“Austin, I want you carrying the duffels,” Martinez says, tipping a nod toward the pile of canvas bags in the corner. “Keep ’em open and ready.”
Austin is already standing over the bags, gathering them up and slinging them over his shoulder. The others check their ammo supplies, holstering their weapons in quick-release rigs on their hips and belts. Barbara shoves a Colt Army .45 down the back of a sash wrapped tightly around her thick midriff, David handing her two extra clips.
They work with the practiced concentration of veteran bank robbers. They’ve done this many times. Still, there’s a certain tension crackling around the dim enclosure as Martinez takes one last look through the open tarp. “Gonna pull around back,” he says. “Be ready to rock and roll, and watch your backs on the way in … the noise of the truck’s already drawn more biters.”
A quick succession of nods around the cargo hold, and Martinez vanishes.
Lilly goes over to the rear hatch and braces herself on the jamb as the sound of the cab doors slamming is followed by the revving engine. The truck lurches out of there and then rumbles around the side of the supermarket.
Forty-five seconds later, the air brakes hiss and the truck jerks to a stop.
Lilly takes a deep breath, draws one of the Rugers, pushes the tarp open, and hops out.
She lands hard on the cracked pavement, the sun in her eyes, the wind in her face, the smell of burning rubber wafting in from some far-off cataclysm. Martinez is already out of the cab, the .357 with the silencer holstered and banging on his thigh, Gus hustling around the front of the truck. The bald man climbs behind the wheel.
The warehouse sits off to their right, on the edge of the back lot, nestled in a jungle of weeds and razor grass, an enormous corrugated metal box the size of three movie theaters. Lilly sees the unmarked metal door at the top of a small flight of stairs, situated right next to the loading dock, and two huge rolling garage doors in the shadows of the overhang. Everything looks congealed and petrified with age, rusted shut, scarred with graffiti.
She glances over her shoulder and gets a glimpse of a cluster of walkers, a hundred yards away, out by the busted Piggly Wiggly sign, slowly turning toward the commotion and starting to shamble in their direction.
Austin comes up behind Lilly. “Let’s go, let’s go,” he mutters, lugging the duffel bags. “While we’re young and in one piece!”
David and Barbara come up fast behind Austin, the older couple staying low, with eyes wide and alert. Martinez gives a hand signal to Gus, pointing off toward the loading dock. “Back it up, Gus, and keep the radio open and an eye on things outside.”
“Roger that.” Gus revs the engine, then starts to put the truck into gear.
“We’ll be coming out the loading dock side,” Martinez informs him. “So keep the engine running and be ready to roll at a moment’s notice.”
“Got it!”
Then things get moving very quickly, very efficiently, as Gus backs the truck up to the dock while the others swiftly and silently creep toward the unmarked side door, moving with the cold competence of a SWAT team. Martinez climbs stairs, pulls a long metal shim from his belt, and starts working on the padlock, pounding the shim with the butt of his gun. The others huddle behind him, glancing over their shoulders at the encroaching dead.
The lock snaps, and Martinez pries the door open on squeaking hinges.
They plunge into darkness and overwhelming stench—rotting meat, acrid pukelike smells, ammonia odors—the door slamming behind them, making them jump. A single skylight way up above the cobwebbed gantries provides barely enough illumination to reveal silhouettes of aisles and overturned forklifts scattered between the high shelves.
Each one of the intruders—including Lilly—pauses to smile as their eyes adjust enough to see all the canned goods and packaged food rising to the rafters. It is, indeed, the gold mine Martinez had hoped for. But as instantly as they all register their good luck, they hear the noises building in the deeper shadows, as if on cue with their arrival, and one by one their smiles fade—
—as they glimpse the first of the shadowy figures emerging from behind well-stocked shelves.
FOUR
On Martinez’s signal, they start firing, the collective snapping of silencers and flickering muzzle flashes lighting up the dark warehouse. Lilly gets off three quick blasts, and takes down two at a range of about fifty feet. One of the targets—an obese man in tattered work clothes, his flesh the color of earthworms—jerks against a shelf, his skull gushing cerebral fluids as he knocks over a row of canned tomatoes. The other biter—a younger male in greasy dungarees, perhaps a former forklift operator—collapses in a cascade of blood jetting out of the fresh hole in his skull.
