by Misty Vixen
“Wonder what it was,” Delilah murmured, looking up at the blank spot where a sign had once hung over the main entrance.
“Probably a store of some kind that just couldn’t keep it up,” I replied, shading my eyes and leaning forward.
“Not at all like you,” Megan murmured in a surprisingly sexy voice.
I glanced at her. She was smiling at me and I felt a sharp tug of lust. She didn’t do it often, but when she wanted to, she was good at turning on the flirt.
“Stop distracting me,” I muttered as I walked over to the door and opened it up. I saw signs that our mystery guest had been here, too.
“It’s fun, though,” she replied demurely, following me closely.
I sighed. “I know. But we have to focus. Later.”
She stepped next to me and reached out, brushing a hand across my crotch. “If you say so,” she replied, then turned and moved back to the door, past Delilah as she walked in, to keep watch.
I looked at her for a moment, wondering if I had time to bend her over and fuck her slutty little brains out here in this abandoned shop, and shook my head. Delilah was smirking. No, we had to focus. Get the place searched, see if we were really alone or not, and then I could fuck the absolute shit out of both of them.
Especially Megan.
We pissed away about twenty minutes looking that place over, and at the end of it yet again had nothing to show for it, although I hadn’t really gotten my hopes up. I think it had been some kind of shop before it died, maybe a sex shop or adult video store. There were so many of those along highways. Honestly, I was surprised we hadn’t encountered one yet. I wanted some lube. Hazel hadn’t been willing to part with hers and I really wanted to fuck Megan and Delilah in the ass. Especially Megan, she had such a hot ass.
All that there really was in the store were the remains of a campsite. Someone had dragged in a big metal drum barrel from somewhere and used it to start a fire in one of the back rooms. There was a bit of wooden debris and ashes left scattered around the room, as well as some wrappers and other bits of trash strewn about.
That was it though.
We emerged back out into the sunlight and began marching across the street towards the place I’d pegged as a restaurant from the highway.
Judging from the sign, which I could see a bit more clearly now, it was a burger joint.
There were two vehicles in the lot in front of the restaurant, both with open doors and popped trunks. We kept the ball rolling, checking over the vehicles and finding they’d been picked as clean as dead bodies in a desert. The situation wasn’t much improved in the burger joint either. I found more evidence of our mysterious wanderer we were apparently following in the footsteps of. Almost all of the tables and chairs in the burger joint had been reduced to kindling since the end of the world, and I found an unpleasant surprise waiting for me in the back bathroom.
“Shit,” I muttered as I pushed open one of the two stall doors.
“Something wrong?” Megan asked.
“No. Just found a corpse. Old,” I replied.
“Oh.”
Well, probably old. Hard to tell with frozen bodies. I went about the ugly job of searching for supplies, though I could tell someone had done that already. He was middle-aged, maybe into his fifties when he’d died. He looked...tired. Not angry or scared or despairing. Just tired. I knew how he felt. Some days, I was nothing but tired, and it was willpower alone that forced me on. I wondered what his story had been.
Was he a local? The owner of the shop? Or just some guy who’d come wandering across the land? There were no obvious wounds on his body, so he’d probably just frozen to death. People didn’t realize how easy that was to do. I mean, a lot more of them did now probably. Nothing in any of his pockets, unfortunately.
I let him be and closed the door. I was eager to get a move on, but I kept hoping to find something among these buildings. Even if they’d been picked over for months and months at this point, there were often people coming and going. Sometimes people left stashes of stuff behind for one reason or another and, well, to be perfectly honest, I took them. Unless it was very obvious that whoever it was was still around and would come back for it soon. Because usually, it was next to impossible to tell if you were stealing or not.
I mean, I guess it was all stealing in some regard, but there was a world of difference between taking someone’s stash from next door or while they were out for the day, and taking the stash of someone who’d left it there and then died six months ago and hadn’t told anyone where it was. And I was a survivor.
I wasn’t into robbing people, but I wasn’t into just leaving stuff I could use.
“Maybe we should just head for the house,” Megan said uncertainly as we wrapped up our excursion to the burger joint and stepped back outside.
“No,” I replied almost immediately, “we need to be thorough.”
She sighed. “Yeah, I guess you’d know. Hope there’s something in this next one.”
I nodded in agreement and we walked down the rest of the way to the last building on this little side street: a general store. It made me think back to the one that hadn’t been too far from the little cabin I’d set up in when first meeting Delilah and Megan. Out of everything, I thought it had the most potential. Something in my gut said that if there was anything to find among these buildings, it would be in this one.
As we approached, I saw a few signs of the apocalypse that had come. There were usually signs wherever there were pockets of civilization that had obviously been abandoned for awhile. Someone had taped up a hand-printed sign in bold, black lettering that read NO MORE FOOD to the front window beside the main entrance. I’d seen a lot of places like this, gas stations with no gas, grocery stories with no groceries, gun shops with no ammo. And there’d been a lot of places looted, doors kicked in, windows smashed.
Shit, a lot of places had burned down because people were too crazy.
