ZPD 8.11

I remember thinking it was a strange place to be.  To wake up in a Walmart outdoors display, and instantly prepare ones self for battle is odd.  It’s also odd when your dreams are about living a normal life, and you wake to a nightmare of freakish horror.  The human body was never meant for such things… mine wasn’t anyway.

Pete was again using his heavily stained club of a baseball bat to injure every tweak running at him.  They were coming through the front door, and Pete was using the lobby area as a choke point.  Guy grabbed her shotgun, and I grabbed my rifle.  We loaded up as we walked.  It’s important not to run while loading your weapon.  It might go off prematurely, or worse, it might never fire at all.

Pete was handling himself fine, but he was breathing pretty hard when Guy shot her first.

"Took you long enough!" he said.  I ignored him.  He was just being grumpy.  I’m not a morning person myself really.

I shot the last one standing in the lobby, and ran quickly to the door to take a look outside.  I don’t know if there were 20, or 40, or a thousand, but there was a group of them coming, and I couldn’t see the end of them.  I shut the door in a hurry and looked everywhere for a lock.  I couldn’t find it.

"Where’s the lock?" I shouted

"How should I know?" Pete answered.  He looked ready to club down a few more, but he hadn’t seen the swarm.

"There’s a lock here, on the sliding door." Guy said.  The door connecting the entrance to the rest of the store had a small bolted latch.  It wasn’t much, but it was something.  As I turned around, and ran inside there were tweaks right behind me.  They came into the entrance way, bounded over the bodies inside and hit the glass sliding door before we could shut it.  Guy shrieked as one hand came close enough to almost get a grip on her arm.  She turned aside and shot into the gap.  I guess she hoped it would hurt them, or scare them away.  They just stuck more arms through.  It was a horrible sight.  There were so many that the ones in the back started pushing the ones in front into the glass against their will.  The faces of those men did not turn their attention from us for one second.  They stared, and moved dangerously about, smashing their own faces against the glass and drawing blood.  Pete was pushing on the door to keep it shut, and I was pulling on it.  He had his back to them, but I was forced to see everything.

Guy had shot a few of them, but she was putting her gun down and fishing in her pack at this point.

"Guy, help us out here will ya?" Pete said.

My hands were tired, and I was sweating enough to make it slippery.  I slipped off the door for moment, and the tweaks got an extra shove.  We would have been overwhelmed if Petes hand hadn’t been jammed in between the door and glass partition.  He yelped, and I got back into position.  Guy finished what she had been doing and fired two more shots inside the gap.  That made them back off enough, and we were able to get the door shut.  She had used buckshot.  Guy turned the latch, and we stood back to see if it could hold.

The entrance was like a meat grinder.  They kept pushing and smashing and pulling and grasping.  One turned against another, and they killed each other like mad dogs.  We had to turn away.

"That’s awful" Guy said

"I know.  It’s terrible, but we’re safe for now at least."

"Says you." Pete interrupted, "I think my hand is broken.  It doesn’t look like their gonna stop until they get in here. What if they find another way?  They look pretty stupid right now, but it only takes one to get smart, and then we have another fight on our hands."

"It was stupid of us to leave the door unlocked last night.  Come to think of it, we didn’t do a really good job checking the place out either.  We were lucky we didn’t get jumped earlier."

"So what now?" Guy asked.  She looked scared, but her voice sounded strong.  I hoped my voice sounded that strong.

"We find the other ways in.  Actually, we find the other ways out."

"Ways out?  Why don’t we just stay here?" She asked.

I didn’t have to reply right away.  The insanity against the glass was causing it to moan under the stress of it all.

"Pete’s right.  Either they find a new way in, or this one’s gonna give way.  We need to get out while we have the time to figure this out."

"So we split up and find another exit." Pete nodded

"No, not this time" I told him.  "This time we stick together.  If we find an exit, let’s be sure there isn’t a hundred tweakers on the other side ready to tear us to pieces."

"Let me look at your hand Pete." Guy asked.  It was cut pretty bad on his left, where the pinky gets connected to the hand.  It was bruised too, already starting to turn color.

"It’s fine, just give me something to wrap it with." He said, and she did.

