36 Hours (10 page)

I opened a freezer door and grabbed a Jones bottle, popped the cap, chugged it down. Still somewhat cold. And refreshing. Like stealing. But who was there to arrest me? All the cruisers were gone. A bitter laugh. Morality flown out the window.

I went down the aisle Hannah was in. “Let’s load these up in the back. We’ll make as many trips as we can manage.”

“Okay.” She didn’t look me in the eyes. Maybe she was still frightened of the way I had manhandled her. And to be honest, I was starting to feel bad. She talked to Les. I dropped some soda I was carrying and instead grabbed some crates of water. She returned. “He’ll keep watch. He’s looking at magazines, and he said he didn’t want to help.” Lazy. “So I told him to read his magazine by the window, and to make sure none of those diseased peoples comes after us.”

I saw Les go around the bar and disappear into the eatery. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Anthony Barnhart

36 Hours

61

We took our stuff outside and opened the trunk, putting our loot inside the Jeep. We made several trips, dumping in everything we could. I handed Hannah a Jones. “It’s warm, but still a little cool. It’s good, though.” She liked Jones, too, and popped the cap, and just like me, chugged. “What’s your fortune?”

She read the back of the Jones bottle. And laughed. “’Good days are ahead of you’. What a lie.”

I managed to smile. “We’d better load up some more.”

“Do you still want to go to your place?”

“Yes. If no one is there, we can go somewhere else.”

“No. I don’t mind. Anyplace is good. Well. I mean, no place is better.”

I went to get some more dry cereal, and found energy and protein bars. I searched and found some red buckets for carrying items next to the coffee stand. I saw some coffee crème packs, and thought of Chad. He always drank those. Thought they tasted really good. How was he faring down in Kentucky? Was he alive? Was he dead? Was he one of them? And how was our good friend Drake?

How was he doing? Was he alive? Was he dead? Was he one of them?

“Austin,” Hannah said, walking up. “Oh. Good. Energy bars.” She took one off the shelf, unwrapped it, ate it. I took some more and threw them into the bucket. She said, “No, no. You’re doing it wrong. Like this.” She grabbed the box, hung it over the bucket, and dumped it. She grinned. “Who knows when they’re going to show up? We can’t stay here forever. Go faster.” A naturalborn shopper. I couldn’t help but to laugh. Taking all the bars I could, I went to the Jeep and sat them in the back. Left the bucket there.

Hannah was by the window, going by the utilities. “Austin. We could use some of this stuff. They have lighters, butane. Fire. Nice. They have some multi-tools. Here.” She tossed me one. “Do you have a bucket?”

“By the coffee machine.”

“Thanks.” And she was gone.

I entered the eatery, found Les reading and watching the window. “What are you looking at?”

He leaned over, showing me the article. “It’s in the Globe magazine.”

“What’s in the news today? Bat baby returns? Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are bed buddies?” I’d seen it all. We sold Globe and World News magazines at Homer’s Grocery, where I worked, and feared—well, maybe not feared, but knew—I would never work again. When we weren’t busy, and when Anthony Barnhart

36 Hours

62

Richard and I got tired of throwing erasers at the ceiling fans and throwing plastic wads at each other, we’d grab them and read up on all the current myths, legends and folk stories.

“No. They were right. It’s the end of the world.”

He showed me the cover. It read,
Satanists Declare the End of the World is
Coming Soon
. I couldn’t help but laugh. “They were bound to be right sometime.”

Hannah called, “Austin. Stop slacking.”

I patted Les on the shoulder. “Good man. Don’t keep your eyes on the magazine, though.”

“I know.”

I went into the store. She showed me her catch from the utilities. “Got us some more knives and lighters, and some butane. It squirts out. Squirt it all over something, light a match, and it goes up like an inferno. Alex showed me how, once.” Alex? Jealousy. Anger. “Candles, for if we survive to nighttime and need to see. A couple locks, if we need to lock something, some nails and a hammer. Some tape. Duct tape. Always need that. Oh, and-“

“Austin!” Les roared. “Hannah!”

We eyed each other and ran into the eatery. Les was standing, pointing. Between the blooming trees lining the AmeriStop parking lot, the murky images of infected rushing up the street could be seen. The same ones we had escaped. Right on time.

“Game’s over,” I said. “Let’s go. Drop the magazine!”

