Kohta walks into a pharmacy…
Broken glass crunched underfoot as Kohta cautiously entered the shopping mall, hand resting on the butt of his pistol. The glass front doors were shattered and there was blood on the ground – a lot of blood on the ground… but it was quiet and the mall could be a goldmine of supplies. It was worth a look.
The mall was vast, though not as large as Taiei Shopping Town had been if Kohta was any judge. This one was laid out like a street with a glass and steel roof overhead and walled off at each end in the same fashion. The shops were lined up on either side of the central concourse across two stories with now static escalators giving access to the long balconies on either side connected by a series of bridges giving access to the shops on the second floor.
Most of the stores were gated, but a few seemed open. Kohta could easily imagine this place in happier times; a busy wonderland of consumerism with people shopping, kids hanging out at the arcade, couples on dates… times now passed. The overcast sky was filtering through the now dirty skylight to paint the whole place in a filter of grey, making the whole place look dead and powerless. As if Kami-Sama meant to prove the macabre point, one of them – an adult male dressed in stained and ruined remains of a suit, his tie still loose around his neck – emerged from the smashed storefront of a furniture store, staggering slowly towards him.
Kohta took a moment to consider. While he wasn't a fat otaku anymore, he still didn't fancy hand-to-hand combat if he could avoid it. If he shot it, the noise of the shot would draw out anymore in the mall, while the glass end walls shouldstop it from echoing too far outside. If there weren't that many, he could deal with them. It was too many for him to handle; he could turn and run back through the shattered door he'd just come in through. Again, it was worth the risk.
He waited for it to get closer before he drew his weapon; a Gen 3 Glock 19, complete with a Surefire X300 Weaponlight. It, along with the Safariland holster and spare magazines on his belt had been scavenged from the body of an SAT operator they'd encountered. When it reached about 25 yards, Kohta shot it twice in the head.
He placed his shots well. The first impacted on the bridge of its nose, and the second took it square in the forehead, what was left of its brain matter and skull exiting in a gory cloud out of the back of its head before it toppled over backwards. Kohta barely noticed, he was too busy listening. Through the ringing in his ears – a little bit of tinnitus never hurt anyone – a chorus of groans came to life throughout the mall, but not many certainly not more than a dozen.
A few started to emerge from other shops, two from a DVD store and another from a women's underwear boutique. He continued forward, double tapping the pair from the DVD store, part of his mind vaguely acknowledging that at least one of them was younger than he was before giving the boutique worker the same treatment before pressing into the mall.
This place was certainly worth further recon. At least two-thirds of the stores were gated and seemingly, undamaged and unlooted. If they could find the gate keys, maybe in the admin office, and close off the breeches in the end walls, this place really would be a gold mine for them. But that was a job for the whole group. He grimaced slightly; now that he'd started shooting more of them would come and need to be cleared out. Saya would give him hell over that. Perhaps he should have borrowed her MP5 for this run…Then paused as he looked at one of the open storefronts.
It was a pharmacy. He wasn't going to go back empty-handed, and he wasn't going to waste time looking for the gate keys by himself, but this might have some stuff they needed.
He did a quick 360 scan, checking he wasn't about to be snuck up on before training his weapon on the pharmacy. The place had clearly been looted; someone had thrown what looked like a floor polisher through one of the front windows to gain entry, the impromptu breaching device was still lying among the wreckage of the window display, but the front door was still intact, and though depleted, there were still items visible on the front shelves. Gingerly, Kotha pushed open the pharmacy door, more broken glass crunching under foot and a small bell on the door frame above rang as he did.
Something groaned loudly and moved in the back, knocking over something as it did. Without the artificial light, everything back from the windows and ambient sunlight was complexly dark. Kohta cursed and flicked on his weapon light, a harsh cone of white light illuminated the musty darkness, striking bright specs from the dust in the musty air. He panned around the store before he caught movement on the floor behind one of the isles.
A crawler – one of them that had lost the use of its legs - was emerging from behind one of the isles. This one was a male dressed in the white tunic of a pharmacy employee; a nametag still pinned to his left breast. As it got closer, Kohta could see clearly see its legs were broken. Perhaps he'd refused to let whoever had thrown the polisher through the window in and they'd broken his legs for the trouble? Not that it mattered. Kohta double-tapped it through the head and the corpse went as silent and still as the rest… though he swore he could still hear something through the ringing in his ears...
