The Living Dead 2

by John Joseph Adams

  As I look at her now, sleeping on the floor beside me, I realize I’ve never known anyone so intimately. Even Diane had her secrets. But when the world is falling apart around you, secrets become just another luxury that you have to give up…or risk dying for them.

  It is a strange thing for me, to feel like I am falling in love all over again. My grief over the loss of Diane has transformed into what feels like real affection for Alicia. But is it real? Do I really love her as much as I loved Diane? Or do I just feel the need for companionship so badly that I would find a way to love anyone?

  Is this, in fact, just Smurfette Syndrome?

  If it is, I don’t care. My every waking thought for the last two months has been of Alicia. Is she okay? Is she happy? Is she scared? Is she tired?

  As I sit here watching her chest rise and fall as she breathes, every so often letting out the faintest hint of a snore, I find my thoughts of the grocery store below shifting away from What will I find for myself? to What might I find for Alicia? What she might like to eat? What things left behind by other survivors might she find some value in?

  If there is anything left in that grocery store at all, of course.

  But I can’t dwell on that. I have to stay positive. I have to sleep. Tomorrow we’ll go to the store and find out what is left.

  When we arrived here, it had been getting dark, and we had only had enough time to make sure this apartment was secure. In the hustle of preparing for nightfall she didn’t even notice that the window overlooks the grocery store. She’s unaware of the possibilities tomorrow could hold—which is why she fell asleep right away, and I’m still up, obsessing over what we might find.

  Maybe they’ll have saltine crackers. I know she loves them, and they’d still be relatively edible, if a little stale—those things last forever. Tomorrow we’ll know.

  Tomorrow.

  “Did you see it?”

  The question wakes me. Alicia is standing near the window, looking down. I should have closed the curtains. Maybe her opening them would have woken me up and given me enough time to see the surprised pleasure in her smile. Too late now; the news has been broken. Still, the look on her face is full of hope and anticipation. I love how excited she gets about little things, even surrounded by all this death and misery.

  “I was going to surprise you,” I tell her.

  “Oh, that’s so sweet.”

  The look on her face fades instantly as she begins to rush me out of our makeshift bed. Somehow I find even her impatience adorable.

  “Now get ready, I’m dying to see what’s inside,” she says as she pulls the tattered blanket out from under me.

  Clothing is not something that is hard to find—clothes that fit perfectly, sure, but there’s a wealth of clothes a little too loose or a little too tight. We can’t really wash them, so we change clothes every other day or so, rotating through found clothes, trying to stay as clean as we can.

  Alicia brushes her hair constantly, not so much for appearance but to keep it from turning into a tangled mess. We have a small bottle of shampoo, but only use it once a week. I made that rule because she blew through the last one so quickly.

  I can’t fault her for wanting to stay clean. She still uses way too much toothpaste, though. The tube is already almost empty and we’ve only had it for a month. I cover maybe a quarter the length of my toothbrush with toothpaste when I brush. She uses the full-length, as if you could go down to the corner and buy a new tube when you run out. I’ll need to make a point to look for toothpaste once we get into the grocery store. And soap. And definitely shampoo.

  I tighten my belt to hold up my two-sizes-too-big jeans, which I have to admit, I have been wearing for almost three weeks. They still look remarkably close to clean for as much walking as we’ve been doing. The only other pants I’ve found are a bit tight. I wore them for a day and it was miserable. I’m searching this apartment for pants before we go. T-shirts I have plenty of. I usually discard a few before ever wearing them in favor of newly discovered ones. I favor the ugliest ones I can find because they always get a smile out of Alicia. I have a hot pink “Don’t Worry Be Happy” t-shirt that I just can’t get rid of, no matter how many times I’ve worn it.

  “Just let me tie my shoes and I’ll be ready,” I tell her.

  She impatiently hovers over me and feigns annoyance. Alicia always sleeps in her shoes, just in case we ever have to leave in a hurry. It’s a practice she has often tried to talk me into, but I just can’t sleep with shoes on my feet. She watches me roll my eyes and then offers me a fruit bar.

  “Have you eaten anything?” she asks as I tie my other shoe.

  “I kind of wanted to wait until we checked the place out before I ate anything. Wouldn’t want to spoil my appetite.”

  Alicia shakes her head at me. “You know that’s never a good idea.”

  She’s right. I’m sure many people have rushed into such places looking for something to eat, only to get eaten themselves. We could find anything down there, including a large group of walkers. It’s never a good idea to do anything dangerous on an empty stomach.

  I eat a blueberry fruit bar. It’s stale and hard to chew, but it’s the best we’ve got. After I choke it down, we make our way to the grocery store.

  We very rarely find doors.

  I don’t know why, but for whatever reason there aren’t a lot of doors left that haven’t been torn off their hinges. Nearly every door I’ve seen since all of this started has had at least one busted hinge. Especially places like gas stations and grocery stores.

  A fair bit of looting took place early on, before people really started thinning out. Sometimes I feel like you’ve almost got better luck finding a large supply of food in an abandoned residence than you do in a grocery store. They’ve all been…ransacked? I think that’s the word I’m looking for. Most places known for having food have already been ransacked. I suppose during that period a shitload of doors got torn off their hinges.

