Class of 2013 - 12

Chapter Twelve

The Suburban was a large vehicle, and without the back seats it had as much space, if not more than, a pickup truck of the same size. That meant that there was going to be a lot of room for weapons and ammunition – along with any food and water we happened to grab. Most of what was in Big 5 was junk food, but food was food, and why not treat ourselves a little? After all, we had survived this long, weren’t likely to die any time soon unless we fucked up, and that didn’t seem all that probable. There were also energy drinks, water, Gatorade, etcetera in there… which meant that we had a source of something to drink that wasn’t just tap water we had put into old milk jugs, water and soda bottles, and whatever else we could fill up.

This time instead of taking a left out of the parking area, we took a right and headed down A Street toward the overpass. It spanned two expanses – over the road and the railroad tracks, and then over the 215 freeway. It was also the most direct route to the heart of town. In a way, without the various bridges that connected the city, we might not even have to worry about many roaming zombies. The freeway was sunk down between the halves of the city and had the concrete center dividers. It was a manmade block for the shambling, flesh eating bastards. Of course, it wouldn’t stop them forever, but it would sure as hell slow them down. I thought about setting up some sort of blockade on the bridges, but quickly dismissed the idea. It wouldn’t do much, and for it to really make a difference we’d have to blockade the freeway too. It would be possible, but it wasn’t something that we had the people for right now. For now we would have to just stick with the school… but the gears were already turning for how we could expand.

I supposed it was one of the annoying things about me: that I was always thinking way far ahead instead of just what we were doing. Admittedly, I knew that the here and now was more directly important, but I couldn’t help but see the possibilities. Most other zombie plans in our group had involved leaving immediately, going somewhere else – but then, most had also assumed we were all at home. My plan was the only one that had assumed staying in the city and making fortresses out of the schools. It had assumed having to enter and then clear them out, but considering we were stuck on the inside of one already and had cleared it, that job was already done. That also meant that the first stages of my plan were already accomplished: stage one was collecting the group, which was accomplished and then some as we had over twice the number I had planned for; stage two was clearing the school, and we’d gotten both of these things accomplished in under two days. We had weapons and supplies and could go out and fight to get more when the need arose. I hadn’t voiced it, but the plan we were already using was mine.

Part of me wondered if anyone would notice and comment, but I refrained from making mention of it. James already got annoyed by me blowing my own horn the times that I did it, so I figured there’d be less fuss if I didn’t say anything about it. So far I was right and there wasn’t much fuss over anything. However, I knew how things needed to go, especially now. The school was positioned in such a way that we could easily claim a large amount of land that was around it. In some manner, what I envisioned was much like an old castle, at least as far as how things could be handled. Gates, walls, sectioned off areas for specific things, defensible positions, and the ability to continue expanding acre by acre and block by block until we had a large area. We just needed to go do it.

Unfortunately, that would prove to be the hard part with only sixteen people, and half of that being females. Now, I’m not sexist, and I know women can pull their weight, but which would most people rather have a woman doing: cooking and cleaning, or out building walls and palisades in the sun all damn day long? Personally, I’d much rather have a woman doing the cooking and cleaning, because let’s face it… guys weren’t all that great at it. It wasn’t that I doubted a woman’s ability to work – far from – but I did doubt the ability that we males have to do the tasks that women do. We’re not really smart in those sorts of ways, for some reason. Women had it down to a science, but try getting a guy to cook or clean without him having been a bachelor for years and… well, you’d probably end up with a nasty case of food poisoning.

As well… I suppose it is the chauvinist in me, but I’d much rather guys do the pain in the ass manual labor and let the girls relax and do social things. After all, a relaxed woman was usually a happy woman, and a happy woman was one that was less likely to make you want to find a man cave in the post apocalypse. Now… if they wanted to come out and help build, that was all well and good and there was no reason to stop them… but for the love of all that’s holy, just don’t let them complain about the way things were being done. Better yet, don’t let anyone complain about it, because honestly… that was the most annoying thing of all. Complaining. It accomplished nothing but giving the person in charge a nasty headache and bloodlust.

Passing under the overpass, we went around to the left, following the curve, and then took the left turn that lead up and over and into the heart of town. As we reached the crest, I could already see some zombies down below, but they weren’t thick enough to be a problem yet. Hopefully they wouldn’t gather to the point that we would have a problem getting out of the parking lot, but I had a twisting, twirling, sickening feeling in my gut that told me something was going to go wrong. Despite that, I drove down and took the right into the parking lot that served Big 5, Big Lots, Stater Brothers, El Pollo Loco, Sizzler, Carl’s Jr., a small gas station that I can never recollect the name of, and a bunch of other smaller businesses that were in the shopping center – including an orthodontist, a small Mexican restaurant, a hole-in-the-wall Subway, a donut place, and… actually, come to think of it, most places in there had something to do with food or the body in some way or another. The only exception was the auto parts place, and even there you could get a snack and drink.

