Blight 23/?
Jamie stands on the chair they’re using to get over the railing and onto the ladder. The moment disorients him for a second, deja-vu of the last time he was here, ready to go out of their shelter. He tells himself it’s just him and Tyler this time, nobody slow to protect. They can do this. They’re good at this.
The wind whips down the street, cold and biting his face. He’s not sure the heavy jackets were the best idea. Too padded, too encumbering.
Further down the building, a shower of electronics equipment starts to fall. The dead on the street turn at the noise, but slower than they did last time, and Jamie is worried they’re just smart enough to learn, to wait until there’s something actually alive before they bother moving. They shuffle, slow, but reach for the flutter of the plastic bags that come next. Maybe they aren’t becoming jaded. Maybe they’re getting old, worn out. How long can a dead thing possibly keep moving?
“Remember how I told you?” Alfonse asks, and Jamie nods. He’s got the tools on him, the two power drills they found and charged before the power went out. Screwdriver, hammer, awl, WD-40. Pry-bar in case it’s barricaded somehow instead of actually locked.
“You call it,” Tyler says from behind him, and Jamie can’t stall anymore.
“Okay,” Jamie says. “Careful on the ladder down.”
“I’m always careful,” Tyler says, and he’s so not always-careful that it’s a joke. Jamie smiles and starts to move down the ladder, one sure step at a time. He clears the landing-spot on the sidewalk and hears Tyler behind him.
The plan is to go straight across with as little interruption as possible. To let the others continue the distraction. They move together, quick and confident, dodging around the slow-moving blighted, taking them down just because it’s so fucking easy.
They have to be more careful as they get to the parking lot, through the jumble of cars and shopping carts. The front of the store is at right angles to the front of the apartment and they swing wide so they can see before they get up on it.
Tyler’s empty backpack flops on his back. There are a few things they need to grab if they see it (diapers, a water hose that’s longer than the washing-machine ones, store walkie-talkies if they can find them). Tom had said Nikki was pouting that the building full of yuppies didn’t have enough decent cereal, and if they find anything fruity-sweet to grab a box. Jamie thinks the guy is a little ambitious there, but maybe the last-single-man-in-Dallas bump is about as effective as the Hey-I-play-in-the-NHL bump.
They get to the front door, a dead-end culdasack. There are two sets of sliding doors. The motion sensors are as dead as the electricity. Tyler swipes one of the blighted off of its feet and then smashes its skull while Jamie slots the end of the pry bar into the crease, tries to work it open if it’s just deactivated. He pushes, and nothing. No give at all. Okay, disappointing, but not surprising.
“Yours!” he calls, and drops the tool bag in front of the door. Tyler switches with him. The scattering of dead are about split evenly, one half falling for the diversion, the closer ones starting to file towards the storefront. The last time he was out here, it would have been a problem, but they’re so impaired now that it’s not hard to step up, to get to them before they get to Tyler.
He hears the sharp tap-tap of Tyler hammering a hole into the lock-face with the awl, right where Alfonse said to put it, just above the key-hole. The first drill has the eighth-inch bit, and Tyler starts to drill while Jamie keeps him safe. He’d had a vague thought, of filling another cart as they were running through, but there will be such a thick carpet of corpses by the time they’re done that they’ll never get it over them.
The drill’s motor whines and then suddenly spins unimpaired and Tyler shuts it off.
“Your turn,” he says and takes up his bat. Jamie slips the jacket off of his shoulders, too hot from the exertion to deal with its stifling bulk.
Jamie has more weight behind him. Even after being sick, he’s still the stronger of the two. He needs both weight and strength when he switches to the drill with the quarter-inch bit, widening the hole Tyler made, drilling out and destroying all the tumblers.
“Jamie!” Tyler says, over the grind of the drill, and Jamie turns to look.
“Hold up a sec,” Tyler says, looking towards the corner of the store that’s furthest from the apartments. “I thought I saw…” he takes a few steps that way, and Jamie is so close to getting this lock open. He glances and doesn’t see any dead close enough to worry about. He pulls the switch, leans into the back of the drill.
