Judgment Day: Part 14
Part 14 of my barely-edited novel that I’m wildly posting without even paying attention to weird-ass spelling errors. Yay!
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There’d be a book somewhere in a library that could help him decode everything. He even cracked open the locked cabinet and filled up on whatever mind-bending horrors that In the silent world, the van’s engine roared like an animal, the tires shattering the rainy morning as he turned and headed away from Wheaton Plaza, weaving through the spiderweb of traffic towards the strip mall across the street. At the grocery store, he pulled into the parking lot and sat behind the wheel, staring through the wall of glass into the store. The supermarket was full of bodies, a grim tableau of shoppers – fallen in the aisles, lined up at the registers, cashiers leaning over the machines. In all the movies, people flocked to the churches to die. In modern America, the afflicted had rushed into Safeway. Maybe, if there had been more time, the churches would have been crowded, but only after everyone had their supplies. The bodies were piled at the doors, holding onto each other, trying to run when it hit. They had grabbed armfuls of groceries. The first instinct before fight or flight was to loot.
It was too much. He felt walls closing in on him, the driving, screaming need to get out of the city breaking the surface of what meager level of reason he still had. Molly took one look at the blocked doors, then turned away and stared out at the sea of cars in the parking lot.
“I’ll go in,” Daryl said, “You keep an eye out for any of those things. Or, anything, I suppose.”
“What do I do if I see something?”
“Hide.”
“Should I warn you?”
He shook his head, “You see something, you take care of yourself.” They weren’t alone out here. That was clear, but he wanted to get things over with. Instead of out here guessing in the silence, he wanted to see what he was fighting. Square off and put an end to the tension. He patted Molly’s shoulder, then climbed out of the van.
The doors to the grocery store slid open when he approached, a blast of heat from above pushing the heavy smell of death against him like a fist. He shivered slightly, then stepped over the dead and headed for the carts. Every instinct told him to not look back, but he still did. He scanned the bodies, waiting for one of them to pop up, looking for any sign of movement. Breathing, a twitching hand. Or did he expect a calm, cool monster to be loitering in the nearest aisle, smiling malevolently and speaking in a voice that didn’t need breath? He grabbed a cart, but then he really did have to take in the dead. It wasn’t just the weekday shoppers and the poor people who had rushed through the doors at the last minute. There was no way he could maneuver a cart through this mess. He grabbed a hand basket, closed his eyes and took a foul, shuddering breath. The rot had begun already.
He focused on non-perishables, and all the medical supplies. Taking basket after basket back to the doors and setting them down in the foyer between the outer doors and the inner doors, the pile soon large enough to trip the electronic eyes and keep the doors open. One-stop shopping — everything the young apocalypse survivor needed.
Gathering the supplies brought a sense of hope. He was stacking up enough for he and Molly to survive for a month, and it may also be currency further down the road. The world would soon be all about food, medicine and weapons.
He vaulted the counter at the pharmacy and stood in the harsh lights for a moment. How the hell did people work under these lights all day? His office was no different, though. He had done it. He’d never been on this end of the counter before. At first, he picked his way along the shelves and grabbed everything that was familiar – antibiotics, painkillers. But there were so many weird bottles and funny names, he just started scooping everything into baskets. Getting into the big time drugs cabinet with a fire extinguisher and brute force made him feel like some sort of feeble criminal and when he let the extinguisher clatter to the floor, he looked up, expecting security or cops, but he saw only corpses. God, deep down, he prayed he’d be surrounded by cops. Hands in the air, buddy! It would be a dream come true. But there was nothing.
Back at the entrance, he added to the pile of supplies and glanced out at the van. Molly was looking towards the road, her profile seeming distant and mystical behind the rain washed window. He wondered, staring at her unmoving silhouette, about immunity to whatever it was that had struck them. Had they really been spared? Or would they, too, turn into creatures, or die choking like the lady in the parking lot and the dead piled beside him? He turned back for one last item – several gallons of spring water. Then he started dragging everything out to the loading area, back into the cool morning rain. Molly rolled down the window and waved cheerily at him which, given the circumstances, just seemed like a cruel mockery. A distant part of his mind rambled through what life would be like – they would need to raise crops, perhaps he could take over a place that had a greenhouse. If domesticated animals were still alive he could take over a farm or something. Perhaps he should spin by a bookstore and get some how-to guides before he left the city. Or was that something that could wait until they got away? There were libraries all over, and the dead commuters and shoppers in the store behind him were starting to pull him down, cloud his vision, block up his throat. He needed to get as far from this rotting horror city as possible.
He opened the sliding side door of the van and began to load up the supplies – handbaskets and all. Molly was looking everywhere, peering through the grey rain for any sign of movement. He looked at the back of her head, his hands leaning on a heavy basket full of canned goods. The food and supplies left behind by their civilization would eventually run out and, logically, there had to be other survivors. For a time, those others would be a threat. There were no laws now, no society. Daryl had read “The Coming Dark Age,” one of the more famous essays on the end of the world written from the viewpoint of the early 1970’s. The essay said that the breakdown of civilization would lead to a certain lawlessness, but there was also the naïve hope that humanity would pull itself together and reform civilization; that a new society would adapt and deal with the catastrophe and begin a slow rebuilding process. Authors David Brin and Larry Niven used the essay as a foundation for their apocalypse books. Daryl had read only a small number of their work, but Brin came into his sphere at the same time as a Costner adaptation of one of his books hit the theaters. With Brin, the “restored” postal service became the glue for disparate communities living under a feudal system. Niven used the ideas for his utopian group of survivors surviving a comet strike, facing the barbarism of other survivors. The great idea of evil and good polarizing. It was the stuff of sci-fi but, now, Daryl was living it. He didn’t see the polarization of evil and good, though. In the real world, there was only evil. Monsters, arguing survivors, every man for himself.
Perhaps it was the years on the commuter train coloring his opinion, but he doubted that Mankind would once again embrace civilization so readily. Heroes came out of wars, they worked for governments and causes and organized groups of people. If any leaders survived, they were in a bunker right now, or circling the country in a nice, big plane. Good luck finding them on the ground rallying the troops. The survivors tiptoeing around would be just like he and Molly: Scattered, scared and, probably, spending this time going nuts. Those types would be shooting first and asking questions later right now. Hoarding and hiding at the expense of others. Others would be attacking a society that had kept them in check for their entire lives, consuming everything they could get their hands on. Only after a period of gluttony, xenophobia and vigilantism would anyone embrace some form of regulated society, and then it would be out of basic need. The power would fail, the water would stop, the bodies would stink long before the survivors got their heads together. Of that, Daryl was sure. When the wheels were turning, America was a racially-obsessed, isolationist society. He dreaded the possible attitudes of a community starting from scratch. That is, of course, if those monsters didn’t nip the problem in the bud. How widespread were those creatures? That was a question he had to answer. They looked like regular people, that was one trap to be wary of if they did run into other survivors. Could the monsters pose as normal folks?