An Apocalypse Family (Book 1): Family Reunion (12 page)

They started to argue, but when she fixed them with a grandmotherly stare, they both nodded and quit fussing.

Lynn entered the store and grabbed a cart. She headed down the closest aisle, throwing in anything nonperishable. Her main goal was speed and getting as much food as she could. The store wasn’t that busy, which puzzled her. She came head-to-head with another woman who was frantically filling her cart with frozen dinners. She thought about telling her frozen food wasn’t the best option at this point but kept the comment to herself. She made the turn onto the canned food aisle to find it well stocked. Again, she was surprised; if this were Denver, the first sign of a good snowstorm would have cleared the shelves. She wasn’t highly selective, but took a minute to try to get a variety of canned goods.

Someone in the back of the store interrupted the quiet.

“Hey, hey, hey!” It was a man’s voice. It initially sounded mildly perturbed and quickly escalated to a panicked objection. That was followed by the crash of someone locked in a full-on wrestling match, knocking over displays and banging into shelves. She then heard what sounded like a wounded mountain lion shrieking a loud wail of either pain or agitation.

Her fight-or-flight instinct triggered. She wheeled her cart toward the front of the store. She just cleared the aisle and was almost to the checkout when she saw and heard the woman in the freezer section scream. The bagboy had her on the ground and was tearing into her arm with his teeth. He flung blood in a wide arc as he wrenched a piece of flesh from her bicep, working his way toward her neck, shaking his head like a pit bull.

Lynn’s bowels turned to water and she broke into a full-fledged run, pushing the cart straight past the cashier, who stood frozen in horror. The boy looked up from his feeding frenzy and shrieked at another shopper standing a few feet away. The shopper was a middle-aged man who dropped the fish sticks he was holding and started to run. The bagboy leaped up from the floor and onto the man’s back, biting down on his shoulder.

“Get off! Get off!” he screamed as he ran, beating at the boy with his free hand.

As they passed the stunned cashier and entered the front of the store where the sun shone through the windows, the bagboy let him go and backpedaled quickly, looking like he couldn’t get away fast enough.

The cashier broke for the front doors and almost caught up to Lynn.

“I’m done, I’m outta here!” He pulled off the store apron, wadding it up as he ran to his car.

The shopper who had been bitten fell, got up, and staggered to his vehicle. Lynn crashed the cart into the rear quarter panel of the Prius and was shaking so badly she couldn’t push the release button for the hatch. Madison unlocked the door and started to get out to help.

“Get back in there!” Lynn screamed at her. She finally activated the hatch and threw all the groceries in as fast as she could, looking over her shoulder at the front doors of the store.

*****

Jean pressed the cool washcloth to Meg’s forehead. Meg was unconscious, lying on the couch back home. When Jean got her home, Sarah had helped half-carry, half-drag Meg into the living room. Jean had cleaned and sutured the wounds and was monitoring her closely. Lynn and the kids arrived right behind them.

Lynn prepared soup and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, listening while Jean explained what happened. Jean told her story as she stood in the doorway connecting the kitchen and living room so she could keep an eye on Meg. The kids were occupied in the back room, watching a DVD.

“I wouldn’t believe you if I hadn’t been through the same thing at the grocery store,” Lynn said after Jean finished.

Sarah just sat there, not saying anything. The stress of the last few days had worn her down. She was afraid, she was a widow, and she didn’t know if she could take much more. Jean saw the stare and correctly assessed that Sarah was at the breaking point.

“Sarah, don’t feel like this is all on you. We will get through it as a family.”

Sarah’s shoulders slumped, and she quietly began to cry. “I just don’t know how I am going to do it,” she mumbled. “With Tim gone, and Peter… how am I supposed to raise these kids without Tim, especially now?”

Lynn crossed the room and hugged her. “Like Jean said, we will do it together.”

Sarah nodded and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “How is Mom?”

Jean looked back into the living room at Meg. “She should be okay; she didn’t lose much blood and as long as we can keep the wounds from getting infected…” What she didn’t say was she wasn’t sure if the bite had passed the infection on to Meg. “We will just have to wait and see…” she let the sentence hang there like a cartoon thought bubble.

Lynn finished cleaning up the kitchen after everyone ate their fill of soup and sandwiches. Jean kept a close eye on Meg, who was still unconscious. Sarah lay on Meg’s bed while the kids continued to watch movies in the back bedroom. Lynn walked into the living room, drying her hands on a dishtowel.

