Leslie leaned in and said, “He does realize that he could just keep his mouth shut, right? You're his best friend
—
isn’t it kind of your place to tell him things like that?”
Jude shook his head, smiling happily. “If a man his age isn't smart enough to figure that out, then God forbid I go and say anything about it. It's not my fault he never learned that stupidly simple lesson. Besides, I wouldn't have the heart to put him down if he became one of those things. I mean, I would, but I'd feel like a real piece of shit because of it, if you know what I mean?”
“You guys are weird, you know that?”
“I've known the guy longer than anyone else in my life. He’s pretty much like a brother to me. Well, not pretty much, he
is
a brother to me. We've been through some serious shit together—repeatedly. He hasn’t ever let me down when it really mattered. I’ve accepted the fact that he isn’t going to cure cancer, but neither am I.”
Charlie, sitting next to Joann, said, “So you really think the entire country is going to have this problem? I mean, there’s got to be a lot of graves in the United States, right?”
“There are hundreds of millions of them, to tell you the truth," Joann stated matter-of-factly. "Yes, it's a creepy idea to have to think of, but there isn’t anything we can do about it now. Those who are dead need to go back to being that way. I’m sure we can take care of it, but it’s going to take time, and those who aren’t careful about it are going to wind up being one of them.”
Charlie nodded, examining his small caliber rifle. “You think if we go by somewhere
—
I mean, I don’t care where it is
—
maybe we could stop and I could pick up an axe or a sledgehammer? Hell, I’d take a steel pipe happily right now, if it meant I would have a better chance of getting through this bullshit.”
Joann said, “I don’t have a problem with it, if the rest of them don't have an issue with stopping. I don’t know if we're going to find somewhere open on a Sunday, though.”
Charlie smiled. “You get me near somewhere that has what I need and I don’t care if it's open or not, I’ll get it open. Nothing's going to matter once the shit hits the fan in the big cities. Unless the poor guy that owns the shop is there, I don’t see any problems coming about.”
Jude leaned up in the seat. “Hey, if it means you've got my back, then I’m all good with it. You got any problem with that, Chuck? I can’t hear you
—
speak up!”
Chuck removed his hands from his mouth. “You know I got no problem with
—
” When it dawned on him that he had removed his hands from his mouth, he clasped it shut again. He removed his shield only for a millisecond to say, “I think…I think I got it in my mouth, Jude. I think I drank it.”
Jude patted him on the shoulder. “I’ll let you know if you start to turn into one of those things.”
The rain began to come down in waves, making it impossible to see anything. At that point, Jude really did begin to get nervous about ingesting the water. Seeing a Farm and Fleet store, Jude motioned for them to pull in. Joann parked beneath the commercial pick-up section and the five of them caught their breath. Chuck patted his pockets, pulling out a pack of smokes and looking at it like someone had shot his baby. He tipped it to the side and a mixture of water and tobacco filled his lap.
Leslie said, “You know those things are bad for you anyway, Chuck; might be God giving you a sign that it's time to quit smoking?”
“Yeah, you never know, it could just be that our newly acquired bad-ass SUV doesn’t have a fucking top. Who wants to be scorched in their damn car? The AC can't work too damn good on account of there isn’t any way to keep it in.”
Charlie got out of the truck, looking around. “This place probably has everything dangerous I need and then some.”
Jude got out and checked the store's doors. “It looks to be closed, so hopefully that's on our side.”
“What'll be on our side," Chuck said, "is once I find where they stash their smokes and I get me a carton for the road. If something happens to two hundred finely packed cigarettes, then maybe I’ll see it as a sign from the man above that I should pursue healthier habits. Anyway, the damn Surgeon General of The United States smokes; how in the hell can it be bad for you? Doctors wouldn’t lie to ya, now would they?”
Jude thought about his wife and the lies he’d been told time and time again. How they sat him down to explain optimistically that she had better than an eighty-five percent chance of pulling through. The next week, they would explain how something hadn't worked and it would be changed to fifty, and by the end, they were at twenty-five percent, not looking nearly as hopeful. Jude had continued to run those optimistic percentages through his head while he cast the first handful of dirt on his wife’s grave.
