Zomb-Pocalypse 3 (5 page)

“Like this,” Silas
says, reaching down onto the bottom shelf and grabbing all the boxes of oatmeal
and piling them in the cart. I make a face.

“I’m not really a
fan of oatmeal,” I can’t help saying.

My dad opens his
mouth to reproach me, but Silas beats him to it. “Are you a fan of starving to
death?” he demands, making my dad’s mouth lift at the corners in humor for a
minute before he gets control of himself. Like many times before, I ignore
Silas and keep moving.

“Sugar,” Silas
says, pointing to the shelf, and I stack in several bags while Silas and my dad
keep an eye on either side of the aisle. “Okay, what else?” I start to ask, but
end my question with a scream when a hand reaches out from the bottom shelf and
grabs my ankle.

“What in the
hell?” Silas says as he shines the light down at my feet. The light doesn’t
help waylay my fears. It illuminates a rotting gray hand clamped firmly around
my ankle. The arm is covered in bite marks in so many places that it’s almost
skeletal. The zombie has his grip on my hiking boot, so I’m not super scared of
getting a scratch, but I know that the longer he holds on, the more my chances
increase. Dad is moving in, a horrified look on his face, but I know I’ve got
this. I lift my free foot up and stomp down hard on the zombie’s arm. It takes
a couple tries, but finally the bones snap and the zombie’s grip loosens. I
shake him off and step back, and Silas uses the end of his flashlight to knock
a couple of the boxes out of the way, revealing the sorriest looking zombie
I’ve ever seen. It looks like he was chewed pretty badly, like really bad, as
he’s actually just a torso with more holes in him than a block of Swiss cheese.

“Yikes,” Silas
says as he uses his foot to kick the zombie off the bottom shelf. The zombie is
weakly swiping at us, with no real effort, and Silas doesn’t even waste a
bullet on him. He takes a page out of my book and stomps his skull. I look away
when his skull finally gives and his liquefied brains spill out onto the floor.

“Jesus, you two,”
Dad mutters under his breath, and I think he’s finally getting the picture that
Silas and I can actually take care of ourselves. We keep moving and throw a
bunch more stuff into the carts, canned goods, power bars, and most of the
staples like flour, powdered milk, and sugar. Our carts are loaded and
difficult to push as we start to loop around and head back towards the front
door. It hasn’t felt like we’ve been here all that long, but according to
Silas’ watch we are approaching the second hour. We haven’t seen any other
zombies. Even though I refuse to relax my guard, I do calm down a little as we
go along and nothing happens.

We wind our way
back to the front and find that Barry and Regg—I still can’t think of the Sergeant
as Chad—are already back. They have backed the truck up through the doors so
the pickup box is hanging into the first set of doors. Silas winces when he
sees the doors snapped closed against the sides of the truck, though I guess in
a world filled with zombies, appearances aren’t that important anymore. Barry
and Regg have the box filled three quarters full with the gear they’ve
collected.

“Finally,” Barry
snaps when we arrive, and I can’t help making a face. I don’t really know him,
but from what I’ve seen so far, I’m definitely not a Barry fan.

”You guys got a
pretty good load,” Regg says, overriding Barry’s negativity, and I shoot him a
grateful smile.

We add some of the
stuff from our carts to the pickup and then it’s full. Silas and my dad hold
both doors open while Barry pulls the truck back out into the parking lot and
Regg backs one of the cars inside, and then we carefully let the doors slide
back shut against the side of the car.

There is limited
elbow space, so I keep my distance while Barry, Regg, and my dad pack the car.
I turn my flashlight back into the store and pan it around so I can check
everything out. The clothing section is on the left, and I take a couple steps
towards it. There are a lot of people back at the cabin that don’t have the
proper wardrobe for the upcoming winter. “Where are you going?” Silas asks
right in my ear, making me jump, and I give him a slap on the arm for sneaking
up on me.

“I was thinking
about grabbing some clothes,” I tell him, and he chuckles.

“You’re such a
girl,” he says, and I cast him an annoyed look.

“For the others,”
I clarify. “It’s almost winter, and nobody really has the right clothes,” I
remind him. Silas, Ryan, and I do, but we were on the road and were able to
pick through that camping store—the others weren’t nearly as lucky.

