Gnash (36 page)

Jamie noticed him when he was about three houses down.  She waved excitedly and climbed gingerly to her feet and then bounded down the steps and jogged towards him.  They both retained the philosophy that as long as she could physically exercise, she should continue to do so.  It made sense to retain her pre-pregnancy fitness level as long as possible when there was the very real chance that they could be running for their lives at any given time.

“Hi Baby!” she said when she reached him.  After standing on the tips of her toes to give him a kiss she leaned back, “Guess what?  I felt the baby move!  I know it’s early, but I’m sure I felt it!”

“Wow, that’s exciting,” he said with a hug.  “I can’t believe that little fella is already kicking away!”  They’d scavenged several books on pregnancy from across the neighborhood so it did seem a little early to him for the baby to kick.  They said that a baby could be felt as early as four months, but he privately thought it was probably her digestion instead.  The prepackaged military meals that made up their primary source of food were very hard on your system, one more reason that they really needed the fresh vegetables from the gardens.

“Hey, it may be a girl so don’t get too comfortable saying ‘Little Fella,’” she said with a big grin.  Her face turned serious and she asked, “Any updates to when they’re going to let us evacuate the city?”

“It’s still dependent upon the situation in D.C. and on the scientists’ determination if the virus is airborne.  Any idiot who’s been in contact with a zombie can tell you that it isn’t, but they won’t take our word for it.  I don’t agree with them since you and Baby Donnelly are in constant danger, but I recognize the prudence to wait. 

“Until then, we just need to stay safe and uninfected.  That reminds me, I’ll be leaving on another sweep first thing tomorrow morning.  On the way over, Bill said they lost Jeff Ableman during a grocery store run a few miles from their area to a large group of zombies.  We’re gonna do a joint patrol and ensure they stay away from our neighborhoods.”

“Alright, just be safe, okay?  You’ve got a family to worry about now.”

“I always am, you know that,” he said as he rubbed her arm.  “Have you eaten yet?  I ate in the truck on the way back.”  She nodded that she had, so he said, “Let’s go check on the crops.  Maybe we can sneak a couple of tomatoes or a few handfuls of green beans to add to our dinner.”

“Oh, I’d kill for some fresh vegetables!  Well, maybe not the best phrase to use given our current situation, but I will love to have some fresh veggies.  Let me go get my boots and we can walk over there,” she said as she grabbed his hand and entwined her fingers with his for the stroll back to their home.

***

05 September, 0813 hrs local

Super Grocery Mart

Mars Hill, Indiana

“Alright folks, we’re gonna use this as an opportunity to pick the grocery store clean and take out any zombies we find,” Carrie Downs said.  “Hopefully, we can clear out the store first, get some additional variety for our diet, and then kill some zombies.  I’m getting mighty tired of the Mexican-style Chicken Stew,” she made a face and stuck out her tongue as she referenced one of the MRE
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menu items. 

Grayson chuckled to himself as he remembered some of the disgusting MREs he’s eaten when he first joined the Army. 
These are great compared to shelf-stable Omelet with Ham or Chicken ala King
, he thought.  He would like to wean everyone off of those things.  They were great for initial use to get through a few days of not having supplies, but they weren’t meant for long-term use.

“TP, it’s your turn to be the initial clearing team on this mission,” Carrie said.  Regardless of the negative connotations that the abbreviation of Three Pillars produced, the shortened version had stuck when they combined with the Pecan Valley guys for assault missions.

“Roger,” Grayson acknowledged.

“We’ll set perimeter security and then give you the thumbs up to enter the building.”

“Sacrificial lambs reporting for duty,” Grayson said with another of his two-fingered salutes.

While the Pecan Valley contingent set up security around the building, Grayson’s team moved into position near the rear door.  They’d done this enough by now to learn that they got their biggest bang for their buck by backing their trucks against the loading dock and clearing the building from the back to the front.  It allowed them to get a lot of food from the storage area with little effort and provided them with wide open bay doors to flee through if they had to.

