She took an educated guess based on where she thought she remembered the pharmacy being at the Walmart near her old house. She worked her way to the left around the cashiers stations. A pitch-dark Walmart that’s been ransacked by who knows how many people and used as a home by who knows how many Zombies is strikingly different to stroll through than your average pre-apocalypse supercenter. Every step she took risked bringing down a horde of infected on her. The ground was covered in so much junk it was impossible for her to move at a reasonable speed and not make any noise.
Halfway past the never-ending rows of checkout lanes she stepped on a can of soda and lost her balance. She recovered quickly but not before she’d managed to kick over a small pile of cans. The resulting noise echoed throughout the entire store. She stood still with her heart pounding in her chest waiting to see what would happen. Belatedly realizing she still had the flashlight on she clicked it off to avoid being a beacon of light in the darkness after making all that noise. Nothing happened. She sighed with relief and fumbled around with the flashlight to turn it back on. It was kind of a pain since she had her rifle in one hand and the flashlight in the other.
A loud grunt stopped her from trying to turn on the light. Feeling her heart pounding loud enough now that she was worried the Zombie may hear it, she focused on remaining perfectly still. Another random grunt indicated standing still wasn’t working like she’d hoped. The fact that the Zombies she could hear were grunting indicated they weren’t in full hunting mode. If they were in full hunting mode, then there’d have been screeching and she would’ve probably already been discovered and devoured. Happy that she hadn’t been eaten yet she stood as still as she could until the grunting settled down. Giving it another fifteen minutes after the final grunt she restarted her never-ending trek towards where she hoped the pharmacy was located.
She got excited when she made it to a large empty space beside the check-out lanes before realizing it was the self-check area. Mentally squashing the fear building up inside her she kept moving. She knew what she was doing was borderline suicidal. She knew she’d have killed Randy for doing this. They needed the supplies though. She could feel that she was close. She’d grab what they needed and be out of there while the Zombies nesting in the building kept right on snoozing. As long as she didn’t make any more noise, she should be fine. Even if she did make some noise it’d worked out ok the time before. She didn’t see why it wouldn’t work out the same if it happened again. It wasn’t like the Zombies wandering around in this trash pile of a store were watching where they stepped.
After walking the length of what felt like twenty football fields through a pitch-black maze of noise creating obstacles, she was rewarded with a mostly empty shelf that had some toiletry items left on the bottom. She’d never been so thrilled to see boxes of electric toothbrush heads in her life. She took a sharp left at the entrance to the next aisle. She moved carefully past mostly empty shelves until she came to one of the most ironic obstacles ever.
At some point in the panic caused by the Zombie virus someone had felt the need to shove all of the cotton balls off the shelf and into the aisle. The cotton balls and some other miscellaneous hygiene products were in a big pile blocking her path. Cotton balls were the quietest thing she could imagine but the boxes and plastic bags they came in would make some serous noise if she tried to make it through the big pile in front of her. Shaking her head at the stupidity of having to back track due to the noise that’d be caused by walking through a pile of cotton balls she backed out of that aisle and turned down the next one over.
The next one had a half-eaten leg leaning against the mouthwash section. The blood on it had long since congealed. It looked more like a movie prop than an important part of someone’s body. It was a stark reminder to Kelly of the price she’d pay if she didn’t stay focused on keeping quiet, finding what they needed and getting the hell out of Walmart. Like always she knew her life also hung suspended by a thread the fates could easily snip at any time. How she’d managed to keep it in one piece this long was a mystery.
The pharmacy was open for business. Someone had taken issue with the operating hours and used a sledgehammer to turn the open sign back to on. Considering the extreme rurality and probable economic status of the area they were in the pill poppers had probably been up in here immediately after the first wave of the infected. Kelly wondered what the news media would make of the way everything had ended up. They loved to say pretty much everything was leading to the end of the world so they should get a lot of satisfaction out of the state of things today.
She found the section for bandages. It was diagonal from the entry to the big hole in the wall leading to the pharmacy section. A loud noise from somewhere deep in the store had her heart racing. Struggling to keep her eye on the prize she quickly and carefully walked across the open section in front of the pharmacy waiting area and directly into the pharmacy. There were boxes and trash all over the place in the pharmacy as well, but someone had done a great job of collecting all the pills they could find. She combed through all the garbage and shelves as quietly as she could but at the end of the day only found a few packs of antibiotic in foil containers to take with her.
She listened at the pharmacy door for a minute and heard some noises from the far side of the store. Ignoring those for now she went on a search for the ointment aisle. She was a little more successful there at getting tubes of antibiotic ointment and shoving those into her bag. Finally, she collected as many of the bandages and wraps as she could shove into her pockets and backpack and headed for the front of the store. She increased her pace since she was hearing multiple noises from different areas now. It sounded like something must’ve stirred up some of the Zombies nesting in the store for the night. The noises continued to be relatively distant from her. The distance kept her from freaking out too bad. As long as the freaks stayed on their side of the store, she was good.
