by Guy James
“Thanks. I thought so. What do I put in it?”
Jane looked at Sven for a second, as if considering something, then turned around and picked out some boxes from the shelf behind the counter.
“These,” she said, and began to stack up the boxes on the counter in front of Sven.
He began reading the tops of the boxes. Some of the boxes had a picture of a wolf on them, and were called, “Wolf Power Buckshot.” The boxes said something about nine pellets. The other kind of boxes were called, “Black Magic Magnum,” and had a picture of a roaring bear on them. Sven shrugged, figuring that the animals meant business, and began packing the boxes into the duffel bag that Jane wasn’t using. When he was done stacking the boxes of shells, he put the shotgun into the bag too, making a mental note to read the small owner’s manual that hung from its grip.
Then Sven’s hands went down to the machetes. A glimmer passed through the air, but he wasn’t transported back into the jungle as he’d hoped.
“You okay?” Lorie asked. “What are you smiling about?”
“What?” Sven said. “Oh, I don’t know, just hungry I guess.” He hadn’t realized that he was smiling.
Lorie rolled her eyes, said, “Okay then,” and ran back into the aisles.
Chapter 77
Lorie needed to find something fast. Sven and Jane looked like they were almost ready to go, and Lorie still hadn’t had the chance to hide anything away. She liked the crossbows she saw, and she had thought about sneaking one into the duffel bags, but that wasn’t a good idea. Jane would find it and forbid her from bringing it.
Jane hadn’t said anything about the butcher knife though, Lorie remembered, as she walked to the front of the store and looked down at the dead fat zombie that lay there.
His head wasn’t all there, and his leg was all messed up and bent out of shape, and there was her butcher knife, sticking into a nasty looking gobbet of flesh that was no longer part of the zombie’s leg, It looked like it had detached and fallen away from under the knee, so it was probably part of the zombie’s shin and calf that she was looking at, but it looked misshapen and malformed and it was a nasty pallid yellow on the inside.
Maybe the yellow is the fat, Lorie thought, a fat calf.
She reached for the handle of the butcher knife, but stopped before grabbing it. She didn’t want the thing now that it had the zombie’s stuff all over it. It could be infected, and it was just gross anyway.
Sure it was a nice big knife, but why should she settle for a contaminated butcher knife when she was in a store filled with other knives that were just as good, and maybe even better, like the ones that Sven had found?
Lorie straightened up from the zombie and looked up at Sven. He was standing by the counter, talking to Jane. They looked like they were discussing what to pack, and Jane was showing Sven something with the guns and ammo they were packing.
Those really are good pants, Lorie thought, and she smiled to herself when she remembered how she had cleared the shelves of all the other pants and hid them in the next aisle over. She had almost been unable to hide her delight when Sven believed her tale about the duck pants being the last pants in the store. It was a good trick, and Lorie was sure Evan would be impressed when she told him about it.
She walked to the entrance where Evan was standing.
“What are you up to over here?” Lorie asked.
“Keeping the watch,” Evan said, then he sneezed and wiped his hand across his nose.
“See any zombies yet?”
“No, but it’s getting really dark out there, and that can’t be good.”
“No, it can’t be good, that’s for sure. You feeling better at all?”
“Yeah actually, much better. It all seems like a dream, doesn’t it? Today I mean. Just a bad dream and we’re gonna wake up any second.”
Lorie looked down at the threshold. “I don’t think we are gonna wake up. I think this is it.”
Evan didn’t say anything. He turned around and went back to looking out at the darkening parking lot. Lorie got the sense that she shouldn’t bother him anymore, and she turned around and walked into the first aisle of the store, reminding herself that she needed to get something good that wasn’t a gun or a crossbow, and to get it fast.
As she walked down the aisle, her eyes were again drawn to the stuffed fish sitting atop their special shelves on the walls, and hanging from the ceiling. They were everywhere, and they had troubled her from the moment she walked in and spotted the first one sitting next to the cash register.
