Griz whistled. “She looked prettier from a distance,” he said from the backseat, pointing at the building.
“It’s what’s on the inside that counts,” I replied optimistically.
“Depends,” he said. “Are we talking about girls or stores?”
Jase snorted.
I rotated in my seat to find Griz smirking and Jase grinning from ear to ear. “You guys are hopeless.”
It was then I noticed a green sprig weaved around Griz’s helmet, another one of his personal air fresheners. Without deodorant, we’d all found new ways to deal with not having baths anymore. Today, his sprig reminded me of a laurel wreath, as though he were the mighty Apollo ready for battle. “What. No wreath for me?” I asked.
“If I make one for you, I’ll have to make one for everyone,” Griz replied.
“You made one for Benji,” I said.
“The little trickster conned me into making him one.”
“Diesel even has one on his collar,” Jase added.
Griz shrugged. “He conned me, too.”
I dramatically acted put out. “You made one for the dog before making one for me?”
“Yup,” he replied simply.
“Time for game faces,” Clutch said. “We’re coming up on kick-off.”
I smiled and shook my head at Griz before turning my attention back to the store.
Clutch drove around the perimeter of the building, where we found part of the western wall had collapsed from a fire. That explained the sunlight we’d seen, but the blackened debris worried me. “I hope the fire didn’t burn through the store,” I said.
“If it did, it’ll be a quick trip,” Clutch said as he brought the Humvee to a stop twenty feet from the main doors. We stepped outside. Gripping my machete, I searched the area for any signs of life. The only thing I saw was my breath in the cold air. After we spent many long seconds walking alongside the front and sides of the building, we stood outside the doors.
Inside the store, snow covered a portion of the merchandise, making a playground of shapes that could be anything. We shared
the
look. The one where we both wanted to get the hell out of there, but knew we had to go in. It was the look of dread
.
“It doesn’t look looted,” Jase said. “That’s a good sign.”
Clutch glanced upward, shading his eyes against the sun with his hand. “Well, we can’t wait around. When the sun warms things up, the zeds will start moving around again. We need to either go in now or write it off.”
“At least the snow will make it easier to spot footprints,” Griz said, coming to a stop next to me.
I closed my eyes and turned my face toward the sun, feeling its warmth on my cold skin. After taking a deep breath, I turned back toward the team. “We’re already here.”
Clutch pulled out his handheld radio and clicked the mike. “This is Team Charlie. We’ll check back in twenty minutes. Radio silence otherwise. Be ready to roll out if this run turns to shit. Do not come after us. Confirm.”
“
Got it
,” Marco’s voice came through the radio in response. “
Be careful in there.
”
Jase took the first step forward. “Let’s do this.”
The four of us moved toward the hollowed-out front doors. As one, we stepped through the frames, our boots crunching on broken glass.
A single zed lay in our path in the entryway. Its skin was ripped from its body, flayed by glass shards, several of which were still embedded in organs.
“The thing must’ve been pushed up against the glass doors when the bombs fell,” Griz said quietly as he gripped his machete.
Sprawled under a ceiling where the elements couldn’t get to it, I could see the zed’s organs, even its lungs and heart, beneath its shattered ribs. Its mouth moved only slightly, as though it was trying to tell us something. I’d seen horrific things before, but this zed caused us all to pause. It didn’t attack, though with how ravaged its body was, it probably couldn’t. Instead, it did nothing but lay there and watch us. Its gaze seemed more curious than sinister.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the zed. Not until Griz put it out of its misery with a single thrust of his blade. I took a deep breath and swallowed. The aggressive zeds were so much easier to deal with. They’d come at me with evil in their eyes, and I instinctively fought back. Then, there was the tiniest minority of ones like this one that stuck with me. I called them Zen zeds, the ones that simply stared and never attacked. They haunted my nightmares worse than the violent ones, because these seemed like they retained a shred of their humanity. The act of killing them felt more like euthanasia than self-defense. I assumed they preferred death. At least, that’s what I told myself.
