Sven the Zombie Slayer (37 page)

“Looks good?”

“Yeah, looks fine. All you do is load the shells in here.” Jane pointed to an opening in the shotgun that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “Pump and shoot, and pump and shoot. It’s really very easy, and you don’t have to get close like you’ll have to with those knives.” Jane nodded at the machetes strung on Sven’s belt and he covered them defensively, protecting them from her look.

“I’m not gonna take them away or anything,” Jane said. “I’m just saying.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Here.” Jane handed the shotgun to Sven and he took it, the metal cool against his palms. He turned the shotgun over and peered into the barrel.

“Sven! Don’t do that!” Jane grabbed the gun and spun it around so it was facing down. “Always away from your body and down.” Then she put the gun down on the counter.

“Sorry. You look good with that thing,” Sven said. “Real serious, like that
Resident Evil
chick.”

“Maybe you were right to make me watch all those movies with you.”

“I liked the movies, but I didn’t exactly see this coming. I’ve gotta say though, after this—if there’s an after this—no more zombie movies. I’m done, gonna make a clean break. Just vampires and killer robots.”

“You won’t get any argument from me.”

Sven wondered if Jane was referring to a future in which she and Sven were together, but he didn’t ask her. It was strange to be wanting that now, in the situation they were in.

Then she looked away, and the moment was over.

Sven looked back at the shotgun. He flipped his mask off and leaned over the weapon, inspecting it. It looked good as new, if a lack of scratches was any indication. He looked at the label. “Benelli SuperNova 12
Ga.
Pump-Action,” he read under his breath, with very little idea of what it meant. It certainly looked like a tough man’s gun.

It was big, and black, and—he picked it up off the counter—had a nice weight to it. In his mind, he saw himself clubbing zombies with it, and occasionally shooting it, if he could figure out how that worked. The image pleased Sven, and his grip on the shotgun tightened. He began to fiddle with it, turning it over, touching the parts, playing with what must be the pump part of it.

Then he took the gun in both hands, put it across his body, and struck a pose.

“What do you think?”

Jane looked up at him and it looked like she was trying to suppress a smile, but the smile won out in the end.

“That’s very you,” she said.

“Thanks. I thought so. What do I put in it?”

Jane looked at Sven for a second, as if considering something, then turned around and picked out some boxes from the shelf behind the counter.

“These,” she said, and began to stack up the boxes on the counter in front of Sven.

He began reading the tops of the boxes. Some of the boxes had a picture of a wolf on them, and were called, “Wolf Power Buckshot.” The boxes said something about nine pellets. The other kind of boxes were called, “Black Magic Magnum,” and had a picture of a roaring bear on them. Sven shrugged, figuring that the animals meant business, and began packing the boxes into the duffel bag that Jane wasn’t using. When he was done stacking the boxes of shells, he put the shotgun into the bag too, making a mental note to read the small owner’s manual that hung from its grip.

Then Sven’s hands went down to the machetes. A glimmer passed through the air, but he wasn’t transported back into the jungle as he’d hoped.

“You okay?” Lorie asked. “What are you smiling about?”

“What?” Sven said. “Oh, I don’t know, just hungry I guess.” He hadn’t realized that he was smiling.

Lorie rolled her eyes, said, “Okay then,” and ran back into the aisles.

77

Lorie needed to find something fast. Sven and Jane looked like they were almost ready to go, and Lorie still hadn’t had the chance to hide anything away. She liked the crossbows she saw, and she had thought about sneaking one into the duffel bags, but that wasn’t a good idea. Jane would find it and forbid her from bringing it.

Jane hadn’t said anything about the butcher knife though, Lorie remembered, as she walked to the front of the store and looked down at the dead fat zombie that lay there.

His head wasn’t all there, and his leg was all messed up and bent out of shape, and there was her butcher knife, sticking into a nasty looking gobbet of flesh that was no longer part of the zombie’s leg, It looked like it had detached and fallen away from under the knee, so it was probably part of the zombie’s shin and calf that she was looking at, but it looked misshapen and malformed and it was a nasty pallid yellow on the inside.

Maybe the yellow is the fat, Lorie thought, a fat calf.

She reached for the handle of the butcher knife, but stopped before grabbing it. She didn’t want the thing now that it had the zombie’s stuff all over it. It could be infected, and it was just gross anyway.

Sure it was a nice big knife, but why should she settle for a contaminated butcher knife when she was in a store filled with other knives that were just as good, and maybe even better, like the ones that Sven had found?

Lorie straightened up from the zombie and looked up at Sven. He was standing by the counter, talking to Jane. They looked like they were discussing what to pack, and Jane was showing Sven something with the guns and ammo they were packing.

Those really are good pants, Lorie thought, and she smiled to herself when she remembered how she had cleared the shelves of all the other pants and hid them in the next aisle over. She had almost been unable to hide her delight when Sven believed her tale about the duck pants being the last pants in the store. It was a good trick, and Lorie was sure Evan would be impressed when she told him about it.

