The Breadwinner Trilogy (Book 1): The Breadwinner (16 page)

“Guys, stop, it’s over and done with.  Please, let’s just get this over with and take care of those two things we got out there now.”  Ben peered over a make-up advertisement in the window.  It hid his body so he wasn’t worried about being spotted.  The two eaters just stood there, looking around, not knowing where their prey had gone.  Three more suddenly appeared.  He shook his head but figured they were safe for the moment and took this opportunity with a fully stocked store that hadn’t been looted for some wonderful reason.  Maybe it was because this really was one of the only places he’d seen so far in the city that the owner had enough sense to pull down the gate before they left.  He knew that even at Lucy’s pharmacy they all just ran out like scared animals.  They lucked out with this in a huge way.  There was a ton of food and beverage options and first aid supplies, it was like an oasis.

He met the others in the back.  “We’ve gotta find keys.  I’ll go check the office, they locked the pharmacy up just as good as the rest of the place.  But I know the office door won’t have as good a lock on it.”  Andrew disappeared between the shelves and the rest just stood there, taking the store in.  There were rectangular windows near the ceiling in the corners of the room that allowed natural light in and also allowed them to appreciate the luck they’d run into.  As long as the eaters didn’t know they were in there, they could take some extra time to evaluate the situation outside, examine their supplies and replenish with better things and Juliette could rummage through the pharmacy all she wanted.  Andrew returned a few moments later jingling keys in his happy hands.  He tossed them to Juliette who went to work opening the pharmacy’s door and Clyde grinned at him.

“See?  Shootin’ that lock off wasn’t such a stupid move after all.”

“No, you still did something stupid, but either way, I guess a thank you is in order.”  They embraced each other, almost sharing a brief unspoken apology.

“What do you think Ben?”

“I hate to say it, but I think we need to wait out those things and Juliette might need to chill out for a few.  Let’s stick around here for the time being and head out again when it’s safe.  If we’re smart about it, we make it to Franklin by what, tomorrow night?”

“You got it man.”

“And CVS got wine.  Don’t mind if I do.”  Clyde hurried off to the non-working refrigerators on the other side of the store and helped himself to an unopened bottle of Pinot Noir.  He came back with a warm six pack of his brother’s favorite beer, Yuengling.  Warm beer never tasted so good.

V

The three men enjoyed their warm wine and beer, no matter how much better they might have had it in the past, it was the finest tasting alcohol on the planet at that very moment.  Juliette popped a few Xanax and stocked up her backpack with the antipsychotics she had been previously prescribed for her mild schizophrenia.  The disease ran in her family and although she was only 23, if it was left untreated it would definitely take its toll on her.  Andrew met Juliette a year ago when her mother had a nervous breakdown and needed to be Baker Acted.  It was by no means a romantic situation but Juliette followed his police cruiser to the mental health center and proceeded to have a sort of nervous breakdown herself.  Andrew and Clyde had a very mentally ill mother themselves, so Andrew knew how to handle that sort of thing.  He didn’t want Juliette to end up in the loony bin like her mother so he convinced her to calm down and have a coffee with him.  They’d been together ever since.  Sure, it was an exhausting relationship but Andrew was the type of helpful caring person that only came around once in a lifetime for girls like Juliette.  He found no reason in not fighting to keep something you loved especially when that person wasn’t always responsible for how they treated you.

The night came quickly and their heads buzzed from the alcohol.  They had eaten an unhealthy meal of snacks and spent almost an entire day drinking.  Juliette softly snored in the corner near the pharmacy door and Ben checked the front once more.  It was too dark to tell if the eaters were still lurking around but he didn’t hear anything.  They didn’t dare use a flashlight or anything in the store for fear that the lights might be seen.  The windows toward the ceiling were too high to reach without making a bunch of noise and frankly not worth covering up for only one night.  They sat in the dark, chatting with one another until Clyde soon drifted off into a deep slumber.  Andrew, somewhere in the dark thanked Ben.