She was starting to slip though. She made a bit more noise leaving than she’d made coming in. She had her light dialed way back and was hurrying. Her fear making her walk through the garbage maze more like a drunk rushing to the bar after the announcement of a free tequila shot offer than the delicate ballerina carefully planning each step she’d entered in the guise of. Her blood was hammering in her ears, but she hadn’t noticed any grunts or growls any closer to her than the ones she’d been hearing when she exited the pharmacy.
She walked right into an infected old lady who was standing in the darkness staring at the patch of lighter darkness where the glass doors led out to the parking lot. Kelly hit her hard enough to bowl her over. The Zombie hit the ground awkwardly and turned to see what had knocked it over. Kelly tried to click off her flashlight but accidently uncovered it and shined it around the store instead. The Zombie on the ground screeched and went for her leg. Kelly gave her the leg in the form of her steel toed combat boot connecting repetitively with the old woman’s skull.
Flashlight still waving around on her wrist like she was a human disco ball inviting all the infected to gather round and party Kelly finished curb stomping the old woman’s head. She pulled her foot back from the mess she’d made and considered what to do next. Acting out of sheer panic at the volume of the screeches aimed at her she threw her flashlight back towards the pharmacy as far as it would go. She turned and hauled ass in the other direction for that small patch of less dark wall up ahead. She was no longer concerned with making noise since the demons rushing towards her were making more noise than a bucket of marbles being poured into a whirling garbage disposal.
She hadn’t been worried about noise, but she should’ve been a lot more concerned with the trip and fall hazards. In the good old days, a littered floor in a place like this owned by a family grown wealthy beyond their wildest dreams would’ve been a gold mine for anyone willing to take some temporary pain in exchange for a nice payoff down the road. This scenario was what paid for those big billboards advertising for people who slipped and
fell to call them for big cash rewards. The apocalypse may have come, but Kelly figured the yellow pages still probably had a way for her to get in touch with the ambulance chasers. She was thinking this as she dizzily picked herself up off the ground. She’d tripped over a gallon of what used to be chocolate milk and slammed her head into a display of souvenir coffee mugs.
Rifle held out in front of her she jogged doggedly through the nightmare towards the outside doors. A Zombie ran straight into her spinning her in a circle. Not knowing where the Zombie was or what direction to shoot in, she stopped herself from blindly pulling the trigger and just kept moving. The gamble paid off. The Zombie that’d bumped into her assuming she was just another Zombie wandering the store in the darkness.
Disbelief at having made it to the door alive rocked her world. She hurdled over the shopping cart propping the door open and sprinted for her car. The car was still sitting there ready to go. Kelly pitched her pack in the backseat and took a look over at the store where motion had just caught her eye. A Zombie was working its way out of the store staring at her as it crawled across the rusted-out shopping cart. Kelly started the car and stomped down on the accelerator. A few minutes later her heart was back to beating at a normal human rate. Her biggest concern had gone from being eaten alive to having to explain to her husband why she’d just risked her life for some generic antibiotics, a bunch of gauze and a few tubes of Neosporin.
Chapter 12: The Pale Horseman
Krantz stood in the sitting room of a Charleston mansion. The place reeked of old money and mold. The smell of thousand-dollar Cuban cigars smoked by millionaire politicians and businessmen oozed off the thick mahogany walls mixing with the fumes from the sterno that squatters had been using to warm up cans of beans. They’d shot two of the squatters out in the front yard before sweeping the house and taking six people into custody. They’d be split up and sent to different camps to begin their new lives in the New America. If one out of the six was still alive this time next year it’d be a miracle.
Krantz was rapidly losing his taste for being on the front lines. The haunting radio broadcasts from the Goose Creek commander begging to be allowed to surrender. The half-eaten bodies of children they’d found piled up on the edge of a small settlement. The insane people within had been hoping the Zombies would eat the children and leave them alone. Those were the only people Krantz had killed with his own hands as part of this campaign. He’d relished it at the time.
They’d dragged the group of three wild looking men over to the pile of rotting bodies. Throwing the men down by the kids corpses Krantz had shot each of them in the legs. Then they’d gotten in the helicopter and hovered waiting for the Zombies to arrive. The screams of the men below rivaling the noise of the rotors above. He’d been an agent of karma smiling evilly down at them being eaten alive the same way the kids had been.
Everyday brought some new scene to star in his nightmares. He’d caught himself getting a bit too carried away with his after-dinner cognac most nights this week. It was the only way he could sleep all the way through the night. If he wanted to live through this, he knew he couldn’t afford to get sloppy. Just the thought of the cognac made him want to grab a stiff drink right now though.
The state was pretty much taken. They’d left a no man’s land between the border of South Carolina and North Carolina. Refugees from South Carolina were streaming into North Carolina daily. Krantz knew Roberts had all kinds of spies in North Carolina running reconnaissance operations but he hadn’t been brought into the loop on any of those details yet. It was only a matter of time before he’d be leading that effort. Assuming South Carolina continued to go well, and he wasn’t killed.
