The Plague Unto The End (8 page)

CHAPTER 7 - Previously occupied...

We assumed the store was empty given that it appeared that Sharron had never made it inside of the store.  I started to look at clothes to find something in my size that didn’t smell too bad.  Matt didn’t seem so quick to start shopping.

“What’s the problem?”  I said as I searched the medium rack.

Matt raised his shotgun toward the back of the store and said, “I doubt they only put one person on the staff for opening the store.  We should check the store before we get too comfortable.”

Just as he finished talking I heard what sounded like a row of books being knocked off of a shelf.  I immediately dropped the shirt that was in my hands and pulled out the Glock.

“But the door was locked,” I whispered.

“Shut up! They can follow the sound of your voice,” Matt responded in a very quick whisper.

I could hear shuffling on the cheap carpet, but all of the clothing racks made it very difficult to see where it was coming from.  The store was very small and while we had time to think, I put the Glock back into my pocket and pulled out my sword.  Matt kept his muzzle pointed to where the noise sounded like it was coming from while I tried to make my way around the store walking along the wall.  Then I saw it.  What appeared to have once been a man lay trapped under a bookshelf with at least one clothing rack’s worth of clothes stacked on top of him.  He was sliding his feet on the carpet trying to force his way out from under the pile.  All of his efforts were fruitless.  He acted almost as if he didn’t even realize that he was trapped.

I looked over at Matt and pointed to where the pathetic figure continued his pointless struggle.  Matt looked confused, and instead of advancing on the target, he quickly walked over to me, keeping his eyes on the direction of the scuffing.  When he saw what I was looking at he lowered his weapon and we inched our way toward the rotting yet still moving mass.

“Do you think it can get that stuff off of itself?” I said as we came within fifteen feet.

With a cautious stare, Matt replied, “I’m not sure, but get ready to take its head off if it starts to make progress.”

When the cold lifeless eyes made contact with us, the man forgot completely that he could not move, and focused all of his attention on trying to get us.  He reached with all of the effort he could give, but still did not move from under the pile.

“Look at him.  He was bitten on the neck at some point,” said Matt, pointing at a deep gouge taken out of the man’s neck.

“Have they bitten you yet?” said Matt as he turned to look at me.

“Well, one of them bit my jeans,” I said with a baffled look.

Matt suddenly stood up and stepped back, slightly raising his shotgun, “Did it bite through your jeans?” asked Matt more forcefully.

“No, they have not bitten me yet,” I said, as I took a defensive posture and put my hand on the my gun. “Why do you want to know that?” I said, stepping back a little.

“Neither have I,” said Matt, looking back at the wiggling corpse.  He pointed his shotgun at the face of the creature but hesitated.  “He can’t move, and we need to save the ammo,” said Matt as he lowered his weapon and pointed at the monster.  It took me a few seconds, but I figured out what he was trying to say.  I brought my sword up over my head and chopped at the neck of the unfortunate creature.  The blow landed solid but did not kill it, passing only about halfway through his neck.  The body stopped moving but the head was still chomping away.  I pulled the sword out and aimed for the head this time.  The second blow made contact in the eye socket area.  This time the creature stopped completely.

Neither of us felt comfortable keeping one of those people in the room with us so we pulled the body out from under the shelving and merchandise and stuck him in the female restroom.  It was funny to think that we were still concerned with the gender of a restroom at that time.  We could see that he also used to be an employee of that store.  We guessed that the snarling corpse, Steve by his name tag, must have been overcome by the disease after he had gotten into the store that morning, or he was there the night before and never left.  We also put that same bookshelf in front of the door just in case Steve could get back up.

We slept in the thrift store that night, or at least tried to.  I had not had a chance to really think about what had happened throughout the day, until we sat down in the back of the store.  We both attempted to sleep with our backs to the wall furthest from any doors or windows.  The building did not have many windows and they were mostly warehouse style, high off of the ground.  The rain outside had stopped completely, and the air was becoming crisp.  I heard so many unfamiliar noises: gunshots, explosions, car alarms that no one would ever shut off.  Matt was able to get to sleep much faster than I could and when I did get to sleep, I was woken by the sound of shuffling feet just outside of the front door.

As I began to reach for my Glock, I heard Matt say, “It’s just one, and it’s not trying to get in.  Go back to sleep.”

I paused when he spoke up, but I still wrapped my fingers around the polymer handle of my weapon and pulled it close.

I sat still, looking out the front door at the wandering female corpse.  She looked like a lost tourist, trying desperately to find someone who spoke her language.  I felt myself become compassionate for her almost to the point where I was going to stand up and introduce myself.  Then it hit me,
Am I losing it?
  I had experienced a lot of things that I had never seen, heard, or done and I felt like it was playing games with my head.

