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In the bright light of a windy summer day, three figures walk through a narrow side street. The figure in green leads the way, equipped with a heavy duty backpack, a metal bat, and a cautious eye. He keeps a steady and quiet pace, the two other men walking in tandem just a bit behind him. For all of this man's cautiousness towards the empty streets ahead and around him, all chances of this trio being sneaky is being completely blown by the argument going on between the man with the red headband and the man with glasses that were probably just a few times too large.
"We are not raiding a 7/11 again, Keralis! There's nothing there! There's never anything there! Except your stupid scratch cards!" He gestures to a pocket on Keralis' backpack, still in the midst of his rant as the wide-eyed man tries to interrupt.
"Bubbles, there could be suppl-"
"In the 7/11? There's gonna be valuable supplies in the gas station, 8 months into the apocalypse?" He throws his hands up, seemingly exasperated. "Keralis, we can live off of expired Twix bars just as much as you can redeem your winning lottery numbers right now."
There is a beat of silence as Keralis blinks in Bdubs direction.
And then another.
And then-
"I have won an awful lot of times thoug-"
"WELL CONGRATULATIONS MR. BIG WINNER, I'M SURE THE HIGH LIFE IS GONNA BE JUST GREAT-"
"Shhh." The man in front held up a fist and hissed out a shush, and all noise stopped, the trio freezing right at the edge of the small side street. The frustration from Bdubs face drains, replaced with a practiced calm, and Keralis' lackadaisical mood dissipates, both of them placing a hand on their weapons as the trio pressed against the side wall of the nearest building.
"Xisuma, what're we dealing with?" Bdubs whispers, shuffling closer and attempting to peer around Xisuma to look at the open street. Xisuma waves the group back a bit, pointing down the street further away. With a bit more shuffling, quieter than any of them had been for the last ten minutes, they backed up away from the exit of this side street, far enough that Xisuma felt comfortable enough to step into the center of the street to face the other two and speak.
"We're looking at a group of seven of them, though we somehow managed not to be noticed by any yet." He says, making deliberate eye contact with the both of them.
Bdubs at least tries to look a little ashamed, while Keralis just shrugs with a slight smile on his face.
"Sorry Shishwammy." He says, not looking that sorry. "I do still think 7/11 is a good option. But not if we have to go through seven of the creepy crawlers to make our way to it."
"We weren't trying to go to the 7/11 that way," Bdubs says with a sigh. "We were trying to get to the grocery store the weiro with the eye thing told us about."
"We still could have stopped at 7/11." Keralis says.
"Well, fortunately, now we can't," says Xisuma, breaking into the conversation before it has the chance to become something loud and unruly again. "There's a pack of seven zombies patrolling the main street outside the grocery store, so our options are to try and outrun all of them across a city none of us really know that well, try fight them as we are now, or hit up somewhere with better gear before going anywhere deeper into the city. My vote is on the last one, because I think I saw some kind of sporting goods store back the way we came."
"No objections here," says Bdubs.
"I agree with Shishwammy, but only if I can have any scratch cards we find there," Keralis says.
"You seriously have an addiction, dude." Bdubs loosens the grip on the beat-up crowbar he has had at the ready since Xisuma stopped them, and looks over at Keralis with an exasperated but still somewhat fond look as the wide-eyed man snickers. "Let's get going, X, lead the way."
"Right then. I think it was over this way..." Xisuma begins walking towards the way they came from, Keralis and Bdubs following close behind.
After twenty minutes of backtracking, the pair of them resume casual conversation, albeit this time in a lower tone. Xisuma pitches in every once in a while, but for the most part he's keeping his eyes on the streets ahead of them. Hordes don't typically sneak around, preferring to move around occupied areas in shambling groups, but there had been a few close enough calls in the last city to warrant a cautious eye.
"So, shopping list." Bdubs says as the three of them cross the street, the electric name of the sporting goods store somehow still flickering on and off. "Sharper axes, more medical stuff and maybe we can score a decent sleeping bag for once?"
Keralis nods solemnly. "I want a green one."
Bdubs snorts, hoisting his crowbar off of its place on his belt to rest behind his head. "Let's hope they have green, then."
Xisuma mimics Bdubs drawn weapon, stepping towards the doors as he speaks. "We'll do a quick perimeter of the outside of the store, then just scavenge for whatever we can g-" The doors retract open automatically, and X actually jumps back with a yelp. "Jeez, I was not expecting that at all."
