“Come on,” Lorie said. “Eat it, it’ll make you feel better.”
“Maybe if I only have half…will you split it with me?” Evan asked.
“Sure,” Lorie said.
“No!” Jane cried, the word escaping from her mouth before she could stop it. “I mean, I mean you should eat a whole one, and you Lorie, you get your own whole one. You’re both hungry and can’t be sharing food like that…because Evan you need all the strength you can get, so eat it all.” Jane paused. “Understood?”
The boy gulped, nodded, and began to unwrap the granola bar. Jane ignored Lorie’s bewildered stare, but kept a sharp eye on the eating boy to make sure there was no sharing. Sven had reassured her about their situation, and Jane now thought that the boy did only have a cold or flu or something regular—something that wouldn’t end with him becoming a zombie—but she was still going to play it safe.
The car’s park lights finally came on, shining a fuzzy red through the downpour. It was a downpour worthy of being called a torrent, not that Jane would ever use that word in real life, it wasn’t a word that people said, but when Jane read books and saw the word “torrent,” this was the kind of rain she pictured.
“Okay,” Jane said, looping her arm through the straps of their remaining bags and herding Lorie and Evan toward the door. “Try to keep the plastic tight around you.”
Jane held the door open and watched the kids run out. Lorie opened the right rear door and Evan opened the left. Then they were in the car. Jane was relieved that Sven had remembered to unlock the doors. It was an easy thing to forget under all the pressure they were experiencing.
Then she stood there.
The rain was starting to pick up sideways, and her feet and the bottom of her poncho were beginning to get wet. She let the door close a few inches and kept standing there, looking at the car as it was washed clean by the pouring rain. Jane took a breath and her mind moved forward, toward the car, but her body stayed in place. She thought she heard a honk, but it was hard to hear anything through the noise of the storm.
Then a thick flash of lightning cut through the sky, and a few seconds later there came a loud thunderclap that jolted Jane into action. She ran to the car and got into the front passenger seat.
She knew why she was having such a hard time leaving, and it wasn’t because she was hesitant about going with Sven, Lorie and Evan. There was something she was leaving behind, and she didn’t know if she could.
Jane put her bags down in front of her feet and Sven began to pull out.
The windshield wipers were on full-blast but they were doing a poor job of creating visibility. They weren’t really helping at all, it was as if the windshield was under a never-ending stream, and Jane had to try to understand the shapes in front of the car from behind a current.
Then they were moving through the parking lot. Sven drove slowly, carefully, looking stressed. Jane didn’t blame him, she didn’t know how he could see much of anything at all.
“Stop!” Jane yelled.
Sven hit the brakes hard, and it jolted Jane forward. Her foot hit something hard in the duffel bag in front of her and something clunked, probably a box of ammo.
“I have to get something,” Jane said. “I’m sorry, I’ll just be a second. I’m sorry.”
Jane opened the door and was out of the car, running through the downpour back to the gun shop. She had to use her hands to find her way, placing them on the trunks and hoods of cars to keep from bumping into them. It felt like she was swimming, and the rain was so thick that it was hard to breathe.
Her squinting eyes found the “No Parking” lines on the pavement where she had parked Sven’s car and she lunged forward, sighing with relief when her hands hit the glass of the gun shop door. She pulled the door open and burst in, a drenched, poncho-wearing disaster.
But she had to come back. She just had to. Why she hadn’t just taken the thing in the first place was beyond her. It was a day for taking, and she wanted it bad.
Jane took sloshing steps behind the counter, leaving a trail of water as she went, and slipping part of the way until the strip of carpet behind the counter stopped her. She walked over to what she had left behind, and felt the carpet become sopping wet under her feet in an instant.
She pulled it out of the display in a sudden movement, and banged her wrist painfully against the display’s plastic sliding door.
“Ow!” she yelped, but forgot about the pain as soon the cry had left her mouth.
It had been worth it to come back...so worth it.
