Chapter Twenty
Cheryl surveyed the scattering of litter on the lot. There was a plastic grocery bag on the ground with its contents spilling out: a shattered bottle of spaghetti sauce, broken eggs, and a dented can of chili. She suddenly had a flashback to the morning of the first day that the world began to unravel when she and Mark had stopped at a gas station on their way down from the mountains. That place had been eerily deserted, and at that time they didn’t have any clue that the owner had probably abandoned it and fled. This place was just as quiet and still. “I don’t like this. It looks like a battlefield.”
“We need a place to rest, lick our wounds. Figure out where the hell we’re going and get some supplies.” He started to dismount. “Wait here and leave the bike running.”
She was about to tell him that it might not be wise to do that and waste gas when something caught her eye. She grabbed his arm. “Wait!” She pointed towards a dumpster on the far side of the building. “Look.”
Aidan saw the jeans and work boots sticking out from underneath. “So? Looks like he’s dead.”
She didn’t let go of his arm. “Shouldn’t we go in together?”
“Until we’re sure it’s safe in there, we can’t risk leaving the bike. Stay here. If I don’t come back in ten minutes, take the bike and go.”
“No,” she said, digging her grimy fingernails deeper into his leather jacket. “I don’t like it. I’m not staying out here.”
His eyebrows rose at her rebellion. He leaned in towards her and put his hand over hers. For a half second, she thought he was going to kiss her again. Then any imagined tenderness in his eyes seemed to evaporate, and she wondered if he was about to slap her. Instead of doing either, he shoved her hand off. “You’re getting to be a stubborn brat…you know that?”
Cheryl saw a vague movement in her peripheral vision and looked back towards the dumpster. The legs underneath were gone.
There was a dull CLANG like someone hit it with a fist.
“Aidan!”
A loud POP whizzed beside them.
“Get down!” He shoved her to the ground.
They sprawled down flat on the gravel behind the motorcycle. Cheryl’s heart played hopscotch inside her chest. It didn’t make sense that someone was shooting at them, unless the person was afraid that they were infected or they’d just plum lost their mind.
“Hey!” Aidan yelled, waving a hand in the air like a white flag. “We’re healthy!”
Glancing through the wheelbase of the bike, she saw the barrel of a rifle poke out through a broken corner in the lower front window. A man’s harsh voice rang out. “You two can just get on down the road.”
Aidan raised his head up, making her nervous. The helmets might provide some protection against the walking dead, but they certainly weren’t bulletproof.
“We’re just looking for a few supplies!”
“We don’t have anything for you!” the man yelled back.
The gun pulled inside, and they heard the sound of two voices quarreling. A higher pitched voice that sounded like a woman’s volleyed back and forth with their gruff greeter.
Cheryl exchanged a glance with Aidan, one that insinuated hope.
A man’s face appeared on the other side of the window. She could make out a mouth and a graying mustache as he spoke through the hole.
“Alright. My wife says we have to help you out—if you’re not sick. Leave your gun by the motorcycle and come close to the window, so we can have a look at you.”
There was another bang on the dumpster.
“We’re not alone out here!” Aidan said. “We’re not leaving our guns.”
That statement created more discussion inside. A moment later the man came back. “Well, alright. You can—”
With a deep guttural growl, a burly figure emerged from behind the dumpster. The man looked a good three hundred pounds with a gut as big as a haystack underneath the shreds of his overalls. His entire front side, from the scraggly beard down to his crotch was covered in deep crimson blood and bits of slug-colored flesh as his sunken dead eyes trained right on them.
Cheryl reached for the bag, intending to grab her gun, but Aidan knocked her back with his elbow and fired a volley of shots into the Eater’s head. The man staggered a few steps towards them. When he fell, she was sure that the ground shook.
“Nice shot,” the man shouted from inside. “One down, two hundred million to go. You two should hurry up and get in here. It’s not safe out there.”
