouth hung open with bright white teeth that contrasted the dark and bloody gore around them.
Miss Ruth shot up to her feet.
Jo ran. She backed down the short hall, trying to turn as she went out through the doorway, tripping over the threshold and falling down. A pain flared in her lower back, triggering a sharp pain shooting down one leg.
The sound of running feet down the hall. The sound of an inhuman screech.
Jo had to get up. She had to run. She was on all fours, then up on her feet, grabbing her overnight bag from the floor and looping it over her shoulder. She hurried down the stairs, trying not to stumble and fall. Miss Ruth was still making that screeching sound, a sound Jo would become all too familiar with soon. It sounded like she was trying to say something through her screeches, words mixed in with the grunts and screams.
Jo was not a swift runner, but she would have bet she could outrun an old woman with a bad hip. But Miss Ruth was so much faster now. So much stronger.
After getting to the bottom of the steps, Jo shot out into the parking lot, running for her car that was backed into a space. She had the keys in her jacket pocket; she pulled them out, trying not to drop them.
Miss Ruth was coming—racing across the parking lot. She looked like something that wasn’t even real, something from a horror movie that shouldn’t be possible in the daylight of this cloudy and cold day, a nightmare ripped from the dream world.
Keys . . . she had them in her hand, the door locks popping up. She didn’t want to take her eyes off the charging old woman, but she had to see what she was doing. She couldn’t stumble again. She wasn’t sure if she could fight off the sudden insane strength of Miss Ruth.
She was inside her car. She slammed the door shut and pressed the door lock button down, locking all the doors. Miss Ruth was at her window two seconds later, beating at the glass, leaving dark bloody smears behind.
Jo had to get out of there—the old woman was going to break the glass any minute. Jo started the car, shifted into drive and pulled out into the parking lot. Miss Ruth tried to hold on to the driver’s door, but as Jo picked up speed, the woman slid off the metal and fell away, rolling over a few times on the pavement.
Once she was out in the street, Jo realized that there was a lot more traffic than usual. Cars and trucks were abandoned in the street, some on the side of the road. The vehicles ahead of her were slowing down to get around the abandoned vehicles, many of the motorists honking their horns, some of them shouting out through open windows. Jo kept her hands clenched on the steering wheel, following the minivan in front of her.
She needed some gas—she only had half a tank, but she didn’t want to stop. She passed two gas stations. One had long lines and the other one had big signs announcing that they were out of gas. Two people were fighting each other near the gas station building. Jo saw other people milling around in the distance in front of a housing development. In the cold air there was the unmistakable smell of smoke—she could smell it even inside her car.
A cop directed traffic at an intersection only a mile away from the short road that led to the Super Bea’s. She had to wait through two traffic lights before she could get through. While she waited, as she constantly glanced around to make sure nobody was running up to her car, she dialed Cynthia’s number. It took seven tries; the first six either went to voicemail or led to a robotic voice telling her the number was not in service, but Cynthia finally answered.
“Miss Jo, are you on your way back?”
“Yeah,” Jo breathed out. “Don’t leave the store. There’s something really bad out here.”
CHAPTER 34
Jo
Cynthia was the one person at her store that Jo could truly trust. Like Jo, Cynthia lived alone and didn’t have much to do with her family. Like Jo, this store and her job were really her life. And like Jo, she was scared that the company was going to collapse in the next few weeks like so many other businesses had recently. It seemed impossible to believe that a big business like this would suddenly close its doors, but maybe the passengers of the Titanic had felt the same way as the unsinkable ship began to sink, those passengers frozen in moments of unbelievable shock as the gigantic ship pitched up into the air.
Jo drove down the side road and then into the parking lot of the Super Bea’s. There weren’t a lot of cars in the pa
rking lot, but there were some near the front doors. And there was a crowd of people there, demanding to be let into the store. Jo drove to the back of the store, in through the gate of the chain-link fence that surrounded the huge back area where the trucks were unloaded once a week. She stopped her car and got out, leaving the car running. She dragged the gate closed and locked the padlock. She had the key to the padlock on her car keys and another key in her office.
