“I’m not sure I’d go that far,” Donna said.
She followed him to the women’s room, but at the door he stopped. “Um, should I go first?”
She shook her head. “Um, why wouldn’t you?”
He blushed again. “Well, what if someone’s in there?”
“We’ll probably have to kill them,” she laughed. “But I get it. I felt all awkward in the men’s room, too. I’ll take the lead.”
She nudged past him and into the bathroom. There were no sounds except the drip, drip, drip of the faucet.
“Wow,” Carson said as he moved in behind her.
“What?”
“I expected it to be cleaner, I guess.”
Donna looked around. It was pretty rank. “It’s a crappy convenience store. I guess they just don’t-”
She didn’t get to finish because the stall door in the corner of the bathroom flew open and a woman burst out. Well, at one point, she’d been a woman. Now she had grayish skin, black sludge down her chin and red eyes. She was wearing shorts that were down around her ankles, along with black panties. Whatever had happened to her, she had gotten sick while using the toilet.
Embarrassing way to go, for sure.
“It’s one of those things!” Carson barked.
Donna had never fired a gun. It just wasn’t in her repertoire, so she was surprised at how easy it was to lift the firearm and pull off a shot. She hit the girl between the eyes and immediately the woman collapsed in a heap in front of the open stall.
“Nice,” Carson breathed.
Donna stared. She had just killed a person. Or at least, something that had once been a person. And now that girl was dead, staring up with unseeing eyes and blood and gore pooling beneath her.
It was a good thing she’d already puked.
“I-I have to go out,” she said as she dashed into the main convenience store area again. She set the gun down on the counter and covered her mouth with one hand.
Carson stepped from the bathroom a few seconds later. “The rest of it was clear. Are you okay?”
She nodded. “It isn’t like I didn’t know it was going to be a bad day. I mean, you saw my bridezilla of a sister. But I didn’t think this would happen! I didn’t think I end up murdering someone.”
He stepped up and wrapped an arm around her. “You had to. We’ve already seen that those things… whatever happened to them… it makes them attack. Kill even.”
She nodded, but inside she didn’t feel much better. “I guess. And when this is all over, when everything is normal, the cops will understand, right?”
Carson stared at her for a minute and then nodded. “I’m sure when things are normal, a lot is going to be forgiven, Donna. Here, you fell earlier. Mind if I look at your knee?”
Donna nodded. “I think I ran through some glass, too, after I took off my shoes.”
She sat down on the linoleum floor by the front desk and pulled her skirt up around her thighs. Both her knees were skinned and one foot was covered with dried blood.
“Sorry,” Carson said as he grabbed for some antibiotic ointment and bandages from the shelf. “I didn’t think about your shoes when we started running.”
She shrugged as he started wiping her cuts clean with a handiwipe. It stung, but it had to be done.
“I can’t blame you for that. I’m just glad you came up to the front of the church to get me. You could have just run for it yourself and not helped me.”
He smiled up at her as he wiped the ointment into her cuts. “We’ll find you new shoes if we can.”
She nodded. She was going to need them if they planned to go back out at some point. But maybe the cops would fix all this before they had to.
“Are those scissors?” she asked as she looked down one of the aisles toward the office supply area. It really only had a couple of small notebooks and some pen packs, but the scissors glittered in the overhead lighting.
He reached out and caught them with the tips of his fingers and handed them over. “What are you going to do with them?”
“This,” she said with a laugh as she cut the bottom ruffle of her skirt off so that it hit her at the knee instead of the ankle. “And this.”
She moved to the hideous ribbon on her ass and cut the fabric away.
“Better,” Carson said with a sigh. “That thing really is terrible.”
“My sister hates me, I think,” Donna laughed. She got to her feet and stepped toward the window gingerly. Her feet felt better even after just being cleaned and wrapped.
She looked out past the security gate. People continued to rush back and forth on the street outside. The people who were sick attacked the healthy. Bodies rose from the pavement after lying there a little while and began the whole process over again. She was mesmerized by it.
And then she saw the bride. From a distance, she couldn’t be sure it was Heather. And it was a Saturday, right? In the summer. There could easily be more than one wedding the area.
And then the bride got closer and she recognized her sister’s blond hair and the slinky cut of her ten thousand dollar wedding gown (paid for by dear Mom, even though she couldn’t afford it). Her sister was lurching and staggering. Her skin was gray. Her eyes were red.
“Heather,” Donna breathed and blinked at tears. For a long time Carson didn’t speak and neither did she. She just watched as her sister caught sight of a person riding a bike at breakneck speed. Heather bolted after him and disappeared around a corner.
She turned back to Carson. “Nothing is ever going to be normal again, is it? Whatever this is… it’s bad.”
He swallowed and then attempted a weak smile. “Hey, don’t I owe you a dance?”
“What?” She shook her head.
“Outside the church,” he explained “You said you’d save a dance for me. So may I have this one?”
Donna nodded. Carson stepped behind the counter again and clicked on a radio. No music came out, only the terrified voice of a reporter talking about the carnage they could both see outside the gate. Carson flipped the channel, but every one of them was the same. Reporters yelling, describing terrible things.
