Decay: A Zombie Story by Joseph Dumas Page A

to realize that I was more nervous that the pumps wouldn’t work or would be empty than I was about the threat of infection. We had gotten away from the infected before, we could do it again.
    Mike finally stepped out of the store and into the empty lot. I could still see dark marks of blood stained pavement where the corpses were before we moved them. The spots looked more like dirt or oil stains at this point, but it was still quite disturbing to think of what was actually there.
    Jen shut and locked the door behind us. She and Tara would wait by the window until we returned. Mike and I looked back at them for a moment—then to each other. Then, we began pushing our shopping carts through the lot; they were loud on the rough pavement. I didn’t think about this and definitely became a little nervous that the undead would surely be able to hear us. Luckily, the road was much smoother than the old pavement at Fix-It and made them a little quieter.
    As we reached the road, the walkie-talkie beeped and Jen’s voice came through the light static ambience. “Good luck,” she said. I looked back at the store and they were staring at us through the window. I simply gave them a thumb’s up and kept going.
    “Do you think we’ll come across any of them?” Mike asked.
    “Probably,” I said. “But they’re slow. Hopefully we can avoid any close combat.”
    Mike nodded and asked, “You nervous?”
    I shrugged. “Not as much as I thought I’d be. I’m just crossing my fingers that we won’t have any problems actually getting the gas.”
    “We may have to turn on the power depending upon if the attendant shut it off before this all happened.”
    “Do you know how?” I asked.
    “I’ve never done it before,” Mike explained. “But we can figure it out.”
    We continued down the road which wasn’t too bad looking. A couple of cars were abandoned along the side, one had its windshield broken and the inside was stained with blood. However, there was no sign of an occupant. There was no sign of any infected as far as we could see on the road.
    However, we did pass a vacuum service shop where we witnessed a male and female with employee shirts and nametags on, scraping and pounding against the blood stained front window. They appeared to have been locked in when they became infected. At this point, it was safe to say that these too would spend the rest of their existence—or undead existence—inside that shop, trying to get out.
    As we passed the vacuum repair shop, Mike looked at me and said, “Well, that sucks.”
    After a moment, I started to chuckle at the terrible joke, as did Mike. It was then that I realized how desensitized we had become and that two weeks ago, I would’ve thought that was a terrible thing to say. I felt that Mike was thinking the same thing.
    We didn’t dwell too much on it and continued moving. The road we were walking on soon turned into a hill for a while, so it was getting a little tiring pushing the carts. We tried not to stop as I told Mike that the gas station was only a little further after we reached the top of the hill.
    Eventually, we reached the top of the hill and could barely see the sign for the gas station off in the distance. We stopped for a moment and I decided to try the walkie to let Jen and Tara know of our position.
    I held down the button for a moment and said, “Hey, guys.”
    I waited for a moment until Jen’s voice came back and said, “Peter?”
    “We’re almost at the gas station,” I said. “Things have been pretty quiet.”
    As I said this, I should’ve knocked on wood because all of a sudden, a pair of undead came stumbling from between two buildings.
    One knocked over a trash can as it lunged towards us. Luckily the trash can caused it to trip and gave us an opportunity to move away from them. We backed away from them, keeping the shopping carts in front of us, hoping we might be able to push them away if needed.
    The other undead individual