She shuddered as she looked at the Smith and Wesson .460 XVR Magnum Revolver in her hands.
“Single action...” came a deep, slow echoing voice in her head.
It held five rounds.
“Five rounds.”
It was massive. Mostly silver with a wooden handle.
“Revolver.”
Without letting go of the gun, Jane began to dig around in the boxes of ammo for something suitable. She wanted at least Colt 45, and that was all she got. She turned over all of the boxes looking for .454 or .460, but Colt 45 was all there was. At least there was that, and a decent amount of it—six boxes of twenty rounds each. That would last for a little while. That would do some real damage.
“That’s not a gun for a woman,” another voice said, startling Jane out of her munitions-fueled euphoria. She knew this voice. It was her second shooting coach, the misogynist—Matt. He had been so nice at first, such a perfect gentleman. Then, after a few shooting lessons and a few dates, he had shown his true self.
A woman’s place is at the stove, cooking me breakfast, he would say.
Sure, he would say, a woman should be able to shoot a gun, but a woman’s gun, and never, never, a man’s gun.
The relationship hadn’t lasted very long.
For a moment, Jane wondered what had become of Matt, if the zombies had gotten him. Then she realized she didn’t care. He had only wanted her around to showcase, and to cook and clean and protect his house with her woman’s gun.
To hell with you Matt, she thought, and an image of a well-bitten Matt-the-zombie popped into her mind. She wouldn’t hesitate if she saw him like that. The coldness of the thought struck her, and she opened a box of Colt 45 and loaded the revolver. It was heavy, but she could handle it. There was no such thing as a man’s gun, or a woman’s gun.
Jane reprimanded herself for all the voices she was hearing in her head. It wasn’t like her to hear voices. Psychologists had a name for that. Jane thought it was schizophrenia but she wasn’t sure. That wasn’t her, her head was supposed to be screwed on nice and tight.
At least none of the voices belonged to Vicky, at least not yet. Jane wasn’t sure she could handle Vicky’s voice in her head. Poor Vicky. What had Vicky ever done to anybody? Sure she left crumbs about the place sometimes and had an aversion to using coasters that would have made any man proud, but she didn’t deserve, didn’t deserve to be—
“A woman can’t handle a gun like that! It’s too big! Recoil’s too strong!” she heard Matt’s voice shout. “You don’t have enough muscle in your arms for that one!”
“Shut up!” Jane screamed, cocking the gun. It shook in her hands as she raised it, pointing down the aisle she was facing.
Who was he to tell her anything? He was probably still stuck at that dead-end job where he would never stand up to anyone, no matter how badly they treated him. She wondered if he really had been treated badly at all, or if he was the one doling out abuse. He had certainly made her feel bad...about everything.
“Shut up you—”
But she didn’t finish because a rasping groan came at her from the “Employees Only” section. Jane froze, listening. She heard another groan, this one more guttural, and then she could hear the shuffling of feet. They could only be zombie feet, she decided, and she turned to the “Employees Only” section with the gun held out in front of her body.
She saw him, or rather, it. T
his zombie wasn’t wearing overalls, but a pair of stained, well-worn jeans and an equally stained and well-worn t-shirt. The zombie’s clothes had more holes than the holiest cheese. But it wasn’t as funny as it could’ve been, because through the holes Jane could see dry, grey skin that flaked off with each of the zombie’s shuffling steps.
Another groan came from the thing, and its hands rose up to stomach level. They opened, and began grasping at the air.
That’s when Jane saw the hip holster with a revolver sticking out of it, hammer cocked. This man—back when he had been a man—took his Second Amendment rights seriously.
Jane took a hesitant step back with her right leg and bent her left leg at the knee. There she stood, in a lunging position, as the zombie approached. She aimed, cocked the revolver, breathed in, aimed again, breathed out, and squeezed the trigger.
The shot ripped through the air and most of the zombie’s head disappeared. It had been a clean shot, removing the top half of the zombie’s head above the jaw line. Jane saw teeth and a shriveled tongue, and a disgusting jumble of flesh and bone where the throat and spine must have been.