He didn’t know if he even wanted to be in the loop anymore. His days were starting to revolve more around going through the motions of doing his job than actually doing it. He was basically treading water like pretty much everyone else around him. His eyes were caught by an expensive looking bottle of a light brown liquor sitting on the shelf of the sitting room he was in. He walked over, popped the top off the crystal container it was in, and took a long pull from it. He didn’t even bother to sniff it first. He threw the bottle down on the sitting room floor when he was done. Averting his eyes in shame, he walked out of the room past the men studiously ignoring their commanding officer getting sloshed first thing in the morning.
His guards fell in behind him as he made his way to the dock in the backyard. Once there he ordered one of the men to let the helicopter pilot know they were ready to be picked up. They’d accomplished what they needed to do in Charleston. He’d rode in on his white horse and finished what the other three riders hadn’t gotten around to yet. The people in this city had banded together and survived a Zombie apocalypse only to be enslaved by an army made up mostly of the Georgia National guard. Well, they’d been either enslaved or slaughtered. It was surreal when you thought about it. Who would’ve ever guessed this was the scenario that’d play out at the end of the world?
They’d taken the coast and most of the rest of the state. There was no real uninfected resistance to them at this point. Krantz’s job was starting to migrate back to the more logistical role which he greatly appreciated. He read a report one of his men handed him on how the city in the clouds concept was working out. Based on the report there were a lot of logistical issues with getting it established but it was actually starting to take shape. They’d lost a troop of looters trying to use them to sneak supplies in at night instead of flying in everything by helicopter. The idea had been to just move the supplies in when the Zombies were all sleeping. There were just too many Zombies in the city to sneak anyone in.
Krantz shrugged off his doubts about the city in the clouds being a good idea. He knew they were allocating a ton of resources to stand up something that might not end up being necessary. The practicality of the project didn’t faze him. They needed to build it and try it to understand how useful the concept was going to be. If it was useful then they could imitate it in other states. If it wasn’t then they’d wasted a bunch of resources to find out it wasn’t a viable idea. Unlike the other groups surviving in the apocalypse the Brotherhood had the resources to waste.
There were New American patrols pushing in from Tennessee and up from Georgia now. The captured South Carolinians were being grouped into different camps. Their families were already being separated. The spoken reason for the separation being for the safety of the children and spouses. The real reasons of course being to ensure the loyalty of the new citizens. The rumors of the forced separations had reached most of the people in the state. The was why so many of them were making a run for North Carolina. Roberts had indicated they should let them go. The people to the north already knew something was going on so it wasn’t like they were going to catch them by surprise. An influx of refugees would hopefully help sap their strength.
Most of the information Krantz had on the army to the north had come from the bits and pieces he’d picked up from Kyler. That was another reason he should’ve been more suspicious of the traitor. He’d come straight from the heart of the only real enemy the Brotherhood was going to face in the South East United States. From what he’d understood the people to the north had a pretty similar setup to what they did in the south. Groups of people arranged in settlements who were assigned to teams of looters and such. It shouldn’t be that difficult to assimilate them into the New America.
The helicopter arrived to pick them up. Climbing aboard Krantz realized he didn’t have a destination in mind. His last orders had been to take Charleston which he’d done. It was pretty easy to take territory when everyone was running away from you as fast as possible. The people left alive in these places were all survivors. They scattered like cock roaches when the lights came on. In other cases, they couldn’t wait to surrender. That’d worn off as people started hearing the rumors of how the families would be separated but they’d had plenty in the beginning who just went ahead and proactively surrendered.
/> Krantz got himself buckled in quickly even though he didn’t actually have a destination in mind. He hated not having a plan. Then he remembered that he was the one in charge so he could tell the pilot to hang out while he figured out the next move. He was saved from having to come up with a next move by the appearance of multiple infected running towards the helicopter. The pilot looked over at him and saw he didn’t have his headset on yet. He jerked his finger in the air to indicate he wanted to go ahead and take them up. That seemed like a good idea to Krantz. He may not have a specific destination in mind yet but being swarmed by a bunch of Zombies was not part of his optional itinerary for the day.
“Columbia.” He said into the headset to the pilot once he had them on. He’d go see for himself how the city in the clouds was coming along. That should be interesting at least.
Chapter 13: Bed Rest
“What the hell were you thinking!” Randy’s raised voice echoed through the small house.
Caitlyn and Myriah alternated between trying to listen in and trying to keep the littles from listening in. Zoey in particular seemed fascinated with the argument. It wasn’t even the argument so much as the fact that their parents were being loud. A side effect of the apocalypse was that it kept people from screaming at each other. People who liked to yell didn’t last too long when Zombies were sitting around listening for a clue as to where to go for their next meal.
Zombies! (Book 6): Hold The Line Page 11