“Should she be waking up?”

Jean glanced at Meg and frowned. “Everyone is different. Her vitals are good and she doesn’t seem to be in distress, but I don’t like the fever.”

Meg’s temperature had been over a hundred all afternoon. “I think letting her rest is more important than anything else right now.”

Jean checked the IV she’d started and was thankful that Meg’s supply of such medical equipment was so complete. “I’ve got her on a saline drip with an antibiotic that should fight off any infection for now.”

“What about the boy who attacked her?” Lynn asked. “What are the chances that he passed something to Meg when he bit her?”

“That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?” Jean replied.

*****

Meg looked down on the scene. Lynn and Jean stood over her body laid out on the couch. She could hear the discussion plainly, as if she were participating in it. Her first thought was that she must be dead and would be drifting off to heaven any moment now. Many of her patients had described this type of out-of-body experience to Meg in her years of nursing, but she always credited the stories as a phenomenon of the brain trying to fill in the gaps. It always happened when someone had been in a life-threatening circumstance. Now, it seemed as normal as brushing her teeth.

While dwelling on the significance of this, she realized she was no longer hovering over the living room. Now the world was totally black—no, not totally, now pictures began to flash by quickly: the gymnasium, the grocery store, a dark hall in a house she didn’t recognize. Was she dreaming? The pictures didn’t feel like they were something she’d witnessed, but something that was being shown to her by someone else. She felt something else, too… fear! It was not her fear. It belonged to someone else; someone was showing her their fear. Not just one person, but many; the pictures flashed by faster and faster until her mind cried out,
STOP!

She opened her eyes and Jean and Lynn were standing over her.

“How are you feeling?” Jean asked.

I awoke to the smell of coffee. The night had passed with no visits from the freaks. I had the midnight-to-four watch and heard plenty of shrieking. Either we had hidden well, or they had easier prey at hand. I wasn’t going to complain.

I pushed the recliner down and had to kick the leg rest several times to get it to stay. Max had removed the tarps from the front windows to let in some light. I could see Lisa standing behind the counter through the storage room doorway.

“I smell coffee,” I said, as I wandered out of the back room.

“’Bout time you got up, sleeping beauty,” Max replied.

“Hey, Uncle Ryan, come look at this note again. I’ll get you some coffee,” Lisa said, putting the ledger down on the counter for me.

“First tell me how you made coffee without electricity.”

I picked up the ledger and reread the note Mel left. She handed me a Styrofoam cup full of hot steaming coffee.

“What, no cream?”

She punched me, and I spilled a little of the precious liquid. “Hey now, you give me coffee only to burn me with it?” I sipped the coffee and noticed a few grounds on my tongue. I thought better than to mention it. “Oh my god, that’s good!”

Lisa smiled. “I used a smelting kit to make it.” I spit the coffee out and looked at her. “You mean the one that they use to melt down lead?”

She laughed, “No, this was a ‘new in box’ set, silly.”

I held up the ledger. “So, what am I reading this for again?”

She pointed to the end of the note where Mel had signed. “What do you think these numbers are?” Right there in his note, Mel had put
12-29-16-12
in front of his name.

“Hmmm, you know, I went right by those yesterday, thinking they were a date; but that doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

Max ambled over after overhearing our discussion. “Let me see.”

I flipped the ledger around so he could have a look. “I missed that too. Now that I’m looking at it, it looks like a combination.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Okay, to what, though?”

We all looked at each other. Lisa was the first to speak. “Could it be to one of those gun safes we used to block the doors last night?”

Max shook his head. “I don’t think so, why leave the combination to an empty gun safe?”

I went over to the gun safes. Max and Lisa had pulled them away from the doors, but they were still lying on their sides. I looked in the plastic bag attached to the top of one of them. “Nope, the combinations for these are here, with instructions on how to reset them.”

Max scratched his beard of three days. “Why wouldn’t he write down more information? He gives us the combination to a hidden safe, but doesn’t tell us where it is.”

We all scanned the room again, looking for something obvious that we might have missed. Nothing stood out. I put my hands on my hips and gave them both a flummoxed look.

“Well, let’s search the place carefully and see if we can turn up anything.”