Now I’ve already gone into what makes WalMart such a great place for an apocalyptic survivor, but if you ever need to escape one, it can be tricky.  Fire exits are all clearly marked, and they’re a brilliant bit of design too.  Most fire exits don’t have handholds on the other side, so it makes them useless as entry points unless you have the faculty to use a crowbar.  The down side to fire exits, is that they offer no visual of your escape path.  Leaving a building without knowing what’s in front of you is like leaping out of a frying pan, into a fire.  You could run into a dead end, or a gang of freaks, or both.  The first step in making your escape, is knowing which way to run.

The best way to do this is to find some sort of window, and plot it out.  It gets trickier when there are no windows to be found in a WalMart superstore.  If you’re stuck in a box with no windows, stick your head out carefully and hope it doesn’t get bit off.  Better yet, make a new window.  Luckily enough, we didn’t have to do either of these things.  During our quick patrol, we found the door to the employees only break area, and managers offices.  The door was protected by a keycard lock, but we just borrowed a card from my dead friend at the gun counter, and let ourselves in.  Behind the door were stairs, and we climbed as quietly as we could.  After coming so close to death in the morning, it puts the rest of your day on high alert.

The break room was a messy depressing room, but the managers offices had windows, and that’s all we needed.  By opening those, we could get onto the roof.  Guy went back to get rope (one of the few things we forgot to pick up), and we all crawled outside.

"Anyone afraid of heights?" she teased, as we all looked over the edge.  The front door was completely surrounded.  Our car was in the middle of the crowd.  We wouldn’t be

driving out of there.  At least not in that car.

"So?  What now?"  She asked again.

"Too many to shoot." Pete said.

"Yeah, we need to go round the other side."

We did.  The other side was empty of freaks, or anything else really.  There was a low retaining wall, but nothing we couldn’t hop over, and it looked like this was where the employees parked their cars.  There were a few scattered around still.  We lowered Pete down first.  He held on to the rope with one arm, and walked back down the side of the building while we fed out more rope.  Pete’s a real warrior, even with his hurt hand.  Guy went down next.  She had good form, and it looked like she’d done this sort of thing before.  I went last, and had to breathe deep as I went over the edge.  I hope my face looked brave, but I really did have a thing with heights.  At least heights this high.

The sun was already up, and it had warmed the pavement nicely.  It felt good, even as we were running for our lives.  There were enough cars to choose from in the back, but hotwiring a vehicle is a skill that none of us had.  Pete found an open door on an old Honda, and was trying to mess around with the wires under the dash.  I kept looking, and eventually found a Jeep with a canvas top that looked promising.

It’s strange that I say "promising" because in fact, it had blood stains on the insides of the windows, and when I opened the door a body fell out.  It’s always easier to steal a car though, when the keys are in the ignition, and you know the owner won’t be using it anymore.  Everything inside the jeep smelled terrible, so the first thing I did was tear away the canvas top.  It was warm enough with the sun out, we didn’t need to smell death all day.  I started it up, and both Guy and Pete jumped in.  We were parked against the retaining wall, and no sooner had I backed out, then the first tweakers came around the building.  I gunned it, and did as best I could to avoid crashing into them, or any other obstacles.  I did clip a few, and one even went under the back tire.  That made us jump, and Guy sitting in the back was almost tossed.  She held on to the bar then, and we made it out alive.

We were lucky.  It being our first scavenging trip, we had come away pretty clean besides Pete’s hand.  The next question was obvious.

"Where do we go now?"

Pete asked it first.  We all came up with a few ideas.

"We could go to a police station"

"I have some family up North.  They have a bomb shelter."

"We could stay away from the cities.  Live in the woods for a while."

…

Eventually, I pulled over.

"Listen, we’ve been lucky.  We’ve stayed alive, and a whole lot of people haven’t.  It’s terrible.  We just can’t be the last one’s left.  There has to be others.  The red pill wasn’t so popular that everyone in the world got sick.  We just need to find people like us.  Maybe we can do something, if we have the numbers to help."

"That sounds nice, but how do we find anyone?  If they survived, it means they’re in hiding, or they’re fighting for their lives." Guy said.

"Then we help them fight." Pete said.  I was glad he was on my side in this.

"When Pete and I were up the tree, we heard gun shots.  Lots of shots, especially around dawn and dusk.  I’ve never seen a tweaker use a gun."

"So by following the sounds of gunshots, we find sane people."

"Well… yeah."