Dead Hunger II: The Gem Cardoza Chronicle (20 page)

They were a father and son.  Despite the damage done to their faces, they looked like carbon copies of one another.  The shape of their noses, their eyes.  Even their mouths.

I wanted to cry then.  I didn’t want to kill them.

They drew up beside us, their eyes straight ahead.  Now I felt as though I could smell them.  They were literally no more than a foot or two from any one of us, and they didn’t seem to know what we were.

The man stopped, and the boy followed suit.  I could see, even through the tinted visor, the pink haze around their eyes, but they did not engage it.

And the boy looked up at me.  His 12-year-old face, because that’s what I guessed his age to be, was pocked and torn.  The skin had drawn, gone grey-white.  His chin and cheeks were stained with blood, and I didn’t want to think about whose it was.  I looked straight into those eyes and I started to cry.

Without turning my head, I looked at Flex.  He looked
directly at the man – the father, I knew. 
Dad
was wearing camouflage clothing as was
his son
, and clearly they had been hunting when the outbreak hit them.  I thought just briefly about the strange fact that they were
still
hunting together; the prey had just drastically changed since they set out that long ago morning, probably bidding good-bye to the woman who was wife and mother to the pair.

And as suddenly as they stopped, they began walking again.  Not a change in speed or purpose. 

Just moving on.  Nothing to see here.

Nobody to
eat
here.

We stood stock still until they rounded the corner of the building about thirty yards down.  Then we rolled that machine off the low curb, almost toppling it from its cart, grabbed the device, the laptop and the other things Hemp had taken and put it in the trunk fast.  Flex slammed it closed, I left all my gear on including the Tivek and just jumped in the car with everyone else following suit.

Only when we were safely inside did we remove the BSN helmets and neck seal straps.  We both looked at Hemp and our shocked facial expressions – yes, even with the streaks from my tears still evident – turned to broad smiles.

“Fuck me,” said Flex.  “They work like a son-of-a-bitch!”

Hemp couldn’t speak.  He was smiling so big his mouth must have hurt. 

I reached around my seat and hooked a hand behind his head, pulled him forward and planted a big kiss on his forehead.

“They were father and son,” I said.  “Thanks for inventing a device that eliminated the need for me to shoot them.”

“I saw that too,” Hemp finally said.  “I didn’t really want to kill a father in front of his son either.  No matter what
they’ve become
.”

Flex looked at us both and nodded.  He didn’t speak.  I knew he felt the same.  Flexy has a big heart.  We don’t enjoy the killing, even while we know it’s necessary, and if those two had to die then somebody else could do it.

We decided to forgo the party store next door and just make one stop at Michael’s.  We’d still get there before passing the lake again, so we’d have our balloons and the ability to capture the samples of whatever was coming
out of the earth.

I didn’t know what was worse; to know there was a zombie gas rising from the earth, or to have it all remain a mystery.

I just wasn’t sure which one would do more to dash the eternal hope to which we humans tend to cling.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

From the lab to the craft store we saw a few more rotters.  Three were in the parking lot of a gas station, and the movement of our car drew their gazes.  These appeared to be what Hemp called diggers.  The reanimated dead ones rather than those who’d become infected during life, died and turned.

We pulled into the Mich
a
el’s parking lot.  It was in a center with a grocery store, but our food stock was good.  Still, if there was an opportunity to get more, it’s not like it would go to waste.

There were probably fifty cars, all told, in the lot.  Some had crashed into others to remain that way forever, the doors open, skeletal remains hanging out of both driver and passenger doors.  The ravaged bodies were strewn everywhere, all of them badly decomposed or eaten away by the hundreds of vultures and clearly, the zombies who had attacked them before the flying predators got on the scene.

“Look,” said Hemp,
pointing.  “It looks like that fellow
tried to cage himself under that overturned shopping basket.”

Our eyes went to the man’s destroyed body, one foot still jammed in the part of the now overturned cart that most women keep their purses.  His arms were splayed open wide against the pavement, the hands completely gone, and one of the huge vultures was inside the cart picking away at the foot that hadn’t yet been completely devoured.

“Poor bastard,” I said.  I imagined him crawling under the cart, the ravenous, undead creatures swarming all around it, trying to overturn it and get at the frightened man within.  He would’ve instinctively put his fingers through the top – which was the bottom of the cart – pulling it downward with all his might to keep the zombies from flipping it over.

He didn’t count on them biting his fingers, chewing on the extremities until there was no way he could keep the downward pressure on his makeshift cage.  The moment he relented to the biting, it would’ve gotten immeasurably worse.

Fatally worse.

The other bodies strewn about the parking lot were in similar condition; in every case their heads had been cracked open and the gooey insides consumed.  All of this horror was not something we had to leave the car to observe; driving down one of the two passable rows and glancing left and right was all that was necessary.

“Look at this shit,” said Flex.  “I’ll never get used to it.”

“There must be two hundred vultures,” I said.  “What’s left to eat?”

As large as tom turkeys, they hopped here and there in groups of six to ten, picking violently at the remaining rotting flesh and meat.  They didn’t even react to the Crown Vic violating their space.

I wanted to shoot them, but ammunition should be saved for those who don’t wait for you to die before they eat you.

I pulled the Ford up on the sidewalk right beside the entry door of the craft store.  There would be no running across parking lots filled with vultures and death to get to our car.