The dead keep coming, at least two dozen or more, from every corner of the warehouse.
The air thumps and crackles with strobelike light, as the shooters stay clustered tight near the door, their gun barrels fanning out and blazing. Austin drops the duffels and starts working with his Glock 19, another acquisition from the National Guard depot, featuring a noise suppressor and an attachment below the barrel that sends a narrow thread of red light across the darkness. David picks off a female in a stained Piggly Wiggly uniform, sending the dead girl spinning against a rack of stale bagels. Barbara hits an older male in a blood-speckled dress shirt, clip-on tie, and name tag—maybe the former store manager—knocking the creature down in a red mist that paints a light fixture in pointillist profusion.
The dampened gunfire emits a surreal racket, like a round of mad applause, accompanied by a fireworks display ripping through the fetid stillness, followed by the jangle and clank of spent shells hitting the floor. Martinez edges forward, leading the group deeper into the warehouse. They pass perpendicular aisles and fire at lumbering figures with milky white eyes coming headlong toward them—former machinists, stock clerks, assistant managers, cashiers—each one collapsing in gushing baptisms of blood. They lose count by the time the last one sinks to the floor.
In the echoing silence, Lilly hears the metallic squawk of Gus’s voice coming through Martinez’s walkie-talkie. “—the hellfire is going on?! Y’all hear me?! Boss?! Y’all copy? What is going on?”
At the end of the main aisle, Martinez pauses to catch his breath. He grabs the radio clipped to his belt. “We’re good, Gus,” he says into the walkie’s mouthpiece. “Ran into a little welcoming party … but we’re clear.”
Over the air, the voice sizzles: “’Bout gave me a heart attack!”
Martinez thumbs the TALK button: “Whole fucking staff must have hid out in here when the shit went down.” He looks around at the carnage behind veils of blue smoke, the air stinking now of cordite. He thumbs the button. “You just be ready to roll, Gus. Looks like we’re gonna be loading the truck to the gills with goodies.”
The voice returns: “That’s good news, boss. Copy that. I’ll be ready.”
Martinez thumbs off the radio, puts it back, and turns to the others. “Everybody okay?”
Lilly’s ears ring, but she feels steady, alert. “All good,” she says, thumbing the catch on each of her Rugers, dumping the spent magazines, the clips clattering to the floor. She pulls fresh mags from the back of her waistband and slams them in place. She scans the aisles on either side of her, where the remains of walkers lie in gore-drenched heaps. She feels nothing.
“Keep an eye out for stragglers,” Martinez orders, glancing around the shadowy aisles.
“Damn this thing!” David Stern is complaining, shaking a flashlight. His gnarled hands tremble. “I checked the battery just last night.”
Barbara rolls her eyes in the darkness. “The man’s hopeless with technology.” She takes the flashlight from him. “I thought these batteries might be a little iffy.” She unscrews it and fiddles with the C-cells. It doesn’t help; the thing will not come on.
“Wait a second,” Austin says, shoving his Glock back behind his belt. “Got an idea.”
He go
es over to a shelf on which bundles of firewood are stacked alongside sacks of charcoal briquettes, cans of lighter fluid, and packages of wood chips. He pulls a long piece of hardwood loose, pulls a bandanna from his pocket, and wraps it around the end of the log.
Lilly watches him with interest. She can’t quite figure this kid out. He seems older than his years somehow. She watches him douse the fabric with lighter fluid. He pulls a Bic and sparks the bandanna, and all at once a plume of brilliant orange light illuminates the center aisle in a radiant nimbus. “Very moody,” Lilly says with a smirk. “Nice work, Huckleberry.”
* * *
They split up into two groups. Martinez and the Sterns take the front of the building—a maze of shelves brimming with packaged goods, household supplies, dry goods, condiments, and kitchen staples—and Lilly and Austin take the rear. Martinez orders everybody to move quickly, no fucking around, and if they see something they’re not sure about, leave it. Take only the items with a shelf life.