Like I’d say, those early days of the apocalypse were nuts.
We made our way inside, and again found some signs of melted snow and bootprints. Although now I had something of an idea of this person’s path: this was where they had started. The shape of the bootprint was almost totally lost in this building, the snow little more than a puddle. There was a good chance this was where they had started. Meaning they must have come out of the woods a little farther off to the north.
Again, we would’ve seen them on the highway, even from several miles off, given we’d had a clear, straight view up there.
Still wasn’t much to go off of, but given they were moving in a reverse course of the way we were, I still thought there was a decent chance they were waiting somewhere nearby. Which meant either that one house or the lone cabin up on the hill. Could be they’d moved on, but I figured there was a good chance they’d seen us by now. We were kind of hard to miss if you were looking. And no one had taken a potshot at us, so that was a good sign.
The general store was yet another sad sight: dusty, barren shelves and trash-strewn floors.
By now, we all knew the drill. Megan stood guard and Delilah began looking behind the counter while I walked deeper in and hunted around for anyone or anything that might be hiding. I checked a back bathroom, a manager’s office, and a storeroom, and found nothing worth mentioning. From there, I stayed in the back and began my search for supplies, intending to work my way forward. For a moment, I just stood there in the manager’s office and forced myself to do nothing at all. I just closed my eyes and relaxed.
I was going to rush this, I knew I was, because I was getting impatient and a little frustrated, and I was already kind of pissed and upset as it was.
But if I rushed it, I’d miss something. I could’ve missed something already. Less likely, now that Delilah was performing second sweeps, but still possible.
After taking several deep breaths and just waiting, just doing nothing, I opened my eyes again. I felt better. Calmer.
I was ready to
work.
The office was a sad thing, like a lot of the places I’d come across in my travels. I don’t know what it was about places like this, but so many of them seemed rundown and miserable, even when they’d been functional. No wonder so many people had hated their fucking jobs back then. I started with the obvious places, putting those thoughts aside and narrowing my focus. I checked the desk drawers, pulling them open one by one, checking for false bottoms, then removing them and setting them aside after clearing each.
Nothing in the desk.
I looked up under the chair. Sometimes people taped shit to the bottoms of chairs. Checked up under the desk, too, at that. Still nothing. I’d once found a baggie of cocaine that way, and had made quite the good trade later on.
There was a filing cabinet, two of the drawers already open. I pulled them all open all the way, one after the other, checking, and then pulling them out as well. No joy there. There were wooden shelves, but they were barren. I moved them aside and crouched down. I laughed as I found something. A penny. A fucking penny.
With a soft sigh, I pocketed it. You never knew when something like a penny might come in useful. Impromptu screwdriver, tiebreaker implement, or hell, some people still just liked coins. There was a potted plant, long since dead, that I moved, hoping to find something hidden beneath the big pot. Nope, nothing there, either.
For a moment, I was stymied. I thought for sure there’d be something. Don’t know why. I looked around slowly, first down, then mid-level, then up.
Up.
I pursed my lips. One of the ceiling tiles was slightly misaligned. It was too high up to get to safely, even standing on the desk, but I’d seen something in the storeroom. Hurrying over to it, I snagged the small ladder and brought it back, set it in place, then climbed up it. I pushed up the tile and poked my head up, bringing the lighter with me. Not ideal, given I wasn’t sure how flammable whatever was up there in the roof might be, but I still didn’t have a flashlight. Taking a look around, I grinned.
“There you are, fucker,” I growled.
There was a little backpack up there, in the nearest corner, hidden among shadows. I reached out carefully, snagged it, and then made my way back down the ladder. Once I was safely down, I pocketed the lighter and unzipped the backpack. It was a simple model, something I might’ve worn to middle school, a faded green thing that had seen a lot of use. It was ripped in a few places, sewn up in others. I checked the outer pockets and found nothing, then began pulling out what was inside. It quickly became evident that it was someone’s emergency survival kit, and also that it had been stashed here for awhile.
There was a film of dust on the pack.
I pulled out a small box of matches, a box of purification tablets, a compass, a small first-aid kit with just the basics of bandages, a little roll of gauze, painkillers, antibiotics, burn cream, and a few other odds and ends, a twenty ounce bottle of water that was still sealed, a pocket knife, a change of thermal clothes and, last but not least, a hand-crank flashlight!
Shit, I’d been looking for one of these for forever now. I’d had one awhile ago, but I’d been forced to leave it behind when some assholes had driven me out of town. I packed it all back up and then stuffed the much smaller backpack into my own, since there was room at this point. No food, but it was a good find, at least.
I left the back office and continued along my search.
As I did, I heard the wind picking up, and by the time I’d finished up my search and reunited with Megan in the front, (passing Delilah on her way back to double-check my work), I realized that something was different.
Looking outside, it hit me.
It was darker.
A storm was coming.
SEVEN
“Found something,” I said as I came to stand next to Megan, who was frowning out through the plate glass at the front.
“Oh yeah?” she replied.