He glances over his shoulder, but that changes the angle and the power tool makes an unhappy noise. The bit keeps chewing into the metal, hungry, so fucking close.
“Jame!” Tyler shouts. A shadow moves in the reflection on the dirty glass. Jamie jerks to the side. One of the blighted is stumbling in, a huge guy that’s as tall as Jamie and twice his weight. He’s half to his feet when it falls on him, and he jabs the drill at its face, squeezes the switch.
Black blood and rotting brains mist his face and Jamie twists to the side, hitting the ground hard with all that weight on top of him. The drill bit grinds against the sidewalk, not caring what it’s running against.
“Shit shit shit!” Tyler says, tries to get the guy off of Jamie.
“Look out!” Jamie says, and Tyler stops while he beats back the approaching blighted. Their slow movements don’t seem as easy now. Inexorable like a slow flow of lava coming down a mountain.
Tyler gets the area controlled for enough time to come back to Jamie, and with the two of them working together they get the corpse off of him. Jamie picks up his weapon, hopes he got deep enough into the lock because the drill is fucked. He pistol-whips the next dead with it, throws it away when the battery pack breaks off.
Tyler gets the flat-head screwdriver and hammers it into the key-slot. Almost done. Jamie grabs the pry-bar again, ready to give the push when the lock opens.
Tyler grabs the screwdriver with both hands and turns it like a key. There’s a sharp snap noise, and Jamie has a second of terror that they fucked it up, that the screwdriver just broke off in the lock, and then Tyler is saying “Got it! We got it! Go!”
Jamie hits the bar sideways with his weight and the doors slide open a little more than a foot. Tyler slips the pack off of his shoulder and slides through, pushes one door while Jamie shoves the other until they’ve got it open enough for Jamie to get through.
Jamie falls in, panting, and Tyler is already on the other end of the sliding glass, shoving it closed again. Jamie takes the other one and they get it closed before the dead start to thump against it, walking into the dirty glass and bouncing off.
“Holy shit,” Tyler whispers, and Jamie looks around them.
The store is trashed, bodies rotting in the aisles, some shelves empty and knocked over, others still cluttered with bottles or jars. The lighting is dim, the stench of decay almost overwhelming.
“Let’s get through this and get the hell out,” Jamie decides. Tyler nods, picks up his pack and his bat. They start on one side, floral and bakery. There is a display of mummified mums, dried out in their flower pots, ready for the American Thanksgiving that never happened. The dirt will be worth having, if they can figure out how to not fight to get over here again. If they can figure out how to get more per trip than what Jamie and Tyler can carry.
The bakery is a waste, most of the food gone, the few clear packages that fell on the floor and were overlooked green with mold inside.
Produce has some potential. Onions and some runty potatoes on the floor, kicked into corners. Everything else is a rotted wet mess. Dairy reeks, and even if some of the cheese would be edible, Jamie can’t imagine eating anything that came from that mess.
Tyler turns the corner into the next aisle, just beyond the range of Jamie’s swing.
Something flashes out, faster than Jamie can see it, and Tyler is struck back, falls to the ground on his side, hands on his throat and choking, coughing, gasping.
“I said you have to pay for that!” a man’s voice shouts, and Jamie turns the corner.
The guy is not-okay, filthy and wide-eyed. The left leg of his khaki pants is stained dark from mid-thigh down, a tight belt cutting in deep just above it. He’s got a thick pole, like an industrial mop-handle, held like a weapon. His name-tag reads Mr. Harker, Asst. Mgr.
“This shrinkage is coming out of your bonus!” the guy yells, and he swings the pole down. Jamie raises the bat to block it and the force of the blow rattles down his arm, leaves his hand numb.
“Stop, stop,” he says, and Tyler rolls on the floor, writhing. “We’re sorry! We didn’t know anybody was here! We’ll go!”
“No! Unauthorized! Breaks!” Harker shouts and swings again. Jamie deflects this one instead of trying to stop it. Knocks the pole wide and steps in. Grabs it with one hand. The guy reeks, smells of rot and Lysol bad enough that Jamie gags.