The Super Grocery Mart was a fairly small establishment compared to the biggies, but they’d learned early on that the large stores were typically filled with the undead.  When the power went out and things started going south people flocked to the stores to get supplies and that’s where a lot of them died.

Grayson often wondered where the zombies they faced came from.  It was clear now that the Middle Eastern man that they thought was a druggie was actually one of the zombies, but how was it that Indianapolis and Washington, D.C. had the same problem, but nowhere else in between the two did?  It had to have something to do with that catering truck from his neighborhood in Alexandria that they found outside the drug house.  Had they missed the reanimation of the people that guy had killed? 

As he stood outside the door waiting for the signal to enter it hit him like a ton of bricks.  He could have stopped this whole outbreak right there at ground zero.  They cleared the house and torched it to burn the drugs, but there had been bodies in the back yard that they left untouched.  They must have left before the corpses reanimated.  Logically, he knew it wasn’t his fault, but he suddenly felt as if he’d personally killed over a million people. 

How had he missed it?  The connection was almost as plain as day.  The man must have been bitten and drove here before he died and converted.  But as he thought about it, that wasn’t right either.  The original zombies had been confined to the Pentagon when the French nuked the city.  It was clear that the van from Alexandria had something to do with the zombie outbreak, but how was just out of his grasp.

“Ok, security set.  Move in TP,” Carrie’s voice came over the walkie talkie.

Grayson turned on the flashlight that he’d taped to the barrel of his rifle and flicked on the headlamp he wore over his mountaineering helmet.  About a week after the garden center, they raided an outdoor recreation store and got tons of great gear that transitioned into their current world wonderfully.  Besides the lights and helmets, they’d gotten backpacks, rugged clothing, water filters, heavy duty gloves, skateboarding elbow and knee pads, and water bottles.  Literally everything his little team was wearing and using besides their weapons was from that store. 

He turned the handle on the door, it was unlocked.  He was the first to enter and he quickly turned left to scan while two other men entered behind him, one facing the center of the room, the other facing the left.  The subdued smell of spoiled meat and long-dried curdled dairy products hit him immediately.  It would be way worse once they went into the main portion of the store where the freezers and refrigerated food sections were.  Until they’d cleared the store, he wouldn’t let his people plug their noses or use the mentholated petroleum jelly they each carried.  The zombies smelled just as badly as the rotten meat, but a lot of times, the meat was long rotted and the zombies continued to emit a smell, so that was just another of their senses that Grayson and his team could use to make up for the limited visibility in the store.

“Clear.”

“Clear, right.”

“Clear on my side too,” Grayson whispered.  “Alphonso, come on in and open the bay doors.”

A short, thin figure moved by Grayson’s left side in the shadowy interior towards the doors.  “Got it,” Alphonso said.  There were some clinks and scrapes of metal against metal and suddenly the short man was pulling with all his might and a sliver or daylight along the bottom of the dock grew larger and larger.

“Shit!” the man on the far right yelled as he began firing.  A figure toppled him over and tore at his throat.  He was still firing as he fell and several rounds hit the center man and one tore through Grayson’s tricep.

He dove to the floor into the light and fired in the direction of the zombie that took out his man.  “Get the door open!” he yelled to Alphonso, who had stopped pulling the chain and grabbed his weapon.

Someone from outside the door fired into the zombie’s head and it went flying backwards into the space.  “Boss, you ok?” Gretchen asked from outside the door.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine.  I think Mike and Scott bought it though,” he said through clenched teeth.  The damn wound stung badly.  It was the same arm that he’d been shot in during the Fallujah offensive and then had broken in Oklahoma when all of this started.  Somebody definitely didn’t want him to write his name legibly ever again.  He ignored the blood flowing freely from his arm and swept his rifle back and forth into the gloom.

Gretchen rushed over to him and wrapped his wound with a bandana while the rest of the team from Three Pillars cleared the stockroom.  Several shots rang out near the doors leading to the sales floor.  He grunted as Gretchen helped him up and made his way deeper into the stockroom towards the front. 

“Shit, I almost forgot about Scott,” he said to Gretchen.  “You know what we’ve gotta do if there are any bite marks.”  The last thing they needed was to be attacked from behind by a former team member.  He glanced back towards his team at the door.  They seemed to have the situation well in hand.