“What if we are it?” I whispered to Matt.

“What?” said Matt in a half sleeping voice.

“I mean, what if everyone else on the planet is already like them?” I replied.

“That would really suck,” whispered Matt as he made himself more comfortable.

I slowly drifted off to sleep next to my new friend.  Neither of us had any idea what we were about to face or what we would do to survive it all.  Both of us would have to fight for our lives. In the days ahead, I would have to do things that would change me forever.

Dream #2...

I open my eyes and once again I am alone.  I have nothing but what I am wearing and a strange looking thermos in my left hand.  The thermos is silver and has a hole punched in the top of it with a stiff string sticking out of the hole.  I am very high off of the ground and there is some kind of large metal framework all around me.  The frame is not that of a building but that of a roller coaster.  I am standing very still and looking up toward the sky.  I slowly look down to the ground and it appears that the ground is several hundred feet below.  Something is not right about the ground below, it moves.  As I stare at the ground I realize that it is not the ground moving but thousands of
them
.

“Where are you?” I hear myself whisper.  Again I raise my eyes to the sky and I begin to search the clouds.  I hear metal clanging down near the ground.  They are becoming restless and cannot forget that I am standing here, no matter how still I stand.  The noise below changes.  Now the sound is not a mindless beating noise but a more quiet clatter.  I look down again and gasp in fear...they are starting to climb.  I yell this time, “Where are you?!”  I start frantically searching the sky, my eyes bouncing to every dark spot in the clouds.  I reach into my right pocket and pull out a cheap plastic lighter.  “He said he would try to get here, but he also said not to count on him.”  I whisper to myself.  I look beneath my feet and at the ground level I see my mark.  A large pile of barrels in the back of a truck, which is parked at the base of the coaster, waits for my action.

I flick the lighter creating a small flame, dancing in the breeze.  I scan the mixture of blue and white above my head one last time and bring my hands together.  When the flame makes contact with the fuse sticking out of the silver canister, the fuse flares for moment and begins to sizzle.  I can feel my heart pounding and for an instant I think I can hear it too.  “That isn’t my heart, it’s him,” I yell.  Something is wrong though.  The helicopter is smoking from the engine area and it looks as though he is having trouble keeping it in the air.  Then I remember the explosive in my left hand.  “Shoot!” I gasp.  I begin to throw the explosive canister down toward the truck when I hear someone walking on the same platform that I am standing on.

Just as I release the thermos I see the remains of a young female member of the park workforce stumbling very close to me.  I rear back and lunge forward to shove her over the side of the platform, but just as I see her begin to fall uncontrollably, I realize that I am also beginning to fall.  She’s grabbed onto my shirt and is pulling me over with her.  I reach and grasp desperately for anything, but I am already out of reach.  I feel myself begin to accelerate toward the ground and yet my decomposing companion is still trying to pull me into her rotting teeth.  I look up toward the smoking helicopter just in time to see it smash into the platform I had just been standing on.  Debris begins to fly everywhere.  A small chunk of metal strikes me in the stomach and embeds itself in my abdomen.

I turn my head toward the crowd waiting to welcome me and watch as the thermos explodes just feet above the barrels in the truck.  Suddenly one of the barrels bursts into a ball of fire.  I feel a great overpressure as the rest of the barrels ignite.  There is a blinding flash of light and immense pain.

CHAPTER 8 - The more the...just more...

My eyes flew open and I grabbed onto the floor.  Matt was standing in front of me with a flashlight pointed at my face.

“I tried nudging you, poking you and calling your name.  I was beginning to think you were not going to wake up,” said Matt as he stopped pinching me on the side of my neck.

“It’s still dark out.  Why are we already getting up?” I said as I began to gather my things.

“I’m not sure yet if it makes any difference but if they do have trouble seeing us in the dark, I think we should take advantage of it,” said Matt with a smirk on his face.  We hadn’t gotten much sleep but the couple of hours we got felt good after a very long, strange day.

We both took a few minutes to count supplies before leaving.  I topped off the magazines I still had left, which left me with only seven rounds in the box and ten in each of the two magazines.  I found some cleaning supplies behind the front counter and decided to wipe off all of the blood and dirt from my hands and face.  I also wiped off the blade of my sword, and as I did, a thought came to mind.  The coagulated blood had become very sticky and was starting to smell pretty bad.  I wondered how much contact with the fluids of the infected it would take before becoming one of them, or if one could get infected at all by contact with fluids alone.  I looked at my hands and pant legs and realized that I did not feel sick or anything.  So the infection must not be from contact alone. 
Maybe the infection only comes from the bites
, I thought.

