So as a result, the insides of most places are dangerous as all hell. The walkers can just come and go as they please. Seems like a lot of them like to be inside. They seem to be drawn indoors, perhaps because that’s where they mostly stayed before. I don’t really know why, and I don’t much care; all I do know is that when looking around in a grocery store like the one Alicia and I are about to enter, you need to be careful.
The Carson twins had carried guns. I don’t know if they had them before or just found them along the way. Whatever kind of guns they were, I never noticed. Didn’t matter anyway-when the twins died, they took those guns with them.
I’ve never fired a gun. I never really felt qualified to handle one. I think if I had a gun, I’d probably just shoot myself in the foot, or worse. It’s not like a toy; the triggers actually require quite a bit of pressure, or so I’ve heard.
The mechanics of the whole thing seem beyond me. Point, stay steady, shoot… It seems so simple; maybe I’m overthinking it. But don’t you have to cock most guns? And aren’t they supposed to be cleaned regularly or else they jam up? I’ve watched movies where people take guns apart to clean them and there’s all kinds of little springs and shit inside. That baffles me. I’m supposed to somehow figure out how to take a gun apart and put it back together? No fucking way.
Then there’s the sound, which is the number one thing that will draw walkers to you. Firing a gun is like ringing the dinner bell. You may think to yourself: Well, how do you attack them, then? You don’t. Or I don’t, anyway. I run. Anyone who’s smart runs. You see one, you go the other way. If it hasn’t seen you, just keep walking-even at a leisurely pace-and you’ll be just fine. Shoot it and the next thing you know you’re surrounded, and then you’ll be dead.
Guns just aren’t practical.
So if you find yourself in the middle of a large group of walkers-gun or no gun-you’re dead. That’s all there is to it. Only reason you’d want a gun in that situation is so you can turn it on yourself before they tear into you.
That’s another reason I don’t carry one: I know I might be tempted to do just that, and I was always told growing up that suicide was a one-way ticket straight to hell. Not that I necessarily buy into all that, but I’m hedging my bets, or rather, I had been. I don’t know if that should be a concern of mine anymore.
So I carry a knife. You’d be surprised how easy it is to push a knife into one of their faces. If they get too close, or you don’t see them until they’re practically right on top of you, which has happened to me exactly once, you stab them in the face. Didn’t kill it right away the time I did it. More like made a handle on the thing’s head for me to push it away with. They’re not very strong. I knocked it over and wiggled the blade around until it messed its brain up enough that it stopped moving.
Alicia is what you would call petite, so you wouldn’t think a bat would be much use to her, but that’s her weapon of choice. Thing is, you don’t really have to bash a walker’s brains in. The idea is to knock them off balance, and Alicia’s a pro at that. She knocks them in the head with that bat, next thing you know they’re down on their side trying to figure out which way is up, and by then we’re long gone.
Alicia is walking out front. She turns to me just before stepping into the store, shushing me, as if I don’t already know to be quiet. The windows in this place have all been smashed out and there’s broken glass all over the ground, so being quiet is going to be pretty much impossible. If there’s something in there, we’re going to know it right away. And vice versa.
The grocery store is dimly lit from the daylight outside. The front area of the store is in clear view, but anything past that fades into black quickly, especially with our eyes adjusting from the brightness of the midday sun. I’ve never understood why these types of places don’t have windows anywhere but in the front.
The store is small, not a big-time grocery. It’s old, dated, like it’s from the late seventies-the kind of place that just never updated its look. I would have hated shopping here before. It would have reminded me of my childhood, depressed me. This is the kind of place Diane liked. Nostalgic, she would have called it.
“Get your flashlight out,” Alicia whispers.
Looks like I’ll be going into the back. That’s fine, I certainly don’t want Alicia taking the big risks. I can run faster than her. That’s the one thing I’m sure I’m better at.
In places like this, turning the flashlight on causes me no end of anxiety. I’m standing next to a wall of blackness, fiddling around in my backpack for the flashlight. When I finally get it out, there are those few seconds that tick by between turning it on and pointing it at what you’re going to see.
I dread those seconds.
There’s no telling what the flashlight is going to show. There could be a dozen walkers, standing there, patiently waiting to inform me that there will be no treasures to be found here and that I will soon be dead.
Empty shelves, for the most part.
That’s what I see. It’s at once a relief and a huge disappointment. This place has been picked clean.
Alicia is calling me over; she’s found some beef jerky. Usually that’s one of the first things people grab, but this box fell behind one of the check-out counters. I find a can of opened Pringles near a pile of other cans that have been stepped on. I’d eat them, stale and all, but there are bound to be bugs-or worse yet, mice-inside.
In the back of the store I struggle to spend the proper amount of time examining the shelves. The meat section is in the back. As you go down the aisles, the putrid smell intensifies. With each step I think, This is as bad as it’s going to get…until I take another.
Nobody ever took the meat at any of the places we’d been to. The lack of refrigeration makes storing processed meats pretty much impossible. I doubt anyone ever took so much as one package. They just sit in the dark and rot. Even the animals know better than to eat it after a while; they just tear the packages to shit, treating us to the smell.
It stinks in here almost worse than the walkers. You’d think after a while you would become accustomed to all the smells of today’s world. No running water, the stench of death hanging in the air at every turn. Really, though, they aren’t the kind of smells you get used to. You spend so much time in the open air that you have no chance to build up a tolerance. The good part about that is that half the time you smell the walkers before you ever see them.
Of course, if you’re standing near a months-old meat cooler in the back of a dark grocery store, one of them could practically be standing right beside you and you wouldn’t even know it.
And I don’t.
It lumbers forward, reaching for me with that blind grab they all do. I step back, quickly, but careful not to back myself into a corner-I’d done that far too many times to let it happen again.
The walker comes at me, turning the corner, coming at me from the end of the cereal aisle, and all I can think of is Alicia.
“You okay up there?” I yell to her.
“Oh, my God, Timothy!”
She’s rushing down one of the aisles behind the thing, coming toward us. I can’t see her, but I can hear her footsteps as she rushes to my rescue.
“I’m okay! Stay where you are! Don’t-”
Her scream keeps me from finishing my sentence. Another walker has gotten to her.
I continue to struggle with the walker, keeping its gnashing teeth at bay, then manage to jam the knife into its neck. I’d been aiming for its face but there was no time to try for a kill shot now. Pushing it aside I make a break toward the sound of Alicia’s voice. I’m still not quite sure exactly where she is. I blaze across the aisles looking for her, but she’s farther away than I had thought.