Dan looked annoyed. “Trust me, Paul, you’re gonna wanna sit down for this.”
Warily, Paul folded himself into the tiny chair and slid it forward, producing a horrible screech against the concrete floor that echoed loudly in the small room. His knees scraped the underside of the desk, smearing rusty paint flakes onto his new jeans. Still consumed by the gruesome shootings downstairs, Sophia and Wendy continued staring at the wall with blank looks robbing their faces.
Dan pointed to the black and white security footage. “Look, here we are coming into the store.”
Paul watched the four of them stand like statues just inside the entrance, the setting sun casting their shadows onto the tiled floor ahead of them. Paul remembered it well. “Yeah, so what?”
“Just watch!” Dan said, becoming more agitated by the second.
On screen, Paul watched them appraise the store’s situation. His eyebrows drew together. Even though Sophia stood anchored to the floor while Paul rammed the cart into the jewelry case, her shadow moved. His heart skipped a beat. Goose bumps rippled across his flesh. He leaned in closer to the monitor and squinted through the glare. “What the hell?”
Sinuously, Sophia’s shadow slid across the floor in front of them while Sophia stood scanning the store for signs of trouble. Fear tightened Paul’s gut as the shadow reached up and pulled a long skinny rope from the ceiling. Paul held his breath, heart hammering against his ribcage. On the video, other than shifting in her stance, Sophia still hadn’t moved. Yet her shadow did. In an exaggerated motion, it looped the rope around its neck and that’s when things slowed to a crawl. Paul couldn’t catch his breath. His pulse raced. The shadow cinched the slipknot tight and fell limp, toes listlessly swinging back and forth across the shiny tiles while the girls pranced off screen into the women’s department.
Paul forced himself to breathe. He could hear his pulse thudding in his ears, palms slick with sweat. “How - How is that possible?” he sputtered, shaking the monitor. “This has to be broken.” When no one answered, he looked up to find everyone gone. He jumped back in the tiny chair, knocking the desk over in the process. The computer smashed to the ground in a thunderous crash. Sparks shot into the air. The room’s only door broke open and Paul watched a man with a gold badge on his belt hobble into the room. When he saw Paul he stopped. Small bloody handprints covered the man’s Dockers and there was mud on his shoes. He smiled at the horror filling Paul’s eyes, revealing bloodstained teeth hiding beneath his cracked lips.
Then he ran.
Fast as lightning.
Paul went for his gun, screaming when it wasn’t there.
“Paul.”
The loss prevention agent smashed him against the wall and bit down, shaking his head back and forth and tearing the meat from Paul’s neck. Paul shook violently under the thing’s weight, unable to escape his thorny clutches.
“Paul!”
His eyelids flipped back to find Sophia shaking him in the backseat of the cop car.
“Are you okay?” she asked, staring at him through worried eyes.
He wiped perspiration from his forehead, noticing his new black Adidas and her new red jacket. The darkness outside the car windows caught his eye next. “Where are we?”
“Oklahoma,” Dan said through the cage, drumming his fingers on the wheel and swapping a glance with Wendy in the passenger seat next to him.
Paul sat up straighter and rubbed his eyes. “How long was I out?”
Sophia snuggled up against him. “A couple hours. You didn’t miss much.”
“You woke up just in time, chief,” Dan said, pulling into the driveway of a small ranch-styled house and putting it in park. “I’m exhausted.”
After clearing the messy house that had to belong to a crazy cat lady, Sophia and Paul went out back for some fresh air. So far, Oklahoma’s winter was much milder than Iowa’s but still left a bite in the air at night. Sophia sat down on a picnic table in the backyard and sighed, gazing at the sparkling stars above. “How much longer can we keep doing this?”
