“With what?” Nancy wanted to know. “Loafs of rye bread? Cans of Mini Ravioli?”
“Guns,” Ruby Sue piped up. “We’ll stop ’em with guns.”
Nancy looked at her. “And where, pray tell, will we get those?”
Ruby Sue grinned. “You gotta be prepared, girl. It’s what the Boy Scouts say.” She opened her coat and pulled out a shiny black automatic about the size of a paperback book. “Course, they don’t pack this kind of firepower.”
“Jesus,” Ben said, running a hand through his beard, “is it real?”
Nancy shook her head. “No, it’s a fucking squirt gun, Ben.”
“Yes, it’s real,” Ruby Sue said.
It seemed a reasonable question to her.
She hefted it in the air, taking up a firing stance and mouthing Bang! Bang! soundlessly. She went up to Ben, rubbed against him, pressed the gun into his hand like she was offering her tit—which, Nancy decided, probably would be next—and wrapped his fingers around it. “Take it, Ben. It’s yours. You know how to work it?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
She showed him the safety catch. How to work the slide to jack a round into the chamber. “See? Easy. Easy as pie, honey.”
Nancy sat there, thinking: I can’t believe her. Right in front of me yet.
Nancy was looking her up and down now.
Yeah, she was a slutty little airhead, all right. And that would have been fine except that she had a nice body on her, too. Face wasn’t the best, but cute in a girl-next-door sort of way. Nancy’s skin felt hot. She hadn’t had curves like that since she was nineteen.
“Is this legal? Full auto?” Ben asked.
“Fuck no!” Ruby Sue said, still maintaining body contact with him via hip and arm. “But I won’t tell if you don’t.”
Ben smiled. “You should keep it. In case there’s trouble.”
“Don’t want anything happening to me?” Ruby Sue seethed. “That’s cool. Don’t worry, Joe has others.”
“Others?” Nancy said incredulously.
“What do you think’s in his bag, Nanc? Cookies? We came here to do something. We came prepared,” she said and said no more on the subject. “You keep this one, Ben. I want you to have it.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“Just point it and shoot. Bam! Dick through a donut.”
“You’re definitely handy,” he said and Nancy did not like his tone at all.
“Oh, you’d be surprised how handy I can be.” Ruby Sue’s words dripped with sex.
Nancy hopped off the counter. “Excuse me,” she said. “But I’m right here and I happen to be his wife.”
“Lighten up,” Ruby Sue said. “I won’t break him.”
Nancy stared, eyes gone liquid green.
“Way I’m thinking,” Ruby Sue said, oblivious to it all, “is that these people here are, like, infected with something. But they’re still human… or almost. What we gotta do is shoot ’em in the heads. You know, like zombies? Blow their brains out. Bet that stops ’em.”
“Shut up!” Nancy cried.
“What—”
“Listen,” she said in a haunted voice. “Listen.”
They did.
They had company.
A group of people had assembled out on the sidewalk. They stood stock-still as if waiting for some sign, some command to begin the inevitable. And then apparently, they received it. They pressed in, a tight knot of white faces and leering eyes.
They pushed up against the glass.
Ruby Sue said, “Oh shit.”
Ben started walking towards the front of the store, the automatic in his fist.
Nancy called to him to come back, but he didn’t. Maybe the gun had given him courage, had turned his balls to drop-forged steel. But maybe he just wanted to see, needed to see what the hell this was all about. Get a good look at these savages, prove to himself that, yes, it was okay to kill them because they weren’t men and women (and children) anymore, just berserkers wearing the skins of the same.
They started beating on the plate glass windows.
A tall man, his chest infibulated with numerous gashes and lesions, pressed his hands flat against the glass door. He seemed to be weighing the possibility of gaining entrance. He tried the door, rattled it violently in its frame, then decided to do things the hard way. He let out a maniacal, blood-curdling scream like someone being roasted over a bed of coals.
It went right up Nancy’s spine like fingernails.
Grinning and foaming at the mouth, he began slamming his face into the glass. Not his fists. Not his feet. His face. He pounded it savagely against the glass, leaving a sticky smear of blood and slime with each impact. With each passing second, he put more and more force behind it until the glass began to bulge with each collision and the pounding reverberation of it rang out like the dirge of a funeral bell.
Then a series of tiny cracks fanned-out, met, and the glass shattered, exploded inward in a rain of jagged spikes.
The tall man stumbled in, his face a bloody ruin, his eyes bright and yellow like a stalking wolf’s. Bathed in blood, he seemed no worse for wear.
A dozen others followed him in.
One, a teenage girl wearing a stained pair of cranberry sweatpants and nothing more, stooped down and scooped up a blade of glass. She held it in her hands, seemed fascinated by it. Then she drew it in a straight line between her breasts down to her navel, slitting open the flesh. Then repeating the process with a transverse cut across her sternum, fashioning a crude, bleeding crucifix.
The blood ran.
She dipped her fingers into it and licked them clean.
Ben stood there, rooted to the spot like an old elm, just watching.
Nancy screamed to him and it seemed to break his trance.
He brought the automatic up and started shooting. He put four slugs into the tall man before it slowed him down. He shot an elderly woman in the head and she fell back, fountaining blood. Next came a set of twin boys, no more than ten or eleven. Only remotely human by this point, they scrambled forward on all fours.
Ben put more bullets in them.
He kept shooting until he used up his ammunition, then he turned and ran, shouting to Nancy to get upstairs, get upstairs.
Nancy turned and saw that Ruby Sue was gone.
No, not gone.
At the deli.
A cadaverous man in a Carhartt jacket had her by the hair and was dragging her back. She stomped on the instep of his work booted-foot, pivoted and kneed him in the groin. He released her, more out of surprise than anything else.
In that brief respite, she snatched up a plastic knife from a tray of them and sank it into his left eye. Then she ducked away and Nancy saw no more of her. Just her retreating form and a naked man with an eagle tattooed on his chest who brandished a severed arm, his penis obscenely erect like a missile.
None of the savages had taken notice of Nancy yet.
Five or six of them were in hot pursuit of Ben.
In the center of a cereal aisle, they boxed him in and lunged forward for the kill. Ben climbed right up the shelves, an avalanche of Cheerios and Frosted Flakes in his wake. He made it to the top of the shelves and stayed there.
A few followed him.
The smarter ones ran to catch him in the next aisle.
But he didn’t jump down, he ran straight down the flat top of the shelves kicking displays and signs out of his way, ducking the ceiling. At the end he dove off, straight at the man in the Carhart jacket, the guy who carried the plastic knife in his gored eye without concern. Ben slammed him flat and rolled off him, making for the rear of the store.