Omega Days (Volume 1) - By John L. Campbell Page 0,74

the looted pharmacy, flashlights leading the way. They passed rows of shelves swept onto the floor, their feet shuffling through everything from hairbrushes to headache remedies to packages of adult diapers. The actual drug counter would be at the rear of the store.

Alden had one of the gangbanger automatics in his rear waistband, and he carried a fireplace poker. Xavier’s Ak-47 was slung, and he gripped a long, heavy crowbar. The handheld weapons were best, they had discovered, especially in close quarters. Several days ago both Xavier and Pulaski used their firearms on a pair of ghouls they came across while looting a clothing store. The shotgun sounded like a cannon, and the AK was like a crack of thunder flowing a close lightning strike. The noise drew the dead from every direction, and the group had been forced to run, narrowly getting out the back door and down an alley.

“It’s going to be a mess back there,” Alden warned. “I’ll have to pick through it.”

“Tell me what you need and I’ll help you.”

Alden did; Coreg, Plavix, Coumadin, Digoxin, Lisinopril. “Don’t worry about milligrams, most of them are standardized and I can break tablets if I have to. I’ll take what I can get.”

Pulaski complained about the time it would take to do this, but they had put it off for days, and Xavier informed him that Alden’s heart medicine was more important than Pulaski’s damned cigarettes. The priest was worried. Alden was pale most of the time, his breathing had become labored and he tired easily. The school teacher waved it off with a smile, but Xavier knew B.S. when he saw it and stayed close.

The back of the store was as bad as they expected. The steel gates had been pried open, the counter door kicked in. Cabinets were forced, presumably where the controlled substances had been kept locked away, and Xavier was willing to bet there wasn’t a single tablet of Oxy, Vicadin or Percocet to be found. The world was ending, but people still wanted to get high. The shelves where the medication once stood in ordered rows were empty. The floor, however, was a wall-to-wall jumble of white and brown plastic bottles.

They started searching.

Pulaski was up front watching the street, picking through debris and looking for smokes, while Tricia and Snake searched for food and water. He found half a dozen packs buried under the mess on the floor, none of them his brand, and shoved them into his pack. Flashlights deeper in the store showed him where the kids were, and more lights and rattling noises came from the back. He lit a smoke and leaned back against the cash register, watching out through the broken front windows with their mangled security gates, the shotgun cradled in his arms.

The street was clear for the moment, but that could change quickly. He blew smoke at the ceiling. They were going nowhere, spending entire days to move two blocks, hiding like rabbits afraid to cross the street. The dead were slow and clumsy, but still their little group crept along, jumping at every noise. Rabbits. It was bullshit, they should have been at the water by now, and they hadn’t even reached the highway or passed the Bay Bridge yet. Pulaski huffed smoke out through his nose and thought about Market Street.

“There’s no barrier,” Pulaski said. “We can cross here.”

Xavier shook his head. “We need to wait and watch.”

Market Street was a wide avenue running through most of the city, and it cross their direction of travel. It had been sealed off from the side street by a high barrier of posts, sandbags and barbed wire. Official notices bearing the hazmat symbol were attached to the barrier, announcing that attempts to leave the quarantine zone would be met with deadly force. The authorities had tried to seal off part of the city, rather than go through the trouble of evacuation.

It hadn’t worked.

The dead swarmed up and down Market on the other side of the barrier. Even if the group had been able to breach it, the dead would be waiting. The obstacle forced them to the southwest, down two more blocks. Both cross streets were blocked in the same way. Another day lost.

Sneaking down alleys, ducking into buildings to hold their breath and wait until a single corpse shuffled past, one which Pulaski could easily take out with the fire axe which hung from his pack, stopping so the school teacher could rest… It was bullshit,