The Plague Unto The End (7 page)

I turned back to try to retrieve my weapon from the corpse.  I grabbed the handle and stomped on his face.  It took me three tries, but I finally worked the sword free.  As I locked onto my next target I heard something squeaking up one of the aisles.  I drew my sword back to hack into the skull of the one I had shoved into the soda machine, but before I could swing, his head exploded right in front of me.  The body tumbled sideways toward the front of the store.

Then I heard something I had not heard for hours: someone talking to me.  He was pushing a shopping cart full of groceries with a pump shotgun resting on the top of the pile.  “GO!” he yelled at me.  Then I noticed the mob following him.  Most of them appeared to be pretty slow, but one of them was right on his heels.  I quickly slid my sword back in between the straps of my book bag and pulled out the Glock.  I removed the empty magazine and pulled a full one out of my pocket.  I accidentally dropped the empty magazine onto the bloody floor at my feet.

I slapped in the full one and took aim—scared that I would hit the person I was trying to save, but if I didn’t try, I didn’t know what was going to happen to him.  I took the shot.  It struck the infected female on the right bicep.  At the pace she was running, she lost her balance and fell forward into the legs of her intended victim.  They both fell to the floor and the shopping cart continued to roll.

“Crap!” I could barely get the word out of my mouth before I was attacked a frail-looking old man that had been knocked over by the one whose head had been removed by the buckshot.  Startled by his proximity I let off a stray shot into the darkness behind the man.  A quick kick to the man’s left thigh sent him back into the soda machine.  With several more of them still quickly closing in, I ran around the end of the register to attempt to help the guy I had unintentionally sent sliding across the floor.  But when I came to where I was sure he would be laying, he was already gone.

In a confused panic I began shooting again into the advancing crowd.  Then I heard the voice again, but from behind me this time, “What are you doing! Move!”  I glanced over my shoulder toward the front doors just in time to see the guy I thought I was saving pushing his cart through the propped-open front door.  I sprinted for the front doors.  I wasn’t counting on the slickness of the blood still on the bottoms of my shoes, and when I tried to stop; I slid across the floor into the glass.  But by pure luck I didn’t fall.  When I regained my balance, I ran out the front door I had come in through. 

The inhabitants of the grocery store were still close behind me and aggressively trying to follow me outside.  The guy I had seen run outside was now behind that Volkswagen, scooping handfuls of groceries in through the shattered back window.  I slid the Glock back into my right pants pocket and ran back to the entrance to Food Lion.  With several of the rotting shoppers only feet from the doors, I grabbed onto the doors and yanked them shut.  I started to run around to the other side to attempt the same on the other set of doors, but halfway there, I heard the voice of reason coming from the direction of the Volkswagen, “What are you doing? Get in your car!”  I glanced back at the glass entrance to the store just in time to see a man in a shirt and tie jam his face into the glass right next to me.  The impact was enough to crack the glass and enough to get me moving away from the store.  As I ran to my truck, I saw the other guy’s vehicle lurch forward and begin moving out of the lot, and heard the previously cracking glass shatter and the sound of shoes stepping on broken glass.  In spite of the temptation to look back, I set my eyes on the driver’s side door of the truck and pushed myself harder.  I ripped the door open and tossed my bag onto the passenger’s seat.  I didn’t know exactly where I was going to go next, but I had found someone else.

And I had a feeling that he had some answers.

I followed the beat-up Volkswagen as though I was tailing a friend on the way to his house.  I didn’t know where he was going, but for some reason it felt good to let someone else think for me for those few minutes.  For the most part, the city still appeared to be the same boring place that I had grown up in.  Well, other than the fact that there were almost no healthy people anywhere.

The rain had started to let up again, and at the same time that the rain crossed my mind I realized that I was soaked and shivering.  I had packed extra clothes in my bag, but now my bag was also soaked.  The clock in the truck said 3:07.  It felt like a lot longer than twenty-four minutes had passed since I had been sitting on the floor in my bedroom.  I felt something inside me desiring to turn the truck around and just go home, but in the back of my mind I knew that there was no longer such a place.

The small green car in front of my pickup truck suddenly turned on its right-turn signal and pulled into a thrift store parking lot on Mercury Boulevard.  I had been to the thrift store a few times during my “Old clothes are cool” phase, but it had been a year or so since I had even thought about going there.  We parked right in front of the store in view of the glass front door.  The front door was locked and the inside appeared as though no one had come to open the store that morning.  But we noticed that there was another car in the lot besides both of ours.

The owner of the Volkswagen quickly walked over to the late model Oldsmobile.  I stayed by the front door of the store and waited to see what the other guy was going to do.  The red Oldsmobile was parked across the dividing lines of two parking spaces.  As the other guy walked to the car, he slid several fresh 12-gauge shells into the magazine tube of his shotgun.  Just as he stepped up to the window he raised the muzzle of the weapon to point at the driver’s seat.  I heard a muffled screech and the vehicle began to shift back and forth on the suspension. 
BANG, click-click, BANG, click-click
.  Before I could even get my pistol out to line up on the vehicle, my unnamed companion put an end to the infected driver.

I ran over to where he was standing and helped him get the door open.  He reached in and pulled out the remains of an elderly woman wearing a thrift store name tag.

“Sorry, Sharron,” said the other guy as he dropped the body to the gravel parking lot and began to search the inside of the vehicle.  The entire left side of the woman’s head was gone.  As I looked inside the vehicle, I saw that the left side of her head wasn’t gone, just no longer intact.  I looked down at the remaining face of the poor woman and looked at the name tag. 
Sharron
.  I felt my stomach become queasy again, but all I could do was dry heave.