He waited and listened, his tinnitus faded and he heard it… chewing. It was muffled, and coming from the back area. Kotha thought about it for a moment, but knew if he was going to look for what he needed in peace, he needed to clear the store first – and there might be more stuff in the back he could use. He stepped over the crawler's corpse and headed for the door behind the counter, checking the corners and sweeping the isles as he did until he got to the door. He pressed his ear against the door. One of them was definitely in there, but only one, and it was feeding. Maybe being more interested in its meal and the walls partially insulating the noise of the gunfire had been why it hadn't come out. Or maybe it just hadn't heard him. In any case, Kohta couldn't leave it in there and needed to see what was in the back – Shizuka would be interested in what meds were here at least.
He tried the door, it wasn't locked. Taking a deep breath, he turned the handle and shouldered the door open, sweeping the room with his weapon light. It was a store room, even darker and mustier than the front had been, and was packed with floor-to-ceiling metal shelves that, though not full, were far more stocked than the ones out front – packed with brown packaging boxes filled with various serial numbers on them that meant nothing to Kohta and he didn't have time to investigate yet. The sound of snarling muffled by snacking was far more audible now. His light fell on an infected against the back wall, kneeling over something fleshy that it was ripping bloody chunks from. It looked up from its meal, it was a woman, maybe Kohta's age, and dressed in the same type of ruined uniform that the crawler had been. Hirano shot it twice, and it slumped to the floor dead.
Despite it certainly being dead, there was more of its brain on the back wall than must've been left in its head, Kohta could still hear the sound of breathing. It was laboured and, despite something telling him he didn't want to know, he moved closer, looking down at the dead woman briefly, before his eyes fell on its snack.
It was a dog; a big, old, black Labrador. And it was still alive, though that was worse than if it hadn't been. The poor dog's leg was clearly broken, and its spine might have been from the angle it was lying at, to say nothing of its opened flank that the woman had been feeding on. Yet somehow, its chest continued to rise and fall slightly with laboured breathing. Kohta sighed, he couldn't leave the poor creature like this. He knelt down next to the dog, he raised a hand to try and pet it, but it gave a poor excuse for a snarl in defiance. Kohta sighed, and carefully aimed the muzzle against the side of the dog's head, and put the poor dog out of its misery.
Somehow, pulling that trigger once was harder than the other twelve times he'd fired since entering the mall.
Kohta buried that thought. He'd done the kind thing and he had work to do. He rummaged through one of his pockets and produced a flashlight. He turned it on and killed the weapon light before returning the weapon to its holster. The handheld wasn't as bright as the Surefire, but equally, he wanted to be able to look around without pointing his weapon at everything.
It turned out that the EMP hadn't fried every electrical device; only the ones that had an active electrical current running through it, meaning that if it has been switched off, the electrical device was fine. They'd discovered this when they'd stopped to rest in a house a week or so ago when, while searching for supplies, Shizuka had found a marital aide in a bedside drawer. She'd then proceeded to press the button and it started working, something which she then proceeded to show them all… Later, and on a hunch, Hirano checked the red dot sights on their weapons. The M1As was dead; it had been switched on when the EMP hit, but once they'd found the right type of battery it was back in business. The MP5 wasn't even damaged, it had just been switched off the whole time and they'd assumed it was dead because they'd found it after the EMP. Saya had had a meltdown when they found out.
He scoffed in amusement at the memory before getting back to work and started looking through the boxes. The first one he'd looked in proved to contain flossing tape; useful but not what he was looking for. He kept searching and before long he found the first thing he was looking for.
It had been a few months since the start of the outbreak and the weather was beginning to get colder. Be that because of a high atmosphere nuclear blast, the seasons, or a combination of both, Kohta couldn't say. But what he did know was that Alice had developed a nasty cough over the last few days, which they all hoped was just a cold. Hopefully, a pack of throat lozenges, a box of which he'd just found, for her to go at would stave off the worst of it. He unslung his backpack and shoved a few fistfuls inside before moving on.
