Joshua Gayou - Commune - The Complete Series - A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Box Set (Books 1-4)

He pulled the door open, and we all stepped through, heads turning in an attempt to look everywhere at once.

“Uh… damn…” said Billy.

The interior of the store was just short of obliterated. There was still merchandise in the store, but it appeared that an army of rearranging ninja elves had swarmed through the store with the sole purpose of taking everything off the shelves and placing it all on the floor. The merchandise itself was in various stages of repair, from entirely intact to completely pulverized.

I straightened up and squared my shoulders. “C’mon. There’s stuff in here. It’s just not easy to find and conveniently located.”

“There’s actually more than I thought there was going to be,” Billy said.

We started moving out among the aisles, picking our way carefully among the debris. I left the rifle light on, and Lizzy continued to use her flashlight—the skylights helped, but without the electrical lighting to back them up it was still too dim to see in any detail. I tried to take note of items that might be useful as we went but soon gave up as the total chaos of it all defeated the attempt. I struggled to reconcile the carnage as we went.

“I get why a band of looters would have passed on the Cuisinart Waffle Maker,” I said, nudging the unit over with my toe, “but what the hell? Why would anyone take the time to so completely trash the place?”

“Got me,” said Billy. “I’m still shocked how much stuff is still in here.”

“Maybe they thrashed everything because it was fun?” Elizabeth said while shining her light on a cascade of glass shards spilled across the floor.

Billy and I both stopped to look at each other. “Should I be worried that the idea of destroying the place in the name of fun makes sense to me?” I asked.

“Nah,” said Billy. “I always hated these joints when the world was still sane. Works for me.”

We rounded the outside corner and turned onto the front expanse of the store. I sighted down the aisle, lighting up an array of abandoned check-out stands and self-service kiosks.

“When you think about it, it kind of makes sense,” I said. “There was a lot of crap in these places… a lot of stuff that people wanted but probably didn’t need. Once everything went crazy, most of this stuff was rendered pointless. People don’t need game consoles and picture frames right now; they need food and water—survival supplies, the essentials. The window for the kind of rampant merchandise looting we used to see back in the world was short. I remember hearing about people raiding electronics stores after the Flare when the grid failed. By the time the Plague hit, all of that was over. People were just trying to survive; not score Blu-ray players. And it killed everyone so fast once it really spread… people were too sick to venture out.”

As if to emphasize my point, we began to pass what was left of the food aisles, which were absent of anything useful at all. Water, dry goods, any kind of canned food—even cereal boxes were all gone. What little was left of the perishable items like dairy products, fruits, and vegetables sat on the shelves and behind glass in isolated, rotting pockets.

We finished our rounds of the interior without event or further comment. Whoever it was that trashed the place was long gone by the time we got there. Billy located a couple of shopping carts and passed one over to Elizabeth. Pushing one cart himself, he was unable to handle his shotgun properly, so he put the safety on and rested the barrel on his shoulder such that the muzzle pointed at the ceiling behind him. He set the stock on the handle of his cart, resting his right hand over it to keep it secure, and steered the cart with his left.

“You’re on point, Little Sis. Eyes open.”

“On point?” I asked.

“Push out in front of us and keep your rifle ready.”

“Oh, yeah. Sure thing.”

We made our way to the electronics section first because we assumed the packaged CDs would take up the most space in the carts. I started to pick my way through the CDs that had been left on the racks as well as those strewn across the floor. Billy, on the other hand, began to grab everything in great, sweeping armloads and dumped it all in his cart. He must have felt my eyes on him throughout the racket he made because he stopped and looked back at me.

“Chop, chop,” he said, clapping his hands together lightly. “We can sort all this stuff out on the road.” He continued to scoop piles of cellophane-wrapped music unceremoniously into his shopping cart.

“Makes sense, I suppose,” I sighed, and followed suit.

It turned out he had the right idea—we had just about everything but the preschool toddler music loaded up into two mountainous piles inside of five minutes. As Billy finished arranging the piles before they could overbalance, I moved through the aisles on my own until I located a portable CD player and an AC power inverter that would plug into the Jeep’s cigarette lighter. Billy was good to go; his truck was old enough that it came with a CD player as standard equipment.

“You guys ready?” I asked when I came back to them with my two new finds tucked under my arm.

“Just about,” Billy said. “It’s a long shot, but I want to go look at where they kept the batteries. If there are any left, we should grab them.”

“Good idea,” I said. I placed the boxes for the CD player and power inverter into Lizzy’s cart; it wasn’t filled as high as Billy’s.

There were none of the standard batteries to be had in any capacity, but we did manage to find a few of the more uncommon items. We found a few six and twelve volt universal lead-acid batteries, a few rechargeable battery packs (which looked suspiciously like a couple of AA’s that had been shrink-wrapped together and attached to a sophisticated cable), and literally fistfuls of alkaline button and lithium coin batteries (the last of which Billy said could be used to power our rifle optics, which would need a replacement sometime after two to four years—he was always thinking ahead). At one point, I saw Billy’s hand shoot out from the corner of my eye; when I looked in his direction, I saw that he was picking up a cheap Timex watch.

The toy section was next. The area was just as thrashed as the rest of the store but we managed to find a selection of coloring books that Lizzy liked the look of as well as a large box of Crayons and one of the more expensive containers of markers. When I told her she could pick out whatever toys we could fit in the cart, she looked around herself for a few moments, face solemn. She finally reached out and selected a Barbie doll, causing me to suppress a gag reflex (my parents had not been able to afford Barbie dolls when I was little, which I think contributed to the fact that I’ve always loathed them).

“Is that all you want, Mija? There’s so much more in here,” I said.

“Just this,” she said with her small voice. “I don’t like it in here.”

I nodded and rubbed her back. “C’mon, baby. Almost done.”

We stopped by the feminine products area (Billy standing well outside of the aisle as though he was a vampire avoiding a church) and I executed a repeat performance of the CD shopping spree. I grabbed everything I could get my hands on including boxes of pads and tampons, razors, lotions, cleaning products, and deodorant. Whatever space was left in the remaining cart was quickly occupied and then some, with a mound of female paraphernalia that towered over the edges of the cart walls.

“Okay,” I said. “Are we good? I know this is my idea, but this place is really starting to get to me.”

“Yeah, let’s call it,” Billy agreed.

We retraced our steps to the back of the store, through the customer service desk, and out the rear storage area. As we moved through the storage racks, I could see Billy’s inner packrat perk up as his head swung around to look at the various boxes that were still left on the pallets. I’ll bet that guy was a serious antique store hound in a previous life; his two favorite things to do were to relax by a fire at the end of a long day and scavenge.