Justin had lined up his shot. “Dad do you want me to kill it?” he asked.
I knew deep down in my subconscious she was dangerous, as any beautiful woman was, and she felt worse, much worse. But I couldn’t find it in my humanity to kill if we weren’t in danger. She made no threatening move whatsoever, her eyes watching us warily, and that shook me because I knew there was more than some rudimentary intelligence going on. We sat there and just stared.
“Dad?” Justin asked again. He wanted this standoff done.
“Put the gun down. Alex, get us the fuck out of here,” I said, never tearing my eyes from her.
I heard Spindler gasp, so I know he saw what I did. The zombie woman nodded once, as in ‘thank you’ for not killing her. I shuddered, but nobody else in the van was the wiser. Looking back just a few short weeks later, I wish I had let Justin shoot her.
When I got my composure back, I was able to rationalize the nod as stress induced or just perception problems. I knew better though, I’d wished Spindler hadn’t seen it too. It would have made it a lot easier to brush this away if there hadn’t been a corroborating witness.
“Alex, drive behind the Lowe’s store,” I said with a quaver in my voice. Luckily everyone else was too busy scanning the area to notice the octave change.
“Mike, you heard Jed, we need to get food first and then worry about the wood for the turrets,” Alex bemoaned.
“Yeah, Jed would say that, the old geezer hasn’t done one shift on those god-awful things. I can barely sleep because of the pain in my legs.”
Alex opened his mouth to say something but I cut him off. “Come on Alex, I know what I’m doing, how much food do you think we’re going to fit in here anyway? Go to the back of the store, I can almost guarantee they’ll have a big rig there, we’ll fill it with all the supplies and food we’d need for a year.”
“Mike, I don’t know how to drive a rig,” Alex pleaded.
“No sweat,” I said as I put on my best bull-shitting smile. “I drove one back in my Marine Corps days.”
He eyed me a little dubiously, if he had stared at me a little longer I would have cracked and just forgotten the whole damn plan.
My whole half-hour of driving a big rig had started as a dare from a fellow Marine friend of mine. We had been drinking all night at the base watering hole and had just started walking home to the barracks. We had passed the armory and a giant camouflaged truck sat in the parking lot.
“Betcha can’t drive us home in that,” my drinking buddy Chuck Blaylock dared.
“Can so,” I blustered as I began to squeeze my way through the locked gate.
“What the fuck are ya doing?” Chuck asked, almost as if he had already forgotten what he had dared me about.
He had; unfortunately, my short-term memory wasn’t as bad. I got up into the cab and turned over the ignition, which allowed the glow plugs to warm up. There was no need for keys, like all military vehicles there was no such thing as keys. It would do no good if in the heat of battle the driver was killed or blown apart and the keys disappeared with him. You get my point, right? So within half a minute of getting through the gate the truck roared to life. I lurched the truck forward.
“Crap, there’s a bunch of gears,” I mumbled. I was paying more attention to the shift box than I was the gate. I barely looked up as I crashed through it. The truck stalled, Chuck hopped into the cab from the passenger side.
“’Bout time,” he said, and then he started snoring softly.
The barracks was only two streets over but I was so inebriated I had lost all sense of direction. When the eight trailing military police hummers had pulled us over, I was ten miles from home, had destroyed three cars and one guard shack. All in all, not a great ending to a great night. At my court-martial, the officer in charge of the proceedings, Colonel Laret, went easy on me. First off because the truck I was driving hadn’t blown half the state away. Unbeknownst to us the truck was packed with C-4 explosive. I could have served life in prison at Leavenworth for that alone. When it was all said and done, I had lost two stripes (demoted from sergeant to lance corporal), three months' pay and one year of confinement to the barracks. Chuck lost a stripe just for getting in the cab. They also sent him to another duty station, Okinawa, Japan, so we couldn’t be together to cause any more havoc. I was going to miss Chuck to no end, but this beat a life sentence at Leavenworth, and because of the hard labor, a life sentence at Leavenworth equated to seven years. So long story short, technically I had driven a big rig even if I had no recollection of it.
As it was, there were three trucks parked at Lowe’s. Two were still mostly full, and the third looked as if it had just finished off-loading. That was going to be the one we wanted. We fanned out on the loading bay, thankful that this one was lit up like a spring day. The light was welcome, the sights however weren’t. There had been a brief but intense fight here. Some zombies had re-died and so had a bunch of truckers and dock crew. They had fought with tire-irons, chains and even a floor tile stripper. Gore littered the floor. The only thing alive in here was the incessant buzzing of the flies. Curiously the flies, which I thought of as one of the nastiest creatures on the planet next to cockroaches, wanted nothing to do with the zombies. They covered the remains of the humans, but not a one alit on any of the zombies. Even flying cockroaches knew better. I was thankful that it was early December and not a hot sweltering day in August; the smell was already fetid. I couldn’t begin to imagine what the smell would be like heated up to 98 degrees. I would have liked to have pulled the bodies out of the bay and onto the parking lot, but I didn’t see the point. There were bound to be a lot more bodies in the store itself, and stopping to dispose of all of them would just be eating into precious time. I left Spindler to guard our rear echelon while the rest of us went forward to check out the store. When I swung open the large swinging doors I soon discovered the inside was much more malodorous than the airy bay. I motioned for the small party to retreat. Confusion and fear crossed their features. I calmed my tumbling stomach by pulling in great breaths of the air I had previously thought was fetid.
“We’re going to need Vick’s or something like that to put under our noses,” I said, when I felt like I could finally speak without bits of discharge intermingling with my words.
We hunted for a couple of minutes, never finding the coveted Vick’s. Travis discovered some cologne in one of the metal desks that lined every bay. We made some makeshift bandannas and soaked them in the cologne. So we went back to the swinging doors looking like the best smelling bandits this side of the Mississippi. The redolence of Eau de Death will haunt my olfactory nerves for the rest of my days. The one good thing about the swinging doors, besides being able to prop them open and get air, was that it had allowed the zombies to escape. In the long run that may have been bad, but for right now it was a welcome blessing. We did, however, do a thorough search of the entire store before we began our supply run, just in case there were undead lurkers still roaming about.
I had the unenviable task of finding the keys to the big rig. My biggest fear was that the drivers were all zombified and had just walked off, keys and all. The dockworkers were all dressed the same, blue jeans, light colored shirts and blue smocks. All I needed to do was find some fat men with jackets on. It’s stereotypical but I was in a hurry. After a few minutes of looking I was rewarded, or more likely punished. I had found my quarry. There were two men on the loading bay that fit the description. I was looking for the one that was a little less decomposed than the other. I flipped the first guy over. The left side of his face had been removed. Jagged strips of flesh were all that remained. His left eye had been chewed in half, like a bad Entenmann’s chocolate. Something had bitten into it and decided they didn’t like the flavor and had left it for someone else. My stomach wasn’t going to be right for a week after this.