She felt a little calmer now that she was locked inside the back fence. The fence wasn’t an impenetrable wall, but there was rolled barbed wire strung across the top of it, and that should deter the most determined shoppers.
But would it deter someone like Miss Ruth?
She didn’t want to think about that. She’d told Cynthia on the phone to have the back door unlocked in the next few minutes, that she would be coming in that way.
Jo parked her car on the other side of the loading ramp and got out, grabbing her overnight bag. She hurried over to the single metal door beside the ramp, running up the steps. She still smelled the smoke in the air and she heard sirens in the distance and a few car alarms going off. But at least she hadn’t heard the crowd that had been at the front doors coming around the side of the building.
The door opened before Jo could even pound on it. Cynthia opened the door wide and Jo dashed inside.
“What’s wrong?” Cynthia asked as she closed and locked the door.
“My . . . my neighbor tried to attack me,” Jo said. She stared at Cynthia. They were in the loading bay with the fluorescent lights on above them. She looked over at the garage door to make sure it was locked.
“What? Did you call the police?”
Jo shook her head no. She was about to tell Cynthia about the dead body in her neighbor’s apartment and that the old woman had been eating the person’s face, but she didn’t. A chill crossed her mind as she thought of the rumors she’d heard on the internet about the plague that turned people into flesh-eating crazies. Was she infected now? Had she come into the store and infected Cynthia? Was this how the plague spread so easily? She felt like throwing up.
“Come on in here,” Cynthia said, guiding Jo out of the loading bay and into the hallway, down to the office.
Jo decided that it was too late to worry about the plague now. Maybe they were all infected already. Who knew how many people each one of them had come in contact with over the last few days in this store? Right now she needed to concentrate on keeping this store locked, the products safe, and her employees safe. That was her only job right now.
“Where is everybody?”
“They all left.”
“All of them?”
Cynthia shrugged. “Most of them.”
Jo shook her head. Didn’t they know how dangerous things were out there? “Who’s left?”
“Three of the stockers are already here for the night shift. Tina Yang’s still here. Betty in the deli. Marie in the bakery. Al’s still here.”
Al was the janitor. He had come over with Jo from the Wal-Mart in Carsonville.
“Let’s get everyone together,” Jo said. “We need to have a meeting.”
Cynthia nodded.
*
Fifteen minutes later all nine of them met by the cash registers. The doors and hurricane shutters were still locked and hadn’t been breached yet. Cops had come by and run most of the people off, but every once in a while Jo could hear the sounds of people out there in the dark. But she didn’t think they were customers trying to get in—she thought some of them might be people who were like Miss Ruth, people who were infected. One of the stockers, Rodney, had called them rippers. He had the only cell phone that was picking up internet service at the moment and he showed Jo some articles from websites.
“I’m not telling any of you to stay here,” Jo told her employees. “I know some of you’ve got families to get to.”
“I ain’t got nobody,” Al grumbled.
“Me either,” Tina Yang said. She had come to America as a student and worked part time so she could get her degree; her family was still in China.
Jo looked at the three stockers. “If any of you want to leave, I promise that you’ll still have your job. But I can’t promise how much longer we will be in business. Again, I’m not telling anyone to do anything, but I am asking for help.”
Rodney shrugged. “I’ll stay the night.” He looked at Cam and Nick.
Both of them nodded back at him.
“This is really happening,” Cam said. His eyes were red and bloodshot, and Jo suspected that he had toked on a joint recently. “This is like one of those zombie apocalypse movies.”
“Thank you for staying,” Jo told the three stockers. “You know we’re supposed to have a truck coming in tonight, but I’m not so sure it’s going to get here. If, by some miracle, it makes it here, I’m not stocking the shelves. We’re not opening again. Not for the foreseeable future. But when that truck comes—if that truck comes—I’m going to want to get it unloaded as quickly as possible.”
The three young men nodded.