I looked over at Matt and saw him finish topping off his twelve-gauge.

“Where to now?” I asked as I looked around the shop for more supplies.

“Well, we’ve got a little food in my car, but I don’t have much gas,” said Matt as he stood still and pondered for a moment. “I think we’re both running low on ammo about now.”

I was just about to make a suggestion of my own when Matt said, “This place is not too bad.  The front door poses a slight problem but I think it could be boarded up.  Otherwise, the windows are high off of the ground, the walls are concrete, and there are some supplies here, but nothing that is going to attract looters.”

“Yeah, I see your points, but staying here is not going to solve any of our problems.  We still need ammunition, more food, medical supplies, clean water, gas, and more people,” I said, feeling as though Matt might be giving up.

“Calm down.  You missed my point completely.  We could use this place as a fallback just in case we get into a jam,” said Matt with a very annoyed look on his face.

“Well, what are you suggesting we do then?”

“This is ours for the time being, and I don’t think we should be so quick to give it up,” said Matt, as he seemed to be looking around for some particular item.

Matt found a tool set sitting on one of the shelves.  It was missing a few of the tools but most of what we would need was still in the box.  We carefully took apart a wooden bench, a couple of dressers, a table, and a bookshelf.  We used the nails and screws left over from taking apart the furniture to make the reinforcements.

“Well, let’s get started,” said Matt as he placed a board across the front door.  Before he could pound in the first nail, I said, “Wait a sec.  How are we going to get out of here once we board it all up?”

“I’m sure there is some kind of roof access,” said Matt, pointing to the back of the store.

“Yeah, but let’s check it out first.”  I walked to the rear doors.

The roof access was just as Matt had thought.  It was in the back of the store, but getting to it seemed to be another story.  It was about twelve feet off of the ground and the slide-down ladder was locked in place.  We tried every key on the key ring but none of them fit the padlock.  We pulled a shelf over to the hatch and climbed up to it that way.  I held the shelf while Matt climbed up to the three-foot-by-three-foot hatch.  Once at the top, Matt could see that there was another pad lock on the hatch itself.

“Great!  I’m sure none of these keys fit this lock either,” said Matt as he hung his head.

“Try them anyway,” I whispered as I threw the keys up to Matt.

Matt tried three of the keys with no luck, but the fourth key actually fit.

“Shut up,” said Matt as he unlocked the hatch.  Matt managed to pull himself through the opening and disappeared.  I stood staring up at the dark, cloudy sky and suddenly I really wanted Matt to let me know how it was out on the roof.  I know it was only a matter of one or two minutes, but standing in that cold, dark building by myself, with a bunch of dead people outside, was a little more than I wanted to deal with.

“Hey...Matt…what’d you see up there?” I whispered as loud as possible.

There was a very long, silent pause.  Then I heard footsteps walking across the roof, but they sounded like they were going away from the roof access.  I shook the shelf to see if it seemed sturdy enough for me to climb up without someone to hold the shelf.  The shelf seemed as though it would hold.  I climbed very carefully up the shelf until I reached the hatch.  I slowly peaked up out of the hatch, not knowing what I was going to see.  Matt was standing next to the edge of the roof near the front of the store.  He was standing very still and looking over the edge, toward the ground.  I steadied my footing on top of the shelf and shoved off to pull myself up. 
CRASH!
  The shelf fell over and smashed to the floor.  I was left halfway out of the hatch, trying to get onto the roof.

“What did you do?” Matt loudly whispered as he jogged across the roof to pull me out of the hole.

“I’m sorry!  I think I knocked over the shelf,” I said rather frantically.

“Why couldn’t you just wait?  I would have pulled you up,” said Matt as he finished pulling me onto the roof.  He was looking around and appeared to be pretty concerned.

“Shh!  Listen,” Said Matt.

“What do you hear?” I said, as I began to look around myself.

THUMP, THUMP, THUMP!
  One of the wandering corpses began to slam its rotting arms against the front of the store.  We both stayed low and began to make our way across the roof toward the front of the store.  We peaked over the ledge at the front of the store and saw a female corpse pounding furiously against the front of the store.  We didn’t realize it until we got out onto the roof, but the rain clouds had cleared just enough to let some moonlight through.  At this point, all of the streetlights were off and only one or two businesses in the area had any lights on.  We were mostly surrounded by darkness.