We split the entire store into thirds and began searching in earnest. The floor in the front room was tile and there was no floor safe, neither there or behind the counter. We moved everything hanging on the walls and knocked on the sheetrock to no avail. After a full hour of searching, we came up empty.

“What the hell?” Max said.

“Well, we have the storage room and the shooting range,” I offered.

Max shrugged and said, “Okay, Lisa and I will look in the storage room. You take the range.”

The range could barely qualify as a range. Three shooting lanes, maxed out at 25 meters. Nonetheless, I took one of the large flashlights we had procured from the auto parts store and began looking around. I couldn’t find anything. I went back to find Max and Lisa going through the storage room with similar results.

“Maybe he was just fucking with us,” Lisa commented.

“I don’t know,” I said as I stood back and looked over the layout of the store again. “Something is not kosher here. Look, if we go into the storage room and pace off the distance from the door to the wall…” I demonstrated. “I come up with about twenty-four feet.”

I walked over to the door to the range, entered again, and paced off the distance between the door and the interior wall. “If I go in here and do the same thing,” I said from inside the darkened range, “I come up with about the same, twenty-four feet.”

Max tilted his head, doing the math. “I come up with forty-eight feet; that would leave about ten feet of missing space. That’s an awful lot of dead space. Maybe a secret room?”

Lisa chimed in, “Yeah, but we searched the damn rooms and didn’t find a door. How would you get in there?”

With my thumb, I pointed over my shoulder to the mirror we were all standing directly in front of. “How about through the looking glass, Alice?”

Max and Lisa were on the other side of the counter and I was standing behind it. I turned and looked closer at the mirror. It was made up of three four-foot-wide sections. I pushed on the one to my left, nothing; I pushed on the middle one, nothing again. I pushed on the right one, and it didn’t move much, but I thought I could feel more give than with the other two.

“There’s some movement here,” I said.

Max rushed around the end of the counter and we tried pushing on it again. It moved, but not more than a quarter inch. We looked all around the edges and couldn’t find any kind of latch.

“What about in the ceiling?” Lisa pointed at the drop ceiling above us. I looked around and there under the counter was a small wooden stool. I pulled it out and stepped up. The extra twelve inches was just enough, and I lifted the ceiling tile up. Off to the right and just above the edge of the section was a plastic knob. I turned it to the right; Max was still pushing on the mirror.

“I felt it click!” He released the pressure and the mirror popped out. I replaced the tile and got off the stool.

On the other side of the mirror was a steel door with a combination wheel and a handle inset into it. Max moved to my right so we could open the mirror further and I tried the combination. Left two full cycles then stopped on 12, right to 29, left to 16, then back right to 12. I pulled down on the handle and the door released inward.

I turned on the flashlight and moved into the room. Max and Lisa were right behind me, both with flashlights. My first thought was,
why in the world would they have killed themselves with this kind of resource at hand?

Max summed it up succinctly: “Shit.” It made me think of an article I read about being prepared for the end of the world as we know it. The mental fortitude and the will to live were two things that many preppers fail to take into consideration when planning for the fall of civilization. There were literally thousands of dollars’ worth of preparation in here, yet they did absolutely nothing to protect Mel and his family from succumbing to the realization that the world would never be the same again.

The room itself was not large—probably seven hundred square feet. It felt smaller due to all the stuff that was crammed in it. Some light filtered in through the one-way mirror and a Lexan window next to the door looking out into the store. Next to the door was a weapons rack that held some serious firepower.

A beautiful TP AR 7.62 NATO rifle stole my heart right from the start. TrackingPoint was a relatively new company that built different weapons platforms integrated with a micro-processing riflescope that could make anyone into an expert shooter, even at long range. The scope could lock onto a target and the target could be marked by pressing a small button next to the trigger guard; the shooter would be alerted when they lined up correctly. This technology worked even if the target was moving at up to ten miles per hour. I knew exactly what I was looking at, as I’d seen a demonstration of this particular weapons system on the Internet. The scope even came with its own Bluetooth connection so that the shooter could see exactly what they were aiming at on their tablet or smartphone. Below it were two TP AR 5.56 NATO rifles that used the same technology. These made our M4s seem like muzzle-loading antiques.

