He had felt incredible that morning. It was his ninth day on a fruit and vegetable juice fast, and he knew that for each day on a juice fast, he became one month younger, biologically. It was a miraculous process.
The vegan had just polished off a bottle of carrot and ginger juice in the avocado truck when they hit traffic—standstill traffic, no more than a few miles out from the loading depot. Then, as if on cue, Rainee passed out, slumping onto the steering wheel.
Rainee was a tiny woman, bigger than the vegan, and not a vegan herself, and he was depending on her to drive while he saved his strength for the heavy avocado lifting and unloading later in the day.
As the vegan was reaching over to tap her on the shoulder, Rainee rose from her slump, turning to the vegan. Her eyes opened wide, and...and he jumped out of the truck and ran, starting up the road the way they had come.
It didn’t take him very long to realize what was happening. The stopped cars around the truck were no longer inhabited by their early-rising owners, but by what the vegan could only interpret to be ghouls.
It was the apocalypse. The dead were walking the Earth, perhaps in atonement for their flesh-eating sins—not that the vegan harshly judged the flesh-eaters in his normal life, but on this apocalyptic day, the thought occurred to him.
So he ran, and when he was too tired to run, he walked. As the day wore on, he noticed that the ghouls grouped themselves, and when he passed the groups, they began to shamble toward him.
Even in his spent state, it was easy for the vegan to keep away from them. They were slow, and he was very light and nimble.
The ghouls were not the ones that had hurt him.
It had happened after he had dared to sneak into an Exxon for some cigarettes. He smoked constantly as he made his way up the road, and when he saw the Exxon, he didn’t want to waste the opportunity to stock up. The place looked deserted, and the nearest ghouls were more than a block away, shambling toward him at a snail’s pace. It seemed like a good idea. What could go wrong?
So the vegan crept under the portico and around the pumps, pushed the door of the Exxon’s convenience store open, and nervously walked in.
His suspicions had been correct. The place was empty.
Bolstered by his apparent good luck, he climbed over the counter into the attendant’s spot, and found his preferred brand of cigarette—Lucky Strike—the only brand worth smoking. He was just tucking the second carton of Luckies under his left arm when the sound of shattering glass startled him, and he was covered by a sideways spray of shards.
He flinched, instinctively raising his arm to cover his face, but the sharp spray abruptly ended. The vegan inspected himself, and found that the glass-breaking had left him unscathed.
With his heart pounding and an unknown culprit lurking somewhere close by, the vegan climbed back over the counter as quietly as he could, trying to avoid cutting himself on the shards of window glass that were scattered everywhere. He set himself down and began to tiptoe to the door, wincing at every scrape of glass under his feet.
The vegan had just placed his hand on the door when a gruff, drawling voice called from behind him.
“Hey you, skinny boy, where do you think you’re going?”
The vegan turned and saw a tan, obese man, clad from head to toe in leather. His fat, bald head was covered with a bandana that bore a burning skull featuring fiery eye sockets.
Confused and unsure of how to respond, the vegan just shrugged.
“Don’t you know stealing’s wrong? Just because the world’s about ended don’t make it alright. Don’t you know nothing?” The leather-clad man’s voice contorted with each word, and the vegan found himself growing more and more uncomfortable with every twitch of the man’s leathery face.
The vegan resolutely pulled the door open and stepped through it, out under the portico. “I just...”
The leather-clad man began to trudge toward him, at a surprising speed given his size. “You just nothing. Now hand over those cigs.” The man extended a fat, leather-gloved hand that seemed to want to burst. The vegan now saw that in the harasser’s other hand was a tire iron, probably the thing he had used to break the window. “Now if you had taken some Twinkies or beef jerky or something, I might look the other way. You ever eat? You could use some food. But cigs...especially those—” he pointed a pudgy finger, “—those are for real men.”
The vegan clutched the Luckies tighter and began to back away.
“You stay right where you are,” the leather-clad man said, raising the tire iron in a menacing gesture.
The vegan wasn’t going to do any such thing. He quickened his backward steps, and he was just about to turn and run when his right foot caught on the raised curb that led into the convenience store.
He sprawled onto the ground, twisting on his back. The vegan got his feet back under him to spring up and begin running, but the leather-clad man was already there, apparently having trundled over at a blinding speed.
The tire iron came down in a flash of tarnished silver, and the vegan felt it strike his thigh above the knee. There was no crack, but the dull pain shot downward, creating an agony of feeling in the vegan’s knee, shin, and ankle.
Terrified, but still clutching the cigarette cartons, the vegan crawled backward to get away from the man and his tire iron. He got to his feet through the pain, and began to run.
“Yeah you better run,” the man called after him. “You better be faster than that if you want to live through the day. You ain’t no real man.”
The vegan shot a glance backward to make sure the man wasn’t coming after him, and he wasn’t. The harasser stood there in his leathers, continuing to bellow at the vegan, but not leaving the shade of the Exxon’s portico.
The vegan turned back and kept running until the man was well out of earshot. His leg hurt like hell, and although there had been no crack on contact, the vegan felt the pain of the blow in his bone.
