Assuming Room Temperature (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 3) (16 page)

Bee raised one eyebrow. “Hey, that’s pretty smart! Kat’s right: there is a brain in there, isn’t there? You’re not just a big ol’ hunk of man-candy.”

Turning his head slowly in her direction, Jake gave Cho a level look. “Really?”

“Hey, don’t blame me.” His unamused gaze slid off Kat like water off a duck. “You’ve got a great ass. It’s not my fault other female members of the population—or rather, the
remaining
female population—notice. Cause if zombies noticed your ass, that would just be creepy. Now that I think about it, I guess they do. Kind of. I mean, they want to eat anybody they see, and they aren’t picky about where they start chomping away so technically-”

“Stop. Please. Just stop talking.” Jake turned back to face the aisles again and headed down the nearest, mumbling under his breath. “Christ. I’m the Rodney-fucking-Dangerfield of the Zombie Apocalypse...”

As they moved quickly—but carefully—through the dim store, Kat snagged them a trio of carts from the nearby corral. Each pushed one along as they searched out a pair of generators for Rae and, of course, O’Connor got the one with a bum wheel. It pulled to the left as he rolled it along, so he had to torque his wrist to the right painfully to compensate.

“What kind are we looking for again?” Bee bent at her waist to read the model specification on a nearby box.

O’Connor became momentarily distracted by the sight of Bee leaning over, rear protruding pleasantly as she did so. He found it once again necessary to agree with his long-time, absent friend Allen Ryker. Beatrix Foster was
smoking
hot. The face of a naughty cherub, big blue eyes, green hair done up in an anime-style pair of long ponytails, and if her measurements from the bust down were anything but thirty-eight, twenty-four, thirty-four, he would eat his hat. George treated the young woman as if she were still a clueless teenager, but she was twenty-two and had almost completed her college coursework when the dead rose. Jake had no doubt she knew precisely how make males went ‘goggle-eyed’ and began howling at the moon.

After managing to pull his own eyes back into his head, before either of the women noticed, he said, “Rae wants ‘Kohler Power Force PK500-ESs’. She said something about them having a high output, but I don’t know how much.”

Bee straightened up again. “There are two versions of that model. Which ones do we take?”

“If it were important I’m sure ‘Brainiac’ would have mentioned it. Let’s take that one there and Jake can grab the other.” Kat told her.

She squatted to help Foster’s niece lift the heavy container into her cart and O’Connor’s eyes nearly did the ‘Looney Tunes’ thing again. For the hundredth time, he noted how tight leather pants over a nice set of female extremities made his own feel two or three sizes too constrictive. Focusing on thoughts of puppies, baseball, and Christmas, Jake muscled the second generator into his cart.

They didn’t really help, and he wished for a pair of pants that were a bit roomier in the crotch.

You need to get laid.
Jake’s back-brain told him from the vaults of his mind.

Now is not the time,
he thought back.
And shut up.

The inner voice continued to berate him.
Did we join a monastery when I wasn’t paying attention or something? For God’s sake, will you look at those two? When was the last time you…?”

O’Connor firmly slammed the mental door in his head closed on the voice and attempted to concentrate on not giving himself a hernia. The damn generator was heavy as all hell. He could still hear the voice in his head raging as it pounded on the door in his mind—all the while calling him names and making unflattering references to his parentage—but at least its comments were muffled.

Wardrobe malfunction concealed behind his shopping cart, Jake followed the sway of female hips the opposite end of the store. The aisle opened up mid-way to the rear into a display patio showcasing yard care items such as grills, lawnmowers, outdoor furniture, and some monumentally ugly fountains. Cho giggled, along with Foster’s niece, upon seeing a herd of sickeningly cute gnome statues, but O’Connor thought the grinning, little porcelain figures were creepy. They all looked a little too happy with their red caps and Santa Claus beards. He had a sudden mental picture of a horde of zombie lawn gnomes ravaging helpless pink waterfowl and chuckled.

“What put such a big grin on your face?” Kat asked him, obviously curious.

After explaining the source of his amusement, both women simply stared wordlessly at Jake for almost a full minute.

“Wow.” Beatrix shook her emerald-topped head. “You’re a dork. Cute, but a dork all the same.”