The bat comes down, and even with only one hand on the grip, Jamie is strong and terrified, riding high on adrenaline. Harker’s skull crushes down, a divot that distorts his head down to his eyes.
The store is quiet then, except for Tyler’s ragged choking, except for the thumps of the dead coming against the glass doors up front.
“Shit!” Jamie says and drops the pole, scrambles to Tyler’s side and goes to his knees, lifting Tyler into his arms. “Shit, breathe!” he begs, looking into Tyler’s wide eyes.
Like Jamie’s words made the impossible happen, Tyler draws in a breath, wheezing and raw, but he gets it in. Jamie pulls his hands away and there’s a red mark just under his Adam’s apple, already turning purple. The weapon was dull at least. Didn’t break the skin. Didn’t hit quite hard enough to crush his windpipe. He’s just shocked, Jamie tries to tell himself. Knows it’s better than it could be but Tyler still needs ice, needs medicine, needs something to keep it from swelling up.
“Stay here,” Jamie tells him, and it breaks his heart to untangle Tyler’s fingers from his shirt, to leave him there. He runs, looking for the pharmacy, the over-the-counter medicines. He almost doesn’t recognize it, it’s so decimated.
“Bottom shelves,” he repeats Eduardo’s advice. “Things out of sight, things pushed back from the edge.” He grabs three different bottles and discards them, and then he sees the box with the little purple-grape symbol on it. Takes the time to read that it is actually what he’s looking for and then runs back to Tyler’s side.
“It’s all they had,” he says as he slides in to cradle Tyler’s shoulders again. His hands fumble as he opens the box and takes out the little bottle of children’s Ibuprofen. He can’t bother to read the label, but he doesn’t think it’ll kill Tyler to have a little too much just this once. He pours a careful dose in the cup it comes with, holds it to Tyler’s lips and watches him drink.
Tyler’s lips move and Jamie shakes his head as he pours a second. “Don’t try to talk. Jesus Christ you scared me to fucking death.” He knows it’s not Tyler’s fault. Knows Harker could have got either of them by surprise like that. Still. Tyler is here and alive and Jamie fusses at him just because he can.
Jamie isn’t sure how long they sit there, Tyler’s shoulders in his lap, Jamie counting his breaths, assessing if each one is stronger or weaker than the one before.
Tyler finally taps Jamie’s elbow, and Jamie lets him up. He sits up, his head held at a weird angle to keep the pressure off of the injury.
“I’m okay,” Tyler says. He sounds hoarse, but the words are clear enough. “We gotta finish…”
“No,” Jamie says. “We’ll get you back, and if Tom and Nikki will come with me, we’ll come back.
Tyler shakes his head, puts one hand and one knee on the floor and pushes up from the other foot, stands there for a moment evaluating his damage. “That’s dumb,” Tyler says. “There’s nothing to do for me there that you haven’t done already.”
“Damn it, fine, just stop talking already,” Jamie sighs. Stubborn fucker. Tyler bends over and takes the pole that jabbed his throat, uses it for a walking stick.
Jamie takes the lead now, up and down the aisles. Some are swept clean. No beer or wine, no canned goods. Plenty of ketchup. The salad dressing shelves look almost untouched. They find a dozen cans and jars of olives, far enough from the rest of the cans that they were overlooked. Jamie puts the cans in his bag, leaves the glass jars to come get later, when they won’t get broken.
The breakfast goods are pretty picked through, but Tyler fishes in the recesses of the bottom shelf with the pole and finds a couple boxes of cereal, dumps them in his bag.
The babies and pets aisle is messy but not empty, and Jamie keeps watch while Tyler fills his bag with diapers that might not fit, the smallest ones he can find. They leave the baby food, the infant shampoo, take some diaper rash stuff, grabbing tubes and boxes at random.
They get through to the other side, back where Jamie found the kid’s ibuprofen. The pharmacy gate is closed, locked to the counter. They don’t have another drill charged, but maybe, if they bring enough brute force, they can fuck it up enough to get in.