"Careful, it might bite." Bdubs chuckles as he quickly steps inside through the doors. Xisuma sheepishly follows, giving the door a quick glare. Keralis takes up the back, hands in his pockets, looking around wide-eyed.
The shelves are tall, all of them almost reaching the roof of this warehouse style building. They're packed with boxes upon boxes of whatever nature conquering gear that you could think of, and a smile spreads across Keralis' face as he envisions the kind of bunker someone could make with all of these goodies. He doesn't get to admire everything for too long however, pulled along the perimeter of the building to ensure that there were probably no lurking hordes. They tended to not gather in random untouched stores, but you never knew with these creepy crawlers. Keralis is more willing to get dragged around in a circle by his two friends than he is to get jumped by dead people, so he only tunes out a little bit as Xisuma and Bdubs do their standard safety signals and codewords. He's half convinced at this point that Bdubs doesn't even really understand half the hand sign signals X does, and has just been relying on context clues to figure it out. No matter to him, he will just walk when they're walking and stop when they're stopping.
Speaking of stopping, they finally finish sweeping the perimeter and end up back near the entrance. Keralis tunes back into reality.
"Alright, so, it seems clear and unlooted enough, though some of the bigger displays are completely empty for some reason," Xisuma says. "It’s probably still a good idea to just go aisle by aisle and get anything important."
"You're the boss, Shi-shwammy!" Keralis begins walking towards one of the first aisles without hesitation, causing both Bdubs and Xisuma to scramble after him in a few moments hesitation.
The trio begin their trek from aisle to aisle, taking a slower pace in order to look over everything left. Keralis ignores most of Bdubs and Xisuma’s serious supply gathering, scanning the aisles for his own nefarious purposes. It takes about 20 minutes to get through the first half of the store, but eventually Keralis is able to get to his prize. The swimming equipment section. With a grin on his face, he waits for X and Bdubs to begin moving down the aisle to strike. He slides his weapon off of the shelf, tiptoes up to behind the two debating the usefulness of snorkeling equipment, and-
THWACK
“OH GOD!”
“WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!”
Keralis cackles behind the two of them, pool noodle gripped in both his hands. Both of them have spun around with their weapons out, only to find the culprit grinning like a madman.
After a few seconds of stunned silence, Xisuma begins laughing alongside the wide-eyed man. “Keralis, I can’t believe,” He devolves deeper into laughter, unable to complete his sentence.
Bdubs throws his hands up in the air and turns around to begin walking down the aisle. “That’s it! That’s it! I’m going to go live with the zombies! At least I won’t die of a heart attack there!” Despite his harsh words, he only takes a few steps away before joining the impromptu laughing fit, his hand going to the bridge of his nose. “You are going to be the death of me, Keralis. Or the other way round. I coulda started swinging.”
“I would have just dodged.”
“No way, you could not have dodged that fast.” Xisuma says, securing his bat to his belt once again.
“Have more faith in me, Shi-shwammy. I can dodge a crowbar.” He grins, stuffing the pool noodle back into its place on the shelf.
As he did so, there was a large crash from what couldn’t be more than an aisle over. Bdubs snapped his mouth shut from where he was planning to retort, looking first to Keralis, then the direction of the noise. The mood darkened, Xisuma moving to press himself up against the edge of one of the shelving units and beginning to move closer to where the noise occurred.
The trio fell into formation quickly, Bdubs taking the rear. Keralis held his bat loosely in his hands, just trying his best to be quiet and quick. They make their way to the edge of the aisle, and Xisuma lets out a small gasp at something Keralis can’t fully see.
“But that doesn’t… make any sense?” X mumbles under his breath. “He was in the last city, why would he..”
“X, what are you talking about?” Bdubs leans forward around Keralis, peeking out to the aisle next to them. “Oh snap, that’s a person up there. You saying you know him?”
Keralis joins the scooby-doo esque stack of people looking around the aisle corner, and sees a man in a bright red shirt sitting on top of a shelf, facing away from the three of them. He is swinging his feet against the boxes below him, and a broken device on the floor beneath him reveals itself to probably be what made the crashing sound.