“Like I said, I’m not telling any of you to stay. But if you want to leave, you need to do it pretty soon. Maybe go out the back. Or you may want to wait until the morning.”
“I’m not going out there,” Rodney said, shaking his head. “No way, man.”
“Okay,” Jo said. “I could really use everyone’s help. Even with the hurricane shutters in place, we need to make sure those front doors are secure. We need to pile as much stuff up in front of the doors as we can. Same thing with the doors in the back and the one on the side. We’ll move the stuff in front of the garage door out of the way if the truck makes it here later tonight.”
She didn’t have a lot of faith in the truck making it. She could imagine the truck being run off the highway, overrun by looters. Or maybe those ripper things that Rodney had showed her on his phone, the ripper things that Miss Ruth had become.
CHAPTER 35
Jo
The delivery truck made it to the store by five o’clock a.m. The driver, Jackson, had called ahead on the store phone, letting Jo know he was on the way. He was only five minutes away when he called, but it was the first time his cell phone had had service. Rodney and Cam went out to the gate with the key to the padlock. Tina volunteered to go out there with them to keep watch as they guided the semi-truck into the back so they could close and lock the gate again. The early morning air still smelled like smoke, and there were still noises in the distance: police sirens, car alarms, gunshots, and an explosion every so often. A few planes roared by far overhead, just blinking lights in the night sky.
Jackson got his truck backed up to the loading bay, the air brakes hissing. He got out and opened the back. The gate on the chain-link fence was closed and locked again. Tina was still at the corner of the back of the store where she could watch the gate. She had a walkie-talkie with her.
“All clear so far, Miss Jo,” she said into the walkie-talkie.
“Okay,” Jo told Tina on the walkie-talkie, and then she looked at Jackson and her three stockers. “We need to get this stuff inside as quickly as possible. We’ll stack it all here in the loading bay for now, dry goods over there, and any fresh or frozen foods over there by the door.
Jackson’s truck had two compartments, a refrigerated section toward the front of the truck and a larger section at the back for dry goods. Jackson was at the doorway of the refrigerated section while Rodney, Cam, and Nick went to work unloading the pallets of supplies from the dry goods compartment. Jo had never seen the boys work so fast. Rodney was the leader of the crew and he took over the job of ordering where to set the pallets of boxes down. Jackson stacked boxes up at the edge of the doorway of the refrigerated compartment.
Jo and Cynthia grabbed the boxes Jackson had stacked up and handed them to Al and Marie. Betty could only carry the lightest of the boxes, but she was doing the best she could. They were all chipping in even though they knew the dangers of looters prowling
around out there somewhere in the dark, and the worse dangers of rippers, of even breathing in this possibly infected smoky air.
Within thirty minutes they had everything unloaded from the truck. Jackson closed and locked the doors on his truck, and then he and Tina came inside. Jo and Cynthia closed the garage door, sliding the locking mechanisms in place on each side. It was a steel door and much stronger than a typical garage door, but it still looked flimsy to Jo.
But she couldn’t worry about that right now—they needed to get the products put away. “Let’s get the cold stuff into the refrigerators,” she told the stockers.
“We got this, Miss Jo,” Cam said.
Rodney was already shoving a pallet jack under the first stack of boxes and pumping it up so he could wheel the load into the store.
“Thanks, guys,” Jo said as she watched them push the pallet away. Rodney and Nick held the double doors open for Cam. Cynthia got another pallet jack ready, and Brenda and Marie did their best to help her.
Jo turned to Jackson. “What are your plans?”
He shrugged. “Dispatch isn’t answering at all now. I have no idea what’s going on back there. I thought I might wait it out here for a few hours until I get some word from them.”
“Of course,” Jo said.
Jackson shook his head slowly. “I heard there were riots and looters, but this was worse than I ever thought it would be. Some of those people out there . . . it’s like they’ve gone crazy.”
Jo thought of Ruth in her apartment building.
“I just kept plowing ahead,” Jackson said. “The roads were a madhouse, but I took some back roads I knew and stayed off the interstate.”