It made her think of her high school biology class where she had dissected earthworms and frogs and fetal pigs. Only this smelled much worse. Jane pulled on her surgical mask and stepped backward from the still shuffling zombie.
She watched as the shuffling slowed and the zombie began to totter forward. Jane was quick to react and poked the zombie’s chest with the tip of her gun, pushing it backward, away from her. The zombie tipped backward and fell, arms still outstretched, hands grasping.
Jane’s ears rang and she could feel some soreness in her palms from the revolver’s recoil, but it was still in her hands, and her aim had been perfect.
So much for it being a man’s gun, she thought, putting the notion to rest.
Jane leaned forward over the zombie, and she could see yellow-grey splotches all over its shirt and jeans. When she looked closer, she saw more of these splotches on the thing’s exposed arms, neck, and the small part of its head that was still intact. The splotches looked like the dried remains of a thick liquid, and they made her shudder.
I have to go, she thought, they’re waiting for me.
Jane regained her composure—which was becoming easier to do as the day wore on—and gathered all the boxes of Colt 45. She took a large paper bag from beside the cash register and put the boxes into it. She thought about taking the zombie’s hip holster but decided she didn’t want to go through the process of unfastening it. That required getting much too close for comfort.
She took another shoulder holster down from the rack behind the counter, took her poncho off, and slung the holster over her shoulder, on top of the shoulder holster with the Beretta in it. She stuck the revolver into the new holster.
Reluctantly loosing her grip on the .460 XVR, she let it hang at her side. There was too much weight on her left side now, but she would just have to deal with that. She put the poncho back on, then crumpled the top of the paper bag with the ammo in it, setting it on the counter.
Then she ran down an aisle, looking for some unopened ponchos. Not finding any, and feeling that she was running out of time, Jane grabbed a hiking pack and brought it up to the counter. She took a second paper bag and put it over the one with the Colt 45 ammo in it. Then she put the covered ammo in the hiking pack. That would have to do.
Jane ran to the door clutching the treasure. She was pounds heavier with the revolver, ammo, and additional holster, but she felt light as a feather. The .460 XVR had that kind of effect on her. She pushed the surgical mask down, tucking it once more under the plastic of the poncho around her neck.
“Single action,” she whispered to herself. She loved those two words. Though the .460 XVR also worked in double action, Jane knew that the lighter trigger pull in single action would afford her better accuracy with the impressive weapon. All the men who used the .460 XVR in double action mode were fooling themselves, patting themselves on the back, and missing every target.
Jane shouldered the door open, bolted through it into the rain, and dashed to the car. The rain had let up just enough so that she didn’t have to grope her way along the parked cars.
She wrenched the passenger door open and climbed into the car.
“What the hell was that about?” Sven asked, looking angry.
It didn’t shake Jane out of her high spirits. “I forgot something, sorry.”
“You got something good, didn’t you?” Lorie asked.
The girl must have seen it in the way Jane was carrying her parcel of ammo.
Jane turned around. “Maybe.” She smiled at Lorie, and Lorie smiled back.
Sven clicked the doors shut. He shifted the car into drive and they pulled out of the strip mall, onto Route 29.
As they left the gun store behind them, Jane began to think about the awful splotches on the zombie whose head she had just blown off. Though she wasn’t conscious of it, her right hand was under her poncho, squeezing the grip of the revolver.
Chapter 79
Sven had a hard time seeing where he was driving. The rain was coming down in great sheets, and he could only drive a short distance at a time before having to stop and wait for the rain to let up enough to drive on. He was angry with Jane for running away like that, she could’ve been hurt in there by herself, but he made himself focus on the washout that was the road in front of him.
“You guys need to help me out a little,” he said. “I can barely see anything, so if you see something, let me know as soon as you do.” He had already scraped against several cars when he pulled away from the store.
