The Book of a Few Page 4

  Sarcasm, I usually like it.

  I shook my head and stated that I wasn’t willing to charge into a fight where we were outnumbered three to one. He slumped back in his seat with a sigh. But while I was looking out at the group of infected, he managed to reach across the console of my car and honk the horn a time or two. The zombies down the road instantly looked our way. A couple yelled a horrific and unbridled scream as they started running toward us.

  I looked over at Branden and wagged a finger in his face. “You asshole!”

  He shrugged, and a coy smile stretched across his cheeks. Silently saying to me, Whatcha gonna do about it? I groaned and turned my attention to the road. The car purred, not roared, like a kitten as it attempted to pick up speed like a Formula One racer when I smashed my foot into the accelerator.

  Branden was, without a doubt, toying with death. This was not the time or setting to be making rash, impulsive, or thoughtless decisions. We will die if he continues to do stupid things like this. Just thinking about his behavior enrages me. He put our lives and our only means of transportation at risk without knowing with absolute confidence that we would get food out of it. A heavy amount of caution will be taken when Branden is around from now on.

  We crashed through the infected—well at least most of them, I think. I couldn’t tell how many we had actually hit because blood drenched the windshield after the first two. The windshield wipers worked, but only small areas of the glass were wiped clean. I could only see through a small portion of the glass by leaning forward and pressing myself into the steering wheel. The sounds of the vehicle hitting the zombies were surprisingly loud, and the car shook hard with each one. I figured we hit them going at least forty-five miles an hour, but I can’t remember.

  Trying with my best effort, I kept the vehicle on the road. Assuming that the few infected we didn’t hit were now running behind us, we didn’t have the option of stopping. I drove as well as I could and tried to safely get us up the hill to the Warehouse. I jerked the wheel after briefly seeing the entrance of the employee parking lot with little time to react. I misjudged its distance and ended up driving up the curb onto the grassy hill that surrounds the fenced-in parking lot.

  I cursed aloud when a metallic cracking sound came from my car. It jumped down the next curb while I was aiming for the drop-down gate. Another loud noise—this time a bang and crunch—reverberated through the car as if I had run over something big. We broke through the wooden drop-down gate, which has an odd resemblance to a railroad crossing. Cracks were spider webbed over the windshield. I would have been rather irate about all the damage to my car, all thanks to Branden, but I was too busy trying to make sure we were going to end up an adequate distance from the pursuing infected when we reached the parking lot.

  I pushed the brakes to a stop about fifty yards up the curved entrance to the employee parking lot. The lot seemed devoid of life from what I could perceive through blood and shattered glass. The car’s steering wheel was pulling pretty hard to the right, and since it seemed safe, I exited the vehicle to look at the damage. The front tire was as flat as can be, the bumper was missing chunks of fiberglass, and the hood was absolutely littered with dings and fist-sized dents. Sighing, I motioned Branden out of the vehicle.

  I opened the rear seat door and began retrieving our firearms. I placed both on the roof of the car, and then grabbed my backpack with our extra ammunition. I slid two small boxes to Branden.

  “What do you think we’ll find inside?” I asked.

  “Well, besides food, probably some people,” Branden said as he opened one of the boxes and began pushing shells into his gun.

  “I didn’t even think about someone already being inside.”

  Groaning and yelling came from behind us—a sure sign that the dead that followed us were close by.

  Branden motioned his head toward the glass entrance of the Warehouse. “There’s a van right there.”

  Sure enough, a small red minivan was parked, unattended, on the sidewalk outside the main doors.

  I sighed and extended the poker at the muzzle of my rifle, then slung the backpack straps over my shoulders. Ready for infected or squatters in the Warehouse, I took a quick peek behind us. It was a motorcycle I’d hit earlier. It looked like it was in bad shape before, but I definitely finished it off. With no infected in sight yet, we began walking toward the doors.

  When we got up to the van, we took a moment to look inside. The back end looked to be half loaded with various foods and tools.

  “Slash the tires?” Branden asked.

  “What? No, don’t slash the tires. Jesus, the Warehouse isn’t our property either,” I said.

  Branden shrugged, and we took a few steps closer to the door.

  “If there are people inside that are alive, just try to be peaceful and friendly but aggressive,” I ordered Branden.

  With our eyes peering in as best as we could, we went through the first set of doors that served as a glass breezeway of sorts. Shards of glass crunched beneath our feet as we walked inside. A stone lay on the ground, presumably the tool used by another party of people that first broke inside the Warehouse.

  Pulling our guns to our shoulders, we braced ourselves for enemies to burst forth and attack. We walked past the front desk, which had papers scattered all over it and the surrounding floor. I peered over the counter and found nothing of interest.