“As long as it takes,” Paul said, taking in the bright specks dotting the nighttime sky. The loss prevention agent’s snarling face whisked through his mind. He blinked it away while pots and pans clanged around inside the house behind them. Sophia scooted closer and took his hand, content to just be in his company for now. It reminded him of home, where they could watch a movie together on the couch or go for a bike ride around Gray’s Lake without wearing guns and constantly looking over their shoulders. He could tell she missed it too and he wanted to fix it. Wanted to drive them back to the dream house with a peanut-shaped pool they just moved into and tell her it was all just a bad dream, tell her it’s okay to go outside and water the plants again, it’s okay to go to the mall and it’s okay to keep trying to have that little one who will forever change their lives. He wanted to tell her this but looked over his shoulder instead, thinking he just heard something.
Sophia exhaled a wistful sigh. “I still can’t get over these stars.”
“I know.”
“You remember when we went camping?”
“You mean, the one time we went camping?”
She laughed. “Well, I didn’t think there would be that many bugs.”
“You were so funny.”
“Well, those toilets weren’t funny.”
He smiled. “No, they weren’t.”
“I thought the stars were bright that night, but this... This is breathtaking.”
“You’re breathtaking,” Paul said, kissing her softly and breathing her in like smoke.
She squeezed his hand and pulled away to find his big browns. “You say the sweetest things, Paul Hessler.”
He turned away, guilt springing from the bushes and slashing at him with razor-sharp thoughts of Rebecca, who was, most likely, too dead to feel anything right now. It seemed like another lifetime, but hadn’t even been two weeks ago. He swallowed his own apprehension and stared off into the night. This was a second chance and he was determined not to screw it up. It wasn’t too late for them. It wasn’t! A shooting star scratched the sky, leaving a glittering trail behind that faded back into the night.
She squeezed his hand. “Did you see that?”
“Now we have to make a wish.”
Sophia met his eyes through the moonlit darkness. “Yeah?”
He nodded and lightly traced the curves in her face with his fingers, wishing he could go back in time and stop her from going to that fucking seminar.
“What’d you wish for?” she whispered.
“It won’t come true if I tell you.”
“Oh come on, you can tell me anything.”
His heart broke. She deserved to know about Rebecca, even in this mess they were in. He owed that much to her. Swallowing dryly, he turned to face her, his gut wrenching. Her warm smile made her eyes twinkle brighter than any of the stars above. He opened his mouth, the words hanging on the tip of his tongue. She leaned up and kissed him again, their lips meeting and parting in a slow moving waltz. Her tongue danced with his, tasting of home. He drew back and stared into her eyes, voice dropping to a shaky whisper. “I love you.”
“I love you more than anything in the world and I don’t know what I’d ever do without you.”
He licked his lips, the moon peeking over the house’s roof behind them, watching to see what he would do next. “When you went to Minneapolis for that seminar…”
Her eyes thinned. “Yeah?”
Paul shifted on the picnic table and twisted the platinum wedding band on his finger.
Sophia lifted her brow.
“I…”
“Hey, do you guys know where the Leatherman is?” Dan hollered out the back door. “I need the can opener!”
They stared at each other with smiles inching into their cheeks.
“In the glove box,” Paul yelled back, not taking his eyes from his wife.
“Gotcha, boss!” Dan replied, letting the screen door bang
shut when he went back inside.
Paul shook his head. “Last people on the entire planet and we still can’t get a minute of privacy.”
She rubbed the inside of his thigh. “We’ll find a bedroom inside and barricade the door. I promise.”
His eyebrows went up and she grinned back.
“Maybe set some traps.”
“For them or me?”
“Both,” she said, kissing him again before pulling away with a befuddled look on her face. “What were you saying about Minneapolis?”
He cleared his throat and looked away. “I-I was just going to say I hated being away from you that weekend.”
“Aww, that’s so sweet.” Sophia rested her head on his shoulder and they shared a comfortable moment he wished would last forever. But like everything else in this new world, it would die too because nothing lasted forever. Not when they would have to go back out there tomorrow morning because they needed more food or water or gas or some bullshit he wished they didn’t need. No, now forever meant a day, maybe two if they were lucky.
