There was only an armful of food supplies in there, meat left in a cooler box in the stockroom where they had shut themselves away for the night. But it was important because it was the only meat they had.
Getting the right nutrients to stay healthy and functioning from a plant-based diet had been tricky enough before the apocalypse. With the limited food options in the world they now lived in, it would be much harder. They would need meat in their diets, no way around it. The only problem was that the undead also had an insatiable hunger for meat, flesh and blood.
The snappers were a drain on the meat supply. They needed to take as much as they could get before they had none left.
The camping store was in front of them now, and two snappers jittered toward them as they approached it, coming from the entrance of the store. Did we leave the door open? Eric wondered as Sammy and Rebecca stepped forward to deal with the snappers.
Sammy fired the crossbow at the farthest one, but her aim was too low and the bolt lodged in it’s chest. Fighting her nerves, she managed to reload and aim the weapon without shooting too quickly and missing again. The second shot speared through the snapper’s grey forehead and it fell flat on it’s back.
Rebecca was less lucky with her knife, going for the eye of the other snapper but instead getting her blade stuck in it’s jaw, just below the cheekbone. She gritted her teeth and slammed her foot uselessly into the dead man’s crotch.
Sammy was tugging the bolts from the dead one’s body when she noticed the other woman’s struggle and looked up at her. “Go for the back of the neck! Stab it in the spine!”
Rebecca cast an angry glare her way – but nonetheless followed Sammy’s instructions, ripping her knife from the bloody, snapping face in front of her and stabbing madly at the back of the snapper’s neck.
“No, not like that,” Sammy began. “You have to push it—”
She stopped when one of Rebecca’s wild stabs hit the right spot and severed the spinal cord. The snapper’s body slumped in her arms and she let it crash on the paving.
Eric would have interfered and killed the snapper himself while Rebecca was struggling with it if he hadn’t been distracted by the trail of blood leading into the shop. And the pieces of meat scattered along it.
“Look,” he said to the others, nodding at the blood. “Be alert. There might be some of them in there.”
There was even a severed pig’s trotter laying in the trail. Something about that sent a shiver up Eric’s spine.
They went in quietly. Rebecca stopped at the front and turned around to peer out the windows at the empty plaza. Sammy kept an eye on her while Eric crept to the back of the store, toward the stockroom, nudging a bit of fleshy debris with his foot and noting with unease that the trail led right up to stockroom. The door was half open, and he was pretty sure he could hear movement in there as he got closer.
It was definitely not in the same state as they had left it this morning; they had stacked a few boxes in front of the stockroom door before leaving to make it harder for anyone or anything to get in there and find their food. But those boxes had been toppled over.
Eric hadn’t thought that a snapper would be capable of pushing the boxes as they were fairly heavy, containing tent heaters and other camping equipment. Then again, the undead could be very persistent when they knew there was fresh meat nearby.
Pressing his back to the wall, Eric leaned into the door frame, trying to see inside. But the lights were off and it was pretty dark in there. He could hear something, though – a wet, sloppy sound.
His hand inched along the wall and found the light switch. He kicked the door the rest of the way open as the room burst into light, and the snapper that hunched over the cooler box tearing into their meat supplies straightened up, twisted it’s head toward him. Blood was smeared over it’s sagging face and matted in the ends of it’s ragged hair.
The blood wasn’t from the snapper’s body, but from the raw pork chops it had been feasting on.
It stood and came at Eric, who pulled out his knife and rammed it up through the snapper’s chin and all the way into the brain.
Those pork chops had been the bulk of their meat supplies. Eric walked up to the cooler box and looked inside. The pack of bacon Kingsley had brought with him when they went camping was missing. Glancing around, he spotted the torn, empty pack on the floor next to the cooler.
Not wanting their trip to have been for nothing, Eric decided he would find something else useful to take back to the bus.
He slung a bagged tent over his shoulder, then scooped up a few sleeping bags in one arm. While he was looking for a new portable cooler that hadn’t been touched by infected hands, he heard Sammy call out.
“Rebecca! Come back!”
He ducked back into the shop and saw that the women were both outside in the plaza, the front door swinging closed in their wake. Stumbling after them, he halted in the plaza beside Sammy who had suddenly stopped chasing the other woman after realising what she was doing.
Rebecca ran at a snapper that had emerged from the shadow of an archway directly across from the camping store, following the strange trail of blood and littered flesh that led into the shop. There was fury and grit in Rebecca’s stride, in the white-knuckled grip that clutched her knife.
She shoved her blade through it’s eye, this time hitting the brain in one go. But as she walked, jaw clenched, back towards Eric and Sammy,
