Now he was all that was left of the Yaconi family.
He had wanted to honor his Dad’s wishes, but he couldn’t just leave them like this.
His Dad had been right. It was too dangerous with the dead roaming around everywhere to try to bury them, even in the back yard. He settled for digging a shallow grave in the old coal bin in the back of the basement. The house was an older house and like most of the holder homes, had been heated with coal when it was first built. Over the years it had been converted to gas heat. The old coal room was converted to a storage room but ended up being more of a junk room, a room where things ended up when they didn’t seem to belong anywhere else.
Tony had selected the coal room to bury his family mainly because it was the only part of the basement that didn’t have a concrete floor. He dug a shallow grave in the dirt floor and buried them all together. After he had covered their bodies, he stood and stared at the grave. In his worst nightmares, he could never have imagined he would have been standing there doing what he had just done.
His world, like the rest of civilization, had ended in a matter of a few days.
For most of the next week, Tony had stayed at the house waiting for an opportunity to leave. He never went back upstairs again and he had never gone back to the basement. He spent most of his time watching and listening. It was as if he had watched everything from someone else’s eyes. It had been his only form of escape, because otherwise he would have gone mad.
Tony didn’t eat much that week, but even without much of an appetite, the food ran out after three days.
When the sounds coming from his neighborhood had started to quiet down, Tony decided to leave and search for his friends. To search for some sanity in the nightmare that had become his life.
It had taken him two days of searching before he found his friend Bill. The inhabitants of Uniontown were everywhere, slowly dragging their dead bodies down one street and up the next. Tony soon found that he was like a beacon in the night. Whenever one of the walking dead spotted him, it would groan and soon they would start coming at him from every building on the street. Fortunately they had been slow and he could out run them but there were so many of them. With the dead coming from every direction, Tony found that he always end up getting cornered. Tony had four close calls before he learned to use his head. The dead didn’t think; they just seemed to react. They had only wanted one thing – Him!
When Tony had finally found Bill, he learned that Bill’s family had also been killed along with all the neighbors on his street.
It had taken Tony and Bill almost a week before they were able to find Tom and Joe hiding in Joe’s basement.
After two more weeks of searching and more close calls, they had finally given up on finding anyone else alive.
They had talked about going to Connellsville or Pittsburgh to try and find a safer place, but after a number of attempts to leave Uniontown had ended in near disaster, they had decided to just stay where they were. Maybe they could ride this out, after all how long could the dead continue to roam the streets? They were dead! How were they able to move at all? Surely they would run out of energy or decay to the point they would just stop moving?
Maybe the number of the dead would gradually diminish, then they could try to go somewhere else. They didn’t know, but the plan seemed to make sense, so they stayed.
Winter finally came, but the dead still roamed the streets.
Finding food was hard during the winter months, but the worst thing was the cold. They had managed to find extra clothes to help keep warm, but it wasn’t enough.
Whenever they built a fire for warmth, it would soon draw a crowd of the dead. None of the houses they used were able to hold out for more than a few days against the dead. They had to constantly move from one place to another to survive.
Joe had become ill and died by the middle of January. Tom was cornered and died a horrible death at the hands of the dead near the end of February.
Bill and Tony had managed to survive together into the spring. In order to find food they had begun to expand their search areas. They had started to work their way out West Main Street, out near the intersection of Route 40 and Route 119 near the edge of town. Route 119 circled around Uniontown and acted as a bypass for the traffic that for the last few years no longer had any reason to come into town. Out in this section there had been a lot of fast food restaurants near the Uniontown Mall. Tony and Bill hoped to find something that was still edible in one of the deserted establishments. They were also hoping, as they got further away from the center of town, they would not have to deal with as many of the dead. For some reason the closer they had gone to the main section of town the more of the dead there seemed to be.
It was at the end of May on one of these runs in this unfamiliar area that Bill went into a house to see what he could find. The house looked like it hadn’t been trashed like most houses had now looked and they hoped to find their days meal inside. What Bill had found inside was the family who had owned the house. They had been infected. He found them waiting for him inside, looking for their daily meal of living flesh.
Once again, Tony was alone and on his own.