“Registers next, or back room?” Tyler asks. It’s darker on this side, the light coming in the front windows far away, the translucent skylights few and far between. Jamie thinks Tyler looks pale, hurting.
Jamie considers. With that guy running around in here, he doubts there are any dead left. “Back, I guess.”
They walk side by side, along the back wall, looking for the door to the ‘employees only’ area. Halfway there, Tyler jerks his head to the side. Jamie follows his gaze. In the meat department, there’s a black water hose, rolled up and hanging on the wall. That’s two things off of their list. Jamie hops the counter and gets it down.
“Good eye,” he says when he comes back with it in his bag. A thought occurs to him. “When we were outside and you told me to wait. What did you see?”
“Kids,” Tyler says. “I thought…” he shrugs. “They must have been dead. But for a second, I thought they were looking at us.”
Jamie shudders. Kids are the worst, their little dead bodies so light, their skulls so small.
They get to the back room, but it’s too dark back there, too many boxes and shelves. “No way we’re finding anything useful in the dark,” he decides, and for once Tyler isn’t a little shit about it.
“Yeah. Yeah, okay. Back up front. We’ll see if there’s anything at the registers and then get back. The others will be worried.”
It takes them longer to search the registers than any other part of the store. There’s just such a mess behind them, and Jamie doesn’t want to miss it if there’s a walkie-talkie there. They each start at an end and work through to the middle. He picks up a few chocolate bars, a bag of Cheetos. Little treats for the Akshaya and Darius. They meet up, and Tyler shrugs.
“Can’t win them all.”
Jamie sighs and nods. Okay. Shit. Now they just have to fight their way out. Or he has to. Tyler will be doing good if he can keep on his feet and move faster than a walk. Now that they’re where the light’s better, Tyler is looking kind of pale.
They’ve done this enough times that they don’t need words. Tyler taking up a spot where he can jab the pole out as soon as there is a gap, Jamie getting the pry bar into the place to make a gap.
They go out fighting, Tyler taking down three of them from range, giving Jamie room to open the doors and then spill out swinging. He holds the pack of tools and finds like a shield, pushing the dead back while he swings on them.
The blighted seem to have found some of their energy, moving more like they had when they were fresher. Faster is relative though, and Jamie smacks them down, breaks arms and then skulls, cleans out the doorway. Tyler jabs a few more and then there’s enough time to close the door behind them, pulling it to within a hand’s width of shut, leaving it easier to get into next time.
A couple more blighted come up and are dealt with, and then Jamie looks across the road, at few dead between him and there. Tom and Loui and Nikki are armed up, running a divert-and-smash operation on the sidewalk, piling up the bodies. Eduardo, on the balcony, makes eye contact with Jamie and Jamie raises his hand in a thumb’s up to show that they’re okay.
“Jamie,” Tyler says, soft, and Jamie turns.
So they weren’t dead after all, Jamie thinks. There are two kids, a small one of indeterminable gender, probably about Darius’ age, a taller one with long strands of blond hair escaping her hoodie. Tyler reaches and squeezes his fingers, once, and pulls Jamie a little behind him. Jamie is happy to cede this job to Tyler.
“Hi there,” Tyler says, nodding towards them. They don’t move, don’t blink. The tall one’s blue eyes are dull, gray shadows around them. “Hey. You guys okay? You need somewhere to go? We live in that building over there. We’ve got food and clean water. A warm place to sleep. There’s kids. Darius is nine, and Akshaya is like four?”
The taller one shifts her weight, a flash of shiny metal in her hand, a small short blade.
Tyler takes a step backwards, his bag bumping Jamie’s chest. Jamie makes sure they still have the room to be doing this, but none of the blighted are close enough to worry them yet.
The kids take a step back and then another. Tyler reaches into his bag and grabs one of the boxes of cereal. Puts it down by his feet.
“Hey, you don’t have to decide today. Here, this is for you. You come get it when we’re gone.”