They were all bloated and shiny like they were about to explode in a fountain of fish guts. The mental image made Lorie cringe in a way that the zombie carnage didn’t. The latter had little effect on her, but the swollen painted fish on the walls pointed at her with their stuffed fins, and some of them had spines, and their eyes seemed to be following her, watching her—
Lorie looked away from the fish, and resolved to avoid making any more eye contact with them. They were just dead fish, after all, and Lorie ate fish all the time. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, and it shouldn’t have been creeping her out as much as it was.
There was nothing in the first aisle worth grabbing. There was a lot of birdshot and two-way radios and stupid-looking hood ornaments, most of which were of an overall-wearing man holding a rifle in one hand and a beer bottle in the other. Lorie wondered for a moment if they were scented, but decided not to discover if they were—they probably smelled of beer, or gunpowder, or both. Then she wondered if beer or gunpowder were Harry Potter jelly bean flavors. Beer must have been, but gunpowder? Lorie wasn’t sure, but she kind of wanted some jelly beans now.
“Stop it,” Lorie muttered to herself, “stop getting distracted by these stupid things and get something sharp!”
She turned into the next aisle.
This one was filled with scopes and sights, replacement magazines, rifle cases, and weird-looking binoculars and goggles. Lorie went up to a shelf and picked up a pair of binoculars, examining it. The binoculars looked cool, and they were priced at $343.69, so Lorie figured they were worth taking. She ripped the tag off and powered them on, then put them to her face.
Everything looked the same, except it was now a dark shade of green, then she made out the user display, which showed that the internal battery was half-full. She began turning slowly, but she still couldn’t make out Sven or Jane or Evan through the aisles. That’s when Lorie realized that night vision wasn’t the same as heat vision, and called herself stupid under her breath. She took the goggles away from her face, put them back on their shelf, and ran over into the next aisle.
There she finally found something useful.
Lorie picked up the package of throwing stars and unclasped its top. She reached in and plucked out two of the stars. They were small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, lying on top of each other. She looked at the remaining stars in the package—there were five left. She put the package back on its shelf and began to examine the stars in her hand. She took one in each hand and patted the points with the tips of her fingers. They were sharp, but not even close to as sharp as the butcher knife had been. Each star had eight points, and it looked more like a circle than a star, but Lorie figured that was alright.
With a star held loosely between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, she walked to the back of the store. There she picked out her first target and drew back each of her arms across her body. Then she rethought the motion, deciding to throw one at a time, and let her right arm fall to the side.
She flung the first star with her left hand, and missed. The star stuck in the wall with a reverberating boing.
Then she flung the second star with her right, and it hit home. It sank deep into its target, and there was no reverberation, no boing, just a thunk.
“What was that?” Jane’s voice called from the front of the store. “Everything okay back there?”
“Yeah,” Lorie called, “I’m fine. Just lo
oking for more survival stuff.”
“Be careful.”
“Okay.”
That must have satisfied Jane, because she didn’t say anything more.
Lorie walked up to the star that was sticking in the target, reached up for it, and changed her mind. It was almost halfway into the bloated fish, and when she thought of pulling it out, she got the image of the fish deflating rapidly and shooting fish guts out at her. So she left the star in the fish and went back to the package of throwing stars. She picked it up, looked at it, picked out one more star, then put it back in its package.
They weren’t practical, she decided. They wouldn’t go deep enough to get the zombies in their brains—assuming that was what you had to do to get a zombie—and her aim wasn’t that great with them anyway.
Lorie sighed and walked into the next aisle. As soon as she stepped into it, she knew that this was the one. She had been wrong about the stars, but this was so much different. She found exactly what she wanted, and put it carefully into her back pocket, then pulled the back of her shirt down as far as it would go to cover the bulge and the part of the thing that stuck out.
Her spirits were now officially lifted.