She walked to the entrance where Evan was standing.

“What are you up to over here?” Lorie asked.

“Keeping the watch,” Evan said, then he sneezed and wiped his hand across his nose.

“See any zombies yet?”

“No, but it’s getting really dark out there, and that can’t be good.”

“No, it can’t be good, that’s for sure. You feeling better at all?”

“Yeah actually, much better. It all seems like a dream, doesn’t it? Today I mean. Just a bad dream and we’re gonna wake up any second.”

Lorie looked down at the threshold. “I don’t think we are gonna wake up. I think this is it.”

Evan didn’t say anything. He turned around and went back to looking out at the darkening parking lot. Lorie got the sense that she shouldn’t bother him anymore, and she turned around and walked into the first aisle of the store, reminding herself that she needed to get something good that wasn’t a gun or a crossbow, and to get it fast.

As she walked down the aisle, her eyes were again drawn to the stuffed fish sitting atop their special shelves on the walls, and hanging from the ceiling. They were everywhere, and they had troubled her from the moment she walked in and spotted the first one sitting next to the cash register.

They were all bloated and shiny like they were about to explode in a fountain of fish guts. The mental image made Lorie cringe in a way that the zombie carnage didn’t. The latter had little effect on her, but the swollen painted fish on the walls pointed at her with their stuffed fins, and some of them had spines, and their eyes seemed to be following her, watching her—

Lorie looked away from the fish, and resolved to avoid making any more eye contact with them. They were just dead fish, after all, and Lorie ate fish all the time. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, and it shouldn’t have been creeping her out as much as it was.

There was nothing in the first aisle worth grabbing. There was a lot of birdshot and two-way radios and stupid-looking hood ornaments, most of which were of an overall-wearing man holding a rifle in one hand and a beer bottle in the other. Lorie wondered for a moment if they were scented, but decided not to discover if they were—they probably smelled of beer, or gunpowder, or both. Then she wondered if beer or gunpowder were Harry Potter jelly bean flavors. Beer must have been, but gunpowder? Lorie wasn’t sure, but she kind of wanted some jelly beans now.

“Stop it,” Lorie muttered to herself, “stop getting distracted by these stupid things and get something sharp!”

She turned into the next aisle.

This one was filled with scopes and sights, replacement magazines, rifle cases, and weird-looking binoculars and goggles. Lorie went up to a shelf and picked up a pair of binoculars, examining it. The binoculars looked cool, and they were priced at $343.69, so Lorie figured they were worth taking. She ripped the tag off and powered them on, then put them to her face.

Everything looked the same, except it was now a dark shade of green, then she made out the user display, which showed that the internal battery was half-full. She began turning slowly, but she still couldn’t make out Sven or Jane or Evan through the aisles. That’s when Lorie realized that night vision wasn’t the same as heat vision, and called herself stupid under her breath. She took the goggles away from her face, put them back on their shelf, and ran over into the next aisle.

There she finally found something useful.

Lorie picked up the package of throwing stars and unclasped its top. She reached in and plucked out two of the stars. They were small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, lying on top of each other. She looked at the remaining stars in the package—there were five left. She put the package back on its shelf and began to examine the stars in her hand. She took one in each hand and patted the points with the tips of her fingers. They were sharp, but not even close to as sharp as the butcher knife had been. Each star had eight points, and it looked more like a circle than a star, but Lorie figured that was alright.

With a star held loosely between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, she walked to the back of the store. There she picked out her first target and drew back each of her arms across her body. Then she rethought the motion, deciding to throw one at a time, and let her right arm fall to the side.

She flung the first star with her left hand, and missed. The star stuck in the wall with a reverberating boing.

Then she flung the second star with her right, and it hit home. It sank deep into its target, and there was no reverberation, no boing, just a thunk.

“What was that?” Jane’s voice called from the front of the store. “Everything okay back there?”

“Yeah,” Lorie called, “I’m fine. Just looking for more survival stuff.”

“Be careful.”

“Okay.”

That must have satisfied Jane, because she didn’t say anything more.

Lorie walked up to the star that was sticking in the target, reached up for it, and changed her mind. It was almost halfway into the bloated fish, and when she thought of pulling it out, she got the image of the fish deflating rapidly and shooting fish guts out at her. So she left the star in the fish and went back to the package of throwing stars. She picked it up, looked at it, picked out one more star, then put it back in its package.

They weren’t practical, she decided. They wouldn’t go deep enough to get the zombies in their brains—assuming that was what you had to do to get a zombie—and her aim wasn’t that great with them anyway.

Lorie sighed and walked into the next aisle. As soon as she stepped into it, she knew that this was the one. She had been wrong about the stars, but this was so much different. She found exactly what she wanted, and put it carefully into her back pocket, then pulled the back of her shirt down as far as it would go to cover the bulge and the part of the thing that stuck out.