Jude brought the back of the saw up and into the glass door, shattering it. He kicked out the bar in his way and walked in, leaving the rest staring.
Leslie said, “What did you say to piss him off?”
“Jude isn’t the biggest fan of doctors, or the medical field in general. He thinks they give too many false hopes. They tell you things will be okay when really they haven’t a damn clue, or the guts to tell you how it's really going to go.”
Leslie nodded, thinking of Jude and knowing about the boy at home. “So you're saying he’s had a rough go of it?”
“That's a fair assessment.”
Jude yelled from the inside, “You guys get your asses in here and let’s get the three of you something. There's no reason only to arm Charlie when there's so much stuff in here. They aren’t going to miss anything.”
When the four walked in, they saw an entire store full of everything a farmer, a tree cutter, or your weekend do-it-yourself enthusiast could ever use. They walked through the store, quickly finding three heavy-duty, reliable chainsaws, as well as lighter axes better suited for their frames and machetes for removing heads when the other weapons were not an option.
Jude traded his old axe for a brand-new one with a sledgehammer end on one side and a razor-sharp blade on the other. He left, walking on his own to the opposite side of the store. He listened intently, and when he deemed it safe for the moment, he found a cooler and pulled out bottles of water and sodas for everyone to get a quick drink. It had been too long since they had drank anything, and he knew that, as important as getting back on the road was, they wouldn’t last the day if they didn’t keep hydrated. Jude didn’t care what happened to him, but refused not to make it back to Patrick and Maria if he had anything to do or say about it.
He got sidetracked as he was walking back wheeling the cooler full of drinks and snacks, seeing a
Win this truck
sign. Not far from it sat an extended-cab F150 Jude would've traded Chuck for any day of the week, keys dangling in the ignition. It looked like they wouldn't have to waste precious time waiting for the rain to end to re-embark on their mission. Then he heard growling. Jude rounded a corner and saw two men cornered against a rack of shelves on a dead end. A display of barbed wire fence guaranteed there would be no exit for the two of them. Jude watched as the two men poked with sticks at the three identically-dressed zombies, trying to keep them away.
Jude yelled, “Hey, are you guys okay? What I mean is, are any of you bitten?”
The men shook their heads no, then yes. One of them screamed, “Fucking help us, damn it! These freaks are trying to kill us
—
help!”
Jude couldn’t walk away, even if these men were going to transition into more of the dead soon. He came up behind the first one, pulling out his newly acquired axe, and brought it down into the skull, burying it until it disappeared. Jude swung the dead in a circle, wiggling the axe head, and knocked the other two off balance with the corpse. When one tried getting up, Jude brought the machete down once, twice, and a third time, until its head was severed enough to be kicked free. It spun to a stop in the corner, still trying to chomp.
When the last one gripped Jude’s ankle, he brought the blade down with everything he had. It screamed not in pain, but because of the meal now free from its grasp. Jude walked over, gripping the axe, and kicked at the handle until it came free. He came back to the last of the dead and used the sledgehammer end to collapse its skull. He swung until there was nothing left but a bloody sack of crushed skin attached to its neck covering the dull, white-tiled floor.
One of the men walked forward slowly, hands up and wanting nothing but peace. “Holy shit…is it…is it dead?”
Jude said, “No, it was already dead. I just made sure it isn't going to come back. What happened to the three of them? Did they get bitten? What can you tell me?”
“We were out back smoking a joi…I mean, a cigarette. You see, our asshole boss called us in and told us we had to unload nineteen freights from ten different trucks. We’ve been here all damn day. We weren’t even supposed to
—
”
“Look, kid, do me a favor and just tell me what I need to know. Now, did you get bitten
—
did they get bitten?”