“She must have them in her pocket,” said the other guy from inside the car.  I slowly knelt down and reached into her jean jacket pockets.  I was still struggling with my bowels when I found the keys.

“Why are we here again?” I said as my new friend stepped out of the vehicle and I handed him the keys.

“Don’t you want somewhere to sleep tonight?” he said as he raised his eyebrows.  He ran over to the doors and I followed.

“But why a thrift store?”  I asked while he attempted to find the right key.

“How many cars do you see in the parking lot?” he asked.

“Ours and...Sharron’s,” I replied.

“And those are most likely the only people who are here,” he said just as he got the door open.

We both went inside and locked the door behind us.

“We’re not staying here, though, right?” I asked as I looked back outside toward my pickup truck.

“For now we are,” he replied.  “My name is Matthew McCloy...  My entire family was killed by those sick people,” he said with a blank stare of hate.

CHAPTER 6 - Origin of Matt...

We agreed to stay inside on the thrift store to exchange information and our stories.  We also discussed what supplies we had been able to collect and what we had planned to do next.

Apparently “Matt,” as told me to call him, was another college student, but he attended an out-of-state school.  He had only come home for the weekend to visit his family.  Matt’s parents lived in a county in northern Virginia.  Fairfax County was much larger than Hampton where I lived.  He had made it home Thursday afternoon and was going to go back to school Sunday night.  Everything was fine until Friday night.

A man with a nasty bite wound on his arm came to their door.  He said he didn’t know what had done it, it was very dark, but he did grab hold of part of it.  “It was...cold...very cold, and…the sm…smell!” the man had said to Matt.  At this time it was roughly 9:00 p.m. and Matt wanted to make sure the man would be all right.  Matt’s dad called for the police and requested an ambulance, but the dispatcher advised him that there had been an abnormal amount of calls for service that night and they would send someone as soon as they became available.

About a half an hour later, while Matt’s parents tried to keep the man awake, the man went pale and stopped breathing, and his eyes glossed over.  He was dead.  Matt’s dad told them all to leave the room as he put a blanket over the body.  Before they had all made it into the next room, they heard a blood-curdling scream followed by some thud noises.  The body had gotten up and somehow torn out Mart’s fathers’ throat and was now hunched over the bloody mess chewing.  Matt said that he watched his father taking his last breaths.

Upon seeing Matt, the reanimated corpse grabbed Matt’s father, barely alive, and dragged him into the next room, leaving a streak of red behind.  At that point his mother became uncontrollable and followed them into that room…never to return.  He was not sure what had just happened.  Matt and his little sister Jennifer were not going to stay and see what else the sick man was going to do.  So he ran to the back door, slammed it shut and locked it.  He grabbed his little sister’s hand and they ran to his parent’s room.  Matt smashed open his father’s shotgun case and grabbed his dad’s shotgun.  His little sister was too young to drive, so he drove and he told her to sit in the back seat.  At first, Matt was not sure where he was going to drive to, but eventually he decided to drive to the local sheriff’s office.

Once they arrived at the usually quiet sheriff’s office, they noticed that this was no longer the case.  The town’s crime prevention center had been inundated with panicked citizens.  Rather than join the crowd, Matt took his sister to his Aunt Helen’s house just up the road.  No one was home and the front door was wide open.  Matt attempted to use the phone to make some calls, but none of the numbers he called were ever answered.  Matt and his sister stayed there for a couple of days hoping that his Aunt would come home.  She never did.

Jennifer never liked her Aunt’s house and after staying in that old house for almost two days, she wanted to leave.  He and his sister agreed that they would drive south until they found some help.  They made it out of the driveway okay, but when they came to the end of the neighborhood, Matt made the mistake of going to the area of a high school a few streets over.  The school had been used as a kind of triage when the infected began attacking people.  The facility didn’t last long and was soon overwhelmed.  A Massive crowd of infected people poured out of the school and into the streets.  Matt said that at first he was going to try to drive through them, but his younger sister quickly convinced him that it was a bad idea.  Instead they drove back toward the house.  He said he planned to get out of the neighborhood the back way.  But by the time he made it back to the house the infected had completely overrun their house and were gradually taking over the rest of the street.

He looked to the other end of the street and saw that the undead hoard had not built up as greatly as it had nearer to the high school.  They tried to force their way through.

He gunned the gas and headed for the largest gap in the crowd.  The impact of the three or four they hit caused the car to swerve into the more crowded area.  He heard the rear window glass break, and the quiet interior of the vehicle was flooded with the moans and screeches of the overwhelming crowd.  Just as Matt shoved his foot into the gas pedal, he looked into the rearview mirror and saw several pairs of arms reaching through the shattered rear window.  He tried to turn around to grab his sister’s hand but she was ripped out of the back window, and he knew that with that many, she was already dead.  He said he would never forget hearing his sister’s last helpless scream and watching through the mirror as Jenny disappeared into the horde.  It took all the strength he had inside of him not to stop the car and run to try to save his sister.  He said he drove around in a daze for about an hour before deciding to make up a plan.  His plan was very similar to mine.  But he was planning to leave town.  He thought that maybe what was happening might not be everywhere.  I thought it might not be a bad idea.

At the moment we weren’t in the safest of areas.  He had managed to hit a small gun shop before going to the Food Lion, but that store had been one of the first places looted in his Aunt’s area.  He got a few boxes of shotgun shells but that was about all that was left.  He said there was plenty of handgun ammunition, but like many of the other residents in that area, all he had was a hunting shotgun.  He did not recommend going back though, given the conditions he last saw.

I agreed with him.