“Ben, can you stay here and look after these whilst we go do our thing?” Jacks smiled.
“Yep no problem boss. I mean sir” Ben smiled back and held up his baseball bat, already stained red and brown with blood and other fluids I’d rather not think about. He walked over and locked the doors that the others had just left through and tilted the vertical blinds once again.
I nodded to Ben and indicated that Adam should go before me, he followed Jacks through the door who followed John and Frank.
We entered a long white corridor with several navy doors lining it on both sides.
“Right, is any one injured?” I heard Ben ask from behind me before the doors closed.
“I just don’t know how it happened…” I heard Frank telling the story from up in front.
I zoned out and concentrated on my surroundings, after the second door on the right was a smaller corridor and at the end of that was a fire exit. These days it was always good to know where the exits were.
We stopped about halfway down the corridor in front of two double doors, that had glass panelling in the top half.
“This is the canteen boys, the storage room is through the kitchen and on the right, you should find backpacks on the bottom shelf. Be careful.”
I nodded, pulling out my knife, I took the one door as Adam took the other. We stood facing each other. I knocked on the door loudly, hoping that if there were any undead then they would show themselves.
We waited a few minutes until we could no longer hear the voices of Frank, Jacks and John.
Then we entered slowly, each of us opening the doors wide. Like a cheesy zombie movie in slow motion.
We stood and listened but couldn’t hear anything. So, we continued towards the kitchen and to the back room.
It was lined with shelves of tins and dried pasta and rice. They also had a few crates of bottled water. It was like a goldmine. “Take everything you can carry and more. Hopefully Jacks and the others will come back this way and help us to take more supplies.”
We filled the eight worn backpacks with as many supplies as they would take and placed them by the main doors ready to be taken.
I went back through the kitchen, shoving what I could into my pockets; a few breakfast bars and some toothpaste; Adam copied, once we were full, we went back to the main doors and picked up three backpacks each. One on our backs one on our front and one in our hands. They were so heavy with tins in that I struggled to walk. There was no sign of Jacks or John in the corridor so Adam and I walked back to the reception. The rest of the people had also returned carrying their own back packs.
Adam took one person from each family back to the kitchen to help with the extra backpacks and water. He allowed them two tins each for their backpacks and a bottle of water for each person. We kept a crate which Ben and the other military guys took back along with the back packs of food to their truck which was the largest.
The rest of the water we shared out between ourselves, Jacks and John returned whilst Frank came around the front in a large SUV with huge bars across the front.
We met him out front, now on high alert, checking in every direction, just waiting for the horde to return.
“Lee, Tom can you go and get the other truck? We’ve checked it out and all is good” Frank called out to two middle-aged men wearing jeans and checked shirts. They just nodded and turned walking away without saying a word.
“Frank, you clear on where camp three is?” Jacks asked helping the old couple into the SUV, another man and two women with two kids got into the back also.
“Uh yeah I think so” Frank did not look like he knew.
I looked at Adam who shrugged “I’ll go back with you” he spoke up.
“Thank you. That’s good of you. Will you have enough men to go on ahead Danny?” Frank asked.
“Yeah, we have enough, Adam are you sure?” Jacks asked walking towards Adam.
Lee and Tom came around the corner slowly in two trucks and the rest of the survivors got in. To go from a full camp to less than fifty people was heart breaking.
“Yeah all is good. If I go back with them then the people back at camp will let us in. If I don’t then they may not let them enter.” Adam explained his thoughts behind volunteering to leave us.
“Ok man, be careful ok. I don’t need Amelia on my back cause you’ve gone and gotten yourself bitten” I joked, but he knew that I cared about him and this was my way of saying it.
“Love you too George” he hugged me hard and jogged over to the first car.
“Let’s go!” he hopped in and tapped at the door through the open window.
I watched as they drove away, and for some reason I felt better knowing that Adam was headed home. Now I just needed to find Billy and the Captain and take them home.
“You ready George?” Jacks called, already heading to our car.
“Yes sir” I replied joining him.
We carried on our journey mostly in silence, horrified by what had happened to camp two and more eager than ever to find our friends safe.
“John, pull over here, we are about half an hour away from our camp. We have to go off road again. There is no safe place for us to view this camp.” Jacks’ voice woke me from a light sleep.
I stretched and looked around, all
