The inside of the store was totally trashed. The shelves were barren. The floors were covered in toys, magazines, bottles of soda, and broken glass. The shelves that had once housed things that were useful, like medicine, were empty. The living had already been through this place.
I went to the back of the store and lifted up the counter to enter the pharmacy. Lipitor, Prilosec, Viagra, Xanax…all the pills to manage our modern ailments were still there. No one gave a shit about their cholesterol in the zombie apocalypse. The useful drugs in this new world were the ones that fought bacteria, and someone had taken them all. I saw racks that were meant to hold Penicillin and Sulfa and Cipro and Zithromax…they had been emptied. Not a single pill of their kind to be found.
“No, no, you fucking ass!” I snapped at whatever villain had come before me and taken all the good stuff for himself. It was silly to be angry. I would have done the same thing. I fully intended to walk out of here with a shopping cart full of antibiotics, to make one trip to zombiville and come back with a lifetime supply.
I spent thirty minutes digging through the rubble. During that time, six corpses came through the front door, perhaps attracted by my scent, or the noise I was making back here. The broken glass that littered the front entrance gave them all away, and I took them out with ease.
When I left the store, and found a little pack of the buggers out in the parking lot, I was already well practiced in shooting them dead. I almost enjoyed cleaning out the parking lot of Sun Valley Drug.
Back in the car, back to the GPS, who thankfully was unaware that the world had come to an end and was happy to give me instructions to the next closest drugstore. As the woman behind the GPS gathered her satellite data, I reloaded my Colt.
“Please drive to highlighted route,” the woman told me.
“Sure thing,” I said.
As I pulled out of the lot, I saw a zombie approaching on the sidewalk. I didn’t need to kill it. There was plenty of room for me to go around. But I was starting to like the idea that me and my guns could get by in this new world. I took the Glock from my belt, rolled down my window, and shot the thing between the eyes.
“That’s right, motherfucker,” I said.
I was so happy with myself I turned the wrong way out of the lot.
“Recalculating,” the GPS snapped.
“Oops, sorry Lady,” I said.
Four drugstores later, all of them emptied of antibiotics, my GPS was out of ideas, at least in Ketchum. I began to wonder if the same group of marauders hit all the pharmacies and took the good stuff. Whoever it was, they were smart to do so.
“Fucking Idaho,” I said.
It occurred to me that a mountain town in Idaho was more isolated than the rest of the world, and there might have been a lot of survivors, who might in turn be hovelled up in their homes or their own mountain hideaways. Ketchum was a place for people who wanted to escape all the hustle and connection of urban life. Some of them may have avoided the illness just like I did. And, unlike me, the people in an Idaho mountain town were skilled at living in the woods.
I drove back to Main Street and headed south. A few miles out of town, I stopped the car and took out my phone to send Sabrina a text message.
No medicine in Ketchum. Going to the next town.
A few miles down the road I found myself entering Hailey, which, thankfully, had a CVS drugstore on the edge of town, right on Highway 75. Looking ahead, I could see the zombies down the road, but the area immediately surrounding the drugstore was completely clear.
I pulled up to the drugstore to find the front doors and windows completely intact. There were no signs of looting or other chaos anywhere in the parking lot, and the front doors were locked.
A very good sign.
I stepped back a few paces, then opened fire on the front door with the Colt. The sounds of gunfire and breaking glass were kind of beautiful against the quiet backdrop. It was peaceful up here at the Hailey CVS. This was the place to be—I knew it. I was going to go inside and find life-saving pills for Cori.
For my daughter.
Yes, she was my daughter now. There was no other way around it. I was out here risking my life in the badlands for that girl because I loved her like a daughter. My name might not be attached to hers on any of the legal documents, but none of that mattered anymore. That little girl had two grown-ups taking care of her, and I was one of them.
I kicked out the remaining shards in the front door and stepped inside. I was so relaxed at that moment, so off guard, that the first shot barely even phased me. A loud bang and a crash behind me…someone was here and they were firing a gun.
“Hello?” I said. “Hello!”
The guy appeared from behind the makeup counter. He popped up like a prairie dog and aimed his gun right at me. This time I ducked, which was good, because he shot again, and I could practically feel the bullet fly over my head.
“I’m alive!” I shouted. “Please don’t shoot! I just want medicine for my daughter!”
He was back up again. I dove behind the checkout stand as more bullets flew. He was a short man wearing a blue denim shirt. His gun was a pistol that made a weaker popping noise than my Glock.
“Why are you shooting at me? Please stop. I don’t want to fight! I just need antibiotics and I’m on my way!”
I heard his feet shuffling. He was on the move. I heard him coming around the far side of the store. Crouching low to stay behind the checkout counter, I went the other way.
He appeared behind a bin of big rubber balls and hit me with a single shot from his gun.
Left side of my head. I knew it right away. It felt like someone had grabbed me by the ear and ripped it off. I felt blood dripping down the side of my neck. The little fucker had shot off my earlobe.
By this point, I was right by the front door and could have made a run for it, but some animal instinct that had lain dormant in the civilized world came out. That asshole kept on shooting even after I told him to stop. That asshole was trying to kill me.