Kat nodded and, after giving him a rueful sigh, followed the younger woman farther into the lawn and garden area. O’Connor plodded along at the rear while trying to think up a suitable comeback, but had nothing. He was actually so deep in thought that he nearly hit the backs of both ladies heels when they came to a sudden halt, just shy of the dining set displays.

There were five dead people sitting around one of the picnic tables.

None of the corpses were of the mobile variety, for which Jake was grateful, because three of them were quite small. Even with the bodies’ advanced stage of decay, as they approached the sad group, he could tell the youngest had only been perhaps eight or ten years old. Two were adults—male and female, judging from their clothes—and had died holding each other on one of the wicker loveseats surrounding the table. The other three were arranged close before them in a semicircle, each rotting in an overstuffed patio chair.

O’Connor moved past Beatrix and Cho to absorb the scene. The remains of a meal sat half-eaten upon plastic plates at the table in the center of the ring. Cans of tuna and potted meat, Vienna sausages, crackers, barbeque chips and cheese-puffs, fruit snacks and juice boxes, and a few bottles of wine were scattered a-top the “genuine hardwood slats.” What remained of an impromptu birthday cake—made from long-dried Rice Crispy Treats and melted chocolate bars—with nine candles, sat amidst the cans and discarded food wrappers. Jake moved to visually examine each of the bodies in turn.

“None of them were infected.” he said, as Cho picked up one of the opened juice boxes. “I’m not seeing any bite marks or bullet holes on the bodies either. It’s like they just got comfortable and died.”

Bee’s eyes were wet. “All of them? How-?”

“Diphenhydramine. A lot of it.” Kat held up a depleted Unisom packet. There were at least a dozen open boxes on the table. “It’s an antihistamine that temporarily blocks histamine action, that’s believed to cause alertness in a person’s central nervous system. Most sleep aids have it.”

Bee still looked confused.

“Sleeping pills. They overdosed on over-the-counter sleeping pills,” Kat told her. Dropping the empty packet to the table, she moved to the expired adult corpses. Without so much as cringing, Cho pulled a stained page of notebook paper from the male’s hand and began to read.

“For whoever finds this.

My name is Karl Hanson. Myself, my wife, Maria, and our three children Nicholas, Fay, and Olive have been here for nearly two months. I managed to steal the keys from one of those things outside who was the store manager. Who used to be the store manager, Bernie Williams. I worked here on the dock for 7 years before the zombies. He was a selfish prick, so I knew the bastard would be around. Probably tried to get here to hide himself. He had a wife, but there was no sign of her.

We stayed away from the front doors so those things wouldn’t know we were in here and decided to wait for help. There was plenty to eat, water, even stuff to keep the kids amused. We thought someone would come, eventually. But no one did. I managed to get one of the short-wave radios working so we could find out what’s going on. The people broadcasting all say the Army has pulled back past the Rocky Mountains,

We’ve been left here to die.

Olive is sick. Really sick. Her temperature is over 103 and she hasn’t eaten much in the last week. I think it’s the flu. I can’t be sure, but she’s getting worse and I don’t know what to do. Nicholas has it too, but is coughing a lot more and is short of breath, so it might be pneumonia or something.

We can’t make it to the mountains. It’s too far, I don’t have any guns, and there are so many of those things.

Maria and I talked about it yesterday and we can’t watch our children die, one by one. There’s no hope of rescue and no way for us to escape, so we’re going to crush pills into the kids drinks after Olive’s birthday party tonight. That way…”

Cho put the letter down.

“How could they!” Bee demanded, clearly horrified. “They killed their own kids!”

Jake glanced at the eternally slumbering family. “They were alone. Trapped. I can’t say I blame them.”

“What?” Kat’s head snapped around towards him.

“Any one of us might have done the same. Think about it. If George didn’t have the Mimi hidden away below his cache, we’d have been trapped in Ohio and eventually starved to death. In a situation like that, it’s better to choose how you go out.”

The expression on Kat’s face conveyed her disbelief and shock. “There’s always hope! We’ve made it out of some really tight spots, haven’t we? They could’ve grabbed an abandoned car, tried something!”

