Raven's Hell - Jenika Snow Page 0,10

and the florescent bulbs were in shattered remains on the ground.

Some of the shelves were turned over, and empty boxes of food littered the ground, but there were some bent cans with missing labels amidst the rubble. Moving over to the cans, she picked them up, tried to tell what might be inside due to the labels gone, and said fuck it.

If it was edible, it didn’t matter what it was.

She moved over to a rack that had once held those little snack-sized bags of chips and grabbed a few that were on the ground. They were nothing but crushed up crumbs now, but she was fine with that too.

A bottle of water was what she spotted next, along with some hard candy, cough drops, and even a few partially open meat sticks.

She shoved all she could find in her pack, because these days there wasn’t anything edible that she didn’t like. She didn’t have a choice, not if she wanted to survive. She snagged up one melted and partially opened chocolate bar and even a travel-sized bottle of cheap vodka and placed them in her bag. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

She saw a comb and mirror across the floor by a cardboard cutout of one of the popular teen heartthrobs before all this happened. But the cutout was now leaning to the side, faded from the light that had gotten to it, covered in dirt and grime from the weather, and the smile on his face looked sad now.

Picking up the mirror and comb, she stared at her reflection, at the dirt that covered her face, the bags under her green eyes, and the way she changed so much.

How many young girls had come to this very spot before the contamination, taken a look at the pop star staring back at them with his perfect smile, and looked at themselves in the little colorful mirrors like Rebecca was doing right now?

Sighing heavily from exhaustion and wear, she took a few of the combs and mirrors and put them in the tote. And then as she turned over everything in the store, searched high and low, she found one small toothbrush sitting on a rusted-out shelf. A single roll of toilet paper was also a few feet away, rolled under a pile of smashed boxes, and the top layer covered in God knew what.

She was going back to her loft with more things than she thought she’d find, and it all sounded like nirvana at the moment. She could open one of these cans, heat up the contents with the few matches she had found, and enjoy a warm meal. She hadn’t known how good she had it until the little things in life were now a rarity.

A sound behind her had Rebecca spinning around and staring at a young woman. Well, she wasn’t a woman any longer, but a corpse with long, stringy blonde hair, lifeless, pale, almost white eyes, and dark coagulated blood seeping from every visible opening in her body.

She wore a pair of pants, ones that were tatters on her thin, skeletal body, and a tank top that showed the flesh hanging from her bones.

She’d been dead for a while, given the state of her decomposition. She was slowly shuffling toward Rebecca with her arms outstretched and her mouth open wide, and it was obvious she was starving. She was weak, and although she’d have enough strength to still go after fresh meat, this corpse was more of an easy target.

Ones that had eaten more recently were still slow as hell, but they also had a little bit of strength in them if they caught a person.

She held her knife tightly in her hand, set her bags down so they didn’t have her faltering in bringing this thing down, and waited for it to come closer. The infected tried to walk through one of the clear shelving units at first, and when that didn’t work and it finally fell to the side, she tripped forward. Righting herself and reaching out to Rebecca again, she made this nasty sound and finally lunged at her.

Rebecca fell backward, tripping over one of the end caps and landing on her ass. The woman corpse was on Rebecca seconds later. Rebecca struggled to get her arm free, as the coat sleeve was hooked on a piece of metal shelving.

Black goo slipped from the zombie’s mouth and landed on Rebecca’s coat, and then she finally heard the rip of her jacket tearing free