We decided that moving from our location in the dark would be a bad idea.  If anything went wrong we could find ourselves cornered very fast.  Besides that, we didn’t know if the corpses could see in the dark, smell us, or just somehow knew where we were.  The noise the excited female was making at the front of the store was attracting more of them.  For some reason they did not appear to be in any hurry to get to where she was though.  Some of them even lost interest and walked away before reaching her.

We sat up on the roof for about an hour just watching the shadows move.  The female and the group that joined her at the front of the store stopped pounding after about a half an hour when a single vehicle drove past the store.  They all began to run after the vehicle and disappeared into the darkness.

As I watched the ragged female run into the dark, I thought to myself,
I wonder how long that group would have pounded on the building?

“C’mon, let’s go finish sleeping.  My watch says it’s about five in the morning.  We’ve got about two hours of darkness left,” said Matt as he made his way back inside of the building.

I stood up and looked into the darkness in all directions.

One day.  All of this happened in one day
, I thought as I walked back to the roof hatch.

Matt was standing underneath the hatch inside the building.  The climb up didn’t seem as high as the climb down was going to be.

“How did you get down there without killing yourself?”

“Just slide your legs into the opening slowly and hang by your hands.  Then let go and roll when you hit the ground,” said Matt in a very
duh
tone.

I just knew I was going to break my leg or something.  I slid on my stomach and put my feet through the hole in the roof.  There wasn’t much to hold onto when I got to the point where I had to hang by my hands.  I dangled for a couple of seconds as the thought of how bad of an idea it was to drop that far passed through my head.  I let go and dropped to the floor.  When I hit the floor I tried to roll but the store was dark and I ended up rolling into the fallen shelf.

“Nice moves,” said Matt as he walked back to where we had left all of our gear.

“I’m just glad that I can still walk,” I said as I attempted to get back up without showing that I had hit my back on the shelf.

We decided we were better off being able to see when we moved.  We both sat on the floor again with our backs to the wall and our weapons close by.  I fell asleep much faster this time but my sleep was not as hard as this first time.

I woke with a ray of sunlight filtering through my eyelids.  The thought of everything having been a nightmare passed through my head, but only until I realized I had been sleeping on the floor of a thrift store.  My back was stiff and all of my stuff was gone.  I began to panic.  Stiff back or not I started spinning in circles looking for Matt or my stuff.  Just as I was about to give up and sit down on the floor in self-pity, Matt burst in through the front door of the store.

“I got our stuff in your truck, but we’ve got to go now!” said Matt as fast as he could get it out.

“My gun...my sword,” was about all I could get out.

“They’re up here by the door!  Get your crap and move!” said Matt, looking over his shoulder toward the parking lot.

Just then Matt ran back out the door into the bright hazy morning.  I ran for the door and grabbed my weapons.  I shoved my right hand into my pants pocket and pulled out my keys.  I lifted my eyes and saw why Matt was in a hurry.

I don’t know where they all came from but they seemed to be coming from everywhere.  Hundreds of corpses were coming for us.  Some were staggering, some stumbling forwards, and some were at almost a full sprint.  I heard the blast of Matt’s twelve-gauge cut through the air.  Then I realized that some of them had already made it into the parking lot.

“Open the doors!  I’ve only got three shots left in this!” yelled Matt, standing with his back to the passenger’s door to my truck.

I ran to the driver’s door and stuck the key into the lock.  Suddenly I was thrown to the ground.  I rolled over and pulled out my sword.  A rotting male stood at the front of the truck. He was probably about two hundred and fifty pounds and looked as though he had been killed a few days ago.  He did not move very fast, but I knew that if he managed to get a good grip, that would be it for me.  While lying on the ground, I whipped my sword back and swung with all of my weight.  I heard the crunch when the edge made contact with his left knee.  There was no grimace of pain on his face, only a brief glance at his knee.  Then his eyes shifted back to me.

I began to shuffle backwards as the large corpse began moving toward me.  He took a step with his right leg and then his left, but I noticed his leg wobbled when he put weight on it.  I lunged forward and took another swing at his left knee. The leg bent to the side and he collapsed to the ground right at my feet.  Again I pushed myself back to get away from him while he continued to lurch and reach for me.  I rolled to the side and half stood and stumbled forward.

I turned back to see the bloody mess dragging itself across the asphalt.  I ran toward him and kicked him right under the chin.  He finally stopped after I smashed my dull blade into the back of his skull.  But just as I finished it off, I heard Matt’s shotgun blasting again on the other side of the truck.

“I’m out! Open the door NOW!” screamed Matt.

I ran over to the truck and turned the key still in the door.  I jumped across the seat and unlocked Matt’s door.  Just as I did, I saw Matt swing his shotgun and strike the side of a deceased teenaged boy’s head.