Then Lorie decided to get something for Evan. He was just guarding the door, and she was sure Sven and Jane weren’t finding him weapons. Evan needed something to fight with just like the rest of them did. Lorie half-skipped into the next aisle and picked out two small, aluminum baseball bats—“Home Defense Bats,” their tags read—one for Evan and one for herself. The bats were light but felt very solid, and Lorie was confident they would make a very nice cracking sound against the back of a zombie’s head.
She tried to put her skipping under control and walked out of the aisles and over to Evan, with the two baseball bats behind her back.
“Evan...” she said, “oh Evan...”
Evan turned around. “Hey, what’s that you got behind you?”
“You get three guesses.”
Evan frowned. “Oh alright. Is it for me?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t count as a guess.” Now that Evan was turned away from the parking lot, Lorie found herself glancing behind him to make sure nothing snuck up on them.
“A t-shirt?”
“What? No.”
“A chess set?”
“A chess set? We’re in a gun store. That doesn’t even count as a guess. You still have two more.”
“I dunno, maybe there are deer chess sets or gun chess sets or something. There are all kinds of chess sets, you know, with all kinds of different figurines.”
“Okay, okay, but that still doesn’t count as a guess.” Something about the air had changed, and it was making Lorie feel uncomfortable. It wasn’t the zombie smell, definitely not that. But it felt like the pressure had changed or something, although Lorie wasn’t sure what that meant. Her body felt stiffer than it had only moments before, and she had become impatient with Evan. “Come on already.”
“Uhh, is it a...is it a knife?”
Lorie shook her head. “Nope, not a knife, guess again.”
“Uhh, okay, is it a...is it a...”
Then Lorie’s eyes moved beyond Evan, and she was staring out into the parking lot. She forgot all about keeping her arms behind her back and they fell to her sides.
“A bat!” Evan said triumphantly and sneezed. He took one of the bats from Lorie as she was backing up from the door.
Evan’s smile faded. “What, what is it?” He began to move toward Lorie as he turned around, but of course he must have heard it now. Sven and Jane must have heard it too.
The sound was almost deafening—no, that wasn’t the right word for it, the sound drowned out everything else.
“Wow,” Sven said, coming up from behind Lorie and stepping in front of her. “That’s some rain.” He was shaking his head and had his hands on the knives on his belt. “Guess we better get moving right away.”
Jane joined him in front of the door. “Don’t you think we should wait this out? This kind of rain can’t go on forever, and we won’t be able to see anything if we drive out in it.”
“What if it does go on forever?” Lorie asked. “Everything else has been going wrong today.” They all turned to her, and she went on. “We have to leave. We have to leave now, they’re coming for us, I know they are. We can’t wait for it to end.” Lorie was surprised at the sobs that suddenly tried to choke their way out between her words. She didn’t know why she had lost her composure at the sight and roar of the rain.
“I’m with her,” Sven said. “We’ll just have to take it slow and be very careful.”
Evan nodded and raised his baseball bat over his head. “Yeah,” he added.
Jane sighed. “Okay, let’s go then.”
Jane and Sven went back to the counter where they’d been packing.
“I’ve never seen rain like that,” Evan said.
“Yeah,” Lorie agreed. “There’s something wrong about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s just wrong.”
Lorie watched as sheets of rain fell onto the pavement and cars in the parking lot, sending watery explosions in all directions. Then she looked down and saw that the rain was beginning to seep in, under the door. She backed away, gripping the thing in her back pocket.
Chapter 78
The Beretta 92FS that was now slung at Jane’s side made her feel significantly safer. Racking the slide and squeezing off that first round into the hunter zombie’s brain had changed everything. The bit of recoil from the sleek, silver and black gun in her hands and the zombie’s death rattle had given her hope—hope that they could all live through this.
“Come on,” Sven said. “We gotta get moving again. With this rain, we’ll be going even slower.” There was Sven, always in a rush.