“For what?”  Ben didn’t feel like anything he’d done deserved a thank you.  If anything he still owed everything to Andrew and Clyde.  They’d come out of nowhere and helped him fight off that horde.

“I don’t know man.  Everything happens for a reason, so just, thanks.  We might have never left.  Juliette might have never left.  I have a feeling this will be good for her.”

No one said another word as they closed their eyes and let the booze take them away into a deep sleep.

The sun cast a sliver of light down into the room and across Ben’s face through one of the windows.  Everyone else seemed to be up and rummaging about the store.  Clyde was figuring out how to fit snacks and wine into a bag that already had food and water in it while Andrew went through first aid supplies and Juliette packed up some great antibiotics and painkillers from the pharmacy.  Ben shrugged his shoulders and popped four Advil into his mouth and washed them down with water.  He walked up behind the registers and grabbed several random cartons of cigarettes and shoved them into one of his big bags.  He looked around the counters for anything else that might be useful and decided to take a few bottles of lighter fluid, an extra zippo and a utility knife.

They all cleaned up with the plethora of personal hygiene supplies they had on hand and took some extra deodorants, cleansing wipes and hand sanitizer.  Juliette and Clyde both thought of taking extra personal hygiene supplies and argued over who got what as if there wasn’t enough for the both of them.  Ben was at the front again, peering out the window.

“Is the coast clear?”  Andrew joined him in his watch.

“Looks like it, but who’s to say they don’t come a runnin’ at the sound of that gate coming up?  Or worse yet, some more of those looting thugs.”

“Well, I wouldn’t call them looters, we’re kind of uh, lootin’ now don’t you think?”

“Finders keepers bro, that’s how it goes.”  Andrew and Ben snickered at the window while Clyde and Juliette finally decided to ignore one another and finish packing their stuff up.  They were all relatively close in age.  Juliette and Clyde were both 23, Ben was 25 and Andrew was 28.

“So how long you been outta the service?”  Andrew asked Ben while continuing to scan the street for any movement.

“How could you tell?”

“Oh you just scream military, that and I can pick ‘em out of a crowd, a lot of my family served and a lot of the cops around here have been in.”

“Ah, just over a year.  Went in right out of high school.”

“We’re ready when you two are.”  Juliette came up behind them.  Her bleach blonde hair was pulled back tightly in a neat bun.  For a personal trainer she didn’t have a very athletic build, she was very tall and thin, and with her hair like that she reminded Ben of an anorexic ballerina.  She waved her hand at the smoke from Ben’s cigarette and obnoxiously coughed.  Ben rolled his eyes and threw the cigarette to the tile, stepping on it. 

“Let’s give it a try.”

With everyone all packed up they looked like a group of gypsies.  Andrew very slowly removed the wedge he had placed from under the front door and opened it.  Everyone held their breath as he raised the security gate, the metal grated and clicked loudly, sending shivers down everyone’s spines.  They stood frozen in the doorway, awaiting the feral cries of the hungry dead but they never came.  They looked at one another and figured now was as good a time as any to head out.  They didn’t bother pulling the security gate down, it would have made too much noise and there was no point to locking anything up anymore.  The group carefully made their way across the street and Andrew went up ahead to peek around the corner.  He motioned for them to follow after a moment and they made their way up the last block before reaching the road that would lead them to the highway.  Ben had already noticed that the streets were more congested with cars in this area.  Some had crashed days ago into telephone poles, street lights and other cars.  Some had doors open with blood stained steering wheels.  He swore he even heard one still running off in the distance.  Andrew ran ahead again to check out their final turn.  Ben almost didn’t notice him give the okay to continue.  He was lost in his thoughts for a moment, hoping Veronica had made it out of the city, hoping that he wasn’t putting her in any danger by taking his sweet time with this new group of people.

