Part 14 of my barely-edited novel that I’m wildly posting without even paying attention to weird-ass spelling errors.\u00a0 Yay!<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
—–<\/p>\n
There\u2019d be a book somewhere in a library that could help him decode everything.\u00a0 He even cracked open the locked cabinet and filled up on whatever mind-bending horrors that In the silent world, the van\u2019s 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.\u00a0 At the grocery store, he pulled into the parking lot and sat behind the wheel, staring through the wall of glass into the store.\u00a0 The supermarket was full of bodies, a grim tableau of shoppers \u2013 fallen in the aisles, lined up at the registers, cashiers leaning over the machines.\u00a0 In all the movies, people flocked to the churches to die.\u00a0 In modern America, the afflicted had rushed into Safeway.\u00a0 Maybe, if there had been more time, the churches would have been crowded, but only after everyone had their supplies.\u00a0 The bodies were piled at the doors, holding onto each other, trying to run when it hit.\u00a0 They had grabbed armfuls of groceries.\u00a0 The first instinct before fight or flight was to loot.<\/p>\n
It was too much.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Molly took one look at the blocked doors, then turned away and stared out at the sea of cars in the parking lot.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll go in,\u201d Daryl said, \u201cYou keep an eye out for any of those things.\u00a0 Or, anything, I suppose.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do I do if I see something?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHide.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShould I warn you?\u201d<\/p>\n
He shook his head, \u201cYou see something, you take care of yourself.\u201d\u00a0 They weren\u2019t alone out here.\u00a0 That was clear, but he wanted to get things over with.\u00a0 Instead of out here guessing in the silence, he wanted to see what he was fighting.\u00a0 Square off and put an end to the tension.\u00a0 He patted Molly\u2019s shoulder, then climbed out of the van.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 He shivered slightly, then stepped over the dead and headed for the carts.\u00a0 Every instinct told him to not look back, but he still did.\u00a0 He scanned the bodies, waiting for one of them to pop up, looking for any sign of movement.\u00a0 Breathing, a twitching hand.\u00a0 Or did he expect a calm, cool monster to be loitering in the nearest aisle, smiling malevolently and speaking in a voice that didn\u2019t need breath?\u00a0 He grabbed a cart, but then he really did have to take in the dead.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 He grabbed a hand basket, closed his eyes and took a foul, shuddering breath.\u00a0 The rot had begun already.<\/p>\n
He focused on non-perishables, and all the medical supplies.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 One-stop shopping — everything the young apocalypse survivor needed.<\/p>\n
Gathering the supplies brought a sense of hope.\u00a0 He was stacking up enough for he and Molly to survive for a month, and it may also be currency further down the road.\u00a0 The world would soon be all about food, medicine and weapons.<\/p>\n
He vaulted the counter at the pharmacy and stood in the harsh lights for a moment.\u00a0 How the hell did people work under these lights all day?\u00a0 His office was no different, though.\u00a0 He had done it.\u00a0 He\u2019d never been on this end of the counter before.\u00a0 At first, he picked his way along the shelves and grabbed everything that was familiar \u2013 antibiotics, painkillers.\u00a0 But there were so many weird bottles and funny names, he just started scooping everything into baskets.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 God, deep down, he prayed he\u2019d be surrounded by cops. Hands in the air, buddy!\u00a0 It would be a dream come true.\u00a0 But there was nothing.<\/p>\n
Back at the entrance, he added to the pile of supplies and glanced out at the van.\u00a0 Molly was looking towards the road, her profile seeming distant and mystical behind the rain washed window.\u00a0 He wondered, staring at her unmoving silhouette, about immunity to whatever it was that had struck them.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 He turned back for one last item \u2013 several gallons of spring water.\u00a0 Then he started dragging everything out to the loading area, back into the cool morning rain.\u00a0 Molly rolled down the window and waved cheerily at him which, given the circumstances, just seemed like a cruel mockery.\u00a0 A distant part of his mind rambled through what life would be like \u2013 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.\u00a0 Perhaps he should spin by a bookstore and get some how-to guides before he left the city.\u00a0 Or was that something that could wait until they got away?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He needed to get as far from this rotting horror city as possible.<\/p>\n
He opened the sliding side door of the van and began to load up the supplies \u2013 handbaskets and all.\u00a0 Molly was looking everywhere, peering through the grey rain for any sign of movement.\u00a0 He looked at the back of her head, his hands leaning on a heavy basket full of canned goods.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There were no laws now, no society.\u00a0 Daryl had read \u201cThe Coming Dark Age,\u201d one of the more famous essays on the end of the world written from the viewpoint of the early 1970\u2019s.\u00a0 The essay said that the breakdown of civilization would lead to a certain lawlessness, but there was also the na\u00efve 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.\u00a0 Authors David Brin and Larry Niven used the essay as a foundation for their apocalypse books.\u00a0 Daryl had read only a small number of their work, but Brin came into his sphere at the same time as a Costner\u00a0 adaptation of one of his books hit the theaters.\u00a0 With Brin, the \u201crestored\u201d postal service became the glue for disparate communities living under a feudal system.\u00a0 Niven used the ideas for his utopian group of survivors surviving a comet strike, facing the barbarism of other survivors.\u00a0 The great idea of evil and good polarizing.\u00a0 It was the stuff of sci-fi but, now, Daryl was living it.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t see the polarization of evil and good, though.\u00a0 In the real world, there was only evil.\u00a0 Monsters, arguing survivors, every man for himself.<\/p>\n
Perhaps it was the years on the commuter train coloring his opinion, but he doubted that Mankind would once again embrace civilization so readily.\u00a0 Heroes came out of wars,\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Good luck finding them on the ground rallying the troops.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Hoarding and hiding at the expense of others.\u00a0 Others would be attacking a society that had kept them in check for their entire lives, consuming everything they could get their hands on.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The power would fail, the water would stop, the bodies would stink long before the survivors got their heads together.\u00a0 Of that, Daryl was sure.\u00a0 When the wheels were turning, America was a racially-obsessed, isolationist society.\u00a0 He dreaded the possible attitudes of a community starting from scratch.\u00a0 That is, of course, if those monsters didn\u2019t nip the problem in the bud.\u00a0 How widespread were those creatures?\u00a0 That was a question he had to answer.\u00a0 They looked like regular people, that was one trap to be wary of if they did run into other survivors.\u00a0 Could the monsters pose as normal folks?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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