“I don't know. We woke up one morning and she was gone.” He sighed. “I guess she just got tired of it—tired of being scared and nervous every minute of every day.” Noah stared into the water. “You know how I told you about my father losing it after one of those things surprised him in the shed?”
Alvin nodded.
“It was my mom.” Tears welled in his eyes. “I had to kill her. The old man, he,” his voice caught in his throat. “I think once he saw her, he was ready to go too.”
Alvin swallowed.
A moment of silence passed between them, and then Alvin said, “But how do ya know for sure a bite won’t trigger it?”
“Common sense.” Wiping his tears away he turned back to Alvin. “If I had rabies, why would it take a bite from a rabid dog to trigger what’s already in my blood?”
From the look on Alvin’s face, Noah wasn’t sure he understood.
“I told you. It’s not like the movies.”
V
Noah and Alvin arrived in Lyons around noon, or so Noah surmised based on the sun’s position in the sky. After pulling the boat onto the shore, they gathered their packs and guns and headed east, in the direction of Alvin’s house, on the far side of town.
The two cautiously crept through the streets, scanning for threats as they moved. Alvin was surprised by how clear the roads were. There were some bodies lying around of course, but none of them were reanimated. Maybe what Noah had said about the chaos dying down was more truth than smoke, he thought.
Noah found the complete dearth of living dead to be very suspicious. Based on the diminishing frequency he had encountered at his home, he had hoped their ranks were thinning. But down to nothing? His stomach twisted with anxiety.
They stopped at the intersection of Commerce and Cyprus Streets. A Walmart loomed in the distance. Noah tapped Alvin’s shoulder and then pointed at the superstore.
“But is it worth the risk?” Alvin asked, mimicking his friend.
Noah smiled. “I need to get to a pharmacy, and you need supplies.”
Alvin shook his head.
“You don’t know what you’ll find at home. Your family could be out of food.” Noah looked around. “Besides, if you’ve been on the outs with them, don’t you think arriving with a big bag of supplies would be quite the peace offering?”
Alvin had a pained look on his face.
“We’ll be ok,” Noah reassured him. “We just have to be smart about it.”
Noah looked down the five-lane commercial drive that bisected Lyons. Aside from a peppering of abandoned cars and the occasional carcass, he could see clear to the other end of town. There was no movement anywhere. How’s that possible? He thought. There had to be at least a few dead wandering around.
Something tugged at Alvin’s pant leg. He gasped and jumped back. A desiccated, male corpse reached for him. Its pelvis was twisted backwards relegating it to locomotion by dragging.
Noah buried his machete in its skull.
Alvin put his hands on his knees and caught his breath.
“If that's the worst we encounter today, I'll consider us lucky,” said Noah as he stepped on the corpse’s neck and extracted the blade.
Alvin looked up just in time to see the traffic light shut off. “That's weird. The light stopped working.”
Noah squinted at it. “Maybe the power grid finally shut down.”
Alvin smirked. “Your old man’s probably freaking out right now.”
Noah looked at him askance, but the glance went unnoticed by Alvin.
They crossed the street and weaved between the pumps of a gas station that stood at the end of the Walmart parking lot. Along with half a dozen cars, a large fuel tanker had been abandoned there. It sat above the underground fuel tanks, unable to deliver its liquid cargo.
There were still more than twenty cars in the lot. Noah took an odd comfort at the sight of a corpse thrashing around in the back of a silver Nissan. Just seeing anything move made the otherwise total lack of activity slightly less unsettling.
With the power off, Walmart’s automatic doors refused to open.
“Grab one,” said Noah.
Each man took hold of a leaf and pulled until the doors slowly spread apart. As they came to the inner door, Alvin readied himself to repeat the process, but Noah held out his hand.
“Hold on,” he whispered. Cupping his hands to the glass, he peered inside. The soft sunrays streaming through the frosted skylights were enough to give him a dim view of the front of the store. Movement. “There’s a few trapped inside,” Noah said, not taking his eyes away from the glass.
Alvin peered through the window. Several bodies shambled through the aisles, which were littered with merchandise, without any apparent thought or purpose.
Noah chuckled sardonically. “It looked like this before everything went to hell.”
The joke was lost on Alvin. “Should we go in?”
“We should try to lure them outside. There could be as many of them inside as there are cars in the lot.”
“How we gonna do that?”
“We’ll figure something out.”
They left the entrance and walked around the building. In the back was a loading dock with two huge metal garage doors that sat four feet above the ground. One was closed, but the other was ajar by a few inches. Silently, they both wondered what horrors might lie behind such a large and ominous door. Perhaps a hibernaculum of undead to counter their uncanny good luck walking through town?
Placing his palms against the bottom slat, Noah lifted the door. At first there was nothing, but then, out of the darkness crawled the corroded body of a young man. Alvin and Noah leapt backward, startled. The boy reached over the edge of