“I’ll come with
you,” he says as he walks back to grab another cart. I look back at the carts
that still need to be loaded and know that we need to hurry. Dad would never
leave without me, but I don’t need a lecture from Barry. I see Silas talking to
my dad and pointing towards the clothing section, which isn’t that far away.
After a moment of indecision, my dad nods, which is huge in itself. My dad must
like what he’s seen of Silas so far to trust my safety to him. Silas jogs
towards me with the cart.

“We don’t have
very long,” he tells me, and I nod, I’d already figured as much.

I rush into the
clothing aisle, not really liking how closely packed the racks of clothes are.
A zombie could be right around the corner. I glance over at Silas and see that
he has his gun out and is scanning the area with his flashlight. I grab bags of
socks and underwear without checking the sizes, there will be something that
will fit everyone. Next we find hats and mittens and toss them in the cart too.
“We should head back,” Silas says and I nod, even though I don’t have half the
things I’d wanted. On our way back we take a different route and come across a
display of winter coats. Silas helps me throw a huge load of them into the cart
and then we rush back. They are loading the very last cart and I push mine up
into line. Barry sends me a scowl, but Dad gives me a smile.

“This will be
great, thanks, Jane,” he says, and I beam at him. I watch as they load the
coats and things into the back of the car, and the thought occurs to me that we
didn’t get anything for Sunny. I look over at Silas, who looks at me when he
sees me staring.

“What?” he asks
hesitantly. He already knows that it’s going to be something.

“Sunny,” I say,
and a look of understanding crosses his face. He glances at the others who are
almost finished.

“Stay here,” he
hisses at me, but I shake my head.

“You’re not going
alone,” I tell him stubbornly, and he looks like he wants to argue but knows it
will do him no good and will only waste time. So he nods, and together we jog
off into the darkness. I have never been in this Wal-Mart, but they are usually
all set up the same, and I already know that there wasn’t a kids section on the
side of the store that we already explored. We take off towards the back corner
of the store where Regg and Barry explored.

Silas is running
ahead of me when he suddenly trips, flails forward, and hits the ground. I stop
running instantly and reach for the gun at my waist, even as I shine my
flashlight down on the ground to see what he tripped over. I have to resist the
urge to scream as I see a pile of spilled dog food bags with a body in the
middle. It was a man, and there is something odd about him.

“He wasn’t a
zombie when he died,” Silas says as he picks himself up and leans in closer to
examine the corpse.

“How can you be
sure?” I ask, even though I can see with my own eyes that the man doesn’t have
the usual sickly skin color. He is pale and white, on account of being dead,
but his skin isn’t rotting off.

“Fresh blood,”
Silas mutters as he points to the still-spreading pile of red coming from a
wound on his head. My skin breaks out in goose bumps, and I wonder what
happened.

“This must’ve been
that loud noise we heard,” I suggest, and Silas nods.

“Most likely,” he
agrees as he reaches over and grabs my hand, forcing me to step around the body
and keep going.

“I wonder what
happened,” I say again, unable to get my mind off the corpse. Silas shrugs.

“We can ask when
we get back, but we have to hurry,” he says, snapping me out of my thoughts.
He’s right of course.

We take off at a
jog again, this time being more careful about what’s in front of us, and I
start to see the telltale sign of bright pink racks of clothing. Silas searches
around until he finds a bright pink snowsuit with matching hat, mittens, and
boots, while I grab her a couple packs of clean underwear and socks.

“Let’s get the
hell outta here,” Silas says, and I can’t agree more. We start racing back
towards the front when Silas skids to a stop. There is something different
about the dead man and the dog food up ahead. Two zombies are hunkered down
over his body, ripping the meat from his bones and chewing it noisily. Silas
puts his hand up and holds it in front of me like he expects me to go running
up to the zombies, not fricken likely!

One of the zombies
looks up and growls when it spots us. The zombie lumbers to his feet, excited
by the prospect of fresh eats, and lets out a moan that is drowned out at the
end by the sound of shouting and the scrape of metal on metal. The zombie
pauses and looks behind him, in the direction of the others, like he isn’t sure
which way he should go. “Silas,” I say, not really sure what I’m asking him.
Silas raises his gun and shoots both of the zombies in the head and then he
grabs my arm and pulls me along.