  We found ourselves at a T intersection. One hallway, just past the lobby desk, veered off to the left. Behind doors along the left hallway are the Human Resources offices, meeting rooms, as well as the Nurse’s office. At this point, we didn’t bother to investigate any of the offices. We simply continued on our path further into the Warehouse, where the goods are stored.

  A set of double doors, with only a small rectangle of shattered glass in each, stopped us from venturing further. The doors, normally opened by an employee’s badge, had been propped open by a small rock. Upon examination, someone had gotten himself or herself cut on the glass when reaching inside the small broken window to open the door.

  Branden, without hesitation, reached out to open the door. I got myself in prime position to cover him once the door was opened. Yet again, at first glance, we found no signs of life inside the break room.

  The vending machines that were still standing were mostly empty of all the snacks they used to hold. It was quiet in here, too, but we did hear some distant noise: people talking in the locker room. Tables in the break room were already lying on their sides, so we concealed ourselves behind one.

  None of the voices coming from the locker room were recognizable. I looked over at Branden and whispered to him to be sure to turn the safety off his gun in case something was to happen. Waiting behind the table, I prayed and hoped for the best outcome possible. I was worried, if a fight were coming our way, whether Branden would be able to hold his own.

  Less than a minute after hiding behind the table, three men came out of the locker room. The man leading the group was short and plump. He boasted one of the fullest beards I have ever seen. It was such a dark, rich brown, and its length was a surprising eye-catcher to say the least. Followed by the first man were two taller men. Both were unshaven, but lacked the utter magnitude of the first man’s beard. These two grunted through their teeth as they followed the shortest man with bulging garbage sacks.

  Just as all three of them cleared the locker room door, the first man looked about the break room. He dropped his bag were he stood. Before both Branden and I knew what was happening, the man reached down to his waistband and drew a pistol. He whipped it in our direction and shot at us.

  I dropped down and lay as flat as I could, hoping that the man wouldn’t shoot much lower. Bullet holes appeared in the table just a few inches above me. I cursed repeatedly, frightened beyond control and out of my mind; I thought about running. They had us pinned down, and this was also my first time getting shot at.

  “Stop! Fucking stop!” I yelled.

&nbs
p; Silence, for just a moment.

  “’Dafuck you doin’ in here?” a plummy voice said from across the room.

  “By the look of those bags, we’re doing the same thing you are, asshole!” Branden said, poking his head out from behind the table. The short man fired again when Branden’s head protruded.

  “Oh yeah?” he said. “Whatcha got there, boy? I seen that camo gun. It’s nice. Best hand it over if you wanna walk again.”

  “I’m not giving you shit,” Branden yelled to the man, then in an undertone told me what to do.

  Branden provided the strength I needed. In a quick flash, I swung my leg up and out from the cover of the table. Lying on his stomach, Branden peeked around the corner of the table, gun up. While the fat man was reacting to my foot, Branden was already firing. I couldn’t tell if he hit the man, but I noticed that there was a pause in gunfire. I peeked my head up and over to survey the room and lifted my heavy rifle to rest it on the table.

  One of the taller men was leaving a trail of blood on the floor as he army-crawled in the direction of the door. The other two men were not there. My eyes darted back and forth between multiple other flipped tables and the corners closest to where I saw them last. Thinking that they were just waiting for a moment to get a shot at us, I stayed on guard for a moment while Branden came back under the thin cover of the table to replace the shells he had fired.

  Seconds went by slowly. My heart pounded, hands drenched in sweat, and I could feel my body shaking involuntarily. I kept the end of my barrel bouncing and sweeping around the room. Just as I swept over to a table on the far right side of me, I saw a figure appear from a corner on my left. In the brief amount of time it took me to recognize it, a shot was already fired and I flinched. Luckily, the man missed me. I planned to return fire, but the bearded man was running toward the door. I lined my sights up as best as I could, but I’m not very good with moving targets. As you could guess, I missed, and the man escaped the room.

  Branden gave chase first, and I followed behind him. We kept our guns pointed where the man went, and we swept the room for the missing third man. We couldn’t spot him quickly, so we assumed he must have run out before the bearded man did. Looking outside from the main desk, we saw the bearded man behind the wheel of the van. The missing man was between the driver and the passenger seat in clear sight.

  Branden and I both had the same unanimous feeling: fuck these assholes. But Branden took it a step further than I did. He pointed his gun at the vehicle and began shooting. The gunshot vibrated my eardrums into a ringing sensation. Branden emptied his gun quickly and began running after the vehicle, leaving me behind in shock of his ferocity.

  Branden reloaded the shotgun before firing at the van again while it drove out of the parking lot and down the hill. I stood outside the main doors, watching Branden. When he returned to the building, I asked him what drove him to attack the men to that extent.

  “Well, they were bent on either stealing from us or killing us. If we didn’t try to take them down a peg, what would stop them from trying it on someone else?” Branden said.

