They drive and drive after that; at times it feels like they've been on the road for hours. Large portions of it is spent in silence as Maka watches the trees and the hedgerows pass them on their way to the next town over; some of it is spent sniffing her hair and admiring just how clean she suddenly is. Maka was finding that out when you haven't showered in almost a year, one bath could really do a number on your hair.
After about an hour Soul decides he's sick of silence and with one hand on the steering wheel, begins to rummage through the collection of CD's in the car. "Can you see anything good?" he asks her.
"Depends on your definition of good," she grimaces, spying a disc that promises to be chock-a-block with 'your favorite 80s hits!'. Eyeing up Soul, she decides that he's probably not into 80's cheese and finds a Coldplay CD instead. "There's this," she takes the disc out carefully and inserts it into the CD player. One of their songs blares out the speaker and Soul grimaces.
"Really?"
"I like Coldplay!" Maka insists. "They're pretty good."
Soul stays silent on the matter, but he purses his lips and doesn't mention the music again until they stop driving.
When leafy highways turn into suburban residential estates, Soul slows and they eventually crawl to a halt by a large shopping mall, named 'Boulder Village Shopping'. He parks his Jeep right by the entrance to the place and looks over at Maka. "This will do for tonight. There will probably be a few supplies, and we're not too far into the city." He looks around. "I'm gonna check it out. You stay here, take my gun."
She does so cautiously. "Wait! What are you taking?"
"Don't worry, I've… got something else."
Maka blinks at him like he's a bit stupid and he rolls his eyes, turning away from her. She feels a pang of anxiety as she watches him disappear into the entrance.
He's gone for a long time. Longer than he has any right to leave her all alone and unattended in a random car park in an unfamiliar, probably zombie-ridden part of Colorado. She starts to lose faith that he's ever coming back, and then her heart leaps into her chest as she spies something in the opposite direction.
It's one of them. Only one, and it's pretty slow- but it's definitely ambling towards the van.
She swears under her breath. If it makes a noise, others might come, too. "Crap, shit, fuck… go away, please go away." She breathes. It doesn't seem to respond to her requests, getting closer and closer. As it approaches, Maka can see that it used to be a blonde girl; not that it was anymore.
Maybe it wouldn't be so aggressive on account of being a younger girl? There was some logic in that, Maka supposes.
It bares its dirty, yellowed and pointed teeth as it makes definitive eye contact with Maka and she swears and prays all at the same time.
"Okay, fine. We're doing this," she whispers to herself as encouragement. She rolls down her window and aims her gun as quickly as she can, training it on the zombie before it starts moving rapidly.
One shot.
Bang.
Zombie girl lying dead on the road. Her grey flesh sagging against her dead, sunken eyes. Maka can't stomach to look at them for too long, even dead.
Maka's heartbeat is the only noise left in the parking lot, and as her eyes buzz around her- it speeds up.
A peep from the bushes, but not a peep from the mall.
"Soul, come back," Maka finds herself begging to herself, stomach now dropping as the bushes to the left of the parking lot rustle and two- no, three- bigger, heftier male zombies pop out. "Shit," she chokes and wonders if her gun is in range. She figures- probably not, and decides to get out the car with her weapon in tow.
Getting out of her car arouses attention and the three zombies now focus on her completely.
Bang, bang, bang.
One misses, gets him in the leg. She tries again,
Bang!
All dead now.
She prays that Soul will be back in a minute, there's no way she has enough ammo left in his gun for another fifteen of the damn things.
She can't get back in the car, too noisy. Now is the time for being utterly silent.
She couldn't just drive off, because then what would Soul do?
She doesn't hear anything else for a good twenty seconds, and her muscles begin to relax- maybe there wasn't any more of them in hearing range.
A noise behind her makes her yelp out and whip her head round, holding up her gun and aiming at the potential threat.
Soul frowns. "It's me," he says. "It's safe, follow me."
She scuttles after him as he welcomes her into the medium-sized, echoing shopping mall her shoes now tapping annoyingly on the stone flooring between shops. There was something unapologetically eerie about the abandoned place- with the shops all smashed in, the places mostly looted; the escalators in perpetual stillness and moss climbing up all the walls.
"You're sure it's safe?"
"Yes."
"How come it took so long?" she sends him a look. "It was scary out there."
"I'm sorry. I ran into trouble, and when that was dealt with, I did a double check," he says doubtfully. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine. I just… I didn't hear a shot or anything. How did…?" she references his apparent lack of armory.
"I don't always use guns," he waves her away and she frowns, confused.
How could you possibly kill a zombie with any other weapon other than a gun, she wonders to herself. And she didn't exactly see any knives on him, either.
Not for the first time, her suspicion of him grows. There was something he wasn't telling her, something he was hiding, and there was a reason why.
She spies a dead zombie on the floor, guts slipping out from his putrid stomach, and puts it to rest for the minute, focusing instead on the matter at hand.
"So, uh," she frowns. "What are we doing here?"
"Finding some food? Not sure about you, but I'm hungry." He stops walking to check out a nearby map. "I definitely passed a Costco when I was casing it. Let's check it out?"
"Sounds like a plan," she smiles, knowing that she won't be able to eat anything at all.
