Chapter six: Loot
The night went on without any disturbances. When their shift was over the two boys went inside and tried to wake up Brandon and Ryan. After about five minutes of trying, when the two boys almost had resorted to violence, they started to get up, knowing what was about to happen. It took another five minutes for them to stop rubbing their eyes, grab their stuff and get out. When that was done the two boys tried to find a place to sleep on. Since the staff room was taken by Steve, Carl and Jessica they had to find someplace else to sleep at. Mark made a bed out of three chairs he found and slept on it, it wasn't the best place he had slept on, but it was better than the cold floor. Alec on the other hand had to sleep on the floor since he didn't find any better place.
Mark woke up at sunrise when the sun hit his eyes. He blinked his eyes and tried to remember where he was and what happened last night. It didn't take to long and when he knew that he got up and looked around. The only thing he saw besides the usual things one would find in a gas station was Alec lying on the floor with the glock in his belt. The glock had turned into a part of Alec, or at least something he knew and associated with him. It was as much him as his shoes or his T-shirt. That was kind of scary when he thought about it. Wonder if I look the same with this shotgun? He thought and rose to his feet and slung the shotgun over his shoulder. When he looked around he saw Brandon and Ryan lying in a corner, sleeping and snoring. Guess it's Terry and Carl out there now, he thought.No one else seemed to be awake so he sneaked around a little more. He found a little to eat and sat down on his improvised bed and finished the meal.
As he sat down he thought about things. He forced the thoughts about his family out of his head and concentrated on other things, more important things. If they looked for things in the houses, what should they look out for? What was going on in the rest of the world? What had happened to the government? Not that he cared really. What if everything went back to normal, if the dead just started to stay motionless again? What would become of him then? Would he be arrested for the things he had done? No he wouldn't. Because it would never go back to 'normal' again. And if it did, he wouldn't be arrested. Everyone that lived had done the same as him, the right thing.
Maybe he could become something in this world. A leader maybe? But that was what Steve did. But he sure as hell would become more than he would have in the old world. Back then his only future was to become a pizza delivery guy or something with as low pay as it, if he got a work at all. All thanks to his great childhood. But in the two days this shit had been going on he already had become someone, a survivor. That was better then most of the people he knew, or had known. Then he thought about what others that might survive something like this. The average Joe didn't have a too big chance, unless they were lucky ones. Like he and Alec. Others that might survive was cops, criminals and the other ones with skills that might save their lives. And the ones that had been preparing for this, the survivalists. He was sure that if he lived to meet other people at least a few of them would be Christian, ex-army loonies who had been prepared for a thing like this. People had laughed at them, called them crazies back then. But now it was them who laughed back at the mindless zombies who once had been mocking them. That was pure irony.
Marks thoughts was interrupted by a hand on his shoulder. If he hadn't been so tired he would have screamed. First he thought it was Alec, but he was wrong. He turned around and first saw a slender hand, a girly hand and then the beautiful face reflect in the sun. He couldn't tell if her hair was brown or black in the sunlight. She didn't look like Steve and Carl at all. Her mother might have been a native American or Latino. And in the tank top and tight jeans she was wearing she looked extremely good, as usual.
"Hi, did I scare you?" She asked and looked a little embarrassed over sneaking up on him.
"Nah." He said. Actually she had scared him, but he didn't want to break the macho guy code of honour. "I just woke up, do you know what time it is?"
"I don't have a watch on me but I would guess it's around seven or something." She answered. "You're Mark, right?"
"Yup, and that guy over there is Alec." Mark answered and looked at the sleeping form of his friend.
"Did you know Alec before all of this?" She asked.
"Yeah, I've known him since elementary school. We've always been friends. I, Alec and Stan." He spoke the last words with a hint of sadness.
"Where is Stan now?" Jessica asked before realising that it might be something he didn't want to talk about. Before she could tell him that it was alright if he didn't want to talk about it he answered.
"He's lying in a pile of ash with a bullet through his head." Mark answered calmly as if they were talking about where Stan had moved to. But inside Mark felt the loss. Stan had been more family than the one he had been born into.
"Who did it?" Jessica asked.