One of the dead follows Tyler’s voice in, and Jamie has to take his eyes off the kids to put it down.
When he looks back, they’re gone.
===========
The wind whips down the street, cold and biting his face. He’s not sure the heavy jackets were the best idea. Too padded, too encumbering.
Further down the building, a shower of electronics equipment starts to fall. The dead on the street turn at the noise, but slower than they did last time, and Jamie is worried they’re just smart enough to learn, to wait until there’s something actually alive before they bother moving. They shuffle, slow, but reach for the flutter of the plastic bags that come next. Maybe they aren’t becoming jaded. Maybe they’re getting old, worn out. How long can a dead thing possibly keep moving?
“Remember how I told you?” Alfonse asks, and Jamie nods. He’s got the tools on him, the two power drills they found and charged before the power went out. Screwdriver, hammer, awl, WD-40. Pry-bar in case it’s barricaded somehow instead of actually locked.
“You call it,” Tyler says from behind him, and Jamie can’t stall anymore.
“Okay,” Jamie says. “Careful on the ladder down.”
“I’m always careful,” Tyler says, and he’s so not always-careful that it’s a joke. Jamie smiles and starts to move down the ladder, one sure step at a time. He clears the landing-spot on the sidewalk and hears Tyler behind him.
The plan is to go straight across with as little interruption as possible. To let the others continue the distraction. They move together, quick and confident, dodging around the slow-moving blighted, taking them down just because it’s so fucking easy.
They have to be more careful as they get to the parking lot, through the jumble of cars and shopping carts. The front of the store is at right angles to the front of the apartment and they swing wide so they can see before they get up on it.
Tyler’s empty backpack flops on his back. There are a few things they need to grab if they see it (diapers, a water hose that’s longer than the washing-machine ones, store walkie-talkies if they can find them). Tom had said Nikki was pouting that the building full of yuppies didn’t have enough decent cereal, and if they find anything fruity-sweet to grab a box. Jamie thinks the guy is a little ambitious there, but maybe the last-single-man-in-Dallas bump is about as effective as the Hey-I-play-in-the-NHL bump.
They get to the front door, a dead-end culdasack. There are two sets of sliding doors. The motion sensors are as dead as the electricity. Tyler swipes one of the blighted off of its feet and then smashes its skull while Jamie slots the end of the pry bar into the crease, tries to work it open if it’s just deactivated. He pushes, and nothing. No give at all. Okay, disappointing, but not surprising.
“Yours!” he calls, and drops the tool bag in front of the door. Tyler switches with him. The scattering of dead are about split evenly, one half falling for the diversion, the closer ones starting to file towards the storefront. The last time he was out here, it would have been a problem, but they’re so impaired now that it’s not hard to step up, to get to them before they get to Tyler.
He hears the sharp tap-tap of Tyler hammering a hole into the lock-face with the awl, right where Alfonse said to put it, just above the key-hole. The first drill has the eighth-inch bit, and Tyler starts to drill while Jamie keeps him safe. He’d had a vague thought, of filling another cart as they were running through, but there will be such a thick carpet of corpses by the time they’re done that they’ll never get it over them.
The drill’s motor whines and then suddenly spins unimpaired and Tyler shuts it off.
“Your turn,” he says and takes up his bat. Jamie slips the jacket off of his shoulders, too hot from the exertion to deal with its stifling bulk.
Jamie has more weight behind him. Even after being sick, he’s still the stronger of the two. He needs both weight and strength when he switches to the drill with the quarter-inch bit, widening the hole Tyler made, drilling out and destroying all the tumblers.
“Jamie!” Tyler says, over the grind of the drill, and Jamie turns to look.
“Hold up a sec,” Tyler says, looking towards the corner of the store that’s furthest from the apartments. “I thought I saw…” he takes a few steps that way, and Jamie is so close to getting this lock open. He glances and doesn’t see any dead close enough to worry about. He pulls the switch, leans into the back of the drill.
He glances over his shoulder, but that changes the angle and the power tool makes an unhappy noise. The bit keeps chewing into the metal, hungry, so fucking close.