The family had come staggering out after Tony when they had finished with Bill. Instead of running back into town, he crossed over Route 119 and ran out Route 40 to try and get out of town. There was no reason to go back into town, there was nothing left for him there, only the nightmares of the past year. Only more of the dead.
He knew in town the odds were against him and he too would eventually become a victim of the dead.
He didn’t know if there was anyone left alive anywhere but if there were it wasn’t in town.
He had dodged the many walking dead along Route 40. He soon came to the Uniontown Mall that sat along Route 40 about a quarter mile past the intersection with Route 119. In the hope of finding something to eat, or at least something he could use or wear, he had gone inside but quickly turned and ran. What he had found inside were hundreds of shoppers aimlessly roaming the aisles.
They must have been in the mall when they had become infected, and not being able to figure how to get out of the mall, they had wandered around in there for months.
Tony had barely made it out the main doors, but unfortunately so did the dead.
Tony had run as the hundreds of the dead poured out of the mall and followed him. When the dead began to groan, soon others had begun to come at him from the surrounding buildings. Tony worried he would find himself cornered again and his luck too would finally run out.
Tony ran up the small road behind the mall that went back into a wooded area. He was surprised to see what looked like a large warehouse at the end of the road. He thought he knew the area, but he had never known this large building was back here.
The hoard was closing in on him when he spotted the two large doors standing open in the center of the building. Two large trucks had been backed up to the dock waiting to be loaded so they could make their deliveries.
They had been waiting for a year to be loaded. They would wait for many more years. They would not be making any more deliveries.
A heavy thick layer of dust covered the trucks. The dust looked like it had been on the trucks for many long months. Large circular shapes showed in the layers of dirt on the trucks from the frequent rains that had fallen since the trucks had been parked at the warehouse.
Tony ran up the ramp onto the dock and looked inside. The interior was dimly lit from the light that streamed down from the many skylights in the roof fifty feet above.
Tony had yelled into the doors and waited.
The only sound he heard was the loud groaning coming from behind him on the road.
Tony ran into the warehouse, pulled the two large doors closed behind him and turned the large levers until they clanked, locking the doors.
He turned and looked around to be sure he was alone and what his next move would be. He spotted the rungs of the metal ladder that climbed the wall and followed their path up to the small room forty feet above.
He had quickly climbed the ladder and went into the room. After he made sure the room was empty, he closed the door and slid to the floor and waited.
He sat there until the light coming in through the skylights grew dark. He sat in the total darkness unable to relax because of the loud banging and the eerie moaning of the dead. It had kept him on edge all night.
When the sunlight began to shine through the little window in the office the next morning, Tony decided to take a look.
He walked over to the window and looked down on the hundreds of the dead that had followed him here and were now waiting for their opportunity to feast.
He turned and moved to the door that he had sat against all night and slowly opened the door to see what waited for him below, inside the warehouse.
To his amazement, the warehouse floor below him had been empty, except for about ten dead bodies motionless on the floor. He chuckled to himself as he looked at the motionless dead bodies. It had been a while since he had seen a real dead person. The dead now moved and attacked the living. Motionless, they somehow looked strange and unnatural.
He opened the door the entire way and stared at the warehouse below. He spotted a metal bar lying on the floor at the bottom of the ladder and decided to go down and see what was in the warehouse.
When he reached the last rung, he bent down and picked up the metal bar. In case anything moved he would need a weapon, the heavy bar felt like it would do the job.
First Tony had checked the latches on the large doors to be sure they were holding, then he walked around until he had found the three regular doors on the ground floor that people would use to enter and leave the warehouse. Two were locked and he made sure to lock the third door.
When he began to feel safe, he started to check out the rows of shelves, each extended thirty feet high above him. Tony began to explore each shelf to see what was on them.
He discovered he was in a Walmart warehouse. The front of the building had been stocked with clothes, games, tools, lawn furniture, towels, kitchenware, sheets, blankets, computers and electronics, camping gear, archery equipment and shampoos and medicines.
The back was stocked with food.
He opened a few of the large coolers and freezers, but had quickly closed them when the smell almost knocked him over. There was nothing usable in there.
The shelves however were loaded with cakes, cookies, candy, cereals, chips and snacks, beef jerky and much more. Tony felt like he had struck it rich, if only he had someone to share his find.