Chapter Eighteen
DAY NINE
Paul steered the squad car off Highway Nineteen into a small Texan town called Crockett. The setting sun made this as good a spot as any to round up some prepackaged food and call it a night. With the camping stove Dan found in the basement last night, they could heat up soup, oatmeal, and coffee. As long as it was hot, they didn’t really care what it was. Very little action crossed their path during the day’s monotonous trek south. At one point, Dan tossed out the premise that perhaps the walking dead were beginning to starve to death. As ironic as it sounded, who knew how long those things could really last? That was the big question, wasn’t it? Who would last longer?
Us or them?
Above the grocery store Paul pulled into, stood a large rustic sign in the shape of a cowboy boot with the word Beecher’s running into the heel. After checking the backdoors – all metal and all locked – he drove around front and turned off the car. They sat and listened, taking in the handful of cars parked in the store’s barren lot. A white plastic bag did lazy circles around a stray shopping cart, rising and falling with Paul’s chest.
Sophia stared out the windows. “So this is Texas?”
“Where the hell is everyone?” Dan whispered.
“Dead or hiding,” Paul replied dully, making sure his guns were loaded and the safeties were off. He was getting tired of the same questions day in and day out. Where is everyone? Why is this happening? Who’s responsible? None of it mattered now so who fucking cares. Paul wanted answers as well but just thinking about it made his head hurt. He made a mental note to grab some aspirin for the headache rotating behind his left eye.
Wendy slammed the chamber shut on her gun. “Don’t forget to grab some toilet paper.”
They exited the Missouri State Patrol vehicle and left their car doors open. New running shoes scraped against the concrete in the quiet, pinching Paul’s nerves. Holding the shotgun at the low and ready, his eyes canvassed the front while Dan and Wendy covered the rear.
“Hey, what’s the difference between an Iowa zoo and a Texas zoo?”
The three glanced at Dan without responding.
“In Iowa, the zoo has the name of the animal on the cage,” he said. “In Texas, it has the name of the animal and the recipe.”
They hit him with blank stares and kept walking.
He shrugged. “Get it?”
“Why do you even know a stupid joke like that?” Wendy whispered, pointing her .38 at the ground.
“Long story.” Dan stopped in front of the store’s glass doors that no longer opened electronically.
“He dated a zoologist one time.”
Wendy looked at Paul, jaw dropping. “Are you serious?”
“No,” Dan retorted. “He’s not.”
“Dan, I didn’t know you were such a nature freak.”
Dan pumped his Browning with authority. They turned away from the doors and shielded their faces as he unleashed a thundering blast, exploding jewel-like fragments inside the marketplace. Paul took a last look behind them before stepping through the doors, glass popping under his shoes. The setting sun lit the place up through a westerly wall of storefront windows, the stench overpowering. Covering their noses, reality dropped back down like an anvil. It smelled like a morgue that lost electricity weeks ago but nothing seemed out of place. The only thing to greet them when they entered was a towering igloo constructed from dozens of white cases of Diet 7-Up – only $3.99 each.
Paul’s throat clicked when he swallowed. Anxious eyes swept the place from left to right and back again, adrenaline pumping faster in the ghostly stillness dancing around them. The fact that no one had broken into this place, or so it appeared, left a bad taste in his mouth. If so many people were dead, why weren’t there more zombies stumbling around like drunken sailors? Were they hiding too? And what was that fucking smell?
“Okay, I’m getting a really bad feeling about this,” Sophia said, putting an arm over her nose. She dry-heaved a little but didn’t puke.
“Probably just the spoiled food,” Paul whispered, creeping forward.
Dan gripped the shotgun tighter and followed.
Sophia yanked a bent metal cart from a long stack while Paul kicked the igloo, knocking some cases of pop to the floor. Several cans broke free of their cardboard constraints and rolled across the smooth flooring. Some stopped in a small flower shop off to the side while others hid under the rows of outdated carts. The silence returned, commanding their attention. After a long moment, Paul nodded to the others and moved in. Sophia pushed the cart with one hand, the pink gun in her other. One wheel spun uselessly in the air as Wendy plucked items from the shelves and dropped them into the cart. Paul and Dan covered them from behind, checking their six every few seconds.