After running a few blocks, he slowed down and settled into a quick limp that lessened the pain considerably. At least he still had the cigarettes, which he could easily have lost in the encounter. He wasn’t sure how he’d held on to them, but apparently his body knew its priorities and had put the cigarette cartons into a death grip, and had kept the death grip even in the face of a tire iron attack.
That was some consolation. The vegan continued to look back throughout his journey, watching for the hefty trundle of the man in leather, but it never came. After some time, the vegan decided that the ghouls had taken care of the man, and the vegan fingered his cross once more.
The vegan shook his head. And now here he was, at another inauspicious intersection, exhausted, hungry, hurt, and with nothing to look forward to except the cigarettes. But that was as good a nothing as there could be, so long as it could be enjoyed in safety.
He looked both ways before starting across the intersection, noting that he wasn’t looking out for the flow of traffic, but for ghouls and hidden human miscreants.
The ghouls, he had gathered so far, had no penchant for trickery. Seemingly unable to hide or stalk their human prey, the ghouls made their presence known far in advance by their obtrusive moans and odd, uncoordinated gaits.
He felt a familiar stinging pain in his fingers as he was crossing the intersection. The cigarette, which he had smoked down to the filter and forgotten to throw away, had burned down even further, down to the vegan’s well-stained, cigarette-heat-tempered fingers. He flicked the cigarette away without a second glance.
As he crossed, he kept a watchful eye out for the cars nearest him, most of which held ghouls, apparently and inexplicably trapped in their cars. They stirred as the vegan passed.
They probably want me to let them out, he thought. Fat chance of that...although, if the man in the leathers were here, I might just do that...let them out and see who was faster. But the vegan knew the fat man would probably escape. He was shockingly fast in his movements.
The vegan crossed all the way and looked back. He didn’t have a watch, but he knew by the sun’s movement through the sky that he’d been walking most of the day, except when the sudden downpour had forced him to stop. It had truly been a storm of biblical proportions, and the vegan had ducked into an abandoned strip mall coffee shop in which he cowered and smoked until the storm passed.
I’m limping my way through hell, he thought, and wondered if there was going to be an end to all of this. Was he in purgatory or in some undefined sort of limbo? If this was hell, why wasn’t anyone around to give him a tour? The vegan remembered Darren, a taunting meat-eater who always said, “Vegans go straight to hell,” and, “Vegans are in league with Satan.”
Having gone through the two packs he’d started the day carrying, the vegan broke in one of the boxes of Luckies, as he wondered if Darren had been right.
The vegan started in on his third pack of the day and resumed his northbound limping.
With his left eye and right corner of his mouth twitching in time, he tried to guess how far he now was from the Wegmans up the road. His home was too far, but the Wegmans...that might be a good place to hide for a while.
87
The door slid shut behind Sven.
The shotgun pulled at the muscles in his right arm and upper back. It would have been alright, but his chest and neck were throbbing, shooting fresh bolts of pain into him with each step. He tried steadying the thing with his left hand and repositioning it in front of his body, but that only changed the direction of the pain.
On the day he needed it most, his body wasn’t cooperating. He had been just about crushed, of course, but he expected some more adrenaline in a situation like this, something to dull out the pain and help work through it. Apparently, Sven’s adrenaline supply was spent.
Now, walking into what he knew was a zombie trap waiting to be sprung, the adrenaline wasn’t kicking in...and what if it didn’t kick in when the zombies showed themselves? That wasn’t something Sven wanted to think about, and it wasn’t something he would allow.
“They’re all over the meat section,” Brian said. “It’s really disgusting. They’re...well...you’ll see.”
“Give me a second,” Sven said, not daring to imagine what Brian was referring to. “Just give me a quick second.”
“I too must gather myself,” Milt said, resting his great body on some sacks of red potatoes. “The air conditioning in this facility is quite refreshing.”
Sven nodded in his direction. The man was acting strange, but he could be forgiven under the circumstances. Milt, after all, had come in to help with cleaning out the inside of the Wegmans, and that earned him the benefit of the doubt in Sven’s book.
The three men faced the expanse of the produce section. A long row of checkout aisles, accompanying cash registers, and shopping carts were to their left. The deli section and in-store cafe were to their right. The aisles that made up the bulk of the store were sectioned off to the left of the produce section, and Sven could only see their entrances and wonder what lurked within them.
“I’m fading,” Sven said, feeling the day’s exertions sapping his strength. Then he saw what he needed.
Sven did all he could to avoid stimulants. As a bodybuilder, the elevated cortisol levels and adrenal fatigue that came with stimulant use were things to be avoided, except in certain, very precise pre-competition stages.
But he made exceptions. One was long drives for which Sven needed to keep his mind alert. Another, apparently, was a zombie outbreak.
Sven strode to the cooler that marked the entrance to the first checkout aisle. He put all thoughts of muscle breakdown out of his head and pulled the cooler door open. It was full of energy drinks, as he had expected. He glanced at the variety in the cooler with distaste.