“Jame!” Tyler shouts. A shadow moves in the reflection on the dirty glass. Jamie jerks to the side. One of the blighted is stumbling in, a huge guy that’s as tall as Jamie and twice his weight. He’s half to his feet when it falls on him, and he jabs the drill at its face, squeezes the switch.
Black blood and rotting brains mist his face and Jamie twists to the side, hitting the ground hard with all that weight on top of him. The drill bit grinds against the sidewalk, not caring what it’s running against.
“Shit shit shit!” Tyler says, tries to get the guy off of Jamie.
“Look out!” Jamie says, and Tyler stops while he beats back the approaching blighted. Their slow movements don’t seem as easy now. Inexorable like a slow flow of lava coming down a mountain.
Tyler gets the area controlled for enough time to come back to Jamie, and with the two of them working together they get the corpse off of him. Jamie picks up his weapon, hopes he got deep enough into the lock because the drill is fucked. He pistol-whips the next dead with it, throws it away when the battery pack breaks off.
Tyler gets the flat-head screwdriver and hammers it into the key-slot. Almost done. Jamie grabs the pry-bar again, ready to give the push when the lock opens.
Tyler grabs the screwdriver with both hands and turns it like a key. There’s a sharp snap noise, and Jamie has a second of terror that they fucked it up, that the screwdriver just broke off in the lock, and then Tyler is saying “Got it! We got it! Go!”
Jamie hits the bar sideways with his weight and the doors slide open a little more than a foot. Tyler slips the pack off of his shoulder and slides through, pushes one door while Jamie shoves the other until they’ve got it open enough for Jamie to get through.
Jamie falls in, panting, and Tyler is already on the other end of the sliding glass, shoving it closed again. Jamie takes the other one and they get it closed before the dead start to thump against it, walking into the dirty glass and bouncing off.
“Holy shit,” Tyler whispers, and Jamie looks around them.
The store is trashed, bodies rotting in the aisles, some shelves empty and knocked over, others still cluttered with bottles or jars. The lighting is dim, the stench of decay almost overwhelming.
“Let’s get through this and get the hell out,” Jamie decides. Tyler nods, picks up his pack and his bat. They start on one side, floral and bakery. There is a display of mummified mums, dried out in their flower pots, ready for the American Thanksgiving that never happened. The dirt will be worth having, if they can figure out how to not fight to get over here again. If they can figure out how to get more per trip than what Jamie and Tyler can carry.
The bakery is a waste, most of the food gone, the few clear packages that fell on the floor and were overlooked green with mold inside.
Produce has some potential. Onions and some runty potatoes on the floor, kicked into corners. Everything else is a rotted wet mess. Dairy reeks, and even if some of the cheese would be edible, Jamie can’t imagine eating anything that came from that mess.
Tyler turns the corner into the next aisle, just beyond the range of Jamie’s swing.
Something flashes out, faster than Jamie can see it, and Tyler is struck back, falls to the ground on his side, hands on his throat and choking, coughing, gasping.
“I said you have to pay for that!” a man’s voice shouts, and Jamie turns the corner.
The guy is not-okay, filthy and wide-eyed. The left leg of his khaki pants is stained dark from mid-thigh down, a tight belt cutting in deep just above it. He’s got a thick pole, like an industrial mop-handle, held like a weapon. His name-tag reads Mr. Harker, Asst. Mgr.
“This shrinkage is coming out of your bonus!” the guy yells, and he swings the pole down. Jamie raises the bat to block it and the force of the blow rattles down his arm, leaves his hand numb.
“Stop, stop,” he says, and Tyler rolls on the floor, writhing. “We’re sorry! We didn’t know anybody was here! We’ll go!”
“No! Unauthorized! Breaks!” Harker shouts and swings again. Jamie deflects this one instead of trying to stop it. Knocks the pole wide and steps in. Grabs it with one hand. The guy reeks, smells of rot and Lysol bad enough that Jamie gags.
