by Tracey Ward
He chews on that for a long time. So long that I think he’s just flat out ignoring me, but imagine my surprise when we roll into Mill City and he pulls over at the first convenience store we see. He parks right up next to the front door, making it so we only have to take maybe ten steps to get from the vehicle to the store. The place is dark. There’s nothing and no one else in sight.
“Alright, Al, listen up,” Syd says emphatically, throwing the RV into park. “Jordan and I are going in here to grab supplies. You slip over here and get behind the wheel. Keep a watch out for any…” He hesitates, still struggling with using what he thinks is a ridiculous word. “Zombies that might come by. Honk the horn once if you see one. Quick and short. We’ll drop everything and come running out. Got it?”
“Got it,” she says, unbuckling her seatbelt. She doesn’t fight this time or run off wildly. I think Syd and I are both grateful for that.
“Jordan, let’s narrow down what we’re looking for.”
“Non-perishables. Water. First aid of any kind. Any clothing they may have. Matches. Lighters. Batteries. Flashlights.”
“Cigarettes,” Syd adds.
Alissa frowns at him. “You quit.”
“I did and I’m sticking to it. But be it prison or a war zone, cigarettes and coffee area a currency in dire times.”
I nod in agreement. “We’ll grab anything with caffeine or tobacco. Essentials first, though. Water, first aid, food.”
“Agreed.”
“Whoa, wait,” Alissa says, her voice hushed. “We’ve got company.”
Coming around the back of the building is an infected. He’s short and stocky with a beer gut and some of the most rotted out skin I’ve seen on a zombie so far. I wonder if he’s one of the originals. One of the first ones from Portland that wandered this way instead of heading south with the swarm. If he’s not, he’s decamping rapidly, far faster than any of the others. Does that mean there could be some kind of mutation to The Fever? One that’s working faster? The thought is troubling even though it really changes nothing for us. Dead still need to die. End of story.
“I’ll get him,” I say as I pull my bat free of its harness on my back. “We don’t want to risk a gunshot.”
“No, wait,” Alissa insist urgently. “Let me. I want to try something.”
“Al, it’s no time for experimenting,” Syd says, scowling at her.
“Oh please, it’s the perfect time. There’s no one else around.”
With that she jumps out of the RV. Syd and I follow her out slowly, both of us scanning the surrounding area more closely. It’s all clear.
“I’ve been dying to try this ever since I pulled it off the cop,” she mumbles as she pulls out a thick piece of black plastic. The Taser.
“Make it quick,” I whisper.
The infected hones in on her. He closes the distance incredibly slowly, his joints seeming almost frozen as he jerks and stutters toward her. I’m more convinced than ever that this is one of the first ones from Portland. The thought annoys me. I’m pissed that we spent so much time and so much energy running from this guy and his kind since day one only to meet up with him here and now. It shouldn’t bother me. A zombie is a zombie, doesn’t matter when it died or where it came from. Only it does. It does matter because seeing this thing here makes it all feel futile. Like we’re running and running and he’s walking and stumbling but we end up face to face in the end anyway.
“Come on, Ali,” I tell her, feeling my temper boil. I want to see this thing put down hard. “Let’s do this.”
“Maybe I should have read the manual,” she mutters, flipping the thing over in her hand.
“Al.”
“Stop! Guys, I have it. Here.”
The leads leap out from the black gun in her hand. They implant easily into the soft, rotted flesh of the undead standing dangerously close to her. We all watch with morbid fascination as the electrical current passes through the infected. He jerks and shudders with surprisingly fluid movement compared to his walk. It’s fascinating to watch as his muscles, probably not that much good to him in the first place, go out from under him. He collapses to the ground, falling silent. He’s not dead. There’s no way the Taser destroyed his brain, but he’s going to be down for a while.
“I wouldn’t count on it for a kill,” Syd says, breaking the strange silence, “but it’s a good—“
“Oh, God,” Alissa moans. Her hand goes to her mouth and nose, covering them both as she turns to us. Her face is contorted with disgust.