"He and his brother Kyle was infected. Either I shot him or Alec did it, I don't really know. All of it happened so fast, bang bang and it was over." He said and tried to keep calm. The worst of it was that he didn't feel bad about it.
"Was it hard to do it?" She asked with a look of symphathy. Mark started to wonder if she had a morbid obsession with death or something, she didn't look goth at all.
"No actually it wasn't. I kept thinking that it wasn't him at all. And before I knew it he was dead." He said. That was what was the most fucked up thing about all of it, not that his friend had died and got up on his feet, that he hadn't hesitated a second to kill him again.
"You've lost a lot in this." She said after a while.
Mark nodded and the two teenagers sat quiet for a while thinking about what they had lost.
"You lost any family?" Mark asked after a while. He didn't really want to ask straight out how her mother had died.
"You mean my mother?" She said. Mark nodded. "No, she died in a car accident when I was to young to remember it. It was then dad moved up to Washington. We lived in Texas before, but I don't remember much of it. Carl moved with us."
"So actually you did lose family, just not now. " Mark said and saw her smile, which made Mark smile. "And I kinda guessed that at least Steve was from Texas, no offence but he and Carl looks a little hillbilly."
"Guess you could say that. I have to apologise for Carl, he's a little weird now with everything going on." She said.
"That's okay, I can understand that." Mark said. He could understand why he was a little weird, but this guy had aimed a gun at him twice, and that he didn't forgive. Mark had lost a lot too, but he didn't go around pointing guns at anyone he didn't know.
"He was going to get married and all. He saw his fiancée get killed and eaten. Things like that make people a little weird. Before this he was like a brother to me." She said. "What do you think about them?" She said and looked at Brandon and Ryan's direction.
"Them?" Mark asked and pointed at the two young men. "They're okay. I think they knew each other before this. They don't talk much but from what they've said they seem like good guys."
"They said they knew each other before this. We met all three of them about two hours before you, so I don't know much."
"Alec proposed that we should check the other houses today. What do you think about that?" Mark asked.
"Isn't that a little dangerous?" She asked.
"I don't think there's any zombies left here now. If there was they would have showed by now. And if there were we would easily kick their asses. We're eight people with guns and there can't be more than two maybe three of them in the houses. You did good last night. Everyone did." She had, and from what Mark had seen she shot twice as good as him. A certain Texan gene maybe?
"Yeah right." She said and sighed. "And then I threw up. No one else did. It was the first time I saw someone get killed."
"So what? You survived. The only reason I didn't throw up because I didn't have anything left in me to throw up. First time I saw the zombies I puked as I've never puked before. And it was pure luck that I didn't shit my pants. No one is or should be used to see dead people walking around. That's for the movies." Mark said. "Yesterday was the first time I didn't throw up."
"Really? I thought you were some kind of gang member or something that was used to this things, or at least that you had seen a lot of bad things before all of this." She said, part joking, part serious.
"You did? Before all of this the only thing I did was to skip school and smoke pot." He started but was cut of by a new voice.
"And you jerked off far more times what was healthy for you." Alec said. Both Jessica and Mark turned to see that the sleeping Alec wasn't sleeping.
"Nah, that was what you did. Far to much." Mark said to his friend who smiled at the insult. Probably true about him, Mark thought.
Alec rubbed his eyes and looked around at his surroundings.
"So, what time is it?" He asked.
"We think it's about seven or something." Mark said. Alec got up and sat down on the third chair.
"Did you really think I was a gang member?" Mark asked Jessica.
"No, not really. But both you and Alec took the fight as if it was something that happened every day. As if you were used to see dead people." She said.
"We did?" They asked simultaneously.
"Yeah you did. When I was scared shitless you two looked like if you did something totally normal." She said.
"I can't believe that. I was scared shitless." Alec said. "I didn't think we were going to make it."
"I did. See you kids are getting to know each other a little." Steve said from behind them. "Let's wake the others. We're moving out early, no time for slackers here." Everyone in that family seemed to have a bad habit of sneaking up on people.
Steve walked over to Ryan and Brandon and woke them up by giving them each a light kick. The two men got up much faster this time. Then he went outside to get the two others. When everyone had gathered and ate breakfast Steve started to talk.