Austin leads Lilly down a side corridor lined with deserted offices. They pass door after door, each of them locked and showing empty darkness behind their windows. Austin walks slightly ahead of Lilly, holding the torch high in one hand, the Glock in the other. Lilly has both her guns out, ready to rock at a moment’s notice.
In the flickering yellow light, they move past rows of propane tanks, garden supplies, sacks of fertilizer, cords of firewood, coils of garden hoses, and useless ephemera like bird feeders and garden gnomes. The skin on the back of Lilly’s neck prickles with goose bumps as she hears the echoing whispers and shuffling footsteps of the Sterns and Martinez coming from the darkness behind her.
At the end of the main aisle, against the back wall, they make a turn and discover a large hydraulic pallet jack sitting amid the rakes, shovels, and tools. Austin pulls the thing into the aisle—it’s a big greasy hand truck with heavy iron wheels and twin forks that protrude at least eight feet—and he tests it by pumping the huge hand jack. “This might just come in handy,” he speculates.
“Do me a favor, hold the torch up for a second.” Lilly indicates the shadows along the back wall. Austin raises the torch and reveals, in the dancing glow of torchlight, a pile of empty pallets.
They move quickly, slamming the forks under the closest pallet.
Then they head back down the dark center aisle, the wheels squeaking noisily on the filthy cement floor. They start loading the pallet, Austin pushing and holding the torch, and Lilly grabbing the essentials. They grab fifty-gallon jugs of drinking water, cartons of seeds, sharp-edged tools, coils of rope. They make another turn and head down an aisle of canned goods. Lilly starts working up a sweat stacking shrink-wrapped cartons of peaches, corn, beans, collards, tins of sardines, tuna, and Spam.
“Gonna be heroes, comin’ back with all this shit,” Austin grunts as he shoves the jack along the aisle.
“Yeah, maybe you’ll finally get laid,” Lilly cracks, stacking the heavy trays with a groan.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“What.”
“Where’s this attitude come from?”
Lilly keeps working, her guns digging into the back of her belt. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“C’mon, Lilly … I noticed it right away … ever since I met you … you got a chip on your shoulder about something.”
They work their way toward the end of the canned goods aisle. Lilly slams another carton of cans on the pallet and grumbles, “Can we just get this thing done, and get the hell outta here?”
“Just making conversation,” Austin says as he shoves the dolly around the end of the aisle with a grunt.
They head down another aisle stacked with crates of rotted fruit. They pause. Austin holds the torch up and reveals the blackened, shriveled peaches and bananas in their maggot-infested crates. The fruit has decomposed into slimy black lumps.
Lilly wipes the sweat from her face, her voice coming out low and hoarse. “The truth is, I lost some people very close to me.”
Austin stares at the rotten fruit. “Look … I’m sorry I brought it up … I’m sorry.” He starts shoving the dolly deeper into the aisle. “You don’t have to—”
“Wait!”
Lilly grabs him, holds him still. A faint metallic tapping noise straightens her spine, and she whispers, “Shine the torch over there.”
In the flickering glow, they see a row of freezer doors along the left side of the aisle. The stench of rancid meat hangs in the air. Lilly pulls her guns. The last door on the left is intermittently jiggling and creaking, the rusty hinges loose.
“Stay behind me, hold the torch up,” Lilly whispers, thumbing the hammers on both her Rugers, creeping toward the last door on the left.
“Walker?” Austin grabs his Glock and moves in close behind her.
“Just shut up and hold the torch up.”
Lilly moves past the jiggling door, pauses, stands with her back against the freezer. “On three,” she whispers. “You ready?”
“Ready.”
Lilly grabs the latch. “One, two, three!”
She rips the freezer door open, and both barrels go up, and her heart skips a beat. There’s nothing there. Nothing but darkness and a reeking stench.
The odor engulfs Lilly, making her eyes water as she steps back, lowering the pistols. The black, oily death-rot clings to the inside of the dark freezer. She hears a noise, and looks down at something small and furry scuttling past her feet. She lets out a pained breath as she realizes it was just a rat making all the noise.
“Fuck me,” Austin comments breathlessly, lowering the Glock and letting out a sigh of relief.
“C’mon,” Lilly says, shoving her guns back in her belt. “We got enough. Let’s head back, get the truck loaded, and get the fuck outta here.”