Slowly moving through the parking lot, I drove the Suburban over to the Big 5 and Chien got out quietly; making sure the doors were open as I moved the rear end of the SUV right up to the front doors. It made a strange sort of half-assed seal to make sure we weren’t bothered inside the store as we gathered everything. Getting back out when the time came might be an interesting feat, but we knew that we could do it given enough time. Even as I killed the engine and set the emergency brake, I could see zombies headed toward the storefront. They were both close and far away, but they were headed here, and my mind was screaming at me to leave. This was a bad idea, we shouldn’t be here just the two of us, but I knew that this was an important objective to accomplish.

I knew James would be furious when he found out that we went alone, just us two, and likely Lea would be as well… though ironically Sweet might congratulate us on a job well done, provided that we actually survived. Baring that one condition, he wouldn’t be sore at us. Truth told, that’s the main thing that I was worried about as far as reactions from others. James would be sore at us, Lea would think it was a stupid thing to do alone, but Sweet being our leader was – bad as it sounds – the important opinion of the three. If he did end up sore at us, we might not only lose our leadership positions, but any ability to act on our own without his permission. I already knew that this wasn’t a democracy. I didn’t want to lose what voice I did have. Chien didn’t much care, really. Of course, considering that he didn’t really like being the one that had to take charge, he’d probably be just as happy without that responsibility.

Climbing over the front seat, Chien and I grabbed our weapons from the back and propped the rear doors of the Suburban open. Considering the old white beast was a ’97 model, I was sometimes still surprised that it (and the other one we had at my place) was still running after sixteen (or seventeen depending on how you looked at it) years. Thank heaven it was, or we might have had to rely on Chien’s El Camino, and while the old crossbreed vehicle was awesome, it couldn’t hold as much or be as quiet as the SUV – which was bad when the SUV was as noisy as it was.

With the doors open, we pushed some racks and things up against the walls and doors to make sure nothing got around the open doors or slunk under them. From there we went around the interior of the store to check for zombies, and only found one near the back. Fortunately for us it was the store manager that had been at work when everything started, and they had the keys on them. Much the same as P.M.A. interestingly enough: when the corpses had been stripped, we ended up with a lot of keys for the school – mostly from staff members of one kind or another. I had a feeling that we’d end up with more keys when we ended up going through the things of our schoolmates – and while it was morbid, I had to be thankful that they usually left their keys and identification in their backpacks when we had free dress days so as not to lose them; it took the guess work out of having to figure out whose keys went to whose house and where that house might be out of the whole damn city.

Of course, we hadn’t yet done that. I think a few people dreaded doing it, thinking it was akin to stealing from the dead. I suppose in some way it was, but could you really steal from the dead when you didn’t know which dried husk had been which person? Hell, could you really steal from the dead at all, least of all when the items weren’t even on them, or in a tomb somewhere? I didn’t really believe that you could, least of all when it wasn’t even on them. I guess that made me strange, yet Chien didn’t seem to have a problem with how I was thinking. Though that might have just meant that we were twisted in similar manners. Oh well. In the end, we were the ones that were still alive, so we needed to do the things that would keep us alive. Knowing what resources we had available and using the natural resources that were at our fingertips was only the wise thing to do. Better immoral than dead.

Ignoring the zombies that drew closer and closer at the front, we grabbed the manager’s keys and made our way for the weapons displays and racks off to the right side of the store. One after another we took the guns and laid them out on the counter. A host of shotguns and rifles covered the counter, everything from Kar98k’s, Mosin Nagants, and SKS rifles, to Remington 870’s and Mini-14’s. Not to mention the air rifles that littered the upper shelves of that corner of the store. Better, there were shelves upon shelves of ammunition for all these weapons – though the foreign guns had nowhere near as much as the rest. That didn’t bother us at all. A gun was a gun, a bullet was a bullet, and so long as a bullet and a gun matched each other it could mean another dead zombie. Beside that, what else mattered?

Working quickly, we unlocked the trigger locks on the guns and then carried them two at a time over to the back of the SUV, setting them inside and moving them up behind the seats – making sure we had them off to one side or the other. We wanted to make sure that we had a path to the front so we could climb over when we were done. Once the guns were in we went back and grabbed the boxes of ammo off the shelves. Knowing it would take time to move them without having them in something larger, we also grabbed a couple airsoft gun boxes off the shelves, opened them, emptied them, and then began filling the now empty boxes with smaller boxes of ammunition. We took everything from shotgun ammo to .177 caliber air rifle ammunition. We weren’t going to leave anything behind if it could be helped, and it could.