“Yeah. Some survival gear. No food, but a flashlight, some meds, a compass, good trading stuff if we run across anyone.”
“Good.” She was clearly distracted, and with good reason. A cloud cover had blown in, and it was gray and ominous. Even as we stood staring, light flakes of snow began falling from those skies, blowing in the harsh winds that gave me chills just hearing it. “Maybe we should think about getting to that house soon,” she said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Let’s finish our search here, then get a move on.”
“Okay.” She paused, frowning. “Hurry.”
I nodded and hopped to it, pulling out the flashlight and cranking it, then turning it on. The bright light that came out gave me a morale boost at least. But I understood her anxiety. No one wanted to be caught in a storm, and the house was probably our best bet as a place to bunk down for the duration if we had to.
We moved fast, and I didn’t manage to find anything in the ten minutes I gave myself to check over the front half of the general store, but by then, the winds and the snow were worse. I called for Delilah as I looked out the window and saw the snowfall was getting a lot heavier.
“Yeah, we should go!” Megan called.
Delilah emerged from the back rooms and joined me as we hurried up to the front door. Rejoining Megan, I looked unhappily outside. Visibility was cutting down. Shit. I should’ve headed out sooner. I quickly pulled my hat and gloves on, made sure everything was adjusted, and then threw the door open. “Come on, let’s move it!”
We set out.
Immediately, the roaring of the wind overcame everything else. I kept the layout of the immediate area firmly in my mind as we started moving down the side road, back towards the gas station. Theoretically, we should be there in ten minutes or less. I could still see the indentation of the street in the snow, so that was a good indicator. I glanced back to make sure Megan and Delilah were still following me.
This is why a rope would be handy, although this wasn’t yet a full-on blizzard. Visibility was still half-decent. I could just barely make out the gas station at the end of the street, so ideally, once we got there, we should be able to see the house itself. Even if we couldn’t, it was a simple procedure to get there. I thought back to all the miserable times I’d had to do this before. At least this time I had company.
There were a lot of times where I’d be outside and a blizzard would just kick up without much warning. The weather was all fucked to hell and back now, and that could happen with disturbing ease. And then you could die with disturbing ease.
I pushed on, putting one boot in front of the other, feeling my body heat rapidly diminishing. That was another problem with storms and blizzards. And yet another problem was that we were risking the hope that the house was actually a good place to stay. It might not be. There might be nothing to burn and a lot of broken windows. The look I’d gotten at it had given me an impression of it being intact, but I could be wrong, and I hadn’t seen the whole thing. But right now, it was our best option, so we were taking it.
The seconds seemed to drag on and the next however long it was passed like a fucking kidney stone as I marched on, glanced back every fifteen seconds to make sure no one had wandered off course, and just kept putting one fucking boot in front of the other. Certainly I’d been through worse than this, but something I’d noticed was that the shit happening to you right now tends to seem pretty bad in comparison to everything else.
Finally, we reached the end of the road.
Unfortunately, by then, the visibility had lessened, with snow coming down in sheets, blowing across the whole area.
“Fuck!” Megan shouted. “Where’s the fucking house?!”
“Just stay with me!” I shouted at both of them, making sure they were focused.
They each nodded and we pressed on. I’d gotten good with figuring distance in my head, making mental maps of the area and keeping myself oriented in them, and figuring out about how far I was traveling based on the lengths of my strides. So I aimed myself for the house, walking roughly diagonally across the stree
t that broke west from the highway, and hoped for the best. The winds kicked harder as I walked, and it became more of a pain to keep on track. The snow covered everything and by now I was shivering violently.
We needed heat and shelter.
Now.
Again, pushing. Pushing harder. Keep going. Ignore the cold and the wind and the howling and the goddamn freezing. I found myself pissed that I’d waited for so long. If I’d just left right then, as soon as it started to snow, we could have been there by now. Goddamnit. And it wasn’t like I had anything to even show for that extra ten minutes.
Fuck, where was the other sidewalk?
Was there a sidewalk on this half of the street?
Where was the house?
I began to actually feel the icy tendrils of panic in my gut when, suddenly, the house seemed to appear to me out of the snow. I looked back again, suddenly terrified that I’d have lost Megan or Delilah, but they were still there, struggling along. I had to get them inside. I had to get myself inside, but I was responsible for their safety. Well, for Delilah’s, and I guess for Megan’s, even if she didn’t want to admit it.
The house wasn’t all that big, but it was a house, and the windows were intact I saw as I walked up to the front door. I pulled out my pistol as I approached it, knowing that my aim was going to be shit if I needed to shoot. With my other hand, I gripped the knob and twisted. It was locked. Fuck. I backed up and threw my shoulder against it. The door cracked inward, giving some, but not enough. I hit it again, harder, and that did it.
I stumbled inside, barely managing to catch myself, raising the pistol and-
“Don’t fucking move.”
My eyes and the pistol zeroed in on the voice instantly, despite the cold. I found myself standing in a sparse living room staring at a tall, pale woman wearing a white beanie, white coat, and dirty gray work pants.