When we get closer
to the front, I notice that the light coming in from the front doors is much dimmer
than it was before. Silas pulls me to a stop before we can go running out into
the scene before us. A strangled cry escapes my lips when I see my dad standing
in the entrance, the sunlight practically blocked by the zombies beating
against the outside of the glass doors. Dad is struggling to pull the second
set of doors shut, while three zombies claw, trying to bite and scratch him.

I start running
without a thought in my head, other than saving my dad. Thankfully, Silas
doesn’t even try to stop me. He’s right beside me. Their moans and growls are
deafening. When they see Silas and me, they only increase their efforts,
pounding and trying to break the glass. I pull out my gun, but Silas quickly
slaps it down. “You can’t fire towards the glass; if you miss you’ll crack the
outside doors.” He warns me, passing me an extra knife from his belt. I don’t
even hesitate before jumping into the fray. All I can think about is that my
dad has to be okay, or I’ll be responsible for his death, and I’ve killed him over
a meaningless pink snowsuit.

Chapter Five

“Get out of here,
Jane!” Dad manages to shout at me, even though he’s huffing and puffing from
the exertion of trying to hold back the zombies.

“I’m not going
anywhere,” I fire back as I slide my knife through the eyeball of the zombie
that is causing the most trouble. He stops his rabid attack on my dad and falls
to the floor, jerking the knife from my hand. I’m not going to waste time
reaching through a zombie-infested doorway to get it back, so I pull my own
knife from my belt—the crocodile Dundee knife—but Silas pushes me out of the
way and spears the next rotten face that pokes through the doors. My dad winces
when he slices the zombie down an inch from where his tired arms are trying to
hold the two doors together.

Unlike me, Silas
doesn’t lose his knife and he’s ready for the next walking corpse. He nails the
zombie through the eye, like I did, and then the threat is gone, well not
really, there are at least fifty rage-filled zombies beating against the outside
of the glass doors, but we have at least dispatched the three trapped in the
middle.

Dad sags against
the door and draws a shaky breath of relief. “You should’ve run,” he lectures
me sternly, but I can tell he isn’t really angry.

“We all need to run,
now,” Silas tells us as he eyes the strain the zombies are putting on the
glass, and the small network of spider-web cracks that are erupting from
beneath their pounding fists.

“Were you bitten
or scratched?” I ask my dad, my adrenaline spiking again at the prospect. Dad
shakes his head.

“I honestly don’t
know,” he admits, and I feel my heart sink.

“We will have to
find out later,” Silas snaps as he kicks one of the corpses out of the way and
slides the second set of doors together with a snap. “That won’t hold them
long,” he says, just as the glass gives way in a big sheet and falls to the
floor. The zombies start forward, not caring about the glass shards that still
hang from the door and tear and cut at their flesh. It’s horrifying to see. I
watch a fat zombie in a housecoat walk past a piece of glass and it cuts along
her cheek, releasing black ooze from her rotting, papery thin flesh. When her
eye ball gets poked out by the glass, I actually shudder “Move it, Jane,” Silas
barks in my ear, giving me a shove to snap me out of it.

The zombies are
just reaching the second set of doors when I turn and follow Silas and my dad.
“Do you have a plan, son?” my dad asks, yelling to be heard over the moans and
the sound of shaking glass as a hundred fists pound against it with a hungry
fury.

“We need to find
another way out,” Silas says as he leads us back the way we came when we went
and got the snowsuit.

“What in the hell
is that?” my dad asks when he sees the dog food, corpse, and two dead zombie
tableau up ahead of us.

“That is a good
question for Barry,” Silas mutters as we move past them without stopping.

“I have a lot of
questions for Barry if I ever see him again,” Dad mutters, and that snags my
attention.

“What..?” I start
to ask, but Silas and my dad both shake their heads at me.

“Time and a place,
Jane,” Silas mutters as he grabs my elbow to help steer me around a bin of
discounted running shoes. Behind us we hear glass breaking, and the volume of
the moans increases—the dead are inside.

“It’s okay,” Dad
murmurs, reaching over to pat me on the shoulder, “We have a head start.”

His words are a
tiny bit reassuring, but I know if we can’t find another way out of here, all
the head starts in the world won’t help us. We will be trapped in here with a plethora
of flesh-eating zombies.

