Kirk Allmond - What Zombies Fear - A Father's Quest

When that was done, I had an itch to get off the property. We needed so much; the only real debate was what to go for first. We met with Bookbinder, his teams one, two, and three were headed off today to look for food and fuel. That left us to go on more humanitarian type missions. I was most worried about housing, clothing, and sanitation. I’d always sworn that Wal-Mart and Sams Club were the last places I would want to go. However, the needs outweighed my common sense. One building clear, and we could stock up on almost everything, including I hoped, a tractor trailer.

Marshall, Leo, John, and I loaded up in the Jeep, and headed off to town about 10:00am. We rolled with all the ammo we had left, that situation was getting pretty dire. We were all talking about conserving ammunition all the way to our first target, Wal-Mart.

When we pulled into the parking lot, we immediately revamped our plan. Every car in the parking lot was pulled around the building, bumper to bumper, forming a ring around the store. On the roof, after a study though the scope on Sammie, my rifle, I determined that there were three zombies walking slowly. They had very little motor control, and after four months up on the roof in the blazing sun, they were starting to look pretty bad. They saw us coming as we walked up towards the front doors, and one by one, all three of them walked right off the roof trying to get us.

Only one didn’t smash his head open on the concrete. He laid there for a long time snapping his jaws at me. He looked like a monster out of some cheap horror movie, almost all the flesh gone from one side of his face, scraped off by the impact with the hard parking lot. He couldn’t move anything below his jaw. Marshall calmly walked over and stepped on its head, ending its suffering for good.

The doors to the building were chained from the inside. We walked all the way around the building, checking every door. Finally, we reached the roll up doors in the back, where the tractor trailers were. There were still two rigs backed up to the loading docks, but the doors had been rolled down. I walked up to one and tested it, but it wouldn’t budge. Marshall bent down beside me, strained a little bit, and ripped the door upward with a very loud crash of metal ripping and tearing. I don’t think he opened it as much as he just ripped it upwards out of its tracks. The steel slatted door was dented upwards where his hands were, I’m not sure how much ‘weight’ that would equal, but it had to have taken a lot of force.

“Jesus, Marshall,” I said “I’m glad you’re on my side. What the hell was in your Wheaties?”

“I told you I was strong,” was all he said, as he stepped into the gloomy Wal-Mart back room.

“John, can you be in charge of finding keys to one of these rigs?”

“Marshall, Leo, with me. We’re going to run into a big mess in here. I doubt we’ll find any supers, but I have a feeling there’s going to be a lot of slow zombies, and we need to save ammo.”

Marshall was bare handed, and looked around the room. Finally, he settled on the leg of a turned over steel shelf. The leg was a six foot steel tube, one and a half inches in diameter. He folded it in half by leaning it against the wall and stepping on the middle, and then used his foot to crush the end. When he was done, it looked like something that would hurt.

I had taken to carrying Leo’s kukris, but since she was using them, I was holding an aluminum baseball bat. John, of course, only carried guns, but he was checking for keys, and knew to be quiet.

A few steps into the back room of the store, we started hearing a repeated thump, thump, thump. I advanced slowly towards the sound of the thumping. As my eyes finally fully adjusted to the darkness of the room, I saw one of those huge floor polishers sitting on the floor with its cord stretched tight, plugged into the wall. There was a zombie, walking into the cord. When he did, the polisher would tip a little; then it pulled the zombie backwards. As it staggered backwards, the polisher would fall back flat, thump, thump, thump, as it rocked back to its natural position. The zombie took a step forward back into the cord, repeating the process over and over. We all stood there, watching in amazement as the zombie repeated this process a dozen times. We were clearly its target; I believe it would have kept trying over and over until the cord rotted away. Marshall finally stepped forward, swinging his pipe-thing like a bat, crushing its skull. The zombie fell to the floor with one final thump, thump, thump, and will forever be remembered as the polisher zombie. I suppose that’s about the best epitaph a zombie could hope for.

Leo made a quick sweep of the storeroom, and having found no more zombies, we decided to head out into the main part of the store. I chose this particular store because years before they’d done a study. Apparently adding skylights all over the store saved them gajillions of dollars every year in lighting costs. I knew it would be fairly bright in the store.

What I did not expect was that every single zombie in the store would be waiting on the other side of the door. I pushed the lever down on the door handle with my thumb, and it virtually exploded inward on me. Zombies poured through the door in pairs, pushing me down. I fell to the ground and hit my head on the concrete, causing stars to explode in front of my eyes. Marshall waded in with his club, swinging like a cave man. He hit one so hard, it flew backwards out the door, pushing six or eight zombies back out into the store with it. That bought Leo enough time to drag me backwards, before shooting back to the fray. She had her batons in her hands; they spun like helicopter blades, her arms almost invisible, except for the wet thuds they made when they impacted and recoiled off into another shambler. There was only room for the two of them at the door there, but I knew they had to be getting tired. The bodies were piling up and spilling out of the doorway. I think that actually made it easier, as about half the zombies tripped trying to climb the pile, allowing Marshall or Leo an easy shot.

After nearly ten minutes, Leo was starting to flag. I have no idea how much energy it took her to maintain that speed, but it had to be enormous. About halfway through, John walked up behind me with the keys to a tractor trailer. We both just stood there watching.

Marshall stepped up towards the middle, standing on a pile of zombies six or seven deep, and took over keeping both sides of the doorway clear. He was a machine, each sweep of his club sent zombies and zombie parts flying. We’d have some cleanup work to make sure they were all dead, but this was going way better than I expected.

He’d been flying solo for at least two minutes, when he suddenly lost his footing and went down. I saw his club hit the door frame and get ripped out of his hand, as he was dragged backward into the main part of the store.

Leo, John and I charged through the doorway, and once Leo hit firm footing, she bolted off into the store. John raised his revolver and laid five shots out, killing four zombies that were closing in around Marshall. Marshall grabbed one of the dispatched zombies by the foot, and swung the whole thing like a rag doll, connecting with the one dragging him by the foot. It threw the super zombie into a rack of clothing, where it got tangled up in a bunch of leggings hanging on the hangars. In an instant, Leo was there, driving one of her batons through the things eye, and twirling it around, scrambling its brain like an egg still in the shell.

As the remainder of the zombies in the store closed in on them, John opened up with his black semi automatics, killing the last bunch without having to reload.

When we’d all recovered, we took stock of the store. We’d come in through the house wares department; many of the shelves were knocked over. The store smelled like a gigantic sewer monster ate an entire garbage dump, then let it digest for a few days before throwing it up outside in the hot sun, where it sat ripening for a month. We each grabbed shopping carts and headed off in different directions.