We ran out to the Jeep, jumping through the broken glass. An infected fell from the roof, landing atop of me. I was thrown to the ground, felt him on top of me, the warm, awful breath tingling the hairs on my neck. Les kicked the infected hard in the face, sending the dread-locked fiend over on the ground. Hannah stamped her shoe into his face, breaking his nose and spilling blood. I clambered to my feet.

I got behind the wheel and shut my door. Hannah began emptying the bucket.

“Throw the bucket in! Hurry up!” I shouted, twisting the ignition. The engine sighed to life.

She did and shut the trunk. But it popped back open.

“Oh. Dang it.” Les jumped out and slammed it shut. It popped open. The infected came into the lot. “Something’s in the way! All the stuff is sliding out!”

“Forget it! Forget it!” I yelled.

Anthony Barnhart

36 Hours

63

Les slammed it hard and it caught. They got in. The infected reached us. Before they even shut the doors, I pressed the gas down to the ground. And went nowhere.

Their doors slammed shut. They locked them. Hannah yelled, “Austin! It’s in Park!”

So dumb. I put it in drive and hit the gas. We peeled out of the lot, scraping off my right mirror on a fuel pump. The Jeep swerved out into the road, nearly colliding with a vacant SUV. Infected came from over the ridge of a hill, coming down atop of us, from around the police station. As if they all converged at once. More up the road, blocking my path home. I choked down an utterance of surprise and turned the Jeep in the other direction, ramping the curb, throwing infected off to the sides. They clawed at the windows. I peered through the webbed windshield, went around the smoking remains of the intersection accident. Two infected were eating the flesh off a dead police officer. I vomited all over the seat, green bile covering the cloth. My face muscles tensed, throat ravaging, eyes splitting. The Jeep swerved into the other lane. A car right ahead. Les and Hannah screeched. I jerked the wheel and went down a road, a smaller subdivision. And I knew exactly where we were. The old pumpkin farm rose to our right. Infected stood in the barren patch and loped over the walk-around porch.

“Hold on!” I shouted, and wrenched the car up a gravel drive. The wheels ran dry, friction lost, but caught, just as the infected from the farm house scraped at the trunk. We were all pale in the face. The Jeep rocketed past the farm house, swinging around a ramshackle shed, underneath several overhanging trees, and exploded into the bright morning sun. Light glinted off the forest green paint on the hood, blinding me. I wove through the parking lot. An accident here and there. A few bodies. Spring Falls Plaza. A dance studio and photography shop to our right; a furniture store to our left; ahead of us a parking lot; on one side was Spring Falls Hardware, a vacant building, and then the Spring Falls Salon, Plaza de Spring Falls, and the Spring Falls Tanline. A large road cluttered with abandoned cars far ahead, up against a bank and subdivisions. To the right of the parking lot was my former hell’s gatekeeper, now a haven: Homer’s Grocery.

“They’re coming from the farm house!”

I turned right, and we were in shadows, blowing into the Homer’s Grocery drive-thru. “Everyone out!”

Anthony Barnhart

36 Hours

64

“What?” Hannah screamed. “What’re you doing!”

“Trust me,” I said, and jumped out of the Jeep. The front desk was empty. Hannah and Les got out. Les ran to the entrance. “Better have a plan!”

I grabbed the glass door that said
Homer’s Grocery Employees Only
on it in bold red lettering. It was locked. No. I banged my fists hard on the glass, turned to see Hannah staring at me. A shadow against the wall, and a good friend of mine rushed after her. Lennie, who ran the drive-thru on Fridays. Her eyes had sunken down, turned grossly yellow, as blanched as her bared teeth. She swiped her hands to grab Hannah. I screamed, “Hannah! Down!” She did as I told, probably because of the fear, and Lennie stumbled over her. Then she came at me. My hand fell down instinctively. There was always a bar next to the door to prop it open when ferrying big orders. She snarled. My fingers grabbed the cold steel of the bar, and I swung it up; she jumped up to fall atop of me; I collapsed against the door and drove the sharp end of the pole up into the soft part under her chin; she shrieked as the pole bloodily tore through her chin, mouth and eyes, finally exploding from the top of her skull. Blood sprayed all over the neck of my shirt as her body crumpled down, going into seizures, wracking against several crates of sodas.

Les ran towards me. “We’re screwed, they’re-“

Hannah ran up to the door. “Let us in!”