The kid came forward. “My name is Ed. I don’t know for sure. We didn’t see anything, but when we were out unloading the trucks on the docks, this one guy—Mike—went out and was screwing around in the rain. We told him we had work to do, but he’d had so much to smoke that he didn’t care. We told him we needed to keep working, and after a while he came back in. It wasn’t too long after that when he started to get dizzy and fell down. We didn’t know what to do for him, so we just gave him a bit of distance. It didn’t take long for him to get back up. When he did, Mike attacked us. Those two whose heads you smashed in…well, he did definitely bite them. Once he bit them, it didn’t take them very long to start acting like him, either.”
“So after that happened, what did you guys do?”
“The two of us sprinted in here. These three were chasing us, and we got cornered when we took a wrong turn. We couldn’t have picked a shittier aisle to get stuck in.”
When the two employees approached, Jude held up his axe and backed into the center of the aisle. “You two never did say if you got bitten or scratched by those things.”
The men kept walking, and Jude raised his axe up, ready to go. “I apologize for this, boys, but I’m not going to have you end up like those three. You got a problem with that, well...that's something I guess I’ll just have to live with.”
Ed pulled up his shirt; there was a fresh bite with a good portion of skin from his ribcage missing. The other man looked to him, taking a step back. Ed held up his hands to Jude, and his friend moved to the other side of the aisle, away from him.
Ed said, “It isn’t like I got
a damn disease
—
the stupid asses bit me when we were trying to get away. Come to think of it, Tom, I was saving you!”
“Unfortunately, son, you do have a disease," Jude said, "and it isn’t going to be long before you start dancing around like an insane man. When you get back up, it’s going to be you, but you won’t have any of your intelligence. You are going to be insane with hunger, and you aren't going to care who or what you eat. You don’t get any superhuman powers, other than the fact that only smashing in or cutting off your head is going to really slow you down long-term.”
With this news, Tom ran past Ed’s reach and past Jude. Jude asked, “Tom, is it? Do you know if that truck in the showroom is full of gas?”
Tom nodded. “Well, yeah, it is—the advertisement said you could drive it right off the showroom floor. They're gonna draw on it next month. My boss has been advertising the hell out of that truck. You aren’t going to take it, are you?”
“You know, I sure am, just as soon as my friends and I finish taking everything we need. If I were you, I might do the same and then get home, or as far away from any big town as you can. These things multiply if they aren’t put down.”
Tom looked at Ed, who still had his hands up. “I’m sorry, Ed, I gotta get out of here before you go all crazy. Thanks, mister, I really appreciate your help.”
Jude nodded and looked back to Ed. “You got any last words, kid? Anything you don’t want following you wherever you end up going?”
Ed said, “Aren't you going to wait until I turn into one of those things? You aren’t going to just go and kill me in cold blood, are ya?”
Jude set his axe down and marched forward with the machete. "I wish I could be more civil, kid, but unfortunately for you, I got family to protect. I don’t have the time to wait around here for you to die and come back. The quicker you're gone, the better for everyone involved.”
Jude brought up the machete, quickly slicing through Ed's jugular. Ed took a few steps back, falling down. He brought his hands up to his neck, trying in vain to stop the bleeding. Jude stood clear as the boy’s tear-filled eyes went dark and he fell to the ground. Jude caught his breath for a moment, hoping that, going forward, he would only have to kill those who had already passed and come back. He grabbed the axe as the boy’s body started to twitch and brought the blunt end down three times, until he was sure there’d be nothing left to hurt anyone.
He went back to the store’s showroom, moving displays placed in front of the truck. When he climbed in, he thought it was almost a shame he was more than likely going to take this thing on a ride to hell and back. Jude turned the engine over and let his foot off of the clutch, revving the engine and letting it warm up for a minute before the abuse that wouldn’t quit was bound to start. The others came around the corner, armed to the teeth with newly acquired weapons. Chuck was doubly weighed down, carrying Jude’s chainsaw as well as his own. When the four saw the truck, no one needed to tell them to get in. Jude pulled up slowly, and they took it out the front doors.