Clutch began to move forward again, and the rest of us fell in behind him. We stepped cautiously until we were out of the narrow entryway and stood at the edge of the huge store. Clutch took point, and we followed him as he headed to the right, toward the boat section. Earlier, he’d said that he wanted to clear this section first. With its open spaces and the collapsed outer wall, it would be our Plan B in case we had to leave in a hurry and couldn’t get out through the store entrance.
Rows of fishing boats sat in mish mashed rows on the floor, tossed and blackened by a surge of heat that must’ve hit the entire west side of the building. The bomb blast had been enough to break out all the glass. The sprinkler system must’ve still been working at the time of the bombing, as only the edge of the store had burned.
Fingers crossed, the good stuff was still safe.
Interspersed around the boats stood unmoving snow-covered statues.
Zeds.
I held my machete in a defensive position, ready to swing out at any moment. Griz came to a stop in front of the nearest zed. We encircled it, and my grip tightened on my machete. The duct tape I’d wrapped around the handle to give it a better grip creaked under my grasp.
Like Private Jonathan Hart, this zed’s skin was crisped, and it had no eyes, ears, or nose. Slowly, Griz waved his blade in front of its face. It made no movement.
“Do you think they’re dead?” Jase asked quietly.
“Maybe they’re just frozen,” I whispered back.
“I figured more would’ve migrated,” Griz said. “But, these must be in too rough of shape to drag themselves out of the store.”
Clutch looked across the area. “We’ll take them down one at a time. Don’t get too close if you can help it.”
Jase waved his arm in front of a zed. It didn’t flinch or show any recognition. “Kinda hard, with them standing around like bowling pins all over the place.”
“They must be deaf and blind,” I said. “None of them seem to have sensed us.”
“Let’s keep it that way,” Clutch said.
Griz swung and lodged his machete in the first zed’s temple. He pulled out the blade and the zed collapsed. We all stood and watched as he wiped the blade on the zed’s shirt.
Clutch spoke. “I don’t like how many are still around. Let’s stick together until we clear the building. It’ll take more time, but if we get this place cleared, we can drive the Humvees right through those big doors tonight to hide them in the off chance anyone passes through this area. Plus, that’ll give us more time to do our shopping. With this”—he gestured to the building surrounding us—“We’ll need plenty of time.”
A rat scurried under a boat, and I jumped back with a squeak.
Clutch’s gaze snapped to mine. “What is it?”
Heat flushed my cheeks. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“It was a rat,” I said sheepishly.
His brows rose.
I added, “It was a really big rat.”
He eyed me suspiciously for a moment before returning his focus to the task at hand.
“Chicken,” Jase whispered as he walked by.
“It was
really
big,” I countered, but he’d already moved on to killing a zed.
We spent the next several minutes killing zeds, the entire time I kept on the lookout for rats. I hated rats nearly as much I hated zeds.
Once we finished clearing the boat section, Clutch checked in with Marco on the radio. “There are plenty of stinkers in here,” Clutch reported. “It will take a little longer than planned.”
“
Need help?”
came Marco’s response.
“Negative. Nothing too challenging here. I’ll check in every hour. If anything goes wrong, you bug out and don’t look back. Protect the civilians.”
Marco didn’t respond fast enough for Clutch’s humor.
“Tell me you’ll bug out,” Clutch demanded.
“
I’ve got it covered
,” Marco replied.
We worked our way closer to the center of the store, zigzagging through debris. We finished off any zed we came across, but as we worked our way inward, they were becoming fewer and fewer. Leaning on a table of folded shirts, a zed seemed to stare off into nothingness as though contemplating the mysteries of life. Oblivious to our presence, Griz and I approached. This one was dressed in suit. On its lapel, it had a pin with two laurel leaves crossed over a book and a shepherd’s hook.
“What’s that mean, I wonder,” I said without thinking.
Griz’s lips thinned. “It meant he was a chaplain.”
I frowned. “Oh.”
Griz lifted his blade and paused for a moment before finishing the deed. I turned away in haste, trying to pretend this zed never existed, and I bumped into the clothes rack. A petite zed wearing a store uniform lashed out, and I jumped back. “Shit!”