It didn’t really feel like the raid was taking all that long, but when I finally checked my cell phone for the time, a couple of hours had already gone by, and we were nowhere near done yet. We had the guns and air rifles loaded up, and we were about halfway done with the ammunition (now using the air rifle boxes to carry it). Another half an hour passed by before all the ammunition was loaded, and once that was done we decided to check out the room to the side of the weapons. There were a couple of pistols in there, along with some ammunition – what I was assuming was an order that someone had failed to retrieve. The pistols were a couple of nickel plated Colt Peacemakers. Something I was sure that James would just be ever so giddy over. My friend in mind I went to the soda machine before I could forget and grabbed a Coke, and then to the rack of candy and grabbed a Snickers. I did promise him, after all. Chien laughed.

“You’re really going to take that just for him, aren’t you?”

“What?” I shrugged, “I can’t be a prick all the time. Besides, he earned it, don’t ya think?” I raised a brow, and Chien gave a half hearted shrug of agreement. “Not only that, but if he ever finds out there was an opportunity and I ignored getting his reward, he’ll never let me hear the end of it.”

“Aren’t kids supposed to be taught that rewards are to be accepted thankfully, not expected?” Chien asked, a brow cocked.

“I blame his lackluster parents.” I paused, “Not that I don’t think he could grow out of it, but making him do that would probably be harder than just keeping my word.”

“I guess that’s true. Though he’ll always think you’re some sort of evil mastermind – you really should stop fucking with his head dude.” Chien smirked. “Or is that part of your plan?”

“Why, my dear Asian, whatever do you mean?” I rubbed my hands together and gave a fake evil laugh; then straightened seriously once again. “But yeah… I know I should, but it’s too easy! Not like he’ll ever believe I’m normal in any respect by now anyway. Even if I make the attempt, he’ll still think I’m trying to trick him.”

“Paranoid motherfucker.” Chien shook his head, “How does he survive?”

“The hospitality of others, mostly.” I smirked a little bit. “Like you, me, and Lea.”

“And Sweet, don’t forget him.”

I nodded. “And Sweet, too. Kinda makes me wish Sweet had been his real father. He might have actually been raised right, y’know? I mean… he’s a great guy, but some of the shit he does and says… my god. Hell, I’ll bet you he makes some sort of holocaust crack when he finds out what we intend to do with the bodies. I just bet ya that he will.”

“Please… that’s a fool’s bet. We both know damn well that he will. It’s James.” My turn for a halfhearted shrug of agreement came.

We didn’t like to say it around him, but Christ in heaven, the guy could be downright predictable in some of the worst ways. It wasn’t that he was bad, it was just that he… well, he wasn’t exactly aware of how things made him look. That was odd in and of itself, considering that he could be so self conscious about some things, and then turn right around and not give a shit about others. Unfortunately, he had not yet mastered the art of knowing when and what to say, and when not to say certain things. Thus far, Chien and I had labeled him a work in progress. We just hoped that now with the apocalypse and all, he might actually accomplish some progression. Maybe we were a little hard on him, but that’s because we cared. It was that whole familial thing that we had going, I think.

Once the pistols and their ammunition were loaded into the back, we decided to go around and collect the baseball bats and other potential melee weapons – as well as the archery equipment (though the bows weren’t good for much – they were kiddy bows for the most part). It didn’t take that long, as there really wasn’t that much. The last thing that we were left to debate over was the golf clubs, but in the end we decided to leave them. They were easy to swing, but none of them really had the weight behind them to do massive cranial damage when they were swung. Though something told me most of them were probably for mini golf, and that was why they were so light.

Once the weapons and ammunition were loaded, we raided the place for all the food and drink that was available. Most of it was snack foods and junk, but frankly that didn’t matter all that much. We weren’t trying to be healthy right now. We were trying to make sure that we had enough rations to survive. If someone got a cavity, at least they weren’t dead, and it was possible there was a dentist out there somewhere that could fix the damage for them. This portion didn’t take long, and when we were done we felt we had everything. Unfortunately, when we looked toward the front of the SUV we saw a horde had formed – and a rather massive one at that. Looking at one another, we grabbed the weapons and ammunition that we had brought and headed to the roof access in the back of the store.

Up to the roof we went, staying quiet as we did. The Suburban had made enough noise on the way in that it had attracted a truly massive horde. Between the two of us, Chien and I had taken an entire crate of ammo – thank the heavens for commonality of ammunition. Doing a quick sweep and making an educated guess, we tried to figure out our odds.