The bat comes down, and even with only one hand on the grip, Jamie is strong and terrified, riding high on adrenaline. Harker’s skull crushes down, a divot that distorts his head down to his eyes.
The store is quiet then, except for Tyler’s ragged choking, except for the thumps of the dead coming against the glass doors up front.
“Shit!” Jamie says and drops the pole, scrambles to Tyler’s side and goes to his knees, lifting Tyler into his arms. “Shit, breathe!” he begs, looking into Tyler’s wide eyes.
Like Jamie’s words made the impossible happen, Tyler draws in a breath, wheezing and raw, but he gets it in. Jamie pulls his hands away and there’s a red mark just under his Adam’s apple, already turning purple. The weapon was dull at least. Didn’t break the skin. Didn’t hit quite hard enough to crush his windpipe. He’s just shocked, Jamie tries to tell himself. Knows it’s better than it could be but Tyler still needs ice, needs medicine, needs something to keep it from swelling up.
“Stay here,” Jamie tells him, and it breaks his heart to untangle Tyler’s fingers from his shirt, to leave him there. He runs, looking for the pharmacy, the over-the-counter medicines. He almost doesn’t recognize it, it’s so decimated.
“Bottom shelves,” he repeats Eduardo’s advice. “Things out of sight, things pushed back from the edge.” He grabs three different bottles and discards them, and then he sees the box with the little purple-grape symbol on it. Takes the time to read that it is actually what he’s looking for and then runs back to Tyler’s side.
“It’s all they had,” he says as he slides in to cradle Tyler’s shoulders again. His hands fumble as he opens the box and takes out the little bottle of children’s Ibuprofen. He can’t bother to read the label, but he doesn’t think it’ll kill Tyler to have a little too much just this once. He pours a careful dose in the cup it comes with, holds it to Tyler’s lips and watches him drink.
Tyler’s lips move and Jamie shakes his head as he pours a second. “Don’t try to talk. Jesus Christ you scared me to fucking death.” He knows it’s not Tyler’s fault. Knows Harker could have got either of them by surprise like that. Still. Tyler is here and alive and Jamie fusses at him just because he can.
Jamie isn’t sure how long they sit there, Tyler’s shoulders in his lap, Jamie counting his breaths, assessing if each one is stronger or weaker than the one before.
Tyler finally taps Jamie’s elbow, and Jamie lets him up. He sits up, his head held at a weird angle to keep the pressure off of the injury.
“I’m okay,” Tyler says. He sounds hoarse, but the words are clear enough. “We gotta finish…”
“No,” Jamie says. “We’ll get you back, and if Tom and Nikki will come with me, we’ll come back.
Tyler shakes his head, puts one hand and one knee on the floor and pushes up from the other foot, stands there for a moment evaluating his damage. “That’s dumb,” Tyler says. “There’s nothing to do for me there that you haven’t done already.”
“Damn it, fine, just stop talking already,” Jamie sighs. Stubborn fucker. Tyler bends over and takes the pole that jabbed his throat, uses it for a walking stick.
Jamie takes the lead now, up and down the aisles. Some are swept clean. No beer or wine, no canned goods. Plenty of ketchup. The salad dressing shelves look almost untouched. They find a dozen cans and jars of olives, far enough from the rest of the cans that they were overlooked. Jamie puts the cans in his bag, leaves the glass jars to come get later, when they won’t get broken.
The breakfast goods are pretty picked through, but Tyler fishes in the recesses of the bottom shelf with the pole and finds a couple boxes of cereal, dumps them in his bag.
The babies and pets aisle is messy but not empty, and Jamie keeps watch while Tyler fills his bag with diapers that might not fit, the smallest ones he can find. They leave the baby food, the infant shampoo, take some diaper rash stuff, grabbing tubes and boxes at random.
They get through to the other side, back where Jamie found the kid’s ibuprofen. The pharmacy gate is closed, locked to the counter. They don’t have another drill charged, but maybe, if they bring enough brute force, they can fuck it up enough to get in.