Gretchen pushed the muzzle of her rifle right against the center of Scott’s forehead as Grayson checked for a pulse.  It was there, barely, but there was a clear chunk of skin missing from his shoulder that was already beginning to turn black as the skin died rapidly.  He shook him gently awake and tried to speak to him.

“Tell my wife and kids that I fought bravely.  Don’t tell them about…him,” he gestured weakly towards Mike’s body.

“No problem buddy,” Grayson said as he pulled Scott’s pistol from its holster and placed it in his hand.  “You’ve been bitten.  You know what you need to do.”

“I can’t.  I’m Catholic.  If I commit suicide I’m guaranteed a spot in hell.  I need you to do it for me,” he pleaded.  “Please, before the change happens.  I don’t want to be remembered like that.”

Grayson nodded and stood up.  “I’ll do it Gretchen.  I’m the one who ordered him in here,” he said as he waved her rifle away.  He placed his own rifle where hers had been a moment before and awkwardly squeezed the trigger as he turned his head to avoid spray back.  Even the miniscule recoil from his M4 was enough to send waves of pain through his injured arm.

“Fuck!  What the fuck is the point of this shit?  Why did we have to kill him?  The fucking government should get us out of here,” he screamed in frustration.  Scott’s ruined body twitched at his feet as his final reflexes gave way and his body relaxed.

“The point of you killing him was so that we could still say ‘him’ instead of it.  You did a good thing Grayson, don’t think for one minute that you didn’t,” Gretchen said to him with a comforting hand on his uninjured arm.

He took a deep breath and said, “Thanks.  I needed that.  It’s so frustrating, you know.  We have all the might of the free world just a few miles beyond the beltway, but we can’t leave.  We’re stuck here in a life or death fight just so we can have variety in our dinner.  Shit!”  He took another deep breath.  “Ok, I’ve got it out.  Sorry.  Let’s go see if they need any help up front.”

“Don’t apologize for being human,” she said with a final squeeze of her hand before she dropped it and turned away.

By the time they’d made their way back up to the swinging double doors, the remainder of the store was cleared.  Besides the one in the stockroom, there had been four more on the floor, probably a cashier and three customers. 

Grayson had his team double check everything and then called Carrie on the walkie.  “We’re clear in here, let’s load up.  We took a couple casualties though.”

“Alright, I’ll send in my guys and we’ll get this place emptied.”  The radio went silent for a moment then she asked if anyone else was injured.

“Just me, got shot by one of my own guys during the firefight,” he replied.

“Alright, I’ll be there in a moment.  The perimeter is still clear.  You can tell your guys to start hauling stuff to the back dock.”

“Roger that.”

The store was fairly well stocked, which was a relief.  Apparently the roaming zombies had kept away any other potential groups from raiding the store.  Even though they knew about the other four communities, five if you counted Clear Creek which was wiped out last month, there was evidence of other survivors in the city.  Empty convenience stores, spent shell casings, random fires, they just didn’t want to play with anyone else. 
Hell, a well-stocked family or two could hole up in one of the high rises and we would never even know about it
, he thought. 

He was glad that he wouldn’t be responsible for the block by block search and destroy mission that General Clarke was facing, let alone the massive cleanup mission afterwards.  They’d almost gotten into a firefight with the Brits when they first showed up on scene.  That’s something he should discuss during the next community meeting with the general.  Maybe they should adopt U.S. uniforms while they clear the city.  They’d be less likely to be seen as an invading force by the more isolated groups who were probably in full-on freak out mode by now.

Carrie walked up to Grayson and examined his wound, ensuring he wasn’t really hiding a bite mark instead of a bullet hole.  Not everyone was as brave as Scott had been and several times they’d come close to letting an infected person into their communities because they’d hidden a bite.  It was standard procedure nowadays to inspect every injury closely for potential contamination.  She gave him a thumbs up, “You’re good to go.  Glad I didn’t have to shoot you.”

“Me too,” he muttered.