My reflexes kicked in and I swung my machete, crushing its head in a single shot. “Not frozen,” I said breathlessly before yanking my machete out of the zed’s skull.
“Guess there’s some life left in them yet,” Griz said. “Good to know.”
“Be careful,” Clutch cautioned.
“Yeah,” I replied as I grabbed a folded shirt and cleaned the blade now coated in the thick brown sludge that had once been blood. Killing zeds had become easier over the months. Not just because I’d gained skill and became desensitized to them, but because the zeds were becoming weaker. Their bones had become brittle, to the point my machete rarely became lodged in their skulls or necks anymore.
I crept more carefully as we scoured the store for more zeds. It didn’t take long for us to finish the wide-open area. With the offices in back completely burned or collapsed, we turned our attention to the restaurant on the eastern side of the store.
“Looks in pretty good shape,” Jase said while the four of us stood outside the closed glass door. The area beyond the glass was draped in darkness, making it impossible to see what hid within. “Do we go for touchdown?”
Clutch and Griz stepped up to the glass pane and both looked through.
Griz spoke first. “If there’s anything in there from before, it hasn’t gotten out yet, which means it likely is never going to get out.”
“Let’s leave it for now,” Clutch said. “We’ll post a guard in this area to play it safe.”
I looked back at all the merchandise in the store waiting to be plucked, and I grinned. Just as I was about to say
let’s go shopping
, something clanged on the other side of the door.
“Ah, shit,” I mumbled.
A zed’s visage appeared through the glass. Then another face emerged from the darkness. More kept coming. These zeds, protected from the elements, looked nothing like the ones we’d just killed. These were
healthy
zeds, and there were at least thirty of them.
“You guys really think that door will hold?” Jase asked.
Griz and Clutch both shook their heads.
“Not a chance,” Griz said.
“Son of a bitch. Let’s get out of their line of sight and see if they settle down,” Clutch said as we were already taking steps back.
Instead of calming, our retreat seemed to rev up the zeds even more. They pounded on the door, fighting to get past one another at us. One zed tripped as others shoved at it from behind. Its head slammed into the door, and the glass shattered. Pounding fists tore through the weakened glass. With only the metal handle bar across the middle of the door to hold back the zeds, they worked into a frenzy to get at us.
The zed that had broken the glass with its head was on the ground and crawled out from under the bar. More followed, some tumbling over the bar while the shorter ones crawled under it.
“Outside to the Humvee!” Griz shouted, and we ran.
We jumped over debris and around fallen racks. The linoleum floors had become slick with the melting snow, and we slid our way through the store. I fell hard on my knee, and stars shot through my vision. Clenching my jaw, I jumped up and forced weight on my injured leg.
“To the RP!” Clutch yelled into the radio. “The store is overrun. Get out of here!”
Chapter II
Griz pointed to the collapsed wall beyond the boats. “Plan B! Keep going. We can’t risk the front entrance. We need to put more distance between us and them.”
As we ran passed the entrance, I risked a glance behind me to see three dozen voracious zeds tumbling after us. Rats scurried under racks of clothes and counters. Fortunately, the slick floors were proving difficult for the zeds, and we were getting well ahead of them. I followed Griz as he weaved through the fallen boats and toward the open space where a huge glass door had once been used for moving boats in and out of the store.
Part of the ceiling had collapsed above the door, leaving debris piled several feet high. I stumbled over the rubble and caught myself before falling onto dangerous glass shards. Outside, the sun shone brightly enough to blind me. It took me only a second to get my bearings, and I ran toward our Humvee.
Something had drawn some of the zeds away from us and back to the main entrance. There, the loud engine of the other Humvee slashed through the area. The fast-moving distraction, with six people piled inside, plowed through the herd. Frost stood in back with a rifle and took shots at the zeds that got back up.
With them working on the herd outside, I turned and focused on the dozen or so climbing over the rubble. I unslung my rifle, took aim, and fired. A zed dropped. A shot rang off to my left, and another zed fell. A third shot joined in. We finished off the small herd in less than four minutes.