Aidan reached around her, turned the engine off with the key and started rolling the bike towards the building. She was glad to see that he wasn’t limping as badly as before, but was a little miffed by the way he seemed to be reasserting his machismo all of a sudden.
The door opened for them, and they saw a small, wiry man with gold-rimmed glasses and a walrus mustache, a form that belied his booming voice. At his side was a woman with gray-flecked tawny hair pulled tightly in a bun, a pink pastel t-shirt and a long floral skirt. Her face was tan and clean, and there were fans of lines at the corners of her eyes.
Aidan rolled the motorcycle towards the door, but the man held up his hand. “Park it right out there by the ice bin.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Aidan complied. Cheryl started to walk towards the open door, but stopped when she heard, “No!” in her head.
Mark? Was he giving her a warning? What could he be warning her about?
She gave a weak smile to the man at the door then made up her mind to take note of her guardian angel’s advisement and be on the alert. If anyone inside showed the slightest sign of being sick, she’d tell Aidan, and they’d leave.
As they were ushered in, Cheryl saw the couple eye their duffel bag like it might contain giant vials of the plague. She couldn’t blame them. Suspicion of strangers was warranted in these times.
“You can leave your gun and your bag right there,” the man said, pointing to a spot on the floor next to the heavy metal shelves that had been pushed up against the storefront windows. “The last fellows we let in here tried to rob us, so we’re a little wary of strangers.”
“What happened to them?” Cheryl asked.
The man and woman exchanged an unsure glance then the woman put a hand over her cheek and looked away.
“The Lord gave us the strength to fight back, and we kicked them out,” the man said. “Whatever happened to them after that, well, that was the Lord’s will.”
Cheryl thought about the man’s legs under the dumpster. The bearded goliath that had been snacking on him certainly didn’t seem like one of God’s foot soldiers.
The man stuck his hand out to Aidan. “I’m Jonah, by the way. This is my wife, Liz.”
As they made introductions, Cheryl took in the store with a few quick glances. It was a typical mountain roadside shop with everything from candy bars and canned tuna to fishing lures and souvenir t-shirts for the surrounding ski towns. A rack of brochures for tourists and maps in the corner near the checkout counter caught here eye.
Aidan did his own visual sweep. “You the only ones here?”
Jonah took off his cap and smoothed back a sweaty curl of silver hair in the center of his shiny head. “Nope. It’s me, Liz, our son, Matthew and some folks from our prayer group who were here for a meeting when the attacks started and this became an impromptu bed and breakfast.” Jonah then asked his own questions. “Where’d you folks come from?”
“Genesee,” Aidan said. “Golden before that.”
“How bad was it?”
Cheryl shook her head, trying to evict the images of walking corpses, cannibalistic feeding orgies, and crackling flames. “Bad. We had to leave.”
The couple nodded at the same time, insinuating that they didn’t really want to hear the gory details. They had probably witnessed enough horrors in their own parking lot before barricading themselves inside to know that their little slice of the world was much like the state of the rest.
“Wh
ere you headed now?”
Cheryl glanced back to the information rack, noting the Map of the Southwest in the upper corner.
Aidan said, “We don’t know. We’re looking for someplace safe.”
“As long as you’re pleasant, you’re welcome to stay with us for a while. We got plenty of food and supplies.”
They thanked their new hosts as they were led to the back of the store. There, next to the coolers filled with sodas and bottled water, a group sat around a folding table, playing cards. Cheryl thought they looked like they were simply waiting for a train to arrive, instead of biding their time, hoping that the walls around them would hold and prevent a horde of corpses from crashing in and tearing their flesh apart.
Jonah introduced them. “We’ve got a couple more survivors. This here is Aidan and his wife, Cheryl.”
Wife? She realized that the engagement ring on her left hand that Mark had given her could be taken for a wedding band. Aidan chuckled under his breath then took her hand in his, a gesture that obviously meant play along. She decided that he was right, especially after the religious fervor of the group became more apparent.