"Does anyone have an idea of where to go?" Steve asked the group.
"What if we went east. This might have been something affecting the coasts." Brandon said.
"Beats sitting here. But they said it was everywhere on TV." Alec said. "But we can hope that the army has made some kind of base there or something."
Steve looked at Alec. "Do you believe everything they say on TV? Remember 9/11 when the bodycount went from 10000 to 2500 in a couple of weeks? This might be the same thing, maybe they thought that all the looting and that stuff that comes with things like this was the same thing as the infection." He didn't sound to convincing. "But let's get back to the main problem, what are we going to do now?" Steve asked the group.
"I had an idea last night. Why don't we check the other houses for stuff?" Said Alec.
"What stuff are you proposing? We've got food, water and gas. We don't need anything else. " Carl said with his suspicious tone.
"Weapons, ammo and stuff like that." Mark said before Alec could answer. "That's becoming as useful as food now days."
"To bad you're right about that. But what if there's any infected in there? You thought about that?" Steve asked.
"They would have shown. They're to dumb to ambush us." Jessica said. "I'm voting for looting if we're going to vote about it. " Then she gave Mark a glance.
"And if there are any of them there we can take care of them. There's twelve bodies in that pile out there, that's more people than it should live in those houses." Mark said.
"You've got a point there. How many shot's have you got left since yesterday?" He asked the group.
"Two shots and then I'm chopping the fuckers." Brandon said and looked back at his axe as if it was a living thing, a friend. Even if he hadn't used it yet he looked more than ready to do so as soon as he got an opportunity.
"I don't know how to see how many there's left in this one." Ryan said and looked confused. Terry took a look at the clip and said: "He's got two left. I got one full clip and that's it."
"The one in the gun and one full and another with like three shots in it." Alec said and everyone turned to look at Mark.
"Full chamber and eight in my pocket." He said.
"Are we going to vote or something about doing this or are everyone up for it?" Steve said.
Everyone agreed that it was a good idea to check the houses and together they made up a plan. The 'teams' that took watch (Mark/Alec, Ryan/Brandon and Terry/Carl) were going to take a house each. Steve and Jessica took the last house. If anything happened to a team they would shout as loud as they could and the rest would come running for rescue. It wasn't much of a plan, but it was something. Everyone finished their breakfast, grabbed their things and left the gas station.
The houses were placed in a row and Mark and Alec got the first to the right. It was a two story wooden house that seemed to have been built at the end of the 1900-century. A pretty new pickup was parked outside. Mark walked up to the open door and looked in. He held his shotgun tight and waited for something to come charging at him. No one did.
"Hello!" He shouted. If there was something inside it would have heard it.
"There's no one there." Alec said. "Let's get this over with."
The two boys walked inside looking after anything that could be useful. The house seemed to have belonged to a middle aged couple. In the living room they found lot's of photos on the couple. At one they were in their twenties, another in their thirties and so on. The couple didn't have any children, at least no photos of them. There wasn't anything useful in the living room. Or at least they thought so, until Mark glanced at the bookshelf. In it there were a lot of known books, the bible, some Steinbeck and even some Shakespeare. That didn't count as useful Mark reasoned. But a few books were on had titles like Wilderness survival, SAS survival and things like that. Usually Mark didn't read to much, but without television and the internet he might as well start to do so. The books went into a bag. The two boys moved on into the kitchen. Nothing there but lot's of sharp knives. But who needs a sharp knife when he has a gun? They moved on to the second floor. They split up to do it faster, Mark checked the bedroom while Alec went somewhere else, the guest room or something.
The first thing that struck Mark as he entered the bedroom was that there was a lot of blood in the bed, a lot. He scanned the room with his eyes and didn't see anything useful. He went on to check the closet to his left. Besides lot's of clothes he found something really useful. A smaller fortune actually. In a shoebox he found a .38 revolver, the same as Brandon's, and a box of .38 bullets and on the top shelf there was a winchester rifle and a box of ammo for it. This truly was a nation full of gun nuts, Moore was right. He the slung the rifle over his shoulder, put the two boxes of ammo in his bag and the revolver in his pocket. Then he went to get Alec. He on the other hand hadn't found anything at all.
