So what we did next wasn’t out of some newly found courage. Believe me when I tell you that several of the others were completely against it and I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the idea of going back downstairs with god only knows how many Zeds in the building. We did it because we really didn’t have any other choice. It was what needed to be done if we were going to survive.
Paul convincing us what we needed to do was one thing. Getting everyone to agree on how we were going to do it was another. There were several members of our newly formed group that wanted to make break for it. They weren’t exactly keen on the idea of being stuck in the store for an undetermined amount of time. After all, they had family members and friends out there and they couldn’t comprehend the idea of leaving them out there with everything that was happening.
But deciding between leaving and staying wasn’t the only thing that we were fighting about that morning. How we were going to handle the Zeds that were already in the building nearly started a war. One of the employees that had been in the back room didn’t like the idea of not having a plan on how to deal with the infected that we were sure to encounter once we left the safety of the break room. His name was Trevor. He along with a few of the others wanted Paul to use his gun and shoot our way out. Well, that was met with stiff opposition.
You see there were still a good percentage of people who still believed that the Zeds were just sick people. Shooting them wasn’t an option for them, not then, and after a lot of yelling and name-calling, we all decided against it. It seemed the only thing that we could agree on was that we all needed to work together if we had any chance of getting out of there in one piece. We knew we needed to close the back doors. We knew that even if we were going to leave it was going to take a group effort to get all of us past the monsters in the store and in the parking lot.
Eventually we came to a consensus that we needed to arm ourselves to keep the infected at bay. We weren’t going to use Paul’s gun. Not unless we absolutely had too. Then we came up with a plan to get to the back door and once that door was closed we could work on getting out to the cars safely.
We scoured every drawer and locker looking for anything we could use as a defensive weapon. We didn’t find much. Trevor found a broom and broke the handle in half creating something that closely resembled a baton. Cody chose to grab the fire extinguisher off of the wall and planned on using it any way he could. The rest of us couldn’t find anything of use in the break room. We would have to find things elsewhere.
Once we all felt that we had worked up enough courage to go through with what we were about to do, we slowly started moving the lockers out of the way. Once the path was clear I remember my heart racing as Trevor pulled the door open.
Nothing.
The hallway was just as empty as it had been when we passed through it only moments before. I am not sure what I had been expecting, but it wasn’t an empty hallway, that’s for damn sure.
So we opened every door in the hall, searching for anything that we could use as a weapon. The rooms were mostly offices and storage areas that were mostly filled with paper work and old holiday decorations. But as luck would have it we did manage to find a few things that turned out to be of some use.
We found a box of triangular metal pieces that looked they were used for holding up shelving. They were about a foot and a half in length and very thin, but at least they were made of solid metal. They were narrow at one end so they were actually very easy to hold in your hand and they grew wider towards the other end. You know, the business end as they say in movies. They made for a fine club, and the fact that they were light made them reasonably easy to swing. I grabbed one and so did a man named Ray. He was an African American man who I guessed was in his late fifties. Then most of the others followed suit and picked one up.
Once we were armed I remember standing at the top of the stairway waiting anxiously for someone to lead the way. We couldn’t see anything at the bottom of the stairs but we could definitely hear someone or something moving around down there. The view of the back room was blocked by a concrete wall that enclosed the staircase so we wouldn’t be able to see what was down there until we turned the corner at the bottom of the stairs.
We set out slowly for the bottom. Paul was leading the rest of us with his gun in hand, while we all followed closely behind. My heart was pounding and I could hear some of the others breathing heavily as we approached the bottom step. As we got closer I started to make out what the sounds were that we had been hearing. It was the sound of shuffling shoes on the concrete floor.
When Paul turned the corner I didn’t hear the gun shot I was expecting. Even though we had all agreed that we wouldn’t shoot the Zeds, I just assumed that he would anyway. I know I probably would have. Trevor and Ray turned the corner just ahead of me and we found Paul frozen in place with his pistol pointing at a young man in tattered clothing.
Most of the flesh on his left arm was either missing or shredded. His face was pale, his eyes looked empty, and his body twitched as he moved towards Paul.
The thing that had once been a young man was closing in on him and it was starting to look like Paul wasn’t going to do anything about it. Paralyzed with fear, he didn’t move. So Trevor and Ray ran to Paul’s aid and pushed the Zed to the ground. I watched as Trevor started to beat on the infected young man with the broom handle while he lay on the ground. The force of the blows seemed to have kept the young man from getting back to his feet, but he mostly seemed unfazed by the beating he was taking.
Then just as Trevor stopped swinging his makeshift weapon to take a breath, the Zed reached out with his hand and grabbed a hold of Ray’s ankle. He tried to pull Ray’s leg close to his mouth but before he got too close Cody stepped in.