I turned and saw George and Diane against the glass. Cashiers. They saw me, and their faces lit up. Hannah pleaded, “Let me in! Please!”

They opened the door and we rushed inside. Les was the last one in. Diane calmly shut the door and slid the bolt back over it, just as an infected threw himself against the door, growling, clawing. The woman on the floor writhed in a bath of blood. I watched in horror as the infected turned from the door and jumped upon the woman, tearing her flesh and biting her neck. More infected ran around the Jeep and dove atop the woman, hungrily tearing her apart. George said, “They eat their own dead. And if the dead aren’t eaten, they return from the dead.” His voice was eerily placid. “You see,” he told us, “you have to get them in the head. You have to pierce the brain. Blunt trauma doesn’t work. We tried that.” He just stared at the feast in the Drive-thru. Weakness took over me, and I sat down atop some wooden crates containing raspberry clutches. “Thanks, George. Diane. How you guys doing?”

Diane saw the blood on my shirt. My weakness. The cut on my forehead.

“Better than you, I imagine.”

Anthony Barnhart

36 Hours

65

Hannah demanded, “Is this place safe?”

George glared at her. “Safer than out there, Missus.”

“She didn’t mean anything by it,” I told him. “Back off. She’s just scared. We’re all scared.”

She polished my words, telling George, “Thank you for letting us in.”

He nodded his
you’re welcome
.

Les stared out at the infected eating their comrade alive. “Can they get through the glass?”

Diane laughed. “They’ve tried. But ol’ Homer was a stickler. Everything is plate-glass. Bullet-proof.”

“Yeah,” I said, as if my words meant anything. To Diane, “Is it just you guys?”

“No. We have some customers upstairs. In the lounge. We’ve barricaded the doors leading down here. Those darned diseased swept into our store like a strong south wind. Tore down shelves and turned the deli into a madhouse. Dairy was taken over. A lot of our guys were infected. I think it’s in the bites. A lot of customers fell, too. We were able to round up the customers who weren’t infected, and we lobbied them back here. Boarded up the doors to the store with boards, nail gun and lots of crates, and those big, black magazine return boxes. And all the glass down here, from when it used to be a bar, is bullet-proof. We’ve been able to keep them out. They’ve tried, though. Believe me, they’ve tried.”

“Who else is here?”

“Oh. You mean, besides the customers? Mary and Louis. And Daniel. Though he came by before running up to his mom’s. It’s his day off. But he’s here, too. Came in almost with the disease itself.”

Today Kenny—an ex-World War II veteran—was playing the role of bagger, a role I took up in the afternoons and evenings. “Kenny?”

George shook his head. “You know Kenny. Ever since the second Great War and Vietnam, he’s had that fighting spirit.”

Diane said, “He kept them away from us as we made our way to the lobby. He sacrificed himself.”

“I’ll tell you,” George said, “that I’ve seen a lot of crap in my life. I was a medic in Vietnam, I know what it was like. But nothing, Austin,
nothing
, compares to this… this… I don’t even know what to call it. But nothing compares.”

Anthony Barnhart

36 Hours

66

Diane said, “It’s like the end of the world.”

I reminisced on my thoughts under the deck, and the magazine Les had been reading before we were overtaken at AmeriStop. I pushed it out of my mind. “I don’t like standing here by the door.”

“To the lounge we go, then.”

We walked between aisles of storage. Bananas, green peppers, onions. Stacks of soda. Cereal. Paper towels. Les spoke up. “How’d you know we were down there?”

I said, “They have some windows up there, poking over the roof. Probably saw us, right?”

“Yep,” Diane said.

“And you knew the Jeep was mine.”

She shook her head. “No. The diseased, they just don’t drive.”

We went up a ramp. I had gone up the ramp a million times before, each time looking at my watch to see how much longer until I could clock off and take a spin to freedom, to drop into bed and fall asleep, Dad coming in to say goodnight, Mom scratching my back and pecking me on the cheek, Ashlie lost in the hardcore music floating from underneath her door, sometimes mixed with the curling smoke of incense. My eyes watered, as they often did when incense burned too long, but this time it was sorrow. I wanted to see my family. Wanted to know if they were okay. Wanted to embrace them, and hold them. And I prayed they were safe.

George said, “Saw how you did in that woman. Want another shirt?” He pointed to the blood stain.

“This is my second pair today.”