“Suddenly I’m not so hungry anymore,” Wendy whispered to Sophia, wrinkling her nose as the stench worsened.
“Tell me about it. I already threw up once today.”
Wendy furrowed her brow. “You did? When?”
“Just before we left the house this morning.” Sophia pulled a warm bottle of Gatorade from a shelf. “Think I ate too much soup last night,” she said, cracking the seal and taking a long pull.
Bottled water, cans of soup, tuna, and black beans eased into the cart with light plunks. Instant oatmeal, breakfast bars, and cookies soon followed. Coffee packets, pickles, tortilla shells, toilet paper, deodorant, chap stick and toothpaste joined the loot. They skipped the moldy bakery and the coolers of rotten meats and cheeses with their noses plugged and eyes watering.
Sophia plugged her nose. “Must go faster.”
“Ooh, here we go,” Wendy said, snatching the latest – and last – issue of Us Weekly with the most recent Bachelor on the cover. The man stood in a silk suit, grinning all the way to the bank.
Paul leaned in between them. “This isn’t a library, ladies.”
“I just want to grab a couple of books real quick,” Sophia said, taking down a romance paperback.
Wendy leafed through the magazine’s glossy pages. “Won’t be much longer until this thing’s way outdated.”
Dan leaned his shotgun against a rack of greeting cards and snatched a copy of Guns & Ammo. “Now People magazine is going to have to have the Sexiest Man Not Alive award every year.”
Wendy and Sophia stopped flipping pages and looked up.
He shrugged. “What?”
“Jeez Dan, you really know how to bring down a party,” Paul said, pulling a thick copy of The Stand from a shelf.
Dan rolled his eyes and tossed the magazine into the cart with the others.
It was breathtaking how the gravity of their situation could suddenly come crashing down at the oddest times. It would trip you up, punch you in the gut, and wake you from your hope, leaving you drowning in a pool of swirling doubt. Paul’s eyes caught the cover of a women’s magazine promising the latest spring fashion trends inside.
Skimming the taglines for budget getaways, the new iPad, workout tips, and Easter meal ideas, he blew out a tired breath. There was nothing to look forward to anymore. No more holidays, vacations, or family reunions. No more celebrating a graduation or promotion with friends. Not even a relaxed Friday night with dinner and drinks after a long week at work. Even if there was something small to look forward to in this new reality – like a hot bowl of soup or a cookie that hadn’t yet gone stale – gravity wouldn’t rest long enough to let you look forward to anything for long.
Paul tossed the thick paperback into the cart, smashing a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.
“Hey!” Sophia said, setting the book off to the side.
He squeezed past the girls. “Let’s keep moving and get out of here.”
“I don’t know about you,” Wendy whispered to Sophia, holding up a two page spread of the shirtless bachelor posing on a white sandy beach. “But I wouldn’t care if this guy was dead or alive.”
“Oh my God, that is beautiful.”
“I can hear you,” Paul said over his shoulder.
“I was talking about the ocean,” Sophia replied, winking at Wendy.
Wendy ripped the centerfold out and threw the magazine over her shoulder without looking. “Think I’ll hang onto this, just in case.”
A blood-stained apron exploded around the end cap, knocking Paul to the ground and sending the trooper’s shotgun sliding across the floor. The dead and bloated butcher moved with surprising stealth for a man who weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds, if not more. It was like he was floating on thin air when he snatched Wendy’s long hair and pulled. She screamed, dropping her gun and using both hands to claw at the meat hooks locked into her tangled blond hair. Dan brought his Browning around and took aim but hesitated, unable to get a clear shot. Sophia’s angle was just as bad and Paul scrambled to his feet. The thing sneered at him, holding Wendy in front of its festering body like a hostage. Paul sprinted over and planted a foot into the butcher’s side. The thing stumbled back just enough for Dan to pump a shell into him, violently jerking the corpse into a defunct cooler of rotten eggs. The butcher took a handful of Wendy’s hair with him and she screamed again.
A Little More Dead Page 10