By the time the zombie’s arm reached up, Gary and I were in full on retreat.
“Get in the car!!” I yelled to Justin.
“What’s going on?” Justin yelled back.
“Is anything behind us?” I yelled to Justin, running at the same time. I was entirely too spooked to look over my shoulder to verify it for myself. “Wish there was a Jumbotron I could look up at to check.” Gary looked over at me but did not question my statement. Running for one’s life tends to take precedence over asking questions that aren’t directly involved to said Life.
“No, nothing is… ummm, yeah, you guys should run faster!” Justin yelled, hopping in to the truck cab.
We reached the truck. I fumbled with the handle for a split second, long enough to imagine the deep seated pain involved with a bite to my shoulder. The windshield picked up the reflection of zombies hurtling in our direction. No deaders in this chase. As I opened my door I peered back towards the gas station to see tens, dozens, maybe a hundred zombies heading our way. They were in such a rush to get to us that they were jamming up in the doorway like an old Three Stooges scene that took this inopportune time to come to the forefront of my mind.
The truck started and I hauled ass out of that parking lot just as Gray Eyes slammed into the front quarter panel. “You tell Ron about that and you’ll be walking home,” I stressed.
Gary was too busy white knuckling onto the truck off-road grips to pay me much attention. Within a hundred yards we were safe, but none of us visibly relaxed for another ten miles. Travis kept looking in the rear window, apparently convinced that the zombies were somehow going to be able to keep up with us. I’ll be honest, I kept stealing my own glances. I was under the distinct impression that we had just encountered Zombies 3.0 and we as of yet did not know their new and improved powers. Hopefully it was more like most household products bought at a grocery store that promised new and improved features but delivered only a higher price tag.
“Dad, what was that?” Travis asked, turning back around from another peek through the looking glass.
“I think they were in stasis,” Gary answered, never taking his gaze off the road ahead.
“Hibernation?” I asked for clarification.
“Maybe, that’s my guess,” Gary said.
“What would make them do that?” Justin asked. Travis was busy looking back again.
“Well bears do it for food, or lack thereof,” I said, more talking out loud than to answer his question. Once I friggen said it, I wished I could have pulled it back in.
“Lack of food?” Travis asked, paling. “People you mean? There’s not enough people left for them to eat?” I nodded, sorry I had opened this can of worms.
“How long can they hibernate?” Travis asked.
“Bears can go about three to four months. But fleas can go for like six months and then I think that bedbugs can stay in a stasis state for years, and then there is the Moroccan…” Gary pontificated.
“Enough,” I told him. “You’re scaring the boy and you’re freaking me out.”
“Is there any way we can use this to our advantage?” Gary asked.
“Well, the obvious is that there will be less of them just roaming around. And if we can stumble on an orgy of them, we have a couple of minutes of opportunity where we could burn a ton of them, I mean before they awaken and chase us.” “Burn them. Sounds good,” Travis said with a slight shiver, as if he wanted to heat himself over the roasting of the zombie pyre.
“What now?” Gary asked me.
“Well, now we find a gas station that is not inhabited by the dead and we use Ron’s handy dandy hand pump to fill up a bunch of gas containers. So the next time we’ll be prepared,” I told him determinedly.
“That’s as good a plan as any,” Gary said.
“It’s about time I had one,” I told him.
“Amen to that,” Travis said, stealing one last backwards glance.
CHAPTER TWELVE – Alex and Paul
North Carolina was a balmy 58 degrees, and the trees were resplendent with early spring greenery. Life was burgeoning. Well, that’s an untrue statement, plant life was doing wonderfully and would absolutely flourish in this new world as man’s poison-laced waterways and smoke filled air finally gave way to the pristine, as nature had always intended. Man’s brains had removed him from nature and now ironically it was this very same brain that was going to return the earth back to its rightful owners.
The small band of survivors had wisely avoided Charlotte , instead taking the beltway to the outer limits of the city. Paul knew of what he thought would be a perfect haven. Furniture City Warehouse turned out to be just that. It was a large corrugated blue steel building, one main entrance for customers and then loading docks in the rear for them to pick their purchases up.
“It’s locked,” Paul said, turning back to the throng.
“Were you expecting a ‘Welcome’ sign?” Mrs. Deneaux asked him in her usual acerbic manner.
“You really are tough to get along with,” Mad Jack said, stooping to get a closer look at the lock.
“Do you have a hammer?” Alex asked Mad Jack.
“Even better,” Mad Jack told them. He patted down all of his pockets until he came across what he was feeling for. It was a lock picking device that looked much like a small pistol. “Working for the DoD sure had its perks,” MJ said, placing the picking device into the lock. He began to rapidly pull the triggering mechanism.
“That standard issue?” Paul asked skeptically.
After another ten seconds of fiddling with the device, Mad Jack stood up with a satisfactory ‘Aha’ sound.
“Is it open or not?” Mrs. Deneaux asked. “Do you need all the theatrics?”
“Oh, put a sock in it,” Joann told Mrs. Deneaux as she pulled the door open.
“Hold on!” Alex told her. “We don’t know what it’s like in there.”
“It’s a furniture store. And an inexpensive one at that. So unless zombies have started eating vinyl we should be fine,” Mrs. Deneaux said, although she did not volunteer to go in first.
Joann’s initial haste to get indoors was quelled at the idea that the dark store could be hiding a variety of nightmares.
“We should be safe,” Paul stated. “No food means no people, no people…”
“No zombies,” Little Eddy finished the sentence.
“You got it,” Mad Jack said, pulling a flashlight off the utility belt he was wearing and heading into the murkiness.
The majority of the group huddled behind that one light as they checked furniture display after furniture display looking for anyone or more importantly anything that didn’t belong. The only notable exceptions were Joann and April who were standing guard by the front doors and Mrs. Deneaux who had found a Lazy Boy Recliner and had fallen fast asleep.
It took over an hour to go through the entire showroom floor, the loading bays and the offices, but it was well worth it. There were four fully stocked vending machines with all sorts of snacks from nuts to licorice. Eddy was at first ecstatic to come across an ice cream machine and then severely depressed when he realized he was standing sneaker sole deep in the melted treats.
“Do you think anything’s still in there?” Eddy asked Erin .
“Oh honey, I don’t think so,” she told him and then hugged him before he started to cry again, something he had been doing a lot of since his mother had executed his family and then turned the gun on herself.
“You going to use your fancy lock picking device on this?” Paul asked, pointing to the vending machine.
“Step aside,” Mad Jack told him. The loud splintering crash as he threw a display vase through the glass awoke the slumbering Deneaux.
“What the hell is going on in there!” she yelled from across the floor.
“Everyone’s fine!” Paul yelled. “You old bat,” he said much more softly.
Mad Jack giggled like a schoolgirl. “She really is, isn’t she?” he said, stating a fact more than formulating a question.
“See,” Paul started. “Mrs. Deneaux is proof to me that God has one hell of a sense of humor. End of the world, and the crankiest 75 year old bitch that can’t shoot, can’t run, can’t fight, couldn’t make a friend in a whorehouse on payday and she survives. Armies of the finest men and women on this planet have been ground to dust and yet that cantankerous hag still mouths on.” “Don’t hold back Paul. Tell us how you really feel,” Alex said,