  “I don’t think that they were a threat to us by the time they got in their van. You don’t know if they would kill someone else if we didn’t kill them first. That’s like saying someone is guilty until they’re proven innocent. It’s backwards.”

  “Better to be safe than sorry.” Branden glared at me for criticizing his actions.

  I disregarded his transgressions in conversation, but not in mind.

  With the sun setting on the horizon, we decided it would be in our next best interest to find a secure place to sleep. We were practically stranded at the Warehouse considering that our vehicle, which was running on fumes, was trashed. So, we decided to roll with the circumstances and find an office or bathroom somewhere in the building to sleep for the night. But first, we felt it was a good idea to check and see what remained inside.

  Walking past the dead body of the man that Branden had just killed reminded us of him. We took our chances with the roaming infected and dragged the body outside the building. In the parking lot, we set the body ablaze as best as we could. Without gasoline, the body would be left smoldering overnight, but it was the best that we could do.

  Just through the locker room is the equipment room where various forklifts and other pieces of machinery are stored. To the left of this room is the refrigerated storage area, and to the right is where the mechanics store all their parts and the different pieces of gear needed for the Warehouse to remain operational. We ignored the equipment room and Mechanics’ room, and headed straight to where we knew the food would be.

  Trust me, there is still a boatload of food in here. While we didn’t charge in there recklessly and jump into a mound of bananas while yelling in victory, it was very challenging to retain the joy. This was the kind of reprieve I needed.

  With the knowledge that there was a reward for our efforts, we decided that it would be best to do a full sweep of the building. We backtracked from the refrigerated area filled with cheeses, meats, fruits, juices, and the like to the Human Resources offices. After finding nothing of value or danger in those offices, we went to search the Nurse’s office, but were held back by the locked door. We tried slamming our combined weight into the door, but we weren’t able to get inside.

  We left the office as it was, and headed toward the Mechanics’ room. Inside this room, there is a parts storage area, which is literally a chain-link cage. The metal fence of roughly twenty square feet is tucked into a corner of the room. Inside there are various screws and nuts for generic fixes and complicated ones alike. There is also blue full-body gear for those who worked in the frozen section of the Warehouse.

  “This looks like a good place to sleep,” Branden said, rattling the fence a bit. I couldn’t help but agree.

  Within the first ten steps through the shelving units that sit inside the cage, Branden held out a hand to stop me. When I went to ask what the problem was, he hushed me. We went further into the cage as slowly and as quietly as we could. Almost feeling a sense of danger, I stayed close to Branden. All along the furthest wall of the cage, the heavy gear is hung up neatly. When we were but five feet from it, Branden stopped for a moment and turned his head to the side.

  I curiously watched Branden from behind. He appeared to be looking and listening about the room for something. Yelling came from behind the rows of freezer bibs and jackets, followed by a haunting face. An infected man emerged and reached out toward Branden, who was the closest to him. The savagery of the surprise caused me to startle.

  Branden jumped as I did when the danger presented itself. An arm wrapped completely around Branden before I realized what was happening. With Branden barely able to keep the zombie’s mouth off his skin, I took action. With a burst of strength, I lifted up the butt of my gun to meet the ghoul’s head. It didn’t do much to him other than cause the zombie to lose his grip for a moment so Branden could take a step back.

  Branden cursed and bashed the creature’s knee with the butt of his own gun. It fell to its stomach, and Branden repeatedly hit it with no sign of ever tiring. But with no need to further explain and the morbid creature taken care of, we dragged its body from the cage because no one would want to sleep next to it.

  Branden, in his oddity, thought it would be best to go get a forklift to pin the body to the ground rather than taking the time to try to burn it. I was baffled by this, but didn’t waste my breath objecting. We made an agreement to be sure to burn it tomorrow. He said something about the possibility of the body re-animating, and how he wanted to see if it would come back to life. But wouldn’t that make it some sort of re-zombie or super-zombie?

  Anyways, that brings us to now. There has been so much excitement today, and I don’t know whether I hate it or enjoy it. With all the years of secretly hoping for the world to end, and now that it’s here, I can’t decide if this is good or bad. What I really wanted was the simplicity of the life in a zombie apoc
alypse. I thought I could get used to the day-in, day-out cycle of kill, steal, eat, and sleep. Life without the family complications, bills, social status, and long-term goal setting would be easy. You take your life one day at a time, and the only goal you have is to survive.

  While it is rough for me, I still think I might be able to work through it.

  Day Three

  Getting shot sucks. If anyone reading this has any idea what being shot is and has never experienced being shot, keep it that way. Why am I even bothering with this? I could be trying to talk with savage cavemen who don’t know English. They could use this notebook as kindling for a fire, or toilet paper, for all I know or care. Never mind, I take that back. I do care. If there is any hope that someone someday finds this, I want them to know this little tiny insignificant life is what I went through. I just don’t want my suffering to be for nothing.