by Sean Shake
I didn’t frighten easily.
I got the distinct impression that the only reason I had escaped it before, was because it had been unprepared for me. It had expected me to be just like anyone else, like any other human. That’s why it had tilted its head curiously when it tried to strangle me; when it was unable to.
And then I attacked it before it knew what was happening, before it knew what I was.
Before I knew what I was. And I got the sense that this was somehow the same thing.
But I knew it wouldn’t underestimate me again, and I couldn’t afford to underestimate it.
We made it to the back of Walmart, and I burst through large swinging doors in the stationary area to the stockroom.
Thank God for corporate design. They were all laid out mostly the same so that it was impossible to get lost in them, to engender a sense of coming home, no matter how many miles from your real home you actually were.
“Where are we going?” Abigail asked. “Our truck is out there.”
“Last I remember, our truck flipped over. So unless they righted it, we’re gonna be needing a new vehicle.”
“Again,” Abigail said as we wound our way through pallets of packaged food and home goods stacked high above our heads. “Maybe you should let someone else drive.”
“Not a chance.”
We made it to the back door leading to the loading dock. I pushed the girls against the wall and put my finger to my lips.
They both stared at me, Abigail with a sort of dark fascination, and Emma with a blank fury.
She could be mad at me all she wanted, I wasn’t gonna let her die for some girl she didn’t know.
If we could’ve taken her, I would’ve. But with two broken legs, she would have just gotten us killed.
Besides, she was with her family and her friends, or at least people she knew. They could take care of their own.
We couldn’t save everyone.
I pushed open the door a crack and peered through.
Seeing nothing, I pushed it open a little more. As I stuck my head out, I had the crazy thought that someone would slam into the door, decapitating me or crushing my skull.
I hoped my recent obsession with losing my head wasn’t some kind of premonition.
The loading bay was empty save for three trailers. Only one of which had a tractor attached to it. This one apparently had been abandoned in the middle of unloading.
I pushed the door open all the way and gestured to it with my head to the girls. Abigail went outside, but Emma stayed there, glaring at me.
“Look, I know you want to help her, the Hippocratic oath or whatever—”
“I’m not a doctor.”
“Great, fine. You did all you could, now let’s get out of here before we get killed for no reason. There was nothing more you could do for her.”
She glared at me for several seconds, and I thought I was going to have to carry her out, but then she shook her head and pushed past me out the door.
I stood there for a second, listening for that irregular slapping sound. But I couldn’t hear it.
Yet.
26
“We just gonna walk?” Abigail asked.
I scanned the loading bay, but all I saw was that tractor-trailer.
Well, it was bigger than our previous vehicle, so at least the trend was going in a positive direction.
A fence directly in front of us curved to our right, connecting to the building and blocking that route of travel, which meant the exit must be to our left, then, obscured by the tractor-trailer and two other trailers.
I headed toward it.
“Oh no,” Abigail said. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I never kid,” I said jokingly, walking toward the tractor-trailer, not looking back.
Abigail scampered up beside me, and I heard Emma follow after another second.
The truck was backed into the loading bay, and I stopped on the passenger side, then peered around it.
An empty alleyway, leading out to the main road.
There was perhaps a ten-foot gap between the front of the truck and the fence.
I looked at the truck, then at the distance between the fence and the grill.
How the hell had this guy backed this thing in here?
I pulled open the passenger door.
“Finally letting one of us drive for once?” Abigail asked.
I got in and scooted over to the driver’s seat. Then I gestured for her to climb up.
She grunted. “You really are a terrible driver. And bad luck.” But she climbed in.
So did Emma, apparently having now decided that she was coming with us, and so not wanting to waste time with false protests just because she was angry with me.
I could respect that.
She slammed the door shut, and I found the keys still in the ignition.
Not so surprising. If you’re unloading your truck at Walmart, you probably don’t expect it to get stolen.
Also probably didn’t expect to be invaded by aliens.
Look how that turned out.
Then again, maybe he did, I thought, as I saw an alien bobblehead on the dashboard.
I started the beast up, and it roared to life.
“Shit.”
“What now?” Abigail asked. “Realize you can’t drive it?”
“It’s not that. I need to disconnect the trailer. I don’t want to be driving around with it behind us, having it slow us down.”
And make getting out of here even harder than it was already going to be, I thought.
“Please tell me you don’t want me to crawl out there and disconnect it. Because I don’t think I could. And my red hair’s not gonna help.”
I shook my head, then opened the driver’s door and climbed down, going to where the trailer was hitched to the tractor.
Luckily the legs supporting the trailer were already in place, so I didn’t have to stand there cranking them down.
Still, I only had minimal experience with trucks.
I disconnected three cables connected to the trailer that powered the lights and I wasn’t sure what else, then spent a minute figuring out how to unhitch the trailer. Eventually I got the pin pulled and we were free.
