“Well what the hell were you thinking, leaving your bedroom window open in November?”
“I needed to get back into the house, didn’t I?”
“Well, how would I know you snuck out? Mom was up, getting a glass of water in the kitchen, I told her your bedroom window was open.”
“Do you have any idea how much she scared me when I got back in and turned on the light and she was sitting at my desk?”
“Oh I bet that was pretty scary,” Gary said empathizing with me.
“If I was any older, I probably would have had a heart attack.”
“If you were any older you wouldn’t have had to sneak out.”
“Boys,” Mrs. Deneaux said. “This is really fascinating, but I have a cigarette with my lip marks on it that I’m dying to get back to.”
The thought of anything with Deneaux’s lip marks on it gave me the shudders, apparently Gary too because he went to the end of the aisle without any further delay.
“Nothing up here!” he yelled.
“I thought you said he was in the military?” Brian asked.
“Air Force,” I told him.
“Oh,” Brian answered.
“BT? Can you, Paul and D stay here?”
“You got it, Mike, but this place does not feel right. I think we need to get going sooner, rather than later.”
“Understood, we’ll make this quick.”
“What could possibly make such a strapping young man as yourself afraid?” Mrs. Deneaux asked BT.
“You, for starters,” he answered, looking over her head for any signs of trouble.
“I’m going outside to finish my cigarette.”
“Shit,” Brian murmured as we looked in the tool section.
“What are you looking for? I can help,” I told him.
“Bolt cutters,” he told me almost simultaneously with Gary’s words.
“Movement!” Gary shouted.
“I am so sick of zombies,” I said aloud, but not really directed to Brian. My next sentence was, though. “You want to hear something sick?” I asked him.
“Not really, I’d like to get the bolt cutters and get the hell out of here.”
I ignored his entreaty completely. “I secretly wished something like this would happen. Yeah.” I continued when he looked over at me strangely. “I was sick of my boring ass life and my shitty job. It all seemed so pointless back then. I went to work, came home, ate dinner, said about five words to each of my kids, ten to my wife, went to bed, and then did the same thing the very next day. I mean, I don’t know if I was exactly thinking of a zombie invasion. A potential alien takeover or perhaps Chinese troops making a beach head in California would have worked just as well. I don’t know. I really didn’t care what the calamity was as long as my family was safe and I got out of my rut.”
“Couldn’t you have maybe hoped to win the lottery?” Brian asked me as he turned over a tool box laying on the floor.
“Maybe, but that seemed so farfetched.”
“More so than the world being overwrought with zombies and aliens?”
I noted that he didn’t discuss the Chinese because that was truly a potential threat. Hadn’t thought much about China since this crap started, but they must have close to a billion zombies over there by now. That was a mind-boggling number. I shrugged my shoulders.
“Two maybe three somethings coming this way, still can’t tell what they are though!” Gary shouted. He was backing down the aisle towards us.
“Probably safe to say if they aren’t talking, we know what we’re dealing with,” Paul answered as he went back to the front door to make sure our avenue of retreat wasn’t sealed off.
A shot fired from the top of our aisle.
“Did you get it?” I asked Gary as he came back to us.
“No, I was firing a warning shot.”
“Um, Gary we talked about this. Zombies don’t traditionally care about those kinds of things.”
“I wasn’t sure, I couldn’t see them through the aisles. You sure Glenn didn’t just maybe drop you out of the ranger station window that day at Blue Hills?”
I got the shivers just thinking about it. “There they are,” I said flatly, pointing to three of the mottliest crew of Home Depot workers to ever shamble along. They were a mess--torn, blood-stained clothes, at least two had suffered some sort of gunfire damage. The third, an old man of about eighty, looked like he had a foot and a half in the grave before this started. Surprisingly, the only things that were relatively intact on any of them were their bright orange aprons. “You can ask them if they’ve seen any bolt cutters,” I told Brian.
He looked over to the zombies and then at me. “I wonder if I can still catch up with Alex. He seemed to have his shit together.”
“Only if you take Deneaux,” I told him as I put my pop gun to my shoulder.