The group included two older ladies who looked as delicate as birds, a heavy set middle-aged woman with cropped red hair, a man in his thirties with a heavy gold cross around his neck, and a gray-haired gentleman with spotted hands that shook as he held his spread of cards.
Cheryl figured that Aidan was thinking the same thing that she was. Despite the fact that they had extra guns to share, this flock of refugees would be fairly useless if the store came under a full-scale attack.
“Nice to meet you,” they said, one by one as they introduced themselves.
Cheryl’s mind was so far away that she forgot some of their names a second afterwards.
“And that back there,” Jonah said, pointing to the dark folded lump next to a rack of chips with a black cap pulled down over his eyes “is Matthew. My boy. You can lead a horse to water…”
Matthew didn’t look up at first. He sat with his eyes closed, listening to music on his iPod. He reached for a handful of M& M’s and took a swig from a two-liter bottle of Coke. Then, as if he sensed the sound of his name spoken over the brash sound of guitars screaming from his ear buds, he opened his eyes and looked up. After seeming to determine that the newcomers weren’t a threat, he closed them again and began nodding to the beat.
“Our weekly church prayer group had just commenced when we came under attack a couple of days ago. Given the circumstances, we’ve decided to make our supplications hourly. We were just about to start when you showed up,” Liz said. “You’re welcome to join us.”
“Sure,” Aidan said, giving Cheryl’s hand a gentle squeeze. “A little prayer in a time like this couldn’t hurt.”
One of the older women sat up straighter in her chair and laid her cards face down on the table. “These are the last days, you know. Did you see the sun today? And the moon last night? In Revelations 6:12, it says ‘The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red.’”
Cheryl knew that the sun and moon’s appearance were because of all the smoke in the air. It was possible that there were forest fires going on in addition to the fires down in the valley and from Aidan’s burning cabin. After standing with the group and holding hands in a circle through the prayer session, it became apparent that the whole group thought that what was happening outside was part of Judgment Day, and the spread of the infection was all just part of God’s plan. They believed that they were part of the survivors—the chosen ones—who, at any moment, would be carted off to Heaven on a holy beam of sunlight, bursting through the roof. Cheryl worried that these people would raise their hands to heaven and wait for death instead of mounting a defense if the store was attacked. The way Aidan firmly gripped her hand told her that he believed the same thing. Their time at this shelter was going to be short-lived.
After the final amen, Cheryl admitted to herself that she felt a little better. The thought that there might be a supreme being up above who might make everything turn out alright in the end if she said, please enough times, gave her a pinprick of hope, even if it was as distant as a star’s feeble light. The smirk on Aidan’s face made her wonder if he was holding in some sarcastic remark about the prayer.
He whispered in her ear as the circle parted. “Somehow, I don’t remember our wedding or the honeymoon.”
She whispered back. “Smartass. I guess that explains all our bickering lately.”
“Death and destruction all around us may have something to do with it too.”
“What are we going to do? We can’t stay here long. Maybe a day or two, but then—”
“We need to find out if there’s any gas in those pumps out front, and if they work.”
Liz walked up, interrupting them. “Alright you two. There are no secrets in here. If you’re going to stay with us, we’ve got to be a team. How about some cold lemonade? Then, we can sit and chat a little.”
They thanked her, and as she walked towards the cooler to grab a couple of bottles, the man with the gold cross around his neck approached.
“What’s it like out there?”
Cheryl and Aidan shook their heads in unison.
“How much you want to know?” Aidan asked.
“I can handle it. Lay it on me.”
Aidan started with the attack on his construction site then followed with their hair-raising trip up the mountain, their narrow escape from his cabin, and the rude ending to their breakfast. “I thought it would be safer up here. Fewer of them. But they’re goddamn everywhere!”