Climbing back behind the wheel, I shut the door, and tried to shift the truck into gear.
It resisted me at first, but then went in.
“Shit,” I said again.
“Another problem?” Abigail asked.
“No, everything’s fine,” I said. I was thinking of my sword—Emma’s, really—lost in our lost truck. Maybe I didn’t need it now with the blade that came out of my fist, and this truck was bigger than our last one, but we didn’t seem to be able to hold on to anything.
We were back to zero again, basically. At least I was in a ninja outfit, rather than a hospital gown.
After what felt like an hour re-creating Austin powers, but judging by the clock on the dashboard was less than a minute, I got us pointed in the right direction—toward the main road—with only minor damage to the truck, and a bit more than minor damage to the fence.
Then Emma screamed. “He’s coming!”
I didn’t even bother looking, didn’t ask who she was referring to, because I already knew, could see that grotesque foot slapping the pavement in my mind’s eye as he slowly pursued us.
I pressed my own foot hard into the gas pedal, released the clutch, and burned us the hell out of here.
As we bounced out onto the main road, I spared a glance in my side mirror at the parking lot we’d come in through, but couldn’t see much, couldn’t tell if it was still swarming with hellspawns, and then we crested a bend and all I could see in the mirror was empty road.
“Is anything following us?” I asked, the passenger mirror angled far too low for me; all that I saw a blur of blacktop and white lines.
“I don’t see anything,” Emma said, checking her mirror.
“I told you was a bad idea to go to populatio
n centers,” Abigail scolded.
“That you did.”
“Maybe should listen to me more often.”
Maybe I should, I thought. She didn’t add that she’d also been right about the people not trying to harm us, which I was thankful for.
I liked a girl who didn’t rub it in your face when you were wrong.
“Where are we going?” Emma asked in a monotone.
I spared a glance over at her. Her face was blank as she stared straight ahead.
“We couldn’t have saved her,” I told her.
She nodded, but didn’t reply.
Goddammit. “What do you want me to do? Go back there and try to save them?”
“No, of course not. Why would I expect you to do the right thing? You’re a felon after all.”
Abigail looked at me. “You’re a felon?” She nodded slowly. “That makes sense. With the world ending, I hadn’t really thought about it much, but if you were a guard, you wouldn’t be in the prison infirmary where she works.”
“Right,” Emma said. “He’s a fucking prisoner. An escaped convict now. Surprised he hasn’t raped us.”
For some reason I thought of a Shakespeare quote: ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’ I didn’t know why. It was perfectly reasonable she’d be upset. But it seemed put on, a false front.
Or maybe that was just my own guilt.
I slowed the truck to a stop.
“What are you gonna do?” Emma asked. “Kick us out for questioning you? Or have you decided to rape us after all?”
I didn’t reply to her taunts, just backed the truck up and got it turned around.
“What are you doing?” she asked again, but this time it wasn’t rhetorical.
I still didn’t answer.
I got the truck moving forward once more, and headed back toward Walmart.
“Um,” Abigail said, “this is the direction we’re supposed to be running away from. You know, the one with all the crazy demons.”
“I know.”
“So… what are we doing again?”
“We’re going back to save those people.”
27
There were bodies in the parking lot, but not as many as I would’ve expected.
Being so high up, even slightly higher than in Abigail’s parents’ monster truck, I could see over the other cars, see the bodies—what few there were—lying in dark pools under the muddy lights of the Walmart parking lot.
I parked the truck in front of the unautomatic—and now in once instance, shattered—doors, leaving the engine running, then opened my door to climb down.
As I got out, Abigail climbed from the backseat to the driver’s, and for a moment I thought she meant to take the truck and leave me behind.
Then she climbed down after me.
“Wait in the—” I began, but stopped myself. If they were in the truck, I couldn’t defend them.
Abigail cocked an eyebrow at me.
I waved her on. “Come on. Stay close to me.”
Emma climbed over, but stopped on the running board, like she had in the garage with the monster truck, and looked down at me. “Are we really going to help them?”
“What, I thought that’s what you wanted? Are you complaining now?”
She shook her head.
Then she jumped down and hugged me, before I could hug her back or even respond, she let go. “Let’s go save them.”
Abigail grimaced as we passed a corpse. It was hidden behind one of the pillars, leaned against it, gun still in its—his—hand.
I stopped to inspect him.
“Ugh, come on,” Abigail urged.
The guy had shot himself in the head, perhaps thinking it was better to die than be taken alive—than to be converted.
I thought back to the dark puddles around the other corpses I’d seen from the vantage point of the semi as we drove in. I didn’t remember seeing any corpses without that pool around them.
Odd.
We headed into the Walmart through the broken doors, where we paused, and I listened for my eyeless adversary’s footsteps.
But I heard nothing.
