Sven the Zombie Slayer (52 page)

Looking at the pile was an exercise in fear, the vegan knew, but he thought that if he looked at it long enough, the fear would melt away. The ghouls could become ordinary if he only looked long enough...they were there for a reason, part of God’s plan, part of—

He gulped and shrank back from the mangle of dead ghouls and ghoul pieces. He turned and limped hurriedly to the Wegmans entrance. His heart sank as soon as he looked up, and he fumbled a carton of cigarettes, letting it slip out from under his arm. The familiar doors of the Wegmans slid open, but beyond them, the shutter was closed.

All of a sudden, as if the sight of the shutter had enhanced his hearing, the vegan began to hear dragging noises in the semi-darkness.

Were they here? Were they surrounding him at this very moment? Panic began to gnaw at the vegan, because he knew that he didn’t have much strength left, regardless of how many more cigarettes he smoked. He needed rest and animal-free nourishment.

This was supposed to be my respite, he thought with increasing anxiety, this was supposed to be the end of today’s journey.

Then he remembered the mashed ghouls in the parking lot and cursed himself for being so dim-witted. He realized it was probably the same people that had battled the ghouls in the parking lot who were now inside the Wegmans. Maybe he could join them, maybe they would be welcoming.

So long as they didn’t brandish tire irons at him, he didn’t care what they were like, and in his current state, a tire iron didn’t seem strong enough a disincentive to keep him out in the haunted night.

The vegan reluctantly released the carton of cigarettes still clutched under his arm, setting it on the ground next to the one he had fumbled. He approached the shutter and reached out, about to shake the shutter and holler in to whoever might be inside.

He froze, his hands inches from the shutter.

Through the openings in the shutter, the vegan caught a glimpse of movement. He peered in, and saw that someone was coming straight toward the shuttered entrance, holding a wrapped bundle. By the look of the man with the bundle, the vegan knew at once that he was not a vegan, or even a vegetarian. This was a carnivorous man if the vegan had ever seen one.

What the vegan saw next brought on a ripple of terror that made him into an even more rigid statue of fright. The carnivorous man had not one, but
two
tire irons strapped to his belt, and he was getting closer. It would only be a matter of seconds before the carnivorous man was there, looking the vegan up and down, sneering, taking a tire iron in each hand, and...

Stop it, the vegan told himself, carnivorous though this man may be, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he uses his tire irons for evil.

The vegan regained the use of his muscles and crept sideways, scuttling away from the shutter. He wondered if the carnivorous man had noticed the sliding doors open, but it seemed that the carnivorous man, being preoccupied with his human-shaped bundle, had not.

Human-shaped? Then it hit the vegan like a pile of hard, unripe avocados. The bundle was human-shaped! The carnivorous man with the tire irons was a killer, and probably a close friend of the tire iron brandisher that the vegan had met earlier that day.

Aghast and disconsolate at the discovery, the vegan crept toward a far outer corner of the Wegmans, stole behind a large tree, and prepared for the worst.

His forgotten cartons of Luckies sat in front of the Wegmans entrance, as if asking to be let in.

97

Holding Evan’s wrapped body in his outstretched arms, Sven walked solemnly to the shuttered entrance. At one of the checkout aisles on the way, he gently placed the dead boy into a shopping cart. Sven pushed the shopping cart to the entrance, and began taking apart the make-shift barricade now set up before it.

It was painful work because of his injury, so the disassembly of the barricade was punctuated by bolts of searing pain that shot up from his chest and down from his neck.

Every few moments, Sven glanced at Ivan, who was sitting a safe distance away from the clattering shopping carts, watching. The cat had insisted on coming along, and Sven wasn’t going to stop him. Ivan was turning out to the best of them at this morbid game, dropping useful hints and warnings based on information that it seemed only cats could glean.

Now, with the path to the shutter clear, Sven lifted it and pushed the shopping cart out.

Stepping into the twilight, he at once began to have second thoughts. Putting the body into the freezer was a better idea as far as practicality went—as far as survival went—but it didn’t seem right. It seemed the kind of thing that Milt might do.

With one hand gripping the cart, Sven turned and began to lower the shutter. Ivan slunk out through the diminishing crack and stole off a little ways, until he found a spot that he seemed to like.

Then the cat looked at Sven, his green eyes glowing in the dusk. Sven pulled the rattling shutter down all the way, then he turned back to the cart, and, with a heavy, apprehensive heart, gave it a push.

The cart snagged unexpectedly, and Sven walked into the cart’s handle.

Ivan meowed as Sven winced in pain.

“You saw that coming didn’t you?”

Ivan meowed, probably in agreement.

Sven walked around the caught cart, resolving to pull it, figuring that one of the cumbersome wheels had turned sideways or gotten caught in a sidewalk divot. When he got to the cart’s front, he was startled to discover that both of his theories had been incorrect.

The front wheels of the shopping cart had driven over an open carton of cigarettes, and had caught inside the carton’s cardboard flaps. Next to the open carton lay a closed carton.

