“Anytime.” I handed the binoculars back to him. “Describe to me what you see. I’m going to sketch it out.”
I took out one of my hand-drawn maps and flipped it over to the blank side. I mapped out the base, doing my best to capture the buildings and fields to scale while Kitten narrated all that he could see in the distance, including how many livestock they kept and what weapons they carried. Later, I’d estimate how many people were housed there, what their inventory of weapons might be, along with any strengths and weaknesses they possessed. I didn’t know yet if they were friend or foe, but I wanted us to be prepared.
“All right, I think I’ve seen enough here,” I told him at last. “Let’s hit up that CVS we saw a couple miles back. Maybe they have an inhaler in the pharmacy.”
“And some liquor and candy,” Kitten added, always thinking of the others. “Maybe some batteries too.”
Batteries would be a godsend, but an inhaler was my main objective for the day. Everything else was a nice-to-have. If Kitten couldn’t breathe…
“Inhaler first,” I reminded him.
We mounted the dirt bike and backtracked a few miles to an abandoned strip mall that had a freestanding CVS in the parking lot. I preferred that to an attached building. I found a spot between two dumpsters to stash our bike, then led Kitten on a sweep of the exterior. I’d been training him and the others on safety protocol and situational awareness since we’d left Promised Land, and Kitten in particular had impressed me with his skills.
The concrete parking lot was cracked and full of weeds with the remains of civilization scattered about–nearly disintegrated boxes, empty wooden pallets, broken bottles, and abandoned cars. I looked for easy entry as well as any sign of Rabid activity. It’d been a while since I’d scavenged a commercial property. We mostly stuck to residences because they tended to be safer and better stocked, but finding an inhaler in somebody’s home would be like finding a needle in a haystack.
The back door was reinforced steel and locked from the inside. It’d take a while to chip away at it with my crowbar. At the front, the glass doors had been boarded up with plywood and spray painted with, “Closed for Business.” The advertisements plastered against the inside of the windows were faded and cobwebs stretched between the door frames, a good sign because it meant this place likely didn’t house any live Rabid nests and might still have something worth scavenging.
With the crowbar, I pried off the plywood, which revealed a shattered glass door behind it. I swept the door frame with the metal bar to get rid of any remaining shards, making more noise than I would have liked. We were both wearing combat boots, so I wasn’t too worried about getting cut by the broken glass that littered the ground.
“Watch where you step. And try to be quiet,” I said.
Kitten nodded and followed me inside, sweeping behind us with his gun in the ready position just as I’d taught him. The air inside was stale, filled with the scent of mildew and neglect. The shelves were mostly empty, many toppled over with their contents spilled across the floor. Broken bottles and half-crushed boxes of dry goods littered the aisles, their labels worn and faded. Whatever food and drink had been spilled appeared to have rotted and turned to dust. Like most places, there must have been a mad dash for supplies before it was boarded up and abandoned altogether.
“Let’s do a quick perimeter scan to make sure there are no unfriendlies and then we’ll head to the pharmacy,” I told Kitten. He nodded and we split up to scan the aisles, working from the outside in. No humans, no Rabids, no sign of anything living, not even a stray rat or raccoon. Eerily and suspiciously quiet, but I wasn’t going to complain.
I gave Kitten the all-clear, then noticed a couple bottles of liquor and stashed them into my bag for Macon. My gaze caught on an aisle of Halloween costumes, the most well-stocked section in the place, and I vaguely remembered it was around that time of year when the shit hit the fan. I was planning on dressing up as a Skull Trooper from Fortnite. Funny how priorities change.
“Kitten?” I called, noticing he was no longer in my sight lines.
“Over here,” he called back. I found him in the greeting card aisle, checking out the various holiday cards–birthdays,anniversaries, graduations, all those rites of passage we used to celebrate, now forgotten. He was tucking some of them into his bag, utterly useless and also completely priceless.
“Let’s head toward the back,” I said and nodded in that direction.
The pharmacy hadn’t fared much better than the rest of the store. Faded advertisements for flu shots and vitamins hung from the ceiling. Pill bottles, most of them empty, were scattered everywhere. The surveillance cameras were still mounted to the ceiling, pointed in our direction. I reached up with my crowbar and pried one from its mount, taking some of the plaster with it, then tucked it away in my canvas bag. If Gizmo and Wylie could get it working, we might be able to set up a CCTV system at the compound, a huge boon to our security.
“Where do you think they keep the inhalers?” Kitten asked as he searched the various bins and cubbies.
“Probably in a locked drawer. I’ll start busting them open and you keep looking.”
Most of the drawers and cabinets had already been forced open, but for any that weren’t, I used the crowbar to jimmy the locks. Meanwhile, Kitten was reading the label on every bottle he came across, trying to decipher their contents.
“Babe, just grab whatever you can and stick it in your bag. We can go through it all later,” I told him.
“I don’t want to take something that someone else might need more than us,” he said with a stubborn jut to his chin.
Sometimes I wished he was more selfish. I started looking alongside him, focused on finding an inhaler and nothing else. No pain pills, no stimulants either. I saw what may have been a hearing aid and stuffed it into my bag. There was a crunch of glass at the front entrance, alerting me to the fact that we were no longer alone.
“Did you hear that?” I whispered to Kitten. He shook his head, so I put my finger to my lips and climbed silently onto the counter to get a better view. I was scanning the front entrance for any sign of intruders when the first Rabid rounded the corner, a woman in a torn blouse and ripped pants with questionable stains on her clothing. Her jaw hung loosely from her skull as she let out a guttural snarl and lunged toward me with her arms outstretched. Her sudden burst of speed was alarming, and it took me another second to react. Swinging the crowbar like a golf club, I connected with the side of her skull with a sickening crunch.
On my other side, a Rabid leapt onto the counter, his eyes vacant but hungry. Before I could lift my crowbar again, Kitten had gotten between us, aimed the Glock at its forehead, and fired off a shot. He donkey-kicked the Rabid’s chest and toppled him off the counter. The body landed at a bad angle, its limbs twitching as a puddle of blood pooled underneath its skull.
“Where the fuck did they come from?” I asked, my heart racing, blood pounding in my ears like the thunderous roll of an ocean.
“I don’t know but there’s more coming.” Kitten pointed.
A fuck-ton more. The aisles were rapidly filling with lurching bodies, faster and more agile than I’d ever seen them move before. They swarmed the front entrance too. The only other exit was across the store down a hallway currently blocked by Rabids. They’d come for us in broad daylight, which they could never do before. We were supposed to be safe in the daytime. It was our one advantage against these goddamn motherfuckers, and we’d lost that too?
“Fuck me. What are we going to do?” I muttered. We were completely outnumbered, and I wasn’t sure the two of us could fight our way through this mob without one of us getting bit.