I crept in, cringing at the sound of glass crunching under the girls’ feet.
“Slide your feet,” I whispered to them. “So you don’t step on the glass and make noise.”
We slid our way in past the explosion of glass on the floor like that, looking like a group of amateur moonwalkers, making only slightly less noise than we would have by walking on the glass.
To my surprise, Hunter was still lying on the ground; unconscious but alive.
There was no one else around her.
There was a trail of blood maybe four or five feet long, as though someone—or something—had tried to drag her, but had given up.
This felt oddly like a trap—like the parking lot had—but this area of the Walmart was wide open, with the registers to our left, the clothing section to our right, empty walkway ahead, and an equally empty McDonald’s behind.
I crouched down, peering through the bottoms of the clothing racks, but didn’t see any feet.
I got up and stood on my toes to look over a few of the taller racks and still saw nothing.
Then I looked up, just in case there was something lurking above us.
There was.
28
It was Jed, impaled on a rafter high above.
He appeared to be dead.
I quickly looked back down, not wanting to draw the girls’ attention to that.
Luckily they were both focused on Hunter.
And as I focused my attention on her, I saw why.
Her skin had started to go red, and there were bony protrusions on her forehead. “Is that her skull?” I asked. “Or…”
“It wasn’t like that before,” Emma said. “I—”
“What?”
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“What about her skin. Is that fever? Infection?”
“It’s… No.”
“Okay, we need to make something to carry her with,” I said. “Like a stretcher.”
“Yes,” Emma agreed. “There has to be something we can use in here. It’s Walmart after all. They have everything.”
I scanned the store, mentally walking through my memory of the sections, trying to think of something we could use as a stretcher, and at the same time looking for any danger, feeling rather exposed, and not liking how quiet it was.
We’d only been gone for maybe a minute. Two at most.
It didn’t make sense that the place was already empty after such a short amount of time.
Nor did it make sense that there were so few people left behind…
My mind flashed back to the news I’d heard on our way to Abigail’s parents’, the slightly hysteric newscaster exclaiming, “They’re turning us into them!”
…or maybe it did.
“What about that?” Abigail asked, pointing.
I looked where she was pointing, and saw a wheelchair sitting abandoned at the end of one of the checkout lanes.
I glanced at Emma, who shrugged.
“That’ll work.”
We quickly got Hunter lifted from the floor—her cut motorcycle gear trying to cling to her body, stuck on with dried blood as it was—and loaded onto the wheelchair.
She moaned a little, and said something in her sleep that I couldn’t make out, but didn’t wake.
I started for the doors.
“Wait!” Abigail cried, and ran into the clothing section. She darted around, yanking clothing from racks.
“What are you doing?”
“She’s in her underwear, and it’s like forty outside. She’s going to need some clothes.”
“We don’t have—”
“Done,” she said, arms full of clothing.
I shook my head and pushed Hunter in her wheelchair.
Instead of pushing the chair over the glass, I pushed it through one of the checkout lanes, and toward the eyeglass stor
e, then to one of the doors that hadn’t shattered.
“Open the door,” I told Abigail, and she and Emma pulled open the unautomatic doors.
At the big rig, I repeated my request.
Door open, I lifted Hunter from the chair and climbed up inside the cab. I laid her down on the bed in the back, then sat in the driver’s seat.
“Get that chair folded up and stowed,” I said, gesturing at the passenger’s door, “and let’s get the hell out of here.”
“What about everyone else?” Abigail asked.
“Did any of them look alive to you? All I saw were people who shot themselves in the head.”
“I guess.” She and Emma went around to the passenger’s side, got in, and loaded the wheelchair into the back.
“Kinda cramped back here,” Abigail complained.
“You’ll live.”
Out on the road I kept us to a slow twenty-five, thinking, going over our options.
“Where are you taking us?” Emma asked.
“Trying to figure that out,” I said, a little weirded out by, but also appreciative of, her perceptiveness.
“What about your grandparents?” Emma asked, and I looked at her, now more than just weirded out. How could she—
Then I saw that she was looking in the back toward Abigail, not at me.
“My grandparents?” Abigail asked. “What—” She stopped herself. “My parents. They might be there!”
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” Emma said.
“Where do your grandparents live?” I asked.
“On Lake Erie.”
“Great, they’re nearby then. How do I get there?”
“Um, first you cross the border into Canada.”
29
“You’re really Canadian?” I asked as I pulled us into the empty parking lot of the marina.
“Yes.”
“Huh. That’s weird.”
“Why?”
“I haven’t heard ‘eh’ one from you.”
She rolled her eyes. “Hilarious.”
“And you’re not as polite as I’d expect.”
“Comedic gold.”
“And you haven’t said sorry once.”
She glared at me. “Are you done?”
“For now.” I pulled the big rig to a stop, looking out over the water. “It’s quiet.”