“Registers next, or back room?” Tyler asks. It’s darker on this side, the light coming in the front windows far away, the translucent skylights few and far between. Jamie thinks Tyler looks pale, hurting.
Jamie considers. With that guy running around in here, he doubts there are any dead left. “Back, I guess.”
They walk side by side, along the back wall, looking for the door to the ‘employees only’ area. Halfway there, Tyler jerks his head to the side. Jamie follows his gaze. In the meat department, there’s a black water hose, rolled up and hanging on the wall. That’s two things off of their list. Jamie hops the counter and gets it down.
“Good eye,” he says when he comes back with it in his bag. A thought occurs to him. “When we were outside and you told me to wait. What did you see?”
“Kids,” Tyler says. “I thought…” he shrugs. “They must have been dead. But for a second, I thought they were looking at us.”
Jamie shudders. Kids are the worst, their little dead bodies so light, their skulls so small.
They get to the back room, but it’s too dark back there, too many boxes and shelves. “No way we’re finding anything useful in the dark,” he decides, and for once Tyler isn’t a little shit about it.
“Yeah. Yeah, okay. Back up front. We’ll see if there’s anything at the registers and then get back. The others will be worried.”
It takes them longer to search the registers than any other part of the store. There’s just such a mess behind them, and Jamie doesn’t want to miss it if there’s a walkie-talkie there. They each start at an end and work through to the middle. He picks up a few chocolate bars, a bag of Cheetos. Little treats for the Akshaya and Darius. They meet up, and Tyler shrugs.
“Can’t win them all.”
Jamie sighs and nods. Okay. Shit. Now they just have to fight their way out. Or he has to. Tyler will be doing good if he can keep on his feet and move faster than a walk. Now that they’re where the light’s better, Tyler is looking kind of pale.
They’ve done this enough times that they don’t need words. Tyler taking up a spot where he can jab the pole out as soon as there is a gap, Jamie getting the pry bar into the place to make a gap.
They go out fighting, Tyler taking down three of them from range, giving Jamie room to open the doors and then spill out swinging. He holds the pack of tools and finds like a shield, pushing the dead back while he swings on them.
The blighted seem to have found some of their energy, moving more like they had when they were fresher. Faster is relative though, and Jamie smacks them down, breaks arms and then skulls, cleans out the doorway. Tyler jabs a few more and then there’s enough time to close the door behind them, pulling it to within a hand’s width of shut, leaving it easier to get into next time.
A couple more blighted come up and are dealt with, and then Jamie looks across the road, at few dead between him and there. Tom and Loui and Nikki are armed up, running a divert-and-smash operation on the sidewalk, piling up the bodies. Eduardo, on the balcony, makes eye contact with Jamie and Jamie raises his hand in a thumb’s up to show that they’re okay.
“Jamie,” Tyler says, soft, and Jamie turns.
So they weren’t dead after all, Jamie thinks. There are two kids, a small one of indeterminable gender, probably about Darius’ age, a taller one with long strands of blond hair escaping her hoodie. Tyler reaches and squeezes his fingers, once, and pulls Jamie a little behind him. Jamie is happy to cede this job to Tyler.
“Hi there,” Tyler says, nodding towards them. They don’t move, don’t blink. The tall one’s blue eyes are dull, gray shadows around them. “Hey. You guys okay? You need somewhere to go? We live in that building over there. We’ve got food and clean water. A warm place to sleep. There’s kids. Darius is nine, and Akshaya is like four?”
The taller one shifts her weight, a flash of shiny metal in her hand, a small short blade.
Tyler takes a step backwards, his bag bumping Jamie’s chest. Jamie makes sure they still have the room to be doing this, but none of the blighted are close enough to worry them yet.
The kids take a step back and then another. Tyler reaches into his bag and grabs one of the boxes of cereal. Puts it down by his feet.
“Hey, you don’t have to decide today. Here, this is for you. You come get it when we’re gone.”
One of the dead follows Tyler’s voice in, and Jamie has to take his eyes off the kids to put it down.
When he looks back, they’re gone.
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