Sven whirled around at once, realizing after he did it that whoever had left the cigarette cartons probably hadn’t done it from inside the Wegmans.

Was there someone on the roof? Was someone spying on all of them from outside? Had the zombies taken up smoking?

Sven freed the shopping cart’s front wheels and pushed it gently down the ramp from the sidewalk to the pavement of the parking lot.

It was getting far too dark for comfort. He didn’t want to leave Evan’s body sitting so unceremoniously in the parking lot, but now Sven had to go back inside to warn the others. They had company, and that meant they were all in danger. Unless...unless Sven could spot the cigarette bringer now, outside, and nip the problem in the bud.

Sven scanned the parking lot before him.

It was quiet save for the intermittent scratching of the zombies trapped in their cars. The scratching had grown weaker as the day wore on. Sven hoped that was a good sign, maybe this whole disaster was winding—

He saw a faint glow at the far end of the parking lot, off in the trees behind where he had met Brian and Milt. There was someone there.

A thought dawned on Sven as he began to push the shopping cart nonchalantly in the direction of the glow. Then he stopped, screeching the cart to a halt. He was suddenly certain of what was going on.

It was a trick. The glow was a distraction to get him away from the entrance, so that whoever was trying to get in could get past Sven. It was a group of marauders, come to kill them and take over the supermarket. Sven was sure of it. His mind kept flashing on a zombie movie where a gang of raiders on motorcycles broke into a mall to dish out havoc on the humans hiding there. Their purpose was anarchy, destruction, rape, murder.

All of that was happening now, already, this early into the zombie outbreak.

People are crap, Sven thought, knowing it to be true.

He shifted his grip from the cart’s handle to the shovel, but remained careful not to make any sudden moves. He turned around slowly, surveying all that he could in the moonlight. There was no sign of the rest of the marauder pack.

Sven looked down at Ivan. “What do you think?”

The cat was silent.

Now Sven wasn’t sure what to do. If he approached the glow, he would put enough distance between himself and the entrance to let someone inside. Then again, Jane and Brian were in there, and they weren’t exactly unarmed. Maybe the irregular glow was just a firefly, or a group of them. Sven kept the corner of his eye fixed on the glow, trying to be subtle about his vigilance.

It was time for a decision. Creeping around in the darkness in a world now ravaged by zombies was not something to belabor.

Sven decided.

He would neutralize the threat at once, return to the entrance to secure it, and proceed from there.

With one hand gripping the shovel and the other gripping the shopping cart, Sven pushed the cart slowly toward the glow, glancing back every few paces at the Wegmans entrance.

When he was close to the far end of the parking lot, within twenty feet of the glow that he now made out to be moving and flitting about—just like a firefly might—Sven let go of the cart.

He held on to the shovel, scraping it off the top of the cart. Sven walked toward the glow, no longer trying to be subtle about it. The glowing thing pitched suddenly, and Sven saw the outline of a man, then Sven was running toward him, intent on one thing only—killing the intruder.

Sven leapt over the curb into the wooded area where the glow was. The shovel was down to his side, ready to be swung. The blow was going to be lethal, he was set on that.

Then he saw the man clearly, trying to crawl backward, trying to get away. He looked like a lookout, like a diversion. The man was small, frail, and haggard, and he was exactly what the marauders would use to deflect Sven’s attention from the break-in. The man was too small to do any damage on the offensive.

Sven wasn’t going to let him get away.

Sven swung the shovel, aiming at the lower part of the man’s head, at the jaw area.

He swung with all of his strength.

The impact of the shovel blow jarred Sven as it traveled back up the haft of the shovel, dissipating in his arms and upper back.

The glow had been extinguished.

98

The vegan’s body lay in the dirt, motionless. The cigarette he had been smoking—the cigarette that had given him away—now lay snuffed out and bitten through next to his leg.

The carnivorous man must have realized then that he had struck only the tree behind which the vegan had been hiding, because the carnivorous man raised the haft of the shovel upward, its point over the vegan’s heart.

The vegan reacted, rolling sideways just as the point of the shovel ripped into the earth where he’d been lying less than a second before. He scrambled into a backward crawl toward the parking lot, scraping his hands against the rocks and twigs in the dirt.

The carnivorous man wheeled, face flushed, lifted his shovel once more, and began to pursue the vegan.

“Stop!” the vegan’s hoarse voice cut through the air. “Stop. I come in peace.”

I come in peace? That was a weird thing to say, the vegan knew, but he couldn’t think of anything else. “I come in peace.”

The carnivorous man slowed in his pursuit, seeming to consider the statement.

The vegan took this opportunity and got to his feet, still moving backward. He stepped down into the moonlit parking lot, and the carnivorous man followed.

By the light of the moon, the vegan now saw that his pursuer was not armed with tire irons, but with long, ancient-looking knives. For a reason that the vegan couldn’t place, this made him feel better about the man that had just tried to decapitate him with a shovel.