Someone other than the rats that had also discovered the food and with no one to bother them had made themselves at home in the food section.
Tony had spent the next few days cleaning up the bodies and his office quarters. He had made sure that the doors were all secure so he could relax and began moving food up to his secure room.
He decided he would spend a few days to a week here to eat and build up his strength before moving on.
Tony had always been a loner of sorts, which helped him keep his sanity with all the constant noise. He had hoped the dead would wander off after a while, but they never did.
It was now three weeks later and the noise continued.
Tony was still safe in his hideaway and had gained twenty pounds. Five more pounds than he had lost over the winter months of cold and hunger.
Chapter 2
Tony opened the door to his room and stepped out onto the ledge and checked out the warehouse below.
He had done this every day for the last three weeks.
He had been safe and secure here in the warehouse, but he knew things could all change in an instant.
After making sure the warehouse had not been breached, he started down the ladder to find his mornings breakfast. He had food in the room, but would only eat that food if he found himself trapped there because the dead had found a way inside the warehouse.
He was hopeful they never would find a way in, but he knew he had to be prepared for the worst.
He walked to the shelves in the back of the warehouse and looked them over, finally picking up a box of cherry pop tarts. They were now well over a year old, but those things had so many preservatives in them, they would be good for years to come.
Tony ate the box of pop tarts and washed them down with a bottle of apple juice. He hadn’t eaten this much since he had lived at home. His mother had always made sure he had a hot breakfast of eggs and sausage with home fries. This wasn’t as good as his Mom’s breakfasts, it wasn’t as good as her hot tasty breakfasts, but it was definitely better than what he had to eat for the many months that followed the death of his family in Uniontown.
Like most of his mornings after breakfast, Tony spent the next few hours climbing the tall shelves in the warehouse to see what he could find. So far he had found dozens of backpacks, which he now had lined up on the floor at the bottom of the shelves. He gradually filled each back pack with food and supplies, enough to hold him for a week when he would be able to go out to explore the area or if he had to make a run for it for any reason.
He had found sleeping bags, pillows and cushions for lawn furniture. He had found some blow up pool toys. The bright blue blowup pool raft was now up in his room, it made a comfortable bed to sleep on.
He had also spent a week sorting through the guns and archery equipment. He had found a few 22 Caliber rifles and twenty boxes of shells. A dozen pellet guns with about twenty boxes of pellets and a dozen bows with two hundred arrows.
Tony had also found a few dart boards that he had hung along the sides of the shelves. When he got bored hauling things down off the shelves, he would play darts.
The dart boards on the left side of the warehouse was the zombies and the boards on the right side was the living.
So far the last few days, the zombies beat the living eight out of ten games. From what Tony had seen over the last year, the score seemed pretty accurate, but he hoped it wasn’t an omen of things to come.
Today after breakfast, Tony decided to work on a project he had been thinking about. If the dead didn’t go away and so far they haven’t shown any inclination of moving on, if Tony was ever going to be able to leave the warehouse, he needed to clear a way out.
Yesterday he decided to take one of the 22 Caliber rifles up to his room and start shooting at the dead below. He figured in a week or so, he might be able to kill the majority of the dead around the warehouse. He didn’t want to leave the warehouse, this was the best he had had it since the virus overwhelmed Uniontown, but he wanted to find someone he could be with. He didn’t know how long he would live, but he didn’t want to live out the rest of his life alone. He didn’t know if there was anyone else left alive out there, but he would never know if he stayed here. Maybe he wouldn’t leave the warehouse completely, it would make a great base to return to and it would also be a great place to ride out the next winter. There had to be enough food here to get six people through the winter.
But first things first. Tony picked up a pellet gun and slung it over his shoulder. He picked up two boxes of pellets and three CO2 cartridges and started to climb the ladder up to his den.
He had been thinking about this plan for a few days and yesterday decided to act on his plans. Yesterday he had taken one of the 22 rifles and started to pick off the dead from his small window. He thought it was going well. He had downed about a dozen of the dead before he realized the sound of the gun echoing off the hills and buildings was attracting more of the dead. He looked at the dozen dead lying on the ground below him, then looked at a hundred more zombies coming through the trees.