He raised the fire extinguisher high in the air and brought it down with everything he had. The bottom of the heavy extinguisher landed right on the forehead of the young man on the ground. The sound of his skull cracking was awful. To describe it, well let’s just say there are no adjectives that I can think of to describe it to someone who wasn’t there.
He just stayed on the ground, motionless. He wasn’t getting back up anytime soon from what I could tell. Cody had a look of disbelief on his face as he looked down at the corpse on the back room floor. Ray and Trevor both stepped away and for a moment, probably from some form of shock. Maybe we were waiting to see if that Zed was going to get back up or maybe we just couldn’t accept that Cody had just killed a man. But we had all gone silent.
That was when Cody started to panic. He had just realized that he had killed someone and before the outbreak that came with terrible consequences. Despite that fact that the rules of the old world didn’t apply anymore, we weren’t there yet. The guilt and the remorse that you are supposed to feel, well that doesn’t just go away overnight. Believe me I know.
Looking back it’s hard to even remember that the Zeds were human, or at least they had been at one point. They had lives, they had families, and they had fears and dreams. I remember when we used to see them like that. Then over time they just became things and monsters. It was easier to kill them that way. Maybe if they didn’t look so human we would have accepted what we needed to do earlier. It’s probably one of the reasons it spread so fast. We couldn’t get past the fact that they weren’t human anymore. We wanted to cure them, we wanted to help them and they only wanted to destroy us.
Cody struggled with that for a while. He was having a hard time with what he had just done. Paul, well he was having a hard time for a different reason. He was visibly upset with himself for freezing in the face of danger and it took him some time to snap out of it. But while the two of them were busy working through their issues, the rest of us weren’t afforded the luxury of time to cope with what had just happened.
Another Zed was moving towards us and closing in quickly. A middle aged woman or at least it had been, dressed nicely, and if it weren’t for her pale skin, sunken eyes, and the blood stains on her
shoulder, she looked fairy normal. She would also be my first kill.
As the Zed approached us, a woman in our group who worked for the store stepped forward. Her name was Anne. She was in her mid-forties and a mother and maybe that’s why she did what she did. She tried asking the woman to stop. Anne kept telling her that we would find her help or get her to a hospital. I wonder how many people made that mistake. The zombie-like woman just kept getting closer and closer as Anne pleaded with her to stop and calm down. She didn’t.
She reached out her arms and managed to grab a hold of Anne’s shirtsleeve. Then in one jerky motion she tried to pull Anne in close and drive her teeth into her neck. What happened next is kind of a blur for me. I remember hearing Anne scream, then I remember swinging the piece of metal I had in my hand at the woman’s head. I hit her so damn hard that I felt the corner of the metal triangle go right through the side of her head. I drove that thing right into her temple and she collapsed almost immediately.
I hadn’t been in a fight since I was ten, if you can even call that a fight. I had certainly never hit anyone with a blunt object before. I would be lying if I said that the only thing I felt at the time was remorse. I mean I truly felt guilty about what I had just done, but a small part of me was amazed that I was even able to do it. But then like a wave I remember looking down at the infected woman’s body and feeling so disturbed not only by my actions, but by the whole situation itself. I didn’t move for a while. None of us moved for a while. It was Ray that would get us moving again, we needed to keep moving.
We started making our way towards the back receiving doors. The store was eerily quiet. There was no music and it was almost completely silent except for the sound of our footsteps as Trevor guided us to where we needed to go.
When we made it to the back corner of the building where the doors were I could see the metal double doors were wide open just like Trevor said they were. But the area seemed to be completely clear of any intruders. For a second I thought we had caught a break.
Trevor and I cautiously stepped through the receiving doors and outside onto the loading dock. At first glance I thought we had found our way out. The only thing I saw originally was a small box truck parked about twenty or so feet away and it was still running. Trevor told me that it wasn’t there before and that it must have arrived while we were hiding upstairs. It would have been perfect. We could have all jumped in the truck and made a break for it. I still don’t have an idea of where we would have gone, but it was a way out.
That was until Trevor and I saw what was beside the truck. I think we both saw it at that same time because we both made the same sound of disgust almost simultaneously. There appeared to be a man on the ground next to the truck and a small group of people who were kneeling around him. They were all bent over top of him and it didn’t take me long to realize what they were doing. They were eating him. Blood covered their faces and the fronts of their clothing. They pulled pieces of the man’s organs out of his midsections with their hands and brought it up to their mouths without hesitation. I get sick to my stomach just thinking about it.
The driver should have never been there. Even though stores were still open during those early days of the outbreak, shipments from most warehouses had stopped due to safety concerns. Most stores hadn’t received deliveries of fresh produce or dairy for weeks at that point. However Trevor informed me later that store managers were using local vendors to help meet customer demands.