  So as a result, the insides of most places are dangerous as all hell. The walkers can just come and go as they please. Seems like a lot of them like to be inside. They seem to be drawn indoors, perhaps because that’s where they mostly stayed before. I don’t really know why, and I don’t much care; all I do know is that when looking around in a grocery store like the one Alicia and I are about to enter, you need to be careful.

  The Carson twins had carried guns. I don’t know if they had them before or just found them along the way. Whatever kind of guns they were, I never noticed. Didn’t matter anyway—when the twins died, they took those guns with them.

  I’ve never fired a gun. I never really felt qualified to handle one. I think if I had a gun, I’d probably just shoot myself in the foot, or worse. It’s not like a toy; the triggers actually require quite a bit of pressure, or so I’ve heard.

  The mechanics of the whole thing seem beyond me. Point, stay steady, shoot… It seems so simple; maybe I’m overthinking it. But don’t you have to cock most guns? And aren’t they supposed to be cleaned regularly or else they jam up? I’ve watched movies where people take guns apart to clean them and there’s all kinds of little springs and shit inside. That baffles me. I’m supposed to somehow figure out how to take a gun apart and put it back together? No fucking way.

  Then there’s the sound, which is the number one thing that will draw walkers to you. Firing a gun is like ringing the dinner bell. You may think to yourself: Well, how do you attack them, then? You don’t. Or I don’t, anyway. I run. Anyone who’s smart runs. You see one, you go the other way. If it hasn’t seen you, just keep walking—even at a leisurely pace—and you’ll be just fine. Shoot it and the next thing you know you’re surrounded, and then you’ll be dead.

  Guns just aren’t practical.

  So if you find yourself in the middle of a large group of walkers—gun or no gun—you’re dead. That’s all there is to it. Only reason you’d want a gun in that situation is so you can turn it on yourself before the
y tear into you.

  That’s another reason I don’t carry one: I know I might be tempted to do just that, and I was always told growing up that suicide was a one-way ticket straight to hell. Not that I necessarily buy into all that, but I’m hedging my bets, or rather, I had been. I don’t know if that should be a concern of mine anymore.

  So I carry a knife. You’d be surprised how easy it is to push a knife into one of their faces. If they get too close, or you don’t see them until they’re practically right on top of you, which has happened to me exactly once, you stab them in the face. Didn’t kill it right away the time I did it. More like made a handle on the thing’s head for me to push it away with. They’re not very strong. I knocked it over and wiggled the blade around until it messed its brain up enough that it stopped moving.

  Alicia is what you would call petite, so you wouldn’t think a bat would be much use to her, but that’s her weapon of choice. Thing is, you don’t really have to bash a walker’s brains in. The idea is to knock them off balance, and Alicia’s a pro at that. She knocks them in the head with that bat, next thing you know they’re down on their side trying to figure out which way is up, and by then we’re long gone.

  Alicia is walking out front. She turns to me just before stepping into the store, shushing me, as if I don’t already know to be quiet. The windows in this place have all been smashed out and there’s broken glass all over the ground, so being quiet is going to be pretty much impossible. If there’s something in there, we’re going to know it right away. And vice versa.

  The grocery store is dimly lit from the daylight outside. The front area of the store is in clear view, but anything past that fades into black quickly, especially with our eyes adjusting from the brightness of the midday sun. I’ve never understood why these types of places don’t have windows anywhere but in the front.

  The store is small, not a big-time grocery. It’s old, dated, like it’s from the late seventies—the kind of place that just never updated its look. I would have hated shopping here before. It would have reminded me of my childhood, depressed me. This is the kind of place Diane liked. Nostalgic, she would have called it.

  “Get your flashlight out,” Alicia whispers.

  Looks like I’ll be going into the back. That’s fine, I certainly don’t want Alicia taking the big risks. I can run faster than her. That’s the one thing I’m sure I’m better at.

  In places like this, turning the flashlight on causes me no end of anxiety. I’m standing next to a wall of blackness, fiddling around in my backpack for the flashlight. When I finally get it out, there are those few seconds that tick by between turning it on and pointing it at what you’re going to see.

  I dread those seconds.

  There’s no telling what the flashlight is going to show. There could be a dozen walkers, standing there, patiently waiting to inform me that there will be no treasures to be found here and that I will soon be dead.

  Empty shelves, for the most part.

  That’s what I see. It’s at once a relief and a huge disappointment. This place has been picked clean.

  Alicia is calling me over; she’s found some beef jerky. Usually that’s one of the first things people grab, but this box fell behind one of the check-out counters. I find a can of opened Pringles near a pile of other cans that have been stepped on. I’d eat them, stale and all, but there are bound to be bugs—or worse yet, mice—inside.

  In the back of the store I struggle to spend the proper amount of time examining the shelves. The meat section is in the back. As you go down the aisles, the putrid smell intensifies. With each step I think, This is as bad as it’s going to get…until I take another.