I frown, wondering what she’s reacting to. Then I smell it. I’m instantly gagging on it. I lean over instinctively, worried I’ll vomit as the smell washes over me. It’s in my nose, in my mouth, on my tongue and it is disgusting. It’s like burnt hair and frying pork. Like bacon and burning plastic mixed with feces and dog food. It’s familiar but disturbingly foreign. It’s awful and everywhere. I see Syd take several steps back, trying to get away from it but there’s nowhere to go.
“I’m gonna be sick,” Alissa cries.
“No more,” Syd tells her from behind the inside of his shirt. He’s pulled the neck up until it covers his mouth and nose in an attempt to hide from the smell that will haunt us for the rest of our lives. “Never again.”
“No, never,” she agrees, dropping the Taser to the ground.
“All that and he’s not even dead,” I say morosely.
“Jordan, finish him off.”
I shoot her a shocked look. “Are you kidding? I’m not going over there.”
“We have to kill him.”
“Haven’t we done enough already?”
“I want to shoot him,” Syd exclaims.
“It won’t kill the smell,” I remind him, “and we can’t risk someone hearing the shot while we’re still here. We’ll shoot him when we leave.”
“Deal,” Syd agrees.
We all hastily make our way back to the front of the store where the air isn’t so thick. Alissa climbs quickly into the RV while Syd and I cautiously approach the door. I’ve got my bat in hand but I secured my gun in the holster on my hip. If I get desperate I’ll use it. Syd already has his out and ready, his arms extended, pointing it at the ground.
“You go in first,” he whispers, jutting his chin toward the door. “I’ll cover you, come in behind you. Then we’ll do a sweep.”
I nod curtly as I take a deep breath. I swing the door open, pushing it in to help give me cover on my left and weakest side. I do a quick scan of the open area, find it empty, and move slowly inside. I feel Syd take the weight of the door from me as he follows me in. I do a quick search down the main aisle in front of the register, glancing down each of the other aisles as I go.
“Clear,” I whisper.
“Counter,” he whispers back, eyeing the door to the back room.
I move to the counter slowly, keeping my distance as I round it to the open area where the cashier would enter. When I come around to look inside I blink hard, casting my eyes to the ceiling quickly. There’s a body. It’s been pecked at but not eaten entirely. It looks like the cashier was overtaken by infected, a few getting a bite or two out of him but he put a stop to it by putting a bullet in his own head. After that the zombies apparently lost interest. Or maybe they gave up when he got cold. Maybe something better came along, who knows.
“I got a body,” I tell Syd, carefully moving away from the sight. It’s different when it’s not an undead. When it simply is what it is – a dead body. He was never a threat to me. He was never something I wanted to see die and now the sight of him dead and gone is hard to take.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Let’s check the door to the storage room,” Syd says, corralling me away from the counter. “Make sure it’s locked so we don’t get any surprise visitors. Then we’ll shop.”
“Good idea.”
When the door is locked Syd and I feel comfortable stowing our weapons and moving quickly about the store
. We attack the bottled water, grabbing the plastic wrapped cases of it and hauling them out to the RV. I toss a packet of Wet Ones at Alissa on a trip between RV and store. She laughs and calls me jerk, but I get a smile for my trouble so it’s worth it.
Back inside I grab a shopping basket and begin filling it with the single serve, overly priced medicines and ointments, shampoos and soaps, anti-bacterial gels and condoms. I stare at the condoms for a second as I contemplate their usefulness in ways other than their intended purpose. I can’t think of any. I can’t think of a valid reason to give Syd for why I grabbed them other than one very big reason that has me thinking about the river and Ali’s wet shirt a couple days ago. Then I remind myself there’s more than one way to die. That guns ”accidentally” go off all the time.
I put the condoms back.
It’s when Syd and I are sifting through a rack of T-shirts in a variety of colors, each of them stating proudly, Sasquatch is my Spirit Guide, that we hear the horn of the RV blare long and loud three times. I freeze, a blue trucker hat pulled low on my brow, and frown at Syd.