He only had about a thousand shells, at this rate he would run out of bullets long before he ran out of zombies to shoot. The best case scenario, he would still have as many of the dead below after he had run out of ammo as he did when he started. But it looked more likely that he would have two or three times as many of the dead trying to get at him.
Today he would try the much quieter pellet gun. Some of the dead had hard heads and it would take a lot longer to kill them with a pellet gun, but it would be better than inviting more of the dead to join the party.
Tony set up at his window and picked out a target below.
The first shot was followed by a low sounding thup!
Tony thought that was a lot better, but half the time the dead would just reach up and touch their head as if to swat away a bug. He soon found that if he shot at the smaller weaker looking of the dead he had more success.
He would shoot at the more fragile targets but he kept coming back to one large staggering zombie. The guy was huge. He was dressed in dirty farmer coveralls. He was a tempting target, but if Tony kept wasting his pellets on this one target, he was afraid he would soon run out of ammo.
But he kept coming back to this one target over and over. Maybe it was because Tony didn’t want to think about going outside the warehouse while this monster was still out there. Maybe this one would take a few days.
Tony kept back inside the window so he wouldn’t be seen as he shot at the mob below, so they wouldn’t see him and start groaning more than they already were.
He had been shooting for about two hours and counted about thirty dead lying motionless on the ground below.
Not a lot, but at least it was thirty fewer than he had started with. In a couple of weeks at thirty a day, it was possible. But he would have to get more accurate if he was going to do this with the remaining boxes of pellets he had left.
Tony went back down into the warehouse. After eating a bag of Doritos for lunch, he set up a target inside the back of the warehouse and practiced shooting the bow. The bow would definitely do the job, but he only had a limited supply of arrows.
He could use the bow to clear out any dead that were left when he ran out of pellets or CO2 cartridges, but he was hoping to save the arrows for when he ventured out from the warehouse. He needed a silent weapon when he was away from the safety of the walls or he could find himself overwhelmed when the dead were attracted by the sound of a gun.
He would see how things went over the next few days with the pellet gun. He guessed he could go out and retrieve some of the arrows after the dead were eliminated, but he really didn’t want to reuse bloody infected arrows. He wasn’t sure, but that didn’t sound like something he should do.
The light coming through the skylights began to dim as it turned to a dark orange glow.
Tony looked up at the glow. “Another day!” He said out loud.
He stopped and smiled at the sound of his voice. It was good to hear the words spoken out loud, even if he was the one doing the talking. It had seemed so long ago since he had heard anyone actually talk.
Tony grabbed a pack of sticky buns and walked over to the ladder and climbed back up to his room.
After looking out at the sea of dead below his window, he walked back to the door. He took out his pocket knife and added another notch on the door.
He counted the notches, as he did every evening when he added another notch for another day.
Today there were now twenty-one notches on his door. Three weeks. He had been at the warehouse for three weeks.
He laid down on his stomach on the sleeping bag that covered the inflated raft he had spread out on the floor for a bed. He slipped the Walmart tablet and pen out from under the corner of the sleeping bag and began to write.
“Day 21. Still alive, still safe and still alone. Today I started to use the pellet gun to try and clear out the dead outside the warehouse. It took a lot of shots to kill thirty of the dead, but a least no more of the dead came to join the others. I have a lot of second thoughts about wanting to leave the safety of the warehouse, but the thought of finding another living person also excites me. It is safe here and I have enough food so I don’t have to go hungry, but there isn’t much point to living if this is all there is. I’ll keep working on my plan to go out and search the area. It at least gives me something to look forward to. It is important to have something to look forward to. It’s starting to get awful boring here. Safe but boring.
I put fourteen pellets into old farmer George’s head today. He must have a really hard head. He was probably an ornery old coot when he was alive. I wonder how many days it will take me to put him down. If the pellet gun won’t kill him I’ll have to use the bow. One way or another, I have to eliminate him before I try to go outside the warehouse.
I’ve also been moving food and supplies around in the warehouse. In the event the dead somehow manage to get inside, I want to be able to still have access to food, supplies and weapons so I can eat and be able to defend myself until I figure out a way to deal with the problem.”
Tony smiled to himself as he slid the pen and pad back under the corner of the sleeping bag.
He rolled over on his back and stared at the ceiling as his eyes began to close.