A funny thing happened as I scrambled around the checkout counter, keeping low while the bullets flew, escaping everything fired at me and taking up a position behind some Dr. Pepper cases arranged to look like the Sawtooth Mountains . The pain just went away. It was as if my body knew there was work to be done, and the pain of a severed earlobe was a hindrance to the task at hand. As I stood there waiting for the bastard to show his face, my Colt pressed against my shoulder, my hand on the trigger, I thought about how absolutely crazy this all had become in just a few days. When Sabrina and I hit the road in San Antonio, the world was a perfectly normal place. Now, barely a week later, there were zombies in the street and I was in the middle of a shootout at the CVS in Hailey, Idaho.
My assailant was crouched behind the checkout counter, the same spot where I had been a few seconds before. My partially dismembered ears picked up the sound of a magazine case hitting the floor. He had run out. I waited for a second, listening for the click of a reload, and as it didn’t come, I realized I was wasting precious time. The guy was probably fiddling around in his pockets looking for ammo. Now was the opportunity to charge him. My eyes picked out a path from where I stood to where he was. If I made it to the battery display I’d get a clear shot.
“Go Caleb,” I whispered to myself. “Come on.”
My torso was leaning forward, trying to pull my body out with it, but my feet weren’t moving.
Now, I thought. Go now.
As I stood there, a grey-faced teenager came crashing through what was left of the front door. He, or rather, it, was moving with surprising speed, like it had a purpose.
My attacker’s head appeared for less than a second, but then it was gone again as he stumbled over his own feet. And then the zombie was on him.
“No! No! Get off meeeee!!” the man yelled. His scream was interrupted with a horrible crunching sound. Dull, human teeth cutting through living flash. It was like the kitchen knife fighting with the d
eepest innards of the turkey at Thanksgiving. It was the most disgusting sound I’d ever heard.
I stood there for longer than I care to admit, listening to the poor sap getting eaten alive. It wasn’t until another zombie appeared at the door that I took action, killing the zombie at the door with two quick shots to the head, and then the zombie behind the checkout counter, who looked up from his meal to see what the noise was about. A single shot to the center of his face, and I was alone in the drugstore.
Alone with a severed ear that was pouring blood all over my shirt. The instant I felt safe, my body reminded me that I wasn’t well, giving me a hefty dose of pain and dizziness.
I went to the back of the store, found a single first aid kit amidst the mess strewn on the floor, and did a sloppy job of bandaging my ear. Then I turned toward the pharmacy.
I found a dead body on the floor.
It was a young woman with blond hair and a nice tan. She had been shot in the neck. She lay on the floor on her back, completely naked.
What the fuck had been going on in this store before I got here?
Stepping around the woman, who might decide to sit up and attack at any moment for all I knew, I went to the pharmacy and climbed over the counter, where I found another dead body . This time it was a guy. Mid-twenties, he wore a Boise State sweatshirt and had been shot in the head. He lay on the floor right between two computers, both of which were up and running with colorful geometric patterns playing across their screens.
Surrounding the guy, spread all across the floor, were hundreds of pills and powders mixed together in a hellish, unsalvageable mess. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was still on the counter.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “This is unbelievable.”
The whole front of the store is intact, but back in the pharmacy it’s a giant clusterfuck? What the hell? Even if there were antibiotics on the floor, I couldn’t use them. For all I knew, these white and blue capsules on the ground might have been penicillin, or they might have been morphine.
I kicked the wall, shouting, “Dammit!”
My little outburst woke up both computers, the monitors ditching their trippy screen savers for gray and white database screens. I stared at them for a moment, imagining how totally illegal it would have been a few days ago to stand behind the pharmacy counter and look at patient records on the computer.
And then a word jumped out at me from the bottom corner of the screen.
Keflex.
It said, “Keflex, 100mg, 3 times a day for three days.”
Keflex was an antibiotic. This screen was telling me the name and address of someone who had been prescribed an antibiotic. Maybe I was going about this all wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t be looking through drugstores, which were obvious targets for looting on the final days of the world. Maybe I should be looking in the houses people left behind. As the world we knew came undone, the drugstores became fair game for the survivors. They knew to come here and take the good stuff.
But the houses….this person who got a prescription for Keflex…
Winifred Frank. 120 Foxmoore Drive.
Probably just down the street in this small town.
I stepped over the dead dude in the Boise State shirt to get closer to the computer. There was a pad of paper and a pen on the counter, both of them adorned with the logo of some wonder drug that probably made some poor sap a millionaire right before he turned into a zombie. I wrote down Winifred Frank’s address. Then I clicked the right arrow at the bottom of the screen to scroll to the next record in the database.
That record showed somebody getting allergy medicine. I scrolled to the next one. A diabetic. The next three were blood pressure medication. The one after that was Zithromax.
Quinn Jeffers on Pine Street. I wrote down her address too.
I continued through the database, finding four more names and addresses of people in Hailey who had received antibiotics on Monday. Unless those four had all survived this plague, odds were good those antibiotics were still in their homes.