The vendors were looking to capitalize on the business opportunity and were making deliveries at inflated costs to many of the stores nearby. Most of those stores had received a huge load of dry goods weeks before in kind of a last shipment before deliveries became an uncertainty and drivers stopped working. The local vendors were willing to take the risks for the extra money. It’s hard to say why people did what they did when the outbreak started. But that poor driver should have never been there.
We stood completely still. We were both caught up in watching what was happening on the ground in front of us. I couldn’t stop watching what those things were doing. That was probably why I didn’t notice what was standing off to the side of Trevor and I. There was a small group of Zeds that had gathered just a few feet away from us and neither one of us had seen them.
That was until we realized that they had already seen us and they were heading right for us. We tried to jump back inside the store and slam the doors closed. But one of the infected managed to get his body between the two doors before we had the chance. Just as the monster reached out trying to grab a hold of us I heard someone yelling from behind Trevor and I. He was yelling something about getting out of the way.
I moved just in time to avoid an employee named Scott charging at the Zed pushing a truck. It was a metal cart that was about five feet long and waist high on four small wheels. Trucks were usually used for loading up stock from the back room and bringing it out to the sales floor. That day it was being used at a battering ram.
Scott came rushing between us, pushing the truck and rammed the front of it right into the midsection of the Zed that was fighting to get inside. The impact sent the thing flying back to the ground and he immediately starting rolling on the pavement. We all watched, waiting to see if he would get back up. He did.
In that split second, Scott made a decision that caught us all by surprise. He ran. But not before he turned and looked at all of us and told us that he was making a break for it. Then he just ran. He sprinted out the receiving doors and right past the Zed getting up off the ground. He ran right past the small group that was nearby and out into the open. He ran before any of us had a chance to stop him or try and talk him out of it. He just ran. I watched him until he made it to the far corner of the building and then he was out of my sight. I wasn’t sure if he was brave or just crazy. Maybe he was a little bit of both. But if any of us wanted to follow our window of opportunity had quickly closed.
Not only was the Zed that Scott had knocked over back on his feet. There were several others who were closing in on us and blocking any possible way out. An infected woman tried to reach out for me but Trevor struck her in the face with his broomstick knocking her back a step. Before any of the others could get inside we slammed the doors closed and quickly locked them. Then we all waited. I am still not sure what we were waiting for but we all watched the doors waiting for something to happen. That was when the banging started. Some of the others wanted to believe that Scott had changed his mind and was trying to get back inside. But I think that everyone knew that it wasn’t Scott on the other side of those doors.
With the back doors finally secure we started to talk about any other possible way out. But after only a brief discussion it seemed like those that initially wanted to leave had changed their minds. Maybe they had seen just how bad it was out there, or they knew that there was still no way that traffic would have cleared up at that point. But there was a growing desire to stay inside the store and wait a while for things to settle down outside. Staying in the store for a while seemed like the safest option. Our only option really.
The number of infected outside the store had grown and even if we did fight our way through them nobody really had any ideas on where we could go or where would be safer then where we already were. We weren’t sure how long it would take for the authorities to restore order. At least if we waited it out in the store for a while we had security, we had food, water and enough supplies to see us through this. So we decided to stay for what we thought would only be a night or two.
Now I am sure that everyone has been in a store similar to this at one point in his or her life. But maybe all of these stores will be gone by the time somebody reads this. Maybe future generations won’t remember what these monuments to consumerism were like. So I guess a brief description is in order.
It was a big store, but they came much bigger then this one. This was an older store and was in desperate need of a renovation to catch up with most of the other locations like it. It h
ad one main entrance, but the larger stores generally had two. It sold everything from groceries to car parts and everything in between. It literally sold almost everything a person could possibly want or need. From camping supplies and sporting goods to televisions and clothes. You name it the store sold it. It also meant that the store had a large stock room that stored what looked like an endless supply of anything we could possibly need. Originally I thought the store would have the necessary resources to help us survive the outbreak. Especially considering I didn’t think we would be here that long.
But there was one obvious down side that came with our decision to stay. We were leaving the ones we cared about on the outside as the outbreak spread. We may have believed that it was only going to be for a short period of time, but even leaving them out there for one night was a terrifying thought. With no cell phone service and the world falling apart all around us we would all have to hope that our families and friends were somewhere safe. It would weight on all of us.
We had a few other major issues that we needed to address now that we were committed to staying inside the store. There was Bruce’s injury that looked to be more sever then we originally thought. He needed professional medical attention and there was no possible way of him getting it, so he was going to have to make due with whatever we could do for him.
In Hiding: A Survivors Journal of the Great Outbreak Page 4