“That wasn’t the signal.”
“Oh it’s a signal,” he replies, hurrying to look out the tinted windows of the front of the store. I hear the engine of the RV rev, tires squeal. Syd curses. “It just wasn’t a zombie warning.”
“What was it for? Did she leave us here?”
“Yeah, she did. Good thing too.” He turns back to me, tossing down the clothes he was holding and whipping out his gun. “We got company.”
I pull out my gun as well, feeling weird with it in my hands. I haven’t had it out since the grocery store incident. “The living kind?”
“Caravan of ‘em. Al made a smart choice. She took off before they could surround her and trap us.”
Syd goes quickly to the storage room door and unlocks it, poking his head inside the backroom briefly.
“Come on,” he calls in a sharp whisper.
I can see the three large trucks and one long van parking outside the building. They park much the way we did, close to the door but with an easy out ahead of them. Doors begin to creak open and slam shut as people dismount, seemingly unconcerned about the amount of noise they make. That right there is very telling. It says they aren’t scared. They think they’re bigger and badder than anything else out there, other people and zombies alike. At the moment, I don’t care to dispute that fact.
Syd and I hurry through the back of the store, bursting out the emergency exit into the sunlight. He scans the area quickly, making sure our new friends didn’t send anyone to circle around the back, effectively surrounding the place. So far so good. The back is clear.
“Let’s move,” he urges me, keeping low and moving quickly behind dumpsters and abandoned cars.
“How are we gonna find Ali?” I whisper back. I make a conscious effort to keep my gun pointed at the ground and nowhere near him. I’m not comfortable enough with this thing to be sure I won’t cap him by mistake.
“Well, I imagine she got out of sight which means she had to go down the road quite a ways.” Syd looks back at me briefly, his eyes alight, a true grin on his face. He’s loving this. “Good thing you like to run, huh?”
And run we do, for miles. We’re outside the city by the time we see the familiar sight of the RV front end creeping out from behind a thick of trees. We’ve pick up the pace and are sprinting toward it when we’re cut off. A small group of infected, I count six, comes bumbling out from behind the house to our right. Syd swears and falls back a few steps, bumping into me as he raises his gun.
He takes out the first one with a shot dead between the eyes. I take note of his skillful aim for future reference because, oh yeah, it matters to me.
As Syd lines up his next shot, I pull my bat out of the strap on my back. Taking quick strides and keeping to the right of the group, never letting any of them on my right side, I begin swinging. I crack my bat into the teeth of a woman, knocking her jaw loose until it swings awkwardly from her face. I take another swing that connects near her eye, hitting close enough to the temple to take her down. Syd unloads a bullet in the skull of another guy, dropping our count of worries to three.
An infected man toward the back of the group suddenly drops to the ground. As I take a swing at the next guy closest to me, I catch a glimpse of an arrow lodged in the back of the fallen man’s neck. Alissa has damaged his spinal cord. I don’t know if that has destroyed the brain and killed him for the second and final time, but I do know he can’t control his body anymore. I guess it doesn’t really matter. If he’s not truly dead, he’s as good as.
I clock this new guy in the ear, spinning him around until he trips over his own feet and collapses. The last standing zombie treads right over him, reaching and moaning for me. I see Syd advance behind her. He uses the butt of his gun to smash her temple while Alissa pops an arrow in her eye, the arrow whipping by near my shoulder and making my heart shudder to a near stop in my body.
One left. The guy on the ground.
My shoulder is aching from the exertion and I worry I’ll tear my stitches again.
“Want me to get him?” Syd asks.
I step away, shaking out my aching. “Be my guest.”
Syd fires a round in the head. I make sure I’m already on my way toward the RV when he does it. I don’t look back.
“Your bat is broken,” Alissa calls to me.
