He hoped it wasn’t too much. “Here, this will help you relax,” he said, offering the medication and water bottle to Jocelyn.
She resisted, acting confused. “I don’t need to relax; I have to keep watch, right? . . . Oh, and we need to bury Vin.”
“Don’t you worry about that. Someone else will do everything. You’ve been through a terrible ordeal.”
“You said I needed Haldol. I haven’t taken that in years.” She was getting more sluggish.
“You came here for some medicine, right?” Alexander guessed.
She gave him a confused look. “Oh, yes . . .”
“Then take this. It’s medicine.”
Nodding, she took the pills and popped them into her mouth, drinking the water from the bottle. She smiled at him again. “You’re my savior,” she said as she drifted off.
“Jocelyn?”
“Yes?” she said, groggy.
“I’ll stay with you till you fall asleep. As for Vin—” he looked back toward Marty. He and Jocelyn couldn’t see Marty because the flashlight shined on both of them, but he took no chances, speaking up and saying in Marty’s direction. “—he’s not going anywhere.”
Jocelyn drifted in and out of sleep for about ten minutes before Alexander judged her asleep for good.
“You can get up now Marty. She’s fast asleep.” Marty grunted and stood up. “Luckily, I have a pre-med education, which included an internship, so I knew the pharmaceuticals she required. You knew she was like this, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, I didn’t think it wise to tell anyone.”
“No, you did the right thing.” Now Alexander went down to the floor, almost collapsing. This was as intense as his encounter with the zombies before he fled to the market. “I need to stick around for another hour, make sure she doesn’t wake up.”
Marty grunted. “I’ll go back and stand watch.” He picked up the flashlight and shined it on his watch. “I’ll come back in an hour.”
“Okay.”
Marty left.
About a half hour later, Vin showed up.
“What are you two doing in here?” Perhaps he expected to find them having sex, but sex was the furthest thing from Alexander’s mind. Now he had to make up a lie immediately.
“I found her here, sleeping.” Not a good one.
“Sleeping! Wasn’t it her watch?”
“I took over for her. She said she needed some blood-pressure medication. When she didn’t come back, I came in and here she was.”
“With her pack and weapons on the floor?”
Alexander shrugged. He needed to make Vin believe he thought it was no big deal. “People can do some strange things when they’re asleep, especially as they’re falling asleep. Remember, she’s beyond exhaustion. We all are.”
“Still, I don’t see—”
A crash of breaking glass sounded, followed immediately by a scream from Emily. Both sounds came from the front of the store.
Vin sprang into action, a shotgun in his right hand, a flashlight in his left. He ran fast toward Emily’s screaming. Emily came into view, only a few steps away from the entrance. A zombie had smashed a small hole in the front door and was pounding, trying to break down the glass further.
Emily continued to scream but did not move. Vin cursed and put his shotgun back over his shoulder. He reached Emily, grabbing her with his right arm into his chest, and turned around to run when the crash of the glass sounded behind him. He yelled out, “To the break room, NOW!”
But it was too late for him as the zombie overtook him, picked him up, and slammed him into the floor, Emily breaking his fall. Emily screamed and began crying. She had hit her head. The zombie mounted on Vin’s back, pounding away at his temples, on the crown of his head, on his neck before grabbing his head and slamming it down onto Emily.
A shotgun shot rang out and the zombie crumpled. Two more gunshots, then a third, then a fourth.
He got up, pushing the zombie off of him but careful not to hurt Emily, who still screamed and bawled, even more than she had already been. He looked around. Four zombies all down, but their brains were not pulverized. The sheriff moved his gun back and forth, pointing at them. They’d be waking up soon.
“Hold your fire,” he said to the sheriff. “If they move, shoot them in the brains.”
He looked around. “Where the hell is Jocelyn? She needs to chop off these heads!” Vin figured Jocelyn’s way of killing the zombies was a surer thing. And less gruesome. And wasted no ammunition.
“I think she’s still asleep,” Alexander said, his voice distant.
“Fuck!” Vin didn’t understand how Alexander came to that conclusion, but she clearly wasn’t there. He ran to the pharmacy to find her still passed out on the tiled floor. How could she sleep through all this?
He grabbed the sword, surprised at its heaviness. Was this iron? How can she even lift it? He carried it with two hands and went back to one zombie and chopped three times from above before the head severed. She had said she could do it in one blow. Did she lie about that? She did say it took training. He did the same thing to the next zombie, too, but as he did it, more gunshots rang out as the other two zombies were put down again.
His arms achy and tired, he moved over to one of the other zombies and chopped at the head. This time it took four blows.
And the next one took five.
Jocelyn awoke to pain in her cheeks as someone slapped them. Instinctively, she pulled her arms up and covered her face, and the slapping stopped. She opened her eyes, and Vin was hovering over her.
Vin was alive!
And then it all came flooding into her head—her suspicions, Vin being stabbed, sounding like Marty . . . he really
