The Crossing: A Zombie Novella by Joe McKinney Read Free Book Online Page B

air filled with the thundering chorus of gunfire, Cardo was halfway to the back of the store.
    He pushed through the swinging doors and into the back hallway, his gun out and ready. He put his back to the wall and looked left, right—there was no one around. At the end of the hall, a door led to the alley behind the store. It was chained and padlocked shut. He could shoot the lock, but that might draw unwanted attention.
    The door to his left was labeled WOMEN. He wasn’t sure where MEN was, considered lying low in the ladies’ room but then decided that he needed to be higher. There was a two-way mirror located at the center of the store, between the meat display and the bank of coolers containing milk and juice.
    A door at the end of the hall led right. He pushed it open, revealed a staircase—eight steps leading up, a right turn, eight more steps.
    He opened the door at the top of the stairs, and one of Proust’s meathead grandsons turned and lifted the large gun in his small hands. Cardo looked right town the barrel. It bobbed and weaved. There was a puff of smoke, and in the close quarters the sound was like cannon fire. The bullet thrummed past Cardo’s right ear and slammed into the wall behind him. His hands took over, squeezed three rounds into the kid’s surprised face, pummeling it into some kind of spurting cubist mess. The kid’s body hit the ground, the misshapen sack that had been his head flopping forward onto his chest.
    “ Gah,” Cardo said, backing out of the small office and sliding down the wall, watching a sticky wad of what must have been brain matter roll slowly down the fabric of the boy’s Superman t-shirt. The dead boy’s hands twitched in his lap, and he pissed his pants.
    Cardo leaned sideways and vomited onto the top step, and continued to stare into the ruin of the kid’s head until the sight of it ceased to make sense.
    “ Stupid bastard,” Cardo screamed, looking at the gun in his hand and throwing it onto the floor as if it were something hot. He wasn’t sure who he was cursing—Proust, Proust’s dumb grandson, or himself.
    Downstairs, there were more gunshots. Someone screamed in pain, and the place sounded as if it were being ransacked. It quieted down eventually. He waited for the sound of people—alive or dead—finding their way into the hall and onto the stairs, but it never came.
    Cardo stood up, took off his uniform shirt, stepped into the small office, and used the shirt to cover the dead boy’s obliterated head. He picked up his gun, holstered it. The massive gun that Proust had left in the care of his twelve-year-old grandson lay on the floor between the boy’s splayed legs. Crouching, Cardo lifted it, wiped a spot of blood from the barrel onto his pants, and set the gun atop the desk placed before the window that looked down on the interior of the store.
    He dragged the kid’s remains into the hall, careful to not upset the placement of the shirt that concealed the damage that he’d done. He stepped into the small office, shut and locked the door.
    For two hours, he watched as a steady stream of Beistle residents filed into Proust’s Supermarket and picked the shelves clean. There were dead bodies everywhere, and not the walking kind. As far as he could tell, all of them were in about the same shape as the kid out on the landing.
    He reached for his radio and found that he had lost it somewhere along the way. He picked up the phone to confirm it was dead, and it was. There was a small television on the floor beneath the desk. He picked it up, set it atop the blotter, and plugged it in. The picture was a fuzzy mess, and no amount of adjusting the antenna made a difference, so he turned it off and sat staring into the store.
    By the third hour, the place was empty. A dead body wandered in, seemed to take the place in, and then backed out and dragged itself someplace else.
    There were bullets for Proust’s gun in one of the desk drawers. He stood up, replaced