A week or so later, Otoha and I were out and about like it was no big deal. The human brain’s ability to adapt could be downright frightening sometimes. My pre-apocalypse self felt like a completely different person, a distant memory of times long past. Or maybe I was just going cuckoo, who knows?
“C’mere,” Otoha said, waving me over.
We were on a mission to scavenge what we could from the local supermarket, which we’d entered via a busted-up sliding door. The loose shards of broken glass and empty cans haphazardly scattered across the floor served as a mini obstacle course of sorts; we had to carefully tiptoe around it all without making a whole lot of noise. Our rubber soles muffled our footsteps, but they were hardly a fail-safe in the event that one of us took a wrong step.
“This stench is something else,” I muttered, wrinkling my nose.
All the fresh produce was on the first floor, which had transformed into a breeding ground for disease. The wretched, malodorous bouquet was mostly composed of spoiled fruit and veggies, with a hint of rotten seafood. Most of the meats were packed up tight, so they weren’t able to join in on the fun.
As a result of breakthroughs in solar-powered technology in the last few years, many companies had finally been enticed to hop on the gravy train. The harder they fought for market dominance, the more solar panels were produced, and the resulting supply was far more than anyone had initially speculated. To put things into perspective, lower-middle-class households could reasonably afford to begin the transition to solar power, provided their energy consumption wasn’t anything out of the norm, hence why the electricity in my house never went out.
Certain businesses, like our current base of operations, could afford to make a full switch to eco-friendly energy without it weighing too heavily on their finances. Supermarkets, on the other hand, spent more money on power than any other operating expense, mostly because of the inefficiency of their cold-storage facilities and refrigerating equipment. Making the transition at this point in time wasn’t an economically viable move for them, to say the least.
“Up we go,” Otoha murmured, pointing to a flight of stairs.
Worst-case scenario, we could’ve taken the escalator—which was broken, of course—but the much-safer staircase was in perfect condition. It’d be too easy for us to lose our footing on an escalator, especially if we tried to hurry.
“Whoa there, cowboy.” I grabbed Otoha by the wrist, forcefully dragged her back behind cover, and whipped out my trusty pocket mirror.
I said “trusty,” but it was really just a plain old mirror framed in cheap plastic. I’d happened to pick it out among an endless sea of carbon copies we had lying around in the warehouse. It had a generous surface area and was easily expendable, which made my job a whole lot easier.
“What’re you doing?”
“Zombie-spotting the old-fashioned way.”
The path to the staircase was full of blind spots.
“With that thing?”
“It gets the job done.” I held out the mirror and gradually adjusted the angle so I could look around every nook and cranny.
“My FPS days weren’t for nothin’, baby.”
Funny how it took the literal collapse of human civilization for my FPS skill set to come in handy. Not that I’m complaining.
With a little time and patience, we could avoid running headfirst into that one zombie lurking right around the corner. We weren’t really in a rush anyway. I was really hoping this place would be zombie-free, but there were four of them lollygagging around by the back door right next to the staircase.
“Bingo.”
“How many?”
“A couple. We goin’ in guns blazing or what?” I unholstered my SAKURA M360J.
Otoha had been hesitant to hand the gun over to me at first, but she’d come around in the end. When she caved, she mumbled something about putting it in “better hands.” Naturally, I’d cleaned it inside and out just to be safe.
“The gun is our last resort. Got it?”
Hmph. What a spoilsport.
From this brief exchange, one might get the impression that Otoha was the levelheaded one here, keeping the trigger-happy lunatic in check at all times. I knew better, however; I’d seen her fidgeting with that shovel more than enough times, itching to bash in some skulls. She was better at suppressing her violent urges, but she certainly wasn’t free of them.
“They keep pacing back and forth for some reason.”
Something didn’t feel right. It was almost as if they were cycling through a predetermined set of actions, one of which was grabbing fruit off the shelf and immediately putting it back down.
“Notice the aprons? Those are employees.”
“Now that you mention it...” I hadn’t noticed the aprons at first because they were caked in multiple layers of blood, pus, dirt, and everything else imaginable.
“Seems like we’re dealing with a subtype that mimics past behavioral patterns.”
“What is this, an RPG?”
This was just some light banter between two partners in crime. I knew she wasn’t intentionally downplaying the situation; it was just her modus operandi. Who was I to judge the actions of other people?
“Jokes aside,” I continued, “are you saying they’re stocking the shelves and not just randomly picking stuff up and putting it down again?”
“Yup. They’re not stopping any time soon either. I say we take the escalator.”
Slinking from cover to cover, we reached the escalator and carefully made our way up the steps. The stench from the first floor permeated all the way up here, but it was leagues more tolerable.
Hallelujah.
We walked up to the canned food aisle and threw our backpacks on the ground. Otoha’s call to hunker down in the hardware store had been pure genius. Even though she insisted she was just mindlessly abiding by established movie tropes, we still had access to so much cool stuff, including these backpacks, as a direct result of her compendium of zombie knowledge. It was hard not to appreciate her existence on every possible level.