The weapons rack sat above a large Craftsman toolbox. I opened the top drawer to find a full complement of suppressors laid out in foam cutouts, each labeled by bore size. There were two 7.62 and four 5.56. The 5.56 would fit our M4s, and 7.62 would fit the TP AR 7.62.

The next drawer down held four pistols already equipped with suppressors: two Sig Sauer Mosquitos .22LR and two Sig P226 9mm, with two extra magazines for each.

There was more ammunition here than we could possibly load into the two trucks and still have room for food and water. We also found military-grade communication gear, complete with mobile radios that were supposed to be good for up to 25 miles. The whole setup would fit into a backpack, and it even had a Goal Zero Sherpa 100 charger with a 20-watt solar panel.

Beyond the weapons rack were two sets of bunk beds, a desk, and a kitchenette. The entire left side of the room was stacked with gourmet freeze-dried food in five-gallon containers.
That will come in handy.
Toward the back of the space was another door. I opened it and found a full-service bathroom. To the rear of the bathroom was another door—this place was full of surprises. Behind this door was a generator and what looked like a large water tank.

I walked back to the front where Lisa was inspecting the freeze-dried foodstuffs and Max was checking out the rifles.

“This is a pretty sweet setup, Max. If we weren’t so gung-ho to hit the road, I would say we should just make this our home.”

He looked at me and nodded. “We should definitely make sure this is all secured when we leave, to try and keep it for a fallback position.”

Lisa was sitting cross-legged and going through a pail of food. “Uncle Ryan, look at all this food! Can I make us a big batch of it before we leave?”

I smiled. “Sure, I’d like that; how about you, Max?”

Max agreed. “Sounds good to me. She can do that while we load a bunch of this stuff into the trucks. These rifles are amazing; I’ve been reading the manual on ’em and they are some sci-fi shit.”

I picked up the 7.62 version and turned it in my hands. “I’ve seen them demoed, and they’re easy to use, too. Just put the reticle over your target, hit the tag button, then wait for the reticle to turn green, and squeeze the trigger. I saw a twelve-year-old girl hit targets at 250, 500, and 1,000 yards with one—very impressive. That solar battery charger for the radios will come in handy; these scopes do eat up the batteries.”

After a filling batch of chicken à la king, we put the tarps back up on the front window and secured the store. We found the keys to the front door in the secret room. It was eleven o’clock before we finally pulled out of the parking lot, heading toward Interstate 90 east.

I did a radio check. “Chicken One to Raven, you copy?”

“This is Raven, I copy.”

We were trying out the throat mikes, held in place with a nylon choker. It wasn’t real comfortable, but I guessed we would grow used to it. The earpiece felt like a finger stuck in my ear, but at least we could communicate. “Chicken Two, follow me to the fueling point we discussed earlier, copy?”

“Copy.”

We pulled into the gas station where we had procured the cigarettes the night before and stopped next to the fuel tank access point off to the side of the storefront. Max mounted an electric pump to a board and used the 12-volt plug that fit into the power access point in the truck. We used to call it the cigarette lighter, but that was no longer politically correct. One thing we’d found in the secret room was a bolt cutter. Max used it now to snap the lock on the diesel fuel cover. We lowered the tubing down into the tank, still unsure if there was any fuel left in it. The output tubing was exactly the right size to fit the nozzle receptacle on the truck’s fuel tank.

“Well, that worked out well, didn’t it?” I said as Max powered up the pump.

“Yeah, now let’s hope this works.”

The pump hummed while we watched the tube coming out of the ground, hoping for the best, fearing the worst. After what seemed like an eternity, Lisa let out a half-whispered “Yes!” as she saw the diesel fuel coming up the tube. Our system worked, but it was slow; it took nearly twenty minutes to fuel both trucks, even though the tanks were three-quarters full to start with.

“We’re going to have to work on speeding that up if we can,” I said, as we started packing up the pump.

Max agreed. “Yeah, that took too long… Lisa, go get us a shitload of cigarettes, kiddo.”

Lisa ran off to get the smokes and Max turned toward me. “Ryan, without making it obvious, look across the street at the second floor of the building on the corner and tell me what you see.”

I walked over to my truck and grabbed an open pack of cigarettes off the dash, popped one out, and while I cupped my hands around the lighter, I casually glanced at the building. I walked back over to Max.

“Looks like someone is checking us out.”

Lisa walked up with her arms loaded down with multiple cartons of smokes. “This work?”