"Why do you always get to find the cool stuff?" Alec asked with fake jealousy.
"Guess it's just sheer dumb luck or something. Or karma." Mark answered. "You can take this, I already have my shotgun. Maybe Steve or Carl want it though. And if they do you should give it to them, they're better shots than you or me." He continued and handled Alec the hunting rifle.
"Guess we have the cellar left." Alec said and they went downstairs.
The two of them went into the cellar and found something really strange. This cellar wasn't just a storage room for old stuff that most people used it as. Someone, probably the man they had seen on the photos, had converted it into a bomb shelter. And it seemed as if they hadn't been down there for a while. A thick layer of dust covered everything. Besides a lot of 'fuck CCCP' posters and stuff like that there were a lot of canned food that looked to have been updated since the seventies, probably with all the anthrax threats a couple of years back. The two boys walked around in the room that wasn't more than 5x5 feet big. Alec stumbled upon a box containing a smaller box of cigars and two loafs of ''Lucky Strike' smokes. Along with that he also found a zippo lighter. All of that went into the bag.
"It was a good idea to check the houses." Mark said after a while. "We should tell Steve about this."
"Yeah." Alec said and lit a cigarette. These ones were strong ones and he coughed a bit, earning himself the status of "sissy" from his friend.
"I didn't know you smoked." Mark pointed out when he saw what his friend was doing.
"I didn't, but now there's a lot of other things that will kill me both faster and better than this little bastard. It looks cool, do you want one?"
"I'll pass." Mark answered. It was right in one way, but he knew that sooner or later Alec would run out of 'Lucky strikes' and that wasn't a time when one wanted to be addicted to something.
They exited the bomb shelter and went outside to go tell Steve and the others what they had found. When they got outside they saw that everyone else finished their looting. Brandon and Ryan had found two boxes of 9mm bullets and two boxes of 12 gauge shells and some camping equipment, a good find. Terry and Carl had found a .22 rifle, some ammo and a geek, short for a nineteen year old, overweight man in a Star wars T-shirt who lived at his parents place. His name was Alexander. Jessica and Steve didn't find anything useful at all, which was bad. But they had seen a crashed van with lots of blood around it down the road. That had to be the way the people around here had been infected Steve figured.
"We found that rifle and a .38 revolver in the bedroom, some useful books and lot's of canned food that probably is eatable." Mark told the group.
"That's really good. So what do we do with the new guns?" Steve said, talking to the group as usual.
"If it's okay I'd like to keep the rifle. I'm not a to good shot though so if anyone want's it it's okay." Alec said.
"Nah, I'll stick with my twenty gauge and Carl has his twelve gauge. You found it so it's yours. You'll learn how to shoot it. Hope you don't have to use it much." Steve said. "But I think it would be a little better if Jessica had the .38 instead of the .357, the recoil is a little better I think. So now we've got two twelve gauge pump action shotguns, one double barrelled twenty gauge, a scoped winchester hunting rifle, one .357 magnum revolver, two glocks, one Colt .45, a beretta 9mm and a .22 rifle. That's a shitload of guns you know. And I'm the stupid bastard to give them to kids. And of course a fire axe." He smiled in the end.
"Do you know how to shoot?" Carl asked Alex.
"No, not really." He said.
"You'll learn." Steve said.
It took some time to split up the guns, but in the end everyone was armed to the teeth. Mark got to keep his shotgun, Alec got his rifle and his glock and more ammo to it, Carl had his shotgun and got his .357 back, Jessica got the new .38, Brandon kept his gun, so did Terry and Ryan who also took one of the glocks and Alex got the .22 rifle.
Then Mark realised that with the new member of the group and all the food they had they might need another vehicle and ran back into the house they had been checking out. When he returned he had a pair of keys with him, to the pickup. It was decided that Mark and Alec was going to drive the pickup and Alexander to ride with them. The three of them loaded all the canned food along with plenty of water into the pickup. Then the others went back to their cars and together the group drove off. First Steve, then Terry and last of them Alec.