I stuffed my address list in my pocket and climbed back over the pharmacy counter. I was halfway through the shampoo aisle when the dude jumped out from behind cosmetics. His throat was torn open and the ligaments and cords that were supposed to be pulled tight inside were hanging out over his chest, like the filthiest dreadlocks ever. It was my assailant. The guy who had blown off my earlobe, now fully dead and reanimated.
I got off a quick shot to his gut and it sent him stumbling back. He fell into the glass display case of perfumes and who knows what else, and the whole thing collapsed underneath him. Then, like a life-size Jenga puzzle, all of cosmetics came tumbling down, the perfume desk apparently having been some kind of keystone to the whole setup.
The guy was trapped. Walking around to the other side of him, I had a clear shot at his head.
I decided not to take it. Not only had this guy taken off half my ear, but I’m pretty sure he also defiled the corpse of that poor girl back by the pharmacy. Shooting him in the head was an act of mercy he didn’t deserve.
I walked past him, strolling leisurely to the front counter, passing a blood stain on the wall where my ear had splattered when he shot me. There were two zombies down in front of me, the one I’d shot in the doorway, and the one who ate my attacker. Laying on the floor right between them was a gray pistol, and laying a foot away from it was a single magazine cartridge. The guy was just about to reload when that zombie came in and got him.
I picked up the pistol and the cartridge. It was a Smith and Wesson Model 59, a gun I had considered in New Braunfels before ultimately deciding on the Glock.
“Thanks kid,” I said to the zombie on the ground. With the Glock on my belt, the Colt over my shoulder, and now a Smith and Wesson in my pocket, I stepped out of the CVS, leaving one trapped, angry zombie behind me.
Caleb
Quinn Jeffers on Pine Street was dead. I found walking around in her own house.
She was unable to open the doors, and the windows were covered with iron bars meant to keep burglars out. I broke in through a side door to the garage, which had been left unlocked. I found her standing at her own front door, looking longingly through the peephole. It was kind of sad.
Of course, as soon as she saw me she charged. Poor thing was probably hungry as hell. I shot her in the head with my Glock. The Colt, which hung over my shoulder, seemed like overkill inside the lady’s own house.
I found the Zithromax in the upstairs medicine cabinet. It was a five-day course of treatment, six pills in all (two pills on the first day, one every day thereafter). Quinn had already taken three of them. I thought about Cori, about the scope of the infection now raging through her body. Half a treatment of Zithromax wasn’t nearly enough.
I stuffed the pills in my pocket and moved on.
The next name on my list was Carson Webster, who lived at 238 Croy Street. His enormous house, with six bedrooms and a large basement, was mercifully empty when I arrived. The front door was hanging open and there was no one inside who needed to be shot.
Carson had filled a prescription for a ten-day dose of Penicillin, which I found on the counter of the master bathroom.
There were only six pills left inside. There should have been at least fourteen. What had he done with the rest?
I wasted an hour trying to answer that question. Wherever the other pills were, they weren’t in his house. Maybe he’d freaked when the illness took a turn for the worse and started popping them like candy. Or maybe he’d shared them with someone else. Whatever he did, I had to move on.
Winifred Frank at 120 Foxmoore Drive was next. She had a prescription for Keflex. I found it right away. Six pills inside. Two thirds of a 3-day course. Was it enough? Half of one antibiotic, half of another, two thirds of another still. Would any of this even help, or would a litany of partial doses just turn the bacteria into some unholy superbug?
There was one more name on my list. Melba Holbrook on Angela Drive. Two weeks of Do
xycycline. My trip to Melba’s house took me back onto 75, where I ran into a big crowd of corpses who were eager to follow me. Their numbers stayed large as I drove to the west part of town, seeming to grow as I went away from the city and towards the woods. Melba lived in a mansion built right on the river, and her property was crawling with zombies. By the time I got to Melba’s driveway, they were everywhere.
So I turned my car into a mobile zombie hunting station. I rolled down my window and used my Glock to take them out one shot at a time. I drove around the house, stopping every twenty feet or so to take out a patch of them. I had to reload three times and lap the whole house twice before it was safe to get out.
I found the front door of the house locked, so I shot out the picture window with the Colt and used the barrel of the gun to knock away the leftover glass. Inside, I found a beautiful home with brick floors and pineboard ceilings. A winding staircase led up to a crisscrossing catwalk over the main foyer.
There were grunting and scratching sounds coming from upstairs. I held out my Glock like a cop and went to check it out.
The sounds came from a hallway leading to the back side of the home. At the end of the hallway I found a zombie scratching at a closed door like an anxious puppy. She was an elderly lady who had been wearing flowerprint pajamas when she died.
“Hello, Melba,” I said.
Melba turned to me and put her arms out in the classic zombie pose. I stood there for a second, taking in the moment. There I was in a long hall with a zombie coming at me from the other end. You couldn’t have scripted it better.
I aimed the Glock at her forehead, but before I pulled the trigger I tried to say something clever. I don’t know what I was thinking…I guess a whole morning of successful zombie hunting combined with a general loopiness from having my earlobe blown off had made me into the kind of prick who wants to get off a one-liner before shooting the woman in head.
The one-liner I got off wasn’t just lame, it was pathetic.
Zombie Apocalypse Serial #2 Page 9