“How many do you think there are?” Chien asked as we looked down the scopes of our rifles. I was quiet for a moment, trying to think of how many there really might be, but finally I gave up and gave a simple retort.

“Too many; we’ll be at it all day and night if we just decide to try and stay and hold this place.” I glanced over the side of the roof and glared at the horde around the SUV. “But considering that SUV might not move even with the torque it has, we might not have another choice.” I grinned then. “Unless we just kill them as fast as we can and hope that it’s fast enough; might get something done.”

“Well, we have two thousand rounds. I don’t think there’s two thousand zombies down there. Less than a thousand probably.” Chien said as he lowered his scoped rifle and looked at me. “How long do you think it would take to kill a thousand zombies with just the two of us?”

“Well… we’d have to reload fifty times each. We don’t have that many magazines, so we’d also have to reload the magazines, or use other weapons that have larger magazines.” I paused. “The Mini 14’s could work, I think, but they use different ammo.”

“You’re right…” Chien agreed. “I’ll go down and get them and their magazines. You stay up here and start picking off whatever ones you can. Might be best to Sergeant York them.”

“Yeah, if we pick them off from the back, we’ll just keep having a target rich environment, and we won’t have to try and pick off ones that are at a long distance.” I nodded, “Seeya in a bit. I’ll get us started.”

As Chien made his way back down, I grabbed up the scoped rifle I’d brought and zeroed in on the zombies that were furthest out, picking them off one by one in fairly rapid succession. I wasn’t capable of matching Lea’s accuracy, and Chien beat me easily enough most times, but I was good with this rifle. This was the rifle that I had learned to shoot with – the same went for the revolvers that I had with me, and the semi-automatics that Chien carried. My dad had taught me how to shoot with these very same guns, and I was damn good with them. I would still have preferred having an AR-15, or something of the like, but the weapons I had would do just fine.

The next few hours were essentially full of nothing but shooting, and a little score keeping spawned by the friendly rivalry we had between us. Being that we were both essentially mid-range with similar weapons and similar levels of skill with those weapons, it wasn’t anywhere near as one-sided as it would have been had Chien been using that Remington of his. Without that mule of a rifle or the AR-15, he and I were pretty equal. Eventually we switched to the Ruger 10/22’s, and after their magazines dried up we switched to the Mini 14’s. By the time they were empty we switched to our pistols. Most people think a horde would be a terrifying ordeal, but with things positioned as they were and no ability for the zombies to flank us, we were able to cut them down continually. It took probably a couple of hours for us to whittle the horde down to the slight number that was left behind.

With our pistols empty and only twenty zombies left, we both looked down at them and debated reloading. After a moment, I suggested something else.

“Seems a pity to waste twenty rounds when there are other ways, don’t you think?”

“Like what, Roy?”

“Well Chien… there are those weights down in the store… and some lengths of rope…”

“Okay… …and…?”

“And… follow me.”

From there the two of us headed down into the store again and each took up a ten pound weight as well as a length of rope to reach from the roof to the ground. Then we headed back up to the top of the roof and tied the ends of the ropes to the weights.

“So what are we doing?”

“Playing a game, Chien. Rules are simple: no weapons. Drop the weight over the side and pull it back up with the rope. If you kill a zombie, you get a point. First to ten wins.”

“When do we start?”

I pushed my weight off the side. “Now.” A couple seconds passed and it brained a zombie. “One point for me. Better catch up Chien!” I laughed.

“Cheater!” And with that, he practically threw his weight over the side; killing one as I pulled my weight up.

The process continued until we were both on the last zombie we needed to kill. I was lining mine up as his weight dropped, but his didn’t get a kill. Instead it hit the zombie’s shoulder after it moved at the last second. I grinned and let mine drop – scoring a direct hit. However, I blinked, mouth hanging open as the zombie remained on its feet. About the same time Chien was pulling his weight up, I saw why my target hadn’t died. It was wearing a bicycle helmet. Chien’s weight dropped once more and the game was finished as his target’s skull cracked with a grotesquely bloody splat. I glared down at my last target, and then looked to Chien, deadpanning.

“Stay here.” Before he could ask why I was walking away. When I returned I had one of the long barrel shotguns we’d retrieved, and one of the shotgun slugs. Loading the slug, I aimed down and over the side and fired… splattering that damned bicycle helmet and the head beneath it (as well as some of the spine I think) all over the windows and Suburban.

“…Well… that was interesting…” Chien looked over at me, leaning away slightly.

I grinned. “What? It cheated. No helmets allowed.”

Chien rolled his eyes, laughing.