The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(6)

I dread those seconds.

There’s no telling what the flashlight is going to show. There could be a dozen walkers, standing there, patiently waiting to inform me that there will be no treasures to be found here and that I will soon be dead.

Empty shelves, for the most part.

That’s what I see. It’s at once a relief and a huge disappointment. This place has been picked clean.

Alicia is calling me over; she’s found some beef jerky. Usually that’s one of the first things people grab, but this box fell behind one of the check-out counters. I find a can of opened Pringles near a pile of other cans that have been stepped on. I’d eat them, stale and all, but there are bound to be bugs—or worse yet, mice—inside.

In the back of the store I struggle to spend the proper amount of time examining the shelves. The meat section is in the back. As you go down the aisles, the putrid smell intensifies. With each step I think, This is as bad as it’s going to get…until I take another.

Nobody ever took the meat at any of the places we’d been to. The lack of refrigeration makes storing processed meats pretty much impossible. I doubt anyone ever took so much as one package. They just sit in the dark and rot. Even the animals know better than to eat it after a while; they just tear the packages to shit, treating us to the smell.

It stinks in here almost worse than the walkers. You’d think after a while you would become accustomed to all the smells of today’s world. No running water, the stench of death hanging in the air at every turn. Really, though, they aren’t the kind of smells you get used to. You spend so much time in the open air that you have no chance to build up a tolerance. The good part about that is that half the time you smell the walkers before you ever see them.

Of course, if you’re standing near a months-old meat cooler in the back of a dark grocery store, one of them could practically be standing right beside you and you wouldn’t even know it.

And I don’t.

It lumbers forward, reaching for me with that blind grab they all do. I step back, quickly, but careful not to back myself into a corner—I’d done that far too many times to let it happen again.

The walker comes at me, turning the corner, coming at me from the end of the cereal aisle, and all I can think of is Alicia.

“You okay up there?” I yell to her.

“Oh, my God, Timothy!”

She’s rushing down one of the aisles behind the thing, coming toward us. I can’t see her, but I can hear her footsteps as she rushes to my rescue.

“I’m okay! Stay where you are! Don’t—”

Her scream keeps me from finishing my sentence. Another walker has gotten to her.

I continue to struggle with the walker, keeping its gnashing teeth at bay, then manage to jam the knife into its neck. I’d been aiming for its face but there was no time to try for a kill shot now. Pushing it aside I make a break toward the sound of Alicia’s voice. I’m still not quite sure exactly where she is. I blaze across the aisles looking for her, but she’s farther away than I had thought.

I round the corner and see only a mass of dark movement. Is Alicia beneath? On top? Is she even here at all?

I only hear the grunts of a struggle. I can’t immediately tell that they’re hers, but then…yes, it’s her. As I near the struggling mass, I tuck my head down, knowing what I’m going to do. With my arms stretched out at either side, I tackle the beast. I knock it free from Alicia and the thing and I roll off of her in an instant. I swear I hear the sound of bone breaking from the impact, as if I’m demolishing the thing. I fear that’s only my imagination. As I roll on top of it Alicia’s safety is still my only concern, and I never once consider that I’m wrestling a walker, with no clue as to where its mouth is or how in danger of being bit I might be.

I can feel its fingers clawing at my thigh, and my only instinct is to get away, but by then it’s got me—its fingers locked in a death grip around my thigh and my arm. I’m hitting it, kicking at it with my free arm and leg with all my might and I don’t even know what I’m hitting. Suddenly I realize I have my eyes tightly shut, and so I open them—just in time to see Alicia, bathed in light, bringing the baseball bat down on the walker’s head.

She bashes its skull in with a single blow. My arm and thigh now released—Alicia has saved me. She stands over me with the bat, watching the walker—dead for real now—collapse into a heap.

Alicia collapses shortly after.

“Alicia!”

She offers no response. I can barely stand.

“Were you bitten?” I crawl over to her. She’s concealed in darkness; I can’t see any blood. I don’t know if she’s hurt or if her malnourished body couldn’t take the strain of all this exertion. Whatever the case, I have to get her out where I can see her, to the road where it’s safe and well-lit. I begin dragging her frantically toward the light; no time to lift her up—there could be more of them.

I get halfway to the exit before I remember the broken glass in the front of the store. So I drop to my knees and gather her onto my lap, nearly toppling a nearby shelf as I use it to support me as I force myself to stand. I think I hear rustling as I lumber out of the store; a figment of my imagination and not more of them, I hope.

Out in the street I gently lower her down to the pavement. I examine her face. No blood. Her shirt. No blood. Her pants, the same—but there are rips and tears in her clothing, and it’s possible she received a scratch or a minor bite not yielding much blood. The shoes pop off with little effort, having not been untied and retied in more than a day’s time. Getting her pants over her hips is another matter. She’s always insisted on wearing snug-fitting jeans, or at least as snug-fitting as she could find. She claims she doesn’t want to risk having her clothing get caught on something during an escape, but I think that fashion is the last part of civilization she’s willing to let go of. As I start to pull her shirt off she wakes up, helping me the rest of the way.