“Like what, hopped in the Astro-van and headed for Denver? The
Maggot-heads,”
he waved one hand at Cho, “would’ve torn it apart like tin foil.”

“Weren’t you and Allen thinking about attempting to find a pair of snowplows or dump trucks?” She demanded. “Before George showed us the Mimi, I mean?”

Jake sniffed and turned away. “It was a stupid idea. They’d have been bogged down back at the Purifier’s compound. Then those things could’ve just climbed right on top of one-another, busted out the windows, and we’d have been dinner. Shit, I don’t even know if those buses Rae and George are helping to outfit for the people in Langley will be enough to keep them safe on the drive to Pecos, and we’ve only got about seven-hundred miles to go.”

“So, what? We should write them off?” Bee asked cautiously, clearly uncomfortable with the direction their conversation was going. “I mean, Uncle George thinks the buses will work.”

“No, I’m saying our situation is unique because of the Mimi.” Jake headed away from the dead family, towards the deli section. “These parents made their choice based on the information they had. While it sucks, I don’t blame them for it. The survivors in Langley have made their choice, and are betting on a pair of retrofitted
tour buses.
I’m saying we’re going to have casualties. That’s a given. We can’t waste time mourning people who are gone anymore. If we do, one of us will get sloppy at the wrong moment and…”

Kat moved her cart up beside him. “Waste time mourning people. Like Laurel?”

The muscles in Jake’s neck jerked as his jaw clenched. “That’s different.”

“How?” She asked.

“We knew her. She mattered. To all of us.” O’Connor stayed on course for the deli.

Cho was afraid of what he’d say, but pressed him further. “So... You’re saying people—living people—outside our group, don’t matter as much? That it shouldn’t affect us if they die?”

Jake stopped his cart before the deli. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

* * *

Bee nudged Kat’s elbow as O’Connor circled around the long cases into the deli proper. Keeping one eye on Jake, the green-haired girl asked, “Can you believe he said that? That’s cold. I mean, that’s like Uncle George, hard-
core
cold. Is he okay?”

“I honestly don’t know.” Cho told her in a low voice. “What happened to Laurel affected us all—some more so than others—but I think it may have...broken something inside of him. Real bad. There are still moments where if you look in his eyes, you can see how close to the edge he really is. Jake’s fighting it, but a hurt like that doesn’t go away quickly. I’m worried, Bee.”

“So what do we do about it?” Bee looked worried. “I mean, if he flakes out again?”

Kat didn’t have an answer.

“Are you two going to give me a hand with these things or what?” O’Connor came back around the deli case holding a heavy restaurant-grade meat slicer. The bulky piece of equipment caused the thick cords in his forearms and biceps to pop under his skin, and Kat fought back an appreciative smile. She realized that now simply wasn’t the time for snarky bi-play on her part, but it was a struggle. Several sexually provocative comments immediately came into her mind at the sight of Jake’s obviously muscled arms.

“Hold your horses, we’re coming.” Cho moved her empty cart forward for him to plunk the meat slicer down. As he bent over lowering the machine into the basket, she did take a healthy eyeful of Jake’s Khaki-covered rear end though. While not all slick and covered only with soap, like in the shower yesterday, he still had a nice bum.

“Boy. All that running really worked for you, huh?” Bee said with bright smile.

Jake straightened up again, clearly unamused.

Beatrix held both hands up. “Just saying. You’re still a total dork, but that’s some ‘Bow-chicka-bow-wow!’ you got going on there. I bet I could bounce a quarter off—”

Jake pointed behind the cases. “Slicers? Help?”

“Okay-okay! Looting now. Jeez.” Bee and Kat moved to procure a slicer between the two of them as Jake grabbed yet another himself. “You’re as bad as my uncle. I swear, old people get cranky about the weirdest things.”

Kat put forth a mighty effort and managed not to giggle at the expression on O’Connor’s face. “Fair’s fair, hero. What, like you didn’t do the same back a few aisles back?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he protested.

Cho shared a knowing grin with the younger woman as they hefted their slicer into the cart. “Uh-huh. Sure. Do you buy that, Bee?”

“Not for a second.” Bee’s green ponytails bobbed as she shook her head.

Cho put the back of one hand against her own forehead. “Oh my! These generators are so heavy!”