With a sigh, Carson came around and took her hand, then began to slow dance her around the store. She buried her head into his shoulder as the reporters in the background said things like, “carnage”, “Armageddon” and finally, “zombies.”
Then the radio cut out and switched to an emergency three-beep system.
And Carson and Donna just kept dancing.
I Call It Lost Wages
The Vegas sign had seen better days. The word welcome was missing the W, L and M, all the lights had long since been broken and one of the blue posts was hit by a car at some point, so the whole thing was listing to the right side like a soon-to-be-sinking ship.
Samantha looked up at it as she stopped the car. She had imagined coming to Las Vegas for years, but never found the cash or the time between school, a crappy job and a lousy string of boyfriends.
This wasn’t how she’d pictured it.
In the backseat, Troy, the guy she’d been traveling with since they met when they were involved in a fight with some zombies back in Southern California, stirred from his nap and sat up.
“Are we here?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.
“Fabulous Las Vegas,” she said. “Or so the sign says.”
He looked out the window at the burned out buildings, sandy streets and zombies roaming through the deserted parking lots and in the middle of the wide streets that stretched out toward the strip.
“It is pretty fabulous.” He climbed over the gear shift as she started driving again. As he clicked his seatbelt into place he pointed. “Hey look, a hooker zombie!”
She craned her neck and sure enough, there was a female zombie, dressed in a super short skirt and skanky top. She was dragging her leg behind her, with a broken four-inch heel on one foot and a bloody stump for the other. She tilted her head as she looked at Sam’s car. She sniffe
d the air and started dragging toward them at a faster clip.
Sam shrugged. “She might not be a hooker. She could just be a party girl zombie.”
Troy tilted his head to look out the window at the angry zombie. “What’s the difference?”
“Not a lot. It’s subtle. Mostly has to do with method of payment.”
He laughed and scanned the streets. All around were more of the undead, some chewing on carcasses, others dragging themselves around aimlessly through the wrecked cars and burned out buildings. Sam shivered. No matter how long she lived in post-zombie, she hadn’t gotten jaded to the fear yet.
“There are a lot of zombies here. Are you sure you want to stop?” Troy asked, as if he read her mind.
“I heard there were survivors here.” She gripped the wheel. “A safe place. We have to at least look.”
He rested his head on the seat behind him. “I don’t know, Sam. I think this drive of yours to find that ‘one safe place’ is crazy.”
She glanced at him from the corner of her eye. “But you haven’t bailed on me yet.”
“Well, crazy is a lot more normal now.” He shrugged. “Plus I sort of want to see if you’re right anyway.”
“Ha!” She swerved around a small pod of four zombies and gunned the car down the Strip. “I knew it.”
“So where is this ‘safe place’ supposed to be this time?” he asked as he pulled an atlas from the backseat of the car.
She turned into the drive in front of one of the first casinos on the South side of the Strip. It was an older place, one that had probably been set to be torn down at some point before the Outbreak changed everyone’s plans.
“Club Cash-Out.” He shook his head. “Sounds classy. How come no one ever holes up in the Venetian or the Bellagio… you know, a nice place?”
“Too big,” Sam said as she pulled the hand brake on the car. “The Bellagio has almost 4000 rooms and there are literally hundreds of thousands of square feet in that place. Can you imagine all the zombies in there? No, this place only has a hundred rooms. Much better odds to protect it and block additional entrances.”
Troy stared at her. “You think about this stuff too much.”
“That’s how come I’m still alive.”
He reached in the back seat and grabbed for the arsenal they’d been collecting for the past few weeks. Shotguns, handguns, rifles, a bayonet, a machete and a chainsaw.
“Load it up,” he said as he started handing over weapons to her. Now came the tricky part.
“Look, you can’t have the 9mm and the shotgun,” Sam laughed. “It isn’t fair.”
“You and your negotiations.” He rolled his eyes. “Okay, I want the 9mm, so you take the shotgun.”
They continued that way until they had split up the weapons and gotten them into their rightful holsters and slings. Sam sighed.
“Are you ready for this?”
Troy shrugged one shoulder. “No, but there really isn’t any choice, right? It is what it is.”
“Indeed.” She opened her car door. “Be careful.”
He got out too and both of them scanned their surroundings. She had the bayonet and he had the machete. Over the months they’d learned gunfire generally brought more zombies… sort of like a monster dinner bell. They had begun to reserve those kinds of high caliber weapons for emergencies and tight situations with no other choices. As they approached the big automatic doors under the awning, Sam could see that they were barricaded.
A very good sign.
“Stop there!” came a voice from behind the blockade.
Sam froze and so did Troy. Barrels of guns were poking out from strategically placed holes. At least ten that she could count with a quick scan.
“What’s the password?” the voice from behind the wall asked.
Sam looked at Troy and he shrugged. “Um,” he said. “We’re not zombies.”
There were muffled voices in discussion and then a creak as a few sections of the barricade were slid away. “Hurry, hurry,” the voice encouraged them.