Norman (at least that’s what Cheryl thought his name was) grew wide-eyed at the profanity for a second then seemed to relax. “You’re still here, though. You made it through all that. I don’t know what you two believe in, but maybe there’s a reason why you’re not already worm food like what’s left of those in the parking lot.”
Cheryl shuddered at the thought of being a dismembered corpse lying between two yellow stripes on the pavement. She didn’t believe that they were still alive due to any divine plan; she knew that it had been a combination of their fortitude, iced with a big dollop of frosted luck. Question was, how much further could those two ingredients carry them?
Liz came back and handed them cold bottles. They downed the lemonade in just a few gulps. As she directed them to the front of the store towards a makeshift seat on top of a glass display case that contained a mess of expensive fishing lures, the lights flickered.
“Liz!” Jonah yelled from a back room.
“Excuse me a moment. He probably needs a hand with the generator. We’ve got power, but he’s been fooling with it, trying to make sure it works as a back up.”
As soon as Liz was out of sight, Matthew materialized next to them. He leaned against the case and lit a Marlboro.
“They let you do that in here?” Aidan asked.
“What are they going to do? Ground me? Throw me out to the wolves?”
Cheryl laughed. What a punk. She guessed that half of the prayer sessions being held in the store were for his wayward soul.
“What’s your story? How’d you get here, man?”
Aidan gave him a quick recap then pointed to his motorcycle outside.
Matthew whistled. “That’s a nice bike.”
“Thanks.”
“Too bad there’s no sidecar. I’d be riding shotgun when you leave.”
Sorry kid, Cheryl thought. We’ve got a motorcycle not a taxi.
Matthew asked them more questions and hung on every word of their replies; his eyes sparkled as he seemed to be imagining himself in such dangerous situations.
Cheryl asked, “How’d you happen to be here when the attack started?”
“I work here on Tuesdays. Cover the counter, so they can meet. I was up front when I heard a crash back by the ice cream cooler. When I went to check it out, some dude was lying face down on the floor, and his skin was all gray and gross
looking. After I tried to call 911 and couldn’t get through to anyone, I ran to get my dad. When we came back, the guy was on his feet and tried to grab us. If I hadn’t bashed him with a baseball bat, we’d have been his lunch. Then, we heard the first crash in the parking lot…”
As he relayed the rest of the events, Cheryl and Aidan nodded in unison. They knew from experience that he wasn’t exaggerating when he told about them about Eaters mustering in front of the store and starting to attack every patron in sight. Cheryl thought that the only surprising thing was that there weren’t more bodies lying around. She figured that they had been hauled off into the woods as they were fought over. The forest floor around the shop was probably littered with skeletons and fragments of bones.
“Have you heard any news reports about what’s happening?” Aidan asked.
Matthew shook his head. “We don’t got a TV or internet here. Cell phones aren’t worth crap. We’ve got a radio in the back, though. Sometimes, there’s something on it, but nothing too hopeful.”
A radio. Cheryl brightened. “Really? Can we check it out? See if we can tune anything in?”
After tossing his cigarette butt on the floor, Matthew shrugged. “Guess so. Follow me.”
Matthew turned to lead them towards the back of the store, and Cheryl did a couple of quick side steps over to the rack of maps. Aidan kept mum as she lifted the Map of the Southwest and tucked it into the back of her pants, under her shirt. She could tell that he was scoping out the goods just as she was, making a mental inventory of the aisles of candy, crackers, chips, lighter fluid, bottled water, and first aid kits. How soon would it be before they could pirate whatever they needed and be on their merry way?
As they neared the back of the store by the coolers, Cheryl saw a woman’s prostrate form on the floor, staring straight up at the ceiling. She wore a purple Colorado Rockies t-shirt and a pair of white shorts with splatters of dried blood on them.
“That’s Mary Ann,” Matthew said. “She’s part of the prayer group. She’s been like that ever since she ran in here when the trouble started. She won’t talk to anyone, won’t eat, won’t drink. She’s just sort of shut down.”
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