I lift it to inspect it and instantly want to scream out a tirade of curses. It’s badly warped, meaning it’s only a matter of time before it’s utterly useless. In fairness, it’s seen me through some hard times. It’s been doing an admirable job of saving my skin and I would like to thank every disgruntled, zombie worker at the Easton bat plant for their efforts in bringing me a better death stick. However, I’m now boned. My shoulder was crap anyway, but now my weapon of choice is finished. I could get another one but I really wonder if I wouldn’t be better off with something… better.
I sigh deeply as I look at the silver darling one last time, then I cast it to the side of the road.
“Goodbye, old friend.”
“What are you going to use now?” Alissa asks, scooting over to make room for Syd to take over driving.
I climb inside the RV and collapse on my back on the floor feeling sweaty, dirty and spent. “I don’t know.”
“You could learn to use a gun.”
“I think I need to anyway. I’d feel better still having a melee weapon, though.”
“We might have to do more looting,” she warns, grinning at me. “In a building surrounded by walls.”
“Ughhh,” I groan unhappily.
I hear her chuckle from up front as I close my eyes. I toss my arm over my face, feel the RV bump back onto the road from Alissa’s hiding place. Then we’re off, heading into the mountains and the unknown. Eventually we’ll hit the wall because it’s out there. Of that we can be sure, and that’s okay. I don’t fear the end of the quarantine. It’s everything that lies between here and there that has me worried.
Chapter Eleven
It’s been three weeks. Three weeks of searching for the right one and still no luck. I’m lost without my bat. I feel like I should have kept it, warped and broken or no. I’ve considered picking up another one somewhere but all the good ones are taken. Nothing left but wood that will leave me high and dry after just a few hits. It’s time to start expanding my search.
I gave a hammer a try but the reach isn’t there. I tried a tire iron, but it’s heavier than my bat was and my shoulder suffered for it. Plus, I couldn’t find a rhythm swinging it. I’m working with a crow bar now which is nice, but the handle area is lacking. I tried wrapping it with batting tape thinking maybe that would feel at home and familiar but it was a sorry second to what I’m used to. I have a hatchet too, something that’s a little unwieldy and only good for close contact, but I came across it in a hardware store when I was cornered by an infected. It was the first thing I was able to grab, and while it made an
unholy awful, gory mess of the thing coming at me, it did shut him down. Now I keep it almost as a good luck charm. It saved me that day and maybe it will again. Both weapons feel like a lot of work, but for now they’ll have to do.
Luckily I’m learning to shoot a gun, though the threat of running out of bullets leaves me cold inside. Alissa has tried to teach me more about shooting a bow but I don’t have the hands for it, I guess. I can’t get the tension right, the aim down. Something’s wrong with how I’m doing it and we both seem pretty annoyed trying to find out what it is.
In fact, everyone seems annoyed with everything. It was only a matter of time. We’re sleeping in shifts and working through a schedule that’s proving pretty brutal. You sleep for 8 hours, stand guard for 8, then you have 8 off but it’s not really off because you’re in charge of either cleaning, cooking, hunting or fishing. We found a good spot high up in the mountains near a lake with a small rushing river but sitting guard on top of the RV, you can’t help but notice how exposed we are. 360 degrees of vulnerability and it’s your job to watch every last degree of it. It’s stressful and incredibly high pressure, something that is getting to all of us. Particularly Alissa.
I hear it from Syd when she starts taking twice her dosage. The regular amount isn’t cutting it anymore, not with the world we’re living in. We have a pretty good talk about what we can do to help her but despite our unusual civility toward each other, we come up dry. Everyone is doing all they can and pretty soon the extra pills Alissa is taking are going to suck her stash dry. At this rate, she has two more weeks then it’s cold turkey. It’s a scary notion and added stress having that ticking clock over our heads. That clock is going to run out and so far it seems there’s nothing we can do about it.
We’ve been back in town to loot a couple of times. We make sure to hit up towns big enough to have a pharmacy or two, but so far no luck. They’ve been completely cleaned out. Not even a cough drop to be found. Drugs are a higher currency than tobacco and caffeine and judging by the bareness of the shelves, someone out there is unbelievably flush at the moment.