Human Extinction Level Loss (Book 1): Nicole's Odyssey (4 page)

U
nliving.  What was the proper term for them anyhow?
she thought to herself. 
Undead? Living Dead?
Stiffs?

It did not really matter, she decided.  It was not likely she was going to offend them in conversation.  She continued to study the lay of the land, but did not see any movement.  The only sound she heard was the throaty idle of the GTO'S engine.  Ultimately, it was not the store that worried her; it was the town further down the road.  Towns had people and people, or rather what had happened to people, was the real problem.  The store was a choice.  Going through town was not a choice, and it was causing her more angst than merely not knowing the official nomenclature of whatever was standing, walking, shuffling, or crawling between her and where she needed to be.  She studied the store one more time.  It looked completely abandoned, save for the one car in the far reaches of the parking lot.  Nicole looked over at her MP3 player lying in the passenger seat.  It had been dead for the last one-hundred eighty miles, its present condition the main reason she had been playing movie trivia. 

“Could use some batteries,” she said.  And with that, it was decided.  She hit the gas and headed down the hill towards the parking lot.

Having reconnoitered the store from the hill, Nicole felt fairly confident that her shopping trip would be a quick one.  She parked the GTO hood first in front of the store and got out.  Before she closed her door, she took a final look around.  The place looked as empty as Friendly’s, at least before her morning visitors, she thought.

 “The lights are on, but nobody’s home… I hope,” she said as she closed her door and went around and popped the trunk. 

Leaving it open, she approached the store.  On her left was an outdoor fire pit display.  One of the fire-pits was circled in curved flagstones and she picked one up to smash the glass.  She paused, looking down at her shoeless feet.  In her effort to get away, she had left everything back at the motel, including her shoes. 

Can’t pull a Die Hard, today,
she thought, her cinematic influences again surfacing. 

She put down the flagstone and approached the doors.  They slid open for her. 

“Huh…,” she muttered as she went in.  On her right were two lines of shopping carts.  She grabbed one and went shopping. 

It was what Nicole had come to expect.  Except for the complete lack of human activity, the place looked business as usual.  The lights shone brightly, the floors were swept and clean, and the shelves were stocked and waiting.  If it were not for recent events, she would have sworn that everyone but she had been vacuumed off the planet like so much dirt from a rug.  Of course in this case the only “dirt” that remained could walk around and wanted to eat you.  Still, there was no smell here and she did not plan to stay that long.

Nicole made for the batteries.  They were stacked neatly on a displayer by the registers.  With her arm, she began sweeping shelves of them into her basket.  Checking batteries off her mental shopping list, she moved off deeper into the store.

Sam was straightening the last shelf of light bulbs on aisle one, when he heard a noise up by the front of the store.  He poked his head around and saw Nicole disappear down aisle seven in the Walls and Windows department.

Nicole had not slept in a bed since Friendly’s.  She had taken to sleeping in her car with the doors locked and the keys in the ignition.  The Cavalier had been tough; the back seat was not long enough for her to stretch out, and with the passenger side window broken out she had been vulnerable.  The GTO was better, but in her panic to get away from the Dead at the Motor Inn, she had left with her life and nothing else.  Some pillows and blankets would be nice, to replace the ones she sacrificed making her escape.  Nicole did not see any of those, so some throw pillows and eighty-four inch curtains would have to do.  Into the cart they went.  Pushing the shopping cart out of the aisle, she headed for the Outdoor Supplies department.  A big cooler was what she had decided on.  She would find a grocery store and some ice, and then it would be eat and run.  Finding food and not becoming food was the order of the day.  Besides, less stopping meant more miles the way she figured it.

Sam finished the bulbs and made his way to Walls and Windows.  Maybe the customer needed some assistance, and if she was a mystery shopper... Sam did not want to risk getting a bad review.  He got to aisle seven but the customer was nowhere in sight.  He made his way to the end of the aisle, looked right then left, and caught a glimpse of her as she rounded the corner, heading down the light bulb aisle.  Sam turned and followed her.

Nicole turned right into the Outdoor Supplies department.  She spotted the coolers at the end of aisle twenty-two and headed for them.  Selecting the biggest one she could find, a seventy-five quart, she shoved it into her cart.

Sam got to the aisle just as Nicole took a right and disappeared.  He sighed.  She seemed to know what she was after and was not acting like a mystery shopper, so he felt safe.  He turned and went to register four, flipped on the light, and waited.

Nicole stood in front of the outdoor hand tools looking at axes, sledgehammers, and pitchforks.  She picked up a sledgehammer and tested its weight.

“Too heavy,” she muttered. 

She looked at the pitchforks.  The weight was better and she liked the sharp prongs. 
But
w
hat if they get stuck on them? s
he thought. 

Replacing the pitchfork, she glanced over at the hickory ax handles.  She grabbed one and got a feel for it.  The wooden handle was light but solid.  Its tapered end felt good in her hands.  Smiling, she dropped it in her cart.  Gas cans were the next thing on the list.  The pumps at gas stations were unreliable, so siphoning was the next best option.  Turning down aisle twenty-six, she saw them in various sizes on the right.  She grabbed a one-gallon size and three of the five gallon.  Further, down the aisle were hand pumps and she grabbed three of them.  With her cart full, she headed out of the aisle.  Making a left, Nicole saw a display of work boots in the center of the aisle. 

What kind of home improvement store sells shoes,
she thought. 

Shrugging her shoulders, she rummaged through the boxes looking for her size, tossing away the ones that were not. 

“Chauvinists,” Nicole said as she saw that all they had were men’s sizes. 