Despite all the noise the three of them have been making, he doesn’t seem to have noticed them yet. Keralis doesn’t trust this, doesn’t trust this man who has appeared out of nowhere and gives off an energy that feels sickly. All he can see is the red shirt and head of brown hair, the few boxes around him obscuring any skin that would be shown. It was too convenient to be an accident, everything arranged so perfectly and out of sight. Everything about this situation screams that something is about to go wrong, despite nothing having happened yet. Keralis reaches out to tap X’s shoulder, to tell him this, but Xisuma is already moving forward towards the man.
“Ren? Ren, is that you buddy?” Xisuma takes a few tentative steps towards the figure, a few yards into the next aisle, and then everything goes wrong at once.
The figure on top of the aisle spins around with a terrifyingly sharp-toothed grin, grabs a corner of the aisle shelf with a terrifyingly gray hand and pushes , the shelf letting out an ear piercing crack as boxes begin to slide. The entire contents of the shelves begin collapsing forward, and as if he orchestrated this, the zombified Ren pushes off of the top of the aisle, jumping to safety on the aisle shelf behind him.
Box after heavy box of merchandise begin falling off of the shelves in quick succession, focused in the exact area X is standing. Xisuma holds eye contact with Ren for a few seconds too long, a tea-kettle sized box falling directly off the shelf onto his head, knocking him flat before he even got to get any words out. Within seconds, his body is obscured by the boxes raining down, the shelves emptying completely.
Keralis was still following after Xisuma when the avalanche began, so he’s a few feet into the aisle as heavy boxes begin hitting the ground with injury-inducing force around him. He attempts to step backwards, being narrowly missed by an entire mini-grill hitting the ground and shattering completely behind him
“KERALIS!” Bdubs shouts as he takes hold of Keralis arm, yanking him backwards into safety with such force that Keralis is sure that it’s going to bruise. He’ll take that over being crushed. The entire aisle shelf starts leaning inwards with a thunderous metal creak.
Keralis takes only a second to breath before taking another step forward back towards the aisle. “Bubbles, we have to get him out of there-”
The aisle shelf fully collapses downwards, almost flat against the ground if not for the mass amounts of debris. Somewhere in there, Xisuma is buried beneath cardboard and metal, and he’s at the very least unconscious. Keralis doesn’t want to consider the worst case scenario until he’s faced with it, so he’ll run with the assumption that one of his best friends isn’t dead meat, thank you very much. He steps forward, moving one of the boxes out of the way. And then another. Bdubs, for some reason, has gone completely still, knuckles white on his crowbar. He’s not helping. Why isn’t he helping? His friend is unconscious. They need to get him out. There’s no time for standing around.
“Keralis.”
“He wasn’t that far in, I don’t think.”
“Keralis, I hear something.”
“We just have to drag him out of here, and then we can go check out whatever you hear, Bubbles.” Keralis moves another box. He’s trying to get further underneath the aisle shelving unit now, the heavy metal frame making it almost impossible to lift up enough.
“You aren’t paying attention, Keralis!” Bdubs grabs onto Keralis arm again, lightly this time, and moves him away from the boxes to face him. His face is more wide-eyed than Keralis’ typically is. “I think there’s a horde near the entrance. And the dude who pushed the shelves on us went in that direction . I think he’s leading them back to us.”
Keralis looks at the pile of boxes where Xisuma is unconscious, then back to Bdubs. He frowns deeply. “You’re saying we leave him?”
“We have to move NOW,” Bdubs says. “We’ll circle back to get him, but this Ren dude is forcing our hand.”
The moan and groan of the horde becomes audible as Bdubs says that, and Keralis makes up his mind. “Shi-shwammy, we’ll be right back, I promise.” He readies his bat, and nods at Bdubs.
“We’ll draw them out of the store, and then come back for him. Let’s go. He’ll have to be fine for a few minutes,” Bdubs takes off into a sprint towards the front of the store, followed close behind by Keralis.
At the entrance, a horde of seven grey-skinned, sharp-toothed zombies are loping around. None of them are in particularly good condition, but they all seemingly move with purpose, towards the back of the store where all the noise just occured. As Bdubs and Keralis make their run towards the exit, they turn together as one towards them.
With rekindled purpose, the horde breaks into its own breakneck pace, slower than any human could run but with twice as much determination. They want the meat that just passed them by, and so they go after it, following the duo out of the exit.
Bdubs and Keralis begin their mad dash out into the city streets, chased by a horde of flesh-eaters.
And inside the store, two individuals remained.
Without a heartbeat between them.