After another minute or so of searching, he found the second item among a section of boxes which seemed to be dedicated to the 'female hygiene' section of the store. It hadn't escaped his notice that out of eleven human members of their group, seven were women of childbearing age, and Kohta had paid enough attention in health class to know what that meant every month. He wasn't rude or stupid enough to ask if their cycles had lined up yet or when abouts they were, but he did know that a couple of packs of period pads would go down well when it happened. He also made a mental note to grab some chocolate if he could find some…
Now, if he were organising the storage for a pharmacy, he wouldn't keep the last item on his mental list too far from the female hygiene section. Apparently, whoever packed the store room, maybe the Crawler or Snacker, was of the same mind because he found a box of pregnancy tests less than a minute later. It was almost an open secret that Saeko and Takashi were sleeping together, quite when they'd started no one was sure but they had been for at least a month or so now. What he wasn't sure that anyone else had noticed was that last week, when they'd been BBQing some rabbits they'd caught, Saeko had been nauseous over the smell. And that last night, when he'd been on sentry in the early morning hours, he'd seen her sneaking off to the toilet and been violently sick. Again, he'd paid enough attention in health class to recognise food aversion and morning sickness as symptoms of pregnancy. They could be something else entirely of course – maybe she had a stomach bug or a particular aversion to BBQed bunny - but it might not be. So, he shoved a single test in his bag.
His bounty collected, Kohta zipped up his bag and put it on his back and started back towards the entrance. Just as he exited the back room and turned to close the door behind him, the doorbell rang.
Kohta turned towards the door, he could hear one of them had entered the store but he couldn't get eyes on it because of the isles. He ran behind the counter to see and sure enough, one of them – a middle-aged woman dressed like a sales rep having a midlife crisis – had stumbled into the store and was halfway between him and the door. He drew his pistol, belated realizing that he still had the damn flashlight in his left hand. Putting his left wrist under his right to support the pistol, he fired twice. The first round hit her square in the chest, about where the heart should've been, the second went high and right, shattering the undamaged storefront window as it passed through it. She staggered from him but kept coming, making more noise now for having identified its prey. To add insult to injury, the pistol's slide was locked back; empty magazine.
In one fluid motion, Kohta swore, dropped the flashlight from his left hand, and reached for a fresh one at his belt while pressing the magazine release and flicking the Glock to one side with his right. The spent magazine fell away and he slapped a fresh one in to replace it. He dropped the slide and, this time taking a two-handed grip, fired once. This time he caught her with a clean headshot and she went down, the glass in the pharmacy door shattering as the round and brain matter went through it.
Kohta took a breath. He wouldn't have the advantage of the doorbell next time. Maybe coming on a scouting run alone hadn't been such a good idea. He'd been in the mall for about ten minutes now and fired sixteen rounds. Enclosed area or not, that was a lot of noise in not a lot of time. He had what he needed, now was a good time to go.
He stooped to grab the empty magazine and flashlight, clicking the latter off as he shoved them both into his jacket pocket before vaulting over the counter and staring for the door at a jog. He jumped over the dropped saleswoman and through the shattered door, managing to miss catching himself on what was left of the glass by millimetres. Back in the atrium, he looked around, there were a few more of them around, a few had appeared from other stores and a few crowded the balcony rail on the upper level. But there weren't many. If he came back with the group tomorrow, they'd be able to clear this place. Now to get back and report.
He took off at a trot back towards the doorway he came in, half wondering if he could block it with something and then climb over. Maybe a movable sign or a sofa from the furniture store? He was just considering this when he jogged past a map of the mall, one that showed the mall's layout and names of the stores within. May as well go back with at least a vague idea of what else was in the mall and where, so he stopped and doubled back briefly. He was just about to take off again when he recognised one of the store names on the second floor. He looked at it again to be sure, and he smiled.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me!"
A/N: Well, here we are again.
*Edit: There will be a second, possibly a third chapter to this story, mainly based on writing prompts and thoughts I've had. Hence why I changed the numbers Kohta recalls in the group. 1/12/22*
While I'm not going to be embarking on any new full-length stories any time soon, I fancied writing a few one-shots. So I looked up some prompts online and picked one. Might do a few others that follow in the same vein, but this is just for a bit of fun really.
My thanks to my beta reader Draks38 for the quick turn around.
If you like what you see, drop me a review and give me it a Follow/Favourite.
Take care, Stay dry, Drink water, And I'll catch you next time.
TheShreddedSnorlax