They rushed inside and a group of a few young men shoved the barricade back into place behind them. The original sliding doors of the casino were propped open and a weak light from inside cast an eerie glow on the ragged group of survivors behind the barricade. Mostly young people, probably not a one of them was older than twenty-five. Not that Sam or Troy were much past that, themselves, but it was still weird to see all young faces, some of them probably barely out of high school.
“Was that really the password?” Troy asked.
One of the kids shrugged. “Naw,” he said. “But zombies don’t talk. So really anything that’s English is the password.”
Introductions were made all around, not that Sam would remember who anyone was. She hadn’t been very good with names before the apocalypse, why remember someone’s name who would probably be dead in five minutes? Hell, it had taken her a week to remember Troy’s name. He still gave her shit about calling him Tim, Tom, Trey… even Tron (which was still her favorite). She really needed to find some of those “my name is” sticky badges to hand out to new people.
“Come on in,” one of the kids said… was it Mark? Well, it didn’t matter.
They followed him into the main area of the casino. All the gaming machines had been moved, used for parts and as portions of the barricades around all the main entrances. What was left was a large, open area where cots and mattresses had been set up in long rows. There were twenty-five, maybe thirty people milling around. Music played from some kind of battery operated boom box in the corner. Sam winced as she realized it was teenie bopper pop echoing in the room. Just like behind the barricade, the kids inside were all really young and didn’t seem to have much drive or purpose as they roamed around, chatted in small groups and played Hackensack in the corners.
Sam frowned. This wasn’t a safe place. This was just a mini-camp run by kids. Once again, there was only disappointment in the rumors. For a brief moment, the swell of regret was overpowering. She almost couldn’t breathe.
“So how come you guys are all so young?” Troy asked.
“We were here for a Summer Break trip sponsored by our college,” the kid who’d let them in explained. “When it all went down, we stuck together. Only lost five.”
He grinned in pride and Sam couldn’t really blame him. Those were pretty good odds.
“What are your plans, Mark?” she asked.
“Mike,” the kid and Troy said together and Troy smothered a smile.
“What do you mean?” Mike asked with a confused blink.
Sam put her hands on her hips. “I mean, are you thinking about leaving? Building? Expanding?”
He shrugged. “Um, we’re probably just going to wait it out. Wait until someone comes to get us.”
“Comes to get you?” Troy repeated with a glance at Sam. “You really think someone is going to save us all?”
Mike blinked like he didn’t understand. “Our parents must be looking for us.”
“Oh Jesus,” Sam muttered as she paced off away from them for a moment. She didn’t think anyone was so naïve anymore. Even without access to many outsiders and the news they might share, even as kids who were in their late teens or early twenties… they should have known better. After a couple of months of zombie hell… they should have known better.
“Look kid, we’ve been out and about for months,” Troy said, semi-gently. “No one is coming. If you’re staying, it should be because you feel like you’re safe or you have some kind of long term plan.”
Mike smiled, like he knew something they didn’t. “Oh, no. We’ll be fine until things get back to normal. We have a lot of food conserved from the rooms before we locked the upper floors down and from the hotel kitchen. You guys are welcome to stay if you want.”
Troy blinked and Sam’s spine stiffened. They’d been together for a while, but they’d never made any promises to stay together. He wasn’t her boyfriend or anything (despite one heavy make ou
t session a couple weeks back that they hadn’t really ever talked about or repeated). Maybe he was tired to following her from ‘safe place’ to ‘safe place’. She really couldn’t blame him.
“Thanks,” Troy said and her stomach sank. “But naw. The two of us have our own thing planned.”
He looked at her and smiled. “As long as you can put up with me a while longer.”
She nodded and covered her relief with a shrug. “I guess.”
“All right.” Mike shrugged. “You guys want to trade before you go?”
“Sure.” Sam said as she followed him toward the back of the room where supplies were piled up in no particular way or form. She bit her tongue as she pawed through it and offered a bit of what they had.
By the time she was done, Troy was standing by the door, waiting for her. He smiled as she held out a two-liter of his favorite flavor of soda.
“Sweet.” He reached out and took her hand unexpectedly. She stared at their intertwined fingers as he moved toward the door and the outside world. “So, where’s our next stop? Where’s the next ‘safe place’?”
Sam smiled. “How do you feel about Albuquerque?”
“Like it’s six hundred miles away?” he laughed.
The kids at the barrier let them out and they let go of hands to raise their weapons as they scanned for zombies.
Sam clicked the remote entry system for the car. “Then it’s settled. We’re going to New Mexico.”
“Hey Sam?” Troy moved to the driver’s seat and hesitated there.
“Yeah?”
“There is a safe place out there. I know it.”
She smiled. “Me too. Now let’s go find it.”
They’re the Lions Now
The line around the August Memorial Zoo stretched into the parking lot. People shifted from foot to foot, talking and laughing as they waited for the gates to open for the day. At 9AM exactly, a guard came out and slid the metal bars behind the fake rock walls and motioned the people forward to the payment gates.
Ryan looked at his brother. “Why are we doing this again?”
In the Dead: Volume 1 Page 8