VI

They slowly closed the gap between Columbia City and Columbia Beach’s Franklin Township.  The highway was a vast graveyard of vehicles and they took the east bound lane with less cars left on it so it was easier to walk without having to weave in and out so much.  The highway’s shoulder even had cars in it, hindering their ability to conveniently get from point A to point B.  The day was absolutely beautiful despite all the death in the cars around them.  The remnants of the day the whole world went away surrounded them.  Bodies lie decaying in the road, birds picking at their skin, every so often they’d come across an eater either hopelessly wandering the highway with nowhere to go or crouched, greedily munching on something terrible.  The group figured they were lucking out, but the way Andrew saw it was that the highway was still a highway, just a place for things to travel.

“Nobody hung out on the highway when the world was normal.  So why would these things be here now?  Ya know?  When Hank and I were headed back into the city, the things were comin’ up behind us, runnin’ around in front of us, but the only reason they ever stopped is because the people were
stopped.  When there weren’t any more people out here, they moved on, either back to the city, or back to the woods.”

“Yeah, they’re pretty ADD if you ask me.  Sal used to watch them when they were still runnin’ aimlessly up and down my street.  They would literally run into each other, into cars, into walls.  He said they were nothing but stupid animals.  They can’t talk, don’t care about anything but eating and can’t even figure out how to get to their food.  He said even dogs were smarter, dogs could at least figure out how to chew through a bag.”  Ben mimicked Sal’s accent as he quoted him.  He missed his friend and wished they were making the journey to Paradise Bay together.

They reached the bridge and Ben was reminded of Marco.  “Do you mind if we stop for a few?  I just want to look around.”

“Look around for what?  There ain’t nothin’ but dead people up here.”  Clyde dropped his bags and stretched.  “I knew you was a freak.” 

He didn’t know what exactly he was looking for.  He didn’t know what kind of car Marco’s friends were driving that day, or even if he would find some remnant of Marco or his friends.  Maybe a part of him hoped Marco was hiding in one of these cars somewhere but he knew it was highly unlikely.  He hopped the guard rail to the west bound side and walked around, aimlessly peering into cars and not knowing what he might find in each one.  He looked out at the water that ran into the bay.  It seemed to almost sparkle under the sun and it was like a mirror that reflected everything around them.  The trees, the sky, everything could be seen twice in its clear flowing beauty.  He peered over the side and the mirror was shattered.  On the concrete of the foundation below were the splattered bodies of people who had jumped to escape the eaters.  But he knew that they didn’t accidentally land there, if they had any intention of living they would have jumped out and into the water, hoping to be washed away somewhere with less nightmares.  He wondered if any of them were Marco, he wondered if they had been bitten and had enough sense to keep themselves from turning and contributing to the spread of the infection.  He wondered if any of them were Veronica.  He felt himself get angry and came to the conclusion that he had seen enough.  It was time to keep moving.

He rejoined the group back where they had stopped.  “Everything alright?”  Andrew was sitting next to Juliette in the road, applying sunscreen to her fair skinned face.  She placed her oversized sunglasses back on once he was done.

“Yeah,” he finally said.  “Everything’s fine.  Break’s over, are we ready to keep moving?”

“Sure, just a few more miles of highway before we hit Franklin Woods.  We can probably sneak in there and test drive one of those sweet ass houses.” 

“Yeah, Sal and Lucy lived there.  I’m sure they wouldn’t mind us staying in their place for the night.”

“Even better.  No more breaking and entering for us today.” 

Clyde laughed at his brother’s remark, “Whoever would have thought a cop would have raided CVS with us?”  Juliette smiled for the first time since Ben had met her.  He wished she would do it more and maybe then he’d try to make nice with her.

The group pressed on, it took them the entire day to make it from the city to the other end of the highway with the pace that they kept.  Nice and easy, cautious and quiet.  Andrew didn’t think there was a reason to waste energy or resources to make such a short trip.  As much as it pained him to go so slowly, Ben agreed and remembered his grandma’s favorite saying, haste makes waste.

“I’m tired of walking.”  Juliette spoke softly to Andrew.

“You’re in the best shape of all of us and you’re tired of walking?”  Clyde scoffed.  “Gimme a cigarette, will you?”  He threw his bags down dramatically and Ben lit two cigarettes, handing one to him.