“We need to stick
closer to the wall, so we’ll be able to find a door,” Silas whispers as he
leads us deeper into the dark store. He has his flashlight on, and it’s even
more terrifying than it was earlier. Now I know for certain that the light is
attracting every zombie in the store, hell bent on eating us. We come around a
shelf and Silas walks right into a zombie that was lurking at the end of the
aisle. I clap my hand over my mouth to keep from shouting. The flashlight illuminates
his sickly, rotting skin and chipped teeth, and Silas shoves the zombie back
with all his strength. The zombie goes down, sliding across the floor, leaving
chunks of skin and other nastiness. Silas doesn’t give him a chance to shamble
to his rotting feet. He follows him down and plants his knife into the base of
his skull. “Keep moving,” Silas barks, letting out a little puff of breath, and
I know that he was startled by that zombie—we all were.

We follow the wall
for what seems like forever. It’s agonizing jumping at every shadow, but in
reality it’s probably been less than five minutes. Silas stops suddenly and I
nearly bump into the back of him. I peek around his shoulder, worried he’s run
into another dead head, but his flashlight is shining on a set of double doors.

We stare at the
doors, not quite sure what lays beyond them. A loud clatter behind us reminds
us that while we don’t know what lies ahead through these doors, we do know
what’s rooting around in the dark behind us. By comparison, whatever is in this
room cannot be as bad. “Come on,” I urge Silas, imagining the zombies creeping
up behind us in the dark. Silas nods and pulls his gun out, and I do the same.
He had been using his knife up until now, because it’s silent, but not knowing
what we face…the gun is the better choice.

“Stay together,”
Silas snaps as he pushes through the doors and shines his flashlight around the
big warehouse filled with boxes and pallets of inventory, waiting to be stocked
in the store. It will never be stocked now. The moans of the dead fill the
room, echoing off all the concrete, and Silas shines his light in all
directions, trying to locate the source.

“There!” Dad
murmurs as a ragged zombie wearing a blue vest comes stumbling excitedly
towards us. Silas tucks his gun back in his belt and pulls his knife from his
hip instead, and I hold my breath in fear. Getting up close and personal with a
zombie is always a risk, no matter how skillful you are. Silas hands the
flashlight to my dad and strides forward confidently, planting the blade into
the employee’s temple. I only let myself breath again when the zombie slumps to
the ground and Silas pulls his blade from his skull.

“Behind you,” I
squeak when I notice the zombie that’s just walked around a pallet full of
electronics. She isn’t making a sound, not a moan or a groan, which is odd for
a zombie. When Silas stabs her through the eye socket and she falls to the
ground, I can see why. Her throat is completely ripped out; she probably
couldn’t make a sound even if she’d wanted to. I wince and turn away. The door
we came through has steel brackets, like we can use something to barricade the
zombies out. I look around until I find a thick two by four piece of wood
leaning to the side. I pick it up and it slides in perfectly. I’m not sure if
it will keep the dead out or not, but it makes me feel better than before.

“Smart move,
Blondie,” Silas says, coming over to inspect the barricade. “They probably
barricaded the doors every night for added security,” he says as he runs his
hand over the sturdy piece of wood. We hear the sound of shuffling feet outside
the door and freeze. There are no windows, so we don’t bother turning off our
flashlights. We aren’t one hundred percent sure yet that we’re alone in this warehouse,
but we do stand frozen, straining our ears to hear if the zombies are going to
start beating against the door.

We hear scuffling,
like they are rubbing against it as they walk, but they never actually pay it
much attention. After half an hour, it’s quiet outside the door, and Silas
walks quietly towards me and my dad.

“We need to get
out of here and figure out a plan,” he tells us, and we nod in agreement. I
feel relatively safe in here, and there are a lot of supplies, but we can’t
abandon everyone else at the cabin, just because I’m terrified of stepping back
outside. I turn to my dad, and tears well up in my eyes, spilling over and
scalding my cheeks.

“I’m so sorry,
Dad. This is all my fault,” I splutter without meaning to bring it up, and he
wraps me in a hug.

“It’s not your
fault, Janey, how could it be?” he denies, but I know he’s just trying to make
me feel better.

“If we hadn’t gone
to get that snowsuit for Sunny,” I tell him. “You wouldn’t have stayed behind
when the zombies came. We would all be together on our way home.”