Only moments later, Sven hit the brakes and just missed colliding with a mailbox. He had veered off course and driven onto a sidewalk at the edge of the road. No one had noticed in the dense rain.
Then there was a blinding flash of light and the car filled with screams. Everyone screamed but Sven, because his heart had jumped too far up into his throat for him to make a sound. A thunderclap followed immediately behind the flash, and the screams made another round through the car.
“It’s just thunder,” Sven stammered, “and lightning...thunder and lightning.” The lightning had struck just across the road, on the southbound side of Route 29. Sven looked over to see that Ivan was hiding behind Jane’s legs, ears twitching. “Poor Ivan.”
“Isn’t lightning only supposed to hit tall things?” Lorie asked. “That’s what they tell us in school. That hit right in the road over there.”
“You can’t believe everything they tell you in school,” Sven said. “My mom always used to tell me that too, about lightning, probably because she was told that in school, or by her parents. But yeah, it’s not true. Lightning can do random things I think. And there’s not really anything tall in the road here, it’s wide open.”
Sven backed up to give the car the minimum amount of clearance it needed to make it around the mailbox. Any more would have meant risking backing into something—the visibility in the rear was non-existent. “Okay, in this rain it might be more dangerous to go than to stay, so maybe let’s wait a few minutes and see if it gets any better. I still want to get as far out of town as possible to get away from the residential areas. There’s gonna be less of them the farther out we go. Here they’ll find us—they seem to have a way of sniffing us out—and might get us just by outnumbering us.”
“They’re the ones that smell,” Lorie said.
“Maybe we smell a certain way to them,” Evan said.
“They smell awful,” Lorie said.
“That makes sense,” Jane said, “what you said about going somewhere with less people, somewhere farther out. Who knows how long the outbreak will last? Do you have a particular place in mind or are we just gonna drive and drive?”
“I know a place.” Sven was growing more nervous. Was the rain never going to let up? It was a miracle they hadn’t gotten into an accident already. “The Wegmans way down 29. We’ll h
ave food and supplies there, and if it’s safe we can lock the place down and stay there. If not, then at least we can get supplies and keep going from there. We can go farther out somewhere to some farmhouse and take it over if we have to.”
“I hope we don’t have to stay locked up too long,” Jane said. “Remember your mom said only Virginia is affected, then they’ll be able to come in here and take care of it right? I mean the government, they’ve gotta be doing something about this.”
“The radio’s still no good,” Sven said. “I tried it when you went back inside the store. And we don’t know that’s still the case. For all we know the whole country is like this…for all we know the whole…” he trailed off, not wanting to air that particular thought. If the whole world was affected, then maybe running was pointless.
“Wegmans is a great idea!” Lorie suddenly blurted. “I’ve been there. It’s huge, and they have all kinds of stuff to eat. We can probably stay there for weeks, maybe months…as long as it’s not…” the excitement was fading out of her voice, “as long as it’s not full of zombies.”
“I think it’ll be alright. We’re already doing much better, in terms of getting somewhere less populated. I can’t tell if the zombies are wandering around us in this rain, but there are a lot fewer cars on the road.”
“I think the rain is getting lighter,” Lorie said, “right Evan? What do you think?”
If Evan responded, Sven didn’t hear it.
Sven thought the rain might be getting lighter, but he couldn’t tell. A cold sweat was seeping from his palms, coating the steering wheel and making him even more nervous.
Then his protein alarm went off again, and he shut it off with an annoyed slap.
“You don’t want a protein bar?” Jane asked, sounding concerned.
He shook his head. His throat felt like it was locking up, and he wasn’t breathing as deeply as he ought to have been—he couldn’t. It felt like he had over-trained and under-slept. Sven’s body wasn’t happy.
“Evan?” Lorie’s questioning voice came from the backseat. “Evan? Evan?”
Evan didn’t respond.
Out of the corner of his eye, Sven saw Jane turn around.
“What’s wrong?” Jane asked.