Finally finding a men’s size eight, she took the boots out and placed the sole against the bottom of her size six foot.  “Close enough,” she said and put them on. 
Won’t win any fashion awards with these,
she thought as she walked around in them. 

Satisfied that they were at least better than bare feet, Nicole grabbed her cart and headed for the front.

Sam watched the customer approach and reminded himself to tell her about the eighteen months same as cash offer the store had been running.  He put on his best smile and was about to greet her, when she bypassed the registers completely and made for the front door.

“Uh, ma’am.  I can check you out right over here,” Sam said.

To his surprise, the customer appeared to jump out of her skin.  She looked at him and screamed.  Sam used to have a cat that could not hear very well.  Every now and then when he would walk up and surprise it, the cat would go from a sitting position to a foot in the air and backwards.  Up until this moment, he had never seen a person be able to mimic those kind of acrobatics.  Nicole came close.  The two stared at each other for several seconds, before a shaken Nicole grabbed her cart and rushed out of the store.  Sam left the register and stared at Nicole through the glass.  He watched as she hurriedly emptied the contents of her cart into the trunk of her car and slammed it shut.  Nicole jumped behind the wheel, the driver side door barely closed as she peeled out of the parking lot in a cloud of smoke.  Sam stared after her. 

I’m going to have to report this to the Loss Prevention manager when he comes in,
he thought to himself. 

The GTO turned onto the two-lane in front of the store and raced down the road at a furious pace.

Six

In the early days of the Zombie Apocalypse, a term picked up by the news outlets, the various military and governmental agencies had tried to control the spread of the disease through quarantine.  At first, only sections of cities where evidence of an outbreak occurred were cordoned off.  Localized quarantine however, proved ineffectual.  The decision was made that an occurrence in one part of a city or town meant quarantine for the whole of the municipality.  The military was recalled from all forward theaters of operation, their new mission: Laying siege to American cities.  When a city was deemed to have been infected, it was sealed off.  Armed and fortified roadblocks were stationed at all points of entry around the city.  Several miles before one got to a checkpoint, a road sign was placed to warn would be visitors that where they were headed was not somewhere they could go.  Simple in design, it was a single yellow triangle on a pole.  It was decided that no words would be used on the sign.  Perhaps someone who could not read, or who did not understand English would disregard it.  A sinister caricature of a skull was chosen as an image that would universally convey both the danger within a locale, and the message to stay out.  The military had orders to restrict access to and from an infected area and lethal force was authorized.  At first, the task of producing the signs fell to the Governmental Printing Office.  As the disease spread and the areas of quarantine increased, the GPO could not keep up.  Sign production was farmed out to penal institutions.  The infrastructure already set up to make license plates was refitted to produce the quarantine signs.  Inmates across the country cranked them out day and night.  In the end, virtually every city and town in America had a skull on yellow triangle posted at its city limits.  The signs became larger, true-life representations of the pins on the map at NORAD, charting the spread of the contagion.  The map was covered and it became easier to talk about where the disease was not than where it was.  Eventually, it came to a head and nobody was charting the spread of the disaster or quarantining cities anymore.  It was everywhere.

Seven

Nicole stood on the gas and the RPMs approached the redline.

“What the hell was that!?” she screamed.

She entertained the thought that she might have imagined it, a flashback in her mind to a time before.  It simply did not make any sense that someone should still be working there, anywhere.  She cast a final look back over her shoulder and watched the store recede in the distance. 

“A little early to be hallucinating, Nicole,” she said. 

Turning back around, she looked ahead at the town of Fair Valley, the all too familiar skull on yellow triangle whipping past her window.  Nicole strained her eyes as she saw what she thought was movement in the distance.  She slowed the GTO and scanned the horizon.  Her first thought was heat waves rising off the blacktop, but it just did not seem that hot to her.  As she drew closer, what was moving was brought into sharp relief.  Nicole stomped the brakes and brought the car to a screeching stop, as she saw emerging from the city, the collective citizenry of Fair Valley.  They spanned the two-lane and extended for hundreds of yards beyond it in both directions.  The Dead did one thing at a time.  First, they ate, but when a food supply ran out, they moved. 

The food supply in Fair Valley had run out.

Nicole stared out at the advancing horde and briefly considered going through them.  Even at this distance, she could see they were hundreds deep.  Going around them was no good either. Thoughts of getting stuck in a hole or bogged down in the soft ground of the rolling landscape were enough for her to dismiss that as a reasonable plan.  A look in her rear view told her what she already knew; retreat was the only option.  Nicole threw the GTO in reverse, did a blistering three-point turn, and raced back the down the highway.

Slamming the brakes, she skidded to a screeching stop in front of the Home Improvement Super-center and debated about going back inside.  She all but convinced herself that there was nobody actually inside there, that the encounter was purely stress induced.  Besides, she was now headed in the opposite direction from where she needed to go.  If the horde kept advancing it would be hundreds of retraced miles before she got to a turnoff where she could seek an alternate route around the horde. 

How long will that take and what if there is a bigger horde along that route?
she thought.  

Nicole looked over at the store again.  If she ducked in there, maybe they would simply pass and then she could be on her way, unobstructed with no time lost.  Turning the wheel, she gunned the engine and raced up to the front sliding doors.  She killed the engine and ran inside.

Nicole looked around.  Seeing the switch on the right side, she turned off  the doors and locked them.  She then ran to the second set of glass doors farther down by customer service.  A large metal display sat in front of the switch.  Nicole grabbed it and pulled it away.  The metal display made an ear splitting scraping noise as she dragged it across the floor.  She reached over, turned off the doors and locked them.

Sam stopped counting schedule 40 PVC fittings when he heard the scraping.

Good, Bob was finally here,
Sam thought.