The skies had darkened so much that there was now more light in the store than outside. They were waiting for her at the door—Sven and Ivan, Lorie, and Evan.
“I’m coming,” Jane said. “I just need to check I’ve got everything.”
The dark camouflage duffel bag that she had taken for herself had two spare magazines for the Beretta in it—one that held fifteen rounds and one that held ten—they were the only two left, besides the one in the gun that held fifteen.
At least the magazines hadn’t all been ten-rounders, she thought, and thanked God there had still been plenty of boxes of 9 mm Luger ammo. She had taken them all.
She had her gun now, heavier than the Walther P99 that she kept at home for self-defense. She had shot the Beretta before, and was comfortable with its feel. She had also packed a Swiss army knife and some flares just in case, though she didn’t know what she would ever need the flares for.
“You guys have the survival kits?” Jane asked.
“Yeah,” Lorie said, “two. They’ve got batteries, flashlights, a fire starter, emergency blanket, whistle, mirror—” Lorie laughed after that one, “—water purification tablets, and first aid stuff.”
“Okay,” Jane said. “Let’s get some of the compact sleeping bags too. It doesn’t look like we’ll be sleeping in beds tonight.”
That was good there had still been some left, and that everything was packed and ready to go. Jane arranged four sleeping bags on the counter. They hadn’t been able to find any gas masks, so they would have to work with the surgical masks Sven had found.
Jane was still rummaging behind the counter, but she couldn’t find the last thing that was on her mind. She gripped her Beretta, reassuring herself that it was still there, and then zipped up her duffel bag and came out from behind the counter with it. She walked briskly up and down three aisles, picking up four ponchos, and finally, spotting the knife sharpener she’d been looking for, grabbed that too.
“Okay,” Jane said. “I’m ready, let’s go. Just maybe put this on first.” Jane handed Sven a poncho, he looked at it, shook his head, and handed it back to her. Jane guessed he didn’t want it, fin
e, whatever. Just for that, she would tell him how ridiculous he looked in those duck pants, when they got to safety.
“I’ll check to see if it’s all clear,” Sven said. “When you see me start up the car, all of you come out and get in.” He picked up his duffel bag, which was bulging with the shape of a shotgun in it, along with the irregular shapes of the boxes of shells they had packed with paper and plastic bags to protect them from the rain.
Jane, Lorie, and Evan nodded to him, then he glanced over his shoulder to look at Ivan. “You might wanna duck,” Sven said to his cat. “You’re likely to get wet out there.”
Sven opened the door, and as he strode into the rain, Jane saw Ivan drop down into the backpack, and out of sight.
Then Sven disappeared too, lost in the thick rain.
Jane stood there with Lorie and Evan in silence, feeling on edge while she put on her poncho. She considered wrapping up her Beretta and putting it in her duffel bag, but she didn’t want to take it off. She needed it there, against her body, and she wasn’t shy about wearing a poncho. They were taking excessive precautions with the ammo anyway, it would have to be submerged in water for a while to be ruined, but then again, it had been a disastrous day already, and the wrapping was a quick and worthwhile precaution to take, however unnecessary.
“Now you guys put these on too,” Jane said. “Don’t let him lead you with his bad example.”
To Jane’s relief, the kids obeyed and put the ponchos on. Why that made her feel relieved she didn’t know, but it did.
It seemed that Sven was taking a little too long to get the car started, and that made Jane nervous. She began to glance back toward the far end of the counter, wondering about who or what might still be lurking deep inside the “Employees Only” section of the store. They hadn’t checked back there, and she didn’t want to be surprised by any zombies.
“How you feelin’?” Lorie asked Evan.
“Not bad, kinda dizzy, but okay.”
“Maybe you’re hungry,” Lorie said, and Evan began shaking his head in protest.
Ignoring his head-shaking, Lorie proceeded to pull out one of the granola bars she had found in the back of the store. Then she made Evan take it.