“Are you crying?” Cameron Carr asked Fred Grant.
Fred tried not to cry. He succeeded, but doing so left a knot in his gut. He couldn’t let Cameron or anyone else witness his weakness. Oh, he was a very weak man, having stayed out of this battle.
Battle? More like a massacre. Fifteen dead. Fifteen! None of which possessed anything left of the top of their heads but pieces of skull, with or without hair, and bits of brain all over.
“It’s the goddamned smell of the zombie sores,” Fred said. “It’s making my eyes water. I know all of them are outside now, but I just can’t get rid of that stench.”
Seven of the corpses were zombies. Zombies. More like diseased rats.
But Fred surmised burning human and zombie flesh would be a less appealing odor than the sores.
And so when Fred slipped and fell in aisle five in the blood and brain tissue of his good friend Chris, he suppressed an urge to bawl his eyes out. And to vomit. He managed to keep that down. At least he thought it was Chris’s remains, the body nearby sure was, but there was a dead zombie near, too.
One by one, they piled the bodies on top of each other outside. The zombies on the bottom, the fallen survivalists on the top, some still with no or partial noses or ears. On top of those bodies they placed scooped up brain matter, skull, and hair. Such was their reward for not having to take part in the battle. Kind of like having to do dishes after someone else has cooked a large meal.
That last thought brought up the contents of Fred’s stomach right onto the top of the pile. Cam followed with his own vomiting.
Their task completed, they gathered all the stray weapons and locked them in a utility closet in the break room. They then carried the dead witch over to the pile, and, because the stack was so high and broad, they threw her body down just inside the edge.
They left Clarence alone in the break room, his arms still wrapped around the back of his chair, his wrists clamped together with a zip tie. He tried to wriggle his hands free despite the pain in his left wrist, but the restraint was just too tight. He could, however, squeeze his hands into fists, and if he found something sharp within a few inches of those hands, he might cut his way through the thick plastic. They had bound his ankles to the legs of the chair.
He “made a break” for the fire extinguisher by inching his chair around the table, and while he did so his knee screamed in pain, his wrist less so. He clenched his jaw and stifled any noise his throat wanted to make. Eventually, the pain subsided as the adrenaline pumped through his system, but some pain persisted. After a couple minutes, he arrived at the extinguisher, turned his chair around so his hands were next to it, and grabbed onto it. It slipped and dropped onto the floor. Cursing, he turned his chair around again and fit a chair leg into the hook of the extinguisher. He dragged the chair with the canister over to the swinging doors of the break room and, after what seemed like an eternity, pushed the chair and extinguisher through the doors. Though this process was loud, Clarence thought fast was better than quiet.
He got a good look at the nearby aisle signs. As luck would have it, “Housewares” was two aisles down. He started the slow process of dragging himself, chair, and fire extinguisher toward that aisle.
Oliver knew both Fred and Cameron did not hold up well, but most importantly, they’d been able to do the task at hand. So he let them keep their dignity, pretending not to notice the vomit on the pile.
If the witch woke up, it would be a rude awakening!
And dangerous for him. It occurred to him she probably would have left them alone if he’d just given her the sword. But that wasn’t his style. If the sword was worth this much trouble, then he wanted that sword for himself! Before the zombie apocalypse, before witnessing all sorts of crazy shit, he did not believe in any supernatural crap. Even the witch’s curse on his mother he had chalked up to coincidence. But now he believed.
He and Brooke kept their weapons trained on Jocelyn as the others started to pour gasoline onto the corpses. They had plenty of liquor, so they made a lot of Molotov cocktails. Igniting the tops with lighter guns, Fred and Cameron hurled them onto the pile. Oliver had made sure they covered Jocelyn’s body with plenty of gasoline, and now he made sure she had two cocktails thrown on her, one at her head, the other at the bottom of her torso.
The rancid stench of Jocelyn and the other corpses burning filled the air as wind drifted the smoke in Oliver’s direction. It was like burned hair, bad barbecue, and melted tires and plastic, all magnified a thousand-fold.
Nothing smelled so sweet as a burning witch.
The fire, however, was too strong. They probably used too much gasoline. The flames shot up too high, with embers blown toward the building. The wooden archway caught fire. The store started to burn.
Smoke drifted into Clarence’s aisle. Jocelyn must be burning! How much time did he have? He looked around and spotted a pair of scissors hanging on a display hook. He inched the back of his chair over to them and lifted and tugged until he had them in his hands, a difficult feat because of the throbbing in his wrist.
The hook fell to the ground with a loud clang. Clarence hoped the others were too busy to hear it. He might just be able to escape on his own while Jocelyn burning distracted them, but it was a