Dad’s face
darkens. “I don’t blame you for that, Jane. Sunny needs that snowsuit, and this
was Barry’s doing. When the zombies came, he didn’t try to save anyone else, he
just hopped in the car and drove off. He would’ve done the same thing if you
guys were there or not.” My dad shakes his head. “He didn’t even call out for
me to get in the car—not that I would have left you. He just jumped in and
drove off.” I’m shocked by what my dad is telling me, though I never liked
Barry, I can’t believe he would be so selfish. “He didn’t even know the doors
would shut when he moved the car, I just lucked out and they did.”

“What about Regg?”
I ask, finding it hard to believe that the Sergeant would just drive off and
leave us to the zombies.

“When we finished
with the truck and got the car backed in, Barry sent Regg ahead to go home with
the truck. He had some plan that we should stagger our departure so we didn’t
rile up the dead and risk losing supplies.” Dad shakes his head.

“I doubt Barry has
the nerve to go back to the cabin after what he did, but if he does…” My dad
gets a gleeful look on his face, “I’m gonna kick his ass,” he promises, and
Silas grins as well, and I have no doubt that Silas will be first in line to
help.

“So what’s the
plan?” I ask to distract Silas and Dad from their plans to beat Barry, not that
he doesn’t deserve it, but I’d like to get home in one piece, and when we do,
I’ll probably take a swing at Barry myself.

“We need to get
out of here,” Silas states, even though, duh, everyone already knows that. I
resist rolling my eyes at him—barely.

“They didn’t take
the third car,” my dad tells us, and my ears perk up. “Everything fit in the
first two, so it’s still sitting outside.” We are all silent for a minute while
we absorb that.

“I don’t know,” I
say finally. “It could be really dangerous.”

“So is trying to
get back on foot,” Silas counters, and he isn’t wrong. “I think the only thing
we can do is see when we get out there.” Silas rakes his hand through his dark
hair and sighs. “It’s impossible to know otherwise—we don’t even know what’s
gonna be on the other side of this door when we open it.”

“It’s a bad
situation all around,” my dad agrees, “But the sooner we get going, the sooner
we will get home.” A part of me balks at his optimism, the sooner we get going,
the sooner we might get eaten!

“There’s no
helping it,” Silas agrees like he can read my mind. I glance at him sharply,
but he isn’t even looking my way. He’s walked over to the regular door beside
the huge roll up door and he’s examining it.

Dad looks around
at all the pallets of food just sitting around. “It’s too bad we couldn’t get a
tractor trailer and load all this stuff up,” he murmurs. It isn’t a terrible
idea, but it’s not one we can possibly pull off right now.

I open my mouth to
reply, but I am distracted by the metallic squeak of a door opening. I whirl
around and see that Silas has opened the door several inches and is peeking
out. I want to yell at him to shut the door—that he didn’t even give us any
warning—but I don’t. If there are zombies out there, I don’t want to sound the
dinner bell. I pull the gun from my hip and inch forward, being careful not to
point the business end at Silas.

Silas pushes the
door open a little further and then turns back to us with a nod. “It’s as good
as it’s going to get,” he says, and we all nod grimly. My dad comes up behind
me and sets his hand on my shoulder.

“I love you,
Jane,” he tells me, and I don’t like the way it sounds—a bit like a
just in case
goodbye
.

“I love you too,
Dad,” I automatically reply, refusing to let myself give in to the urge for
hysterics. Silas doesn’t give us a chance to say anything else before he pushes
the door open, grabbing the set of keys from a nail pounded in beside the door,
and steps out into the sunshine. I follow him out and am temporarily blinded
after the darkness of the warehouse. I blink the dots from my eyes as Silas
quickly locks the door and pockets the keys.

“We can come back
now,” is all he says as we turn and try to get our bearings. There is a lone
zombie stumbling towards us, but none of us are that worried about him, not
until he gets closer.

“I think we need
to go this way,” Dad says, pointing, and Silas nods, so we take off, keeping to
the edge of the building. I see several dumpsters and shudder, thinking back to
being trapped outside that strip mall. Silas pauses when the zombie behind us
finally gets too close. He stops just long enough to stick a knife through its
eyeball.

We reach the end
of the building and peek around the corner at the parking lot. There isn’t a
lot moving around, all of the zombies must’ve gone inside. “I think it’s worth
making a run for it,” Silas says, but my dad shakes his head.