  Nobody ever took the meat at any of the places we’d been to. The lack of refrigeration makes storing processed meats pretty much impossible. I doubt anyone ever took so much as one package. They just sit in the dark and rot. Even the animals know better than to eat it after a while; they just tear the packages to shit, treating us to the smell.

  It stinks in here almost worse than the walkers. You’d think after a while you would become accustomed to all the smells of today’s world. No running water, the stench of death hanging in the air at every turn. Really, though, they aren’t the kind of smells you get used to. You spend so much time in the open air that you have no chance to build up a tolerance. The good part about that is that half the time you smell the walkers before you ever see them.

  Of course, if you’re standing near a months-old meat cooler in the back of a dark grocery store, one of them could practically be standing right beside you and you wouldn’t even know it.

  And I don’t.

  It lumbers forward, reaching for me with that blind grab they all do. I step back, quickly, but careful not to back myself into a corner—I’d done that far too many times to let it happen again.

  The walker comes at me, turning the corner, coming at me from the end of the cereal aisle, and all I can think of is Alicia.

  “You okay up there?” I yell to her.

  “Oh, my God, Timothy!”

  She’s rushing down one of the aisles behind the thing, coming toward us. I can’t see her, but I can hear her footsteps as she rushes to my rescue.

  “I’m okay! Stay where you are! Don’t—”

  Her scream keeps me from finishing my sentence. Another walker has gotten to her.

  I continue to struggle with the walker, keeping its gnashing teeth at bay, then manage to jam the knife into its neck. I’d been aiming for its face but there was no time to try for a kill shot now. Pushing it aside I make a break toward the sound of Alicia’s voice. I’m still not quite sure exactly where she is. I blaze across the aisles looking for her, but she’s farther away than I had thought.

  I round the corner and see only a mass of dark movement. Is Alicia beneath? On top? Is she even here at all?

  I only hear the grunts of a struggle. I can’t immediately tell that they’re hers, but then…yes, it’s her. As I near the struggling mass, I tuck my head down, knowing what I’m going to do. With my arms stretched out at either side, I tackle the beast. I knock it free from Alicia and the thing and I roll off of her in an instant. I swear I hear the sound of bone breaking from the impact, as if I’m demolishing the thing. I fear that’s only my imagination. As I roll on top of it Alicia’s safety is still my only concern, and I never once consider that I’m wrestling a walker, with no clue as to where its mouth is or how in danger of being bit I might be.

  I can feel its fingers clawing at my thigh, and my only instinct is to get away, but by then it’s got me—its fingers locked in a death grip around my thigh and my arm. I’m hitting it, kicking at it with my free arm and leg with all my might and I don’t even know what I’m hitting. Suddenly I realize I have my eyes tightly shut, and so I open them—just in time to see Alicia, bathed in light, bringing the baseball bat down on the walker’s head.

  She bashes its skull in with a single blow. My arm and thigh now released—Alicia has saved me. She stands over me with the bat, watching the walker—dead for real now—collapse into a heap.

  Alicia collapses shortly after.

  “Alicia!”

  She offers no response. I can barely stand.

  “Were you bitten?” I crawl over to her. She’s concealed in darkness; I can’t see any blood. I don’t know if she’s hurt or if her malnourished body couldn’t take the strain of all this exertion. Whatever the case, I have to get her out where I can see her, to the road where it’s safe and well-lit. I begin dragging her frantically toward the light; no time to lift her up—there could be more of them.

  I get halfway to the exit before I remember the broken glass in the front of the store. So I drop to my knees and gather her onto my lap, nearly toppling a nearby shelf as I use it to support me as I force myself to stand. I think I hear rustling as I lumber out of the store; a figment of my imagination and not more of them, I hope.

  Out in the street I gently lower her down to the pavement. I exam
ine her face. No blood. Her shirt. No blood. Her pants, the same—but there are rips and tears in her clothing, and it’s possible she received a scratch or a minor bite not yielding much blood. The shoes pop off with little effort, having not been untied and retied in more than a day’s time. Getting her pants over her hips is another matter. She’s always insisted on wearing snug-fitting jeans, or at least as snug-fitting as she could find. She claims she doesn’t want to risk having her clothing get caught on something during an escape, but I think that fashion is the last part of civilization she’s willing to let go of. As I start to pull her shirt off she wakes up, helping me the rest of the way.

  There’s not a scrape on her; must have been exhaustion from the struggle. She smiles up at me, and the emotion of the moment shifts. We’re starting to feel safe now.

  “How do I look?” she asks.

  It sounds cheesy, but I say the first thing that comes to mind: “Perfect.”

  Nearly naked, completely vulnerable, in the middle of the road, directly in front of the grocery store, out in the midday sun, she sits up and pushes me onto my backside.

  Checking me for wounds is just a formality. I’ve heard of at least two different cases where the adrenaline rush and the shock of the attack kept a person from realizing they had been bitten for several hours. Never witnessed this first hand but I never like to risk anything. Laughing to herself as she struggles to pull off my shoes, she begins to undress me. The urgency in the moment is gone; she takes her time. By the time Alicia begins unbuttoning my pants, I have my own shirt off. I smile at her.