“Sounds good to me,” Austin says, yanking the dolly back with a smile, then pushing it back down the aisle, following Lilly toward the front of the warehouse. Behind him, a large figure lurches out of the freezer.
Austin hears it first, and only has time to turn around and see the massive male in dungarees and mangled face barreling toward him. Mandibles clenching and unclenching, eyes the color of sour milk, the biter stands well over six feet tall and is covered with a film of white mold from being shut in the freezer for so long.
Jerking away from it, reaching for his Glock, Austin trips over the corner of the dolly.
He falls down, his gun slipping out of his hand, the torch rolling across the cement. The huge biter looms over him, drooling black bile, the torchlight now shining up at a surreal angle. Flames flicker and reflect off the corpse’s shimmering, milky eyes.
Austin tries to roll away but the biter gets its gigantic dead fingers around Austin’s pant legs. He lets out an angry howl, kicking at the walker, cursing it. The thing opens its mouth, and Austin slams the heel of his boot into the maw of black, sharklike teeth.
The crunch of the lower jawbone hardly slows the thing down.
The creature goes for the flesh of Austin’s thigh. The weight of the thing is unbearable, like a house pressing down on him, and just as the thing is about to bite down on Austin’s femoral artery—the blackened teeth only centimeters away—the snapping of two silenced .22 caliber rounds rings out.
Only a few seconds have transpired from the moment the biter first appeared, but that’s the exact amount of time it has taken Lilly to hear the commotion, stop in her tracks, spin around, jack the hammers, raise the guns, take careful aim, and intercede. She hits the biter dead center between the eyes, just above the bridge of the nose.
The huge corpse whiplashes backward in a cloud of blood mist that looks like smoke in the darkness, the top of its skull splitting open and gushing.
It lands in a wet heap at Austin’s feet as the young man squirms away from it and gasps for breath and edges backward on his ass on the cold cement for several frenzied moments. “Fuck!—Jesus!—FUCK!”
“You okay?” Lilly
comes over, kneels, and inspects Austin’s legs. “You all right?”
“I’m—yeah—I’m—fine, fine,” he sputters and stammers, catching his breath. He stares at the massive lump of corpse lying at his feet.
“C’mon, let’s—”
“YO!”
The sound of Martinez’s voice coming from the front of the warehouse penetrates Lilly’s ringing ears. “Lilly! Austin! You two okay?!”
Lilly hollers over her shoulder, “We’re good!”
“Get your shit and come on!” Martinez sounds nervous. “The noise is drawing more of them out of the woodwork! Let’s go!”
“C’mon, pretty boy,” Lilly mutters to Austin, helping him up.
They get up, and Austin retrieves the torch before it has a chance to set anything on fire, and they get the hand dolly moving. The thing weighs a ton now, and it takes both of them, huffing and puffing, to roll it down the aisle.
* * *
They all meet at the loading dock. The Sterns and Martinez have filled the duffels as well as half a dozen large cardboard boxes with a plethora of packaged goods, including cartons of Ramen noodles, gourmet instant coffee, two-liter bottles of juice, packages of flour, boxes of Rice-A-Roni, several pounds of sugar, gallon jars of pickled vegetables, and shrink-wrapped cartons of Crisco, Hamburger Helper, macaroni and cheese, and cigarettes. Martinez radios Gus, and tells him to back the truck up as close to the loading dock as possible, and be ready to roll when the garage door comes up. Austin, still breathless and shaky from the attack, pushes the pallet up to the corrugated metal hatch.
“Gimme that hammer you found back there,” Martinez says to David.
The older man steps up and hands the hammer over to Martinez. The others crowd around, waiting nervously, as Martinez slams the business end of the hammer against the padlock at the bottom of the garage door. The lock is stubborn, and the pounding noises echo. Lilly glances over her shoulder, half aware of shuffling sounds coming from the deeper shadows behind her.
The lock finally snaps, and Martinez yanks the door. The thing rolls up with a rusty shriek. The wind and light rush into the warehouse, smelling of tar and burning rubber, making everybody blink. The floor swirls with stray packing straps and litter stirred up by the breeze.