“Okay, we’re getting in and out,” said Flex.  “Gem, I’ll go with you to help you carry your stuff, but just be ready.  I don’t even want to stay in there long enough to clear it – just be ready to shoot the shit out of anything that comes at you, get your stuff and we’re out.  Hemp?”

“Agreed.  No clearing, just shoot.”

“After you make sure it’s not us,” I added.

“Of course,” Hemp said.  “I’ve grown fond of you two.”

“We’ll be the only ones inside wearing helmets, so we’ll be easy to spot.”

We
put
on our gear and opened the car door.

Something caught my eye behind the glass of the adjacent grocery store.  Movement.

  I walked five steps until I was standing in front of the glass exterior wall where all the shopping carts were stored.

My own reflection obscured what I was trying to see at first, my image with the motorcycle helmet on prominent.  But in a moment my eyes focused beyond my reflection.

Faces stared back.  Dead faces.  Dozens of them, dead, hungry eyes looking through the glass at me.

I had a body flinch just then, and nearly jumped back three feet.  The guys noticed. 

Jeez, I guessed they noticed.

“Gem,” I barely heard Flex call through his helmet.  “What is it?”  Hemp stood beside him, already seeing what I’d seen.

I motioned with my hands.  The zombies inside were pressing against the glass, frantic to get at us, though I knew they couldn’t possibly smell us.  They must relate moving things with food, particularly when the moving thing was shaped like a human.

The doors were closed, the power
off
.  They were trapped inside with no thought process, no logic that could help them determine how to get the hell out.

I was happy for their predicament.  I wondered how many were inside Michael’s.

“There must be forty or fifty in there,” said Flex. 

“At least,” I said.

“Well, they’re locked in, babe.  Let’s get this thing done.”

Flex was right.  In and out.

“Thanks for indulging my emotional needs, guys,” I shouted so they could hear me.  “I’ll be quick.”

I took one more glance at what once would have been called humanity, the walking dead things that swarmed just behind the glass.  It seemed cruel to leave them trapped in there, but they couldn’t know anything anymore.  They couldn’t know cruelty from kindness, pain from pleasure.

They only knew insatiable hunger, and instinctively, what would cure it.

We went inside Michael’s with our guns ready.  I got to one of the checkout stands and grabbed three shopping bags.

Since all the stores in the chain were set up similarly, I knew where to go.  Flex stayed with me and Hemp searched for the party supply aisle to find his balloons.

Only seconds passed before I heard the first three-round burst from Hemp’s gun. 

“Hemp, you alright
?
” sh
outed Flex.  We remained still in order
to hear him, but
he answered right away
.

“
Yeah.  I’ve only seen the o
ne
so far.  That one’s done. 
Keep your eyes open, guys.”

Of course we would.  The next burst startled me, but I kept my eyes on one end of the aisle and Flex watched the other.

I reached the oil paints
,
and after another glance down the aisle
to make sure it was all clear, I
swept a few dozen tubes of various color ranges into one of my bags.  Flex tapped my shoulder and I turned to see a shadow emerging at the end of the aisle closest to the front of the store.  As we watched the shadow grow larger, a tattered woman appeared at the end.  Daylight streamed in from the windows behind her, making her nothing more than a silhouette, but we could tell by her stance and movements that she was one of the infected.

She stopped and looked at us.  We remained still as we’d done outside the lab earlier.  She came down the aisle anyway, probably with no intentions other than to shuffle the aisles as she had likely done since becoming trapped in the store.

Flex shot her.  One quick burst and she was a mess of blood and gore, falling before she had taken her third step toward us.

We stared at her body for a moment, satisfied she was really dead.

“Get me as many of the 20 x 30 canvases as you can carry,” I shouted, and Flex moved further down the aisle to gather the items on my shopping list.

I grabbed two bottles of odorless solvent for brush cleaning and color thinning, along with several brushes of various sizes, bristle materials and rigidity.  Two more steps down the aisle and I reached the watercolor supplies.  Five packages of about twenty colors went into my bag.  Two thick packages of standard sized watercolor paper, and that part was done. 

Five more steps and I had the acrylics and some more media to paint on with them.  It was enough.  I could work some of the frustrations out of my system with what I had.

Another three-round burst came from the end of the
row
.  I looked toward the sound and saw Hemp running forward past the aisle, his gun blasting away.  He stopped so I could see him and looked at me.  He held his arms out as if to ask if I was finished yet, and I nodded at him.  He
suddenly looked away again and
withdrew one of his P99s from his drop leg holster
.  Holding the gun straight out, he fired twice more at something out of my line of sight.

I heard another muffled thump from
somewhere, so
Hemp
had undoubtedly hit his mark.   The
professor
then
turned and ran down the aisle toward me.  I matched his speed, running ahead of him toward the door.  Flexy was leading, his hands filled with the large stretched canvases, and we hit the front doors at full tilt, pushing through them.  We opened the rear door of the Crown Vic and tossed all the shit in the back seat and got our asses back inside the car.

The door of the craft store had closed again, and two female zombies stood inside, clawing at the impenetrable glass frontage, unable to find the door we’d used to exit.  I was again thankful for what happened to their memories when they became afflicted.  Had they retained any of their former awareness, ladies like these could’ve found the door to Michael’s blindfolded and hogtied.  One wore a pink pant suit that was likely once very tight over a large ass and thighs, but that now sagged on her emaciated body like sheets over furniture in an old abandoned house.