The Dead Hunger Series: Books 1 through 5 by Eric A. Shelman Read Free Book Online Page B

again.  I pulled on the door handle, but it was locked.  Slinging the rifle over my shoulder, I put my cupped hands to the door, and peered in.  The fluorescent lights blazed, lighting up every aisle like daytime, but nobody was visible inside.
    At first glance, that is.  Then I saw it.  Near the entrance to aisle 5.  A foot on the floor sticking out of the row of merchandise.  I’m sure it was connected to a body, but I could only see the foot from outside.  I could see some blood by the foot, but not much.  I imagined there was much more near the source of the deadly wound – if the owner of the foot was indeed dead.  It didn’t move, so it was my conclusion that it was so.
    Now I scanned the rest of the store more carefully.  On the same wall as the entrance door, to my extreme right, was a middle aged woman who had apparently been pouring coins into the machine that tallies how much change you saved in your peanut butter jar over the last year, and gives you a receipt to convert that change into paper money.  She never got her receipt.  Her throat was ripped open, and she lay on her back.  Had it been just her throat, I might have been able to lie to myself and make up some other reason she was dead, but her eyes were . . . gone.  The two sockets had been torn at and – what?  hammered on ? – until the skull beneath cracked and pushed inward, and the two individual sockets joined together. 
    I turned and headed back to the Suburban and motioned to Gem to roll down the window fast.  She did.
    “Dead people inside.  I’m not comfortabl e leaving you out here.  This is getting sketchier by the minute.”
    “Babe, it got sketchy for me in Miami, but I know you’re just getting used to all of it.  Did you see anyone alive . . . or, well, moving?”
    I shook my head.
    “Then get what you need and hurry.  We’ll be fine.  Just do me a favor and check on your trailer cargo before you go back inside.  And if they have an electronics department, pick up some of those two-way radios.  They come in pairs, and tourists like to buy them.”
    “Are you sure you’ll be –“
    “Go,” she said, sternly.
    She rolled up the window again and showed me the Smith & Wesson.  She’d already put Trina back on the floor beneath the comforter again.
    I went to the trailer and reached down to check the tie-downs holding Jamie.  She-It was moaning now, a steady, low hum almost, seemingly vibrating the bundle.  If she was starving before, now she had to be near insatiable with hunger.  I felt like a kid who had found a turtle.  I had no idea how to feed it or what it would eat. 
    The truth was, subconsciously I knew what it would eat, but if that was how it was going to be, then my sister would die.  I would not be feeding her that.  Ever .
    Satisfied she was secure and harmless to the occupants of my truck, I ran back to the store entrance again.   I saw two flashlight beams in the distance about a quarter mile away, but they bobbed off in the opposite direction.  I had no idea what percentage of the population had succumbed to this sickness or whatever it was, but if it was just ten percent, it was still a huge problem.
    I reached the door, held Gem’s Uzi out in front of me and kicked it hard.  The latch snapped and I pulled it outward, swinging it open easily.  In Florida, all doors, either commercial or residential, pulled outward.  Hurricane force winds could easily blow doors in if not, so this was an ordinance.  From the outside, they’re all pulls.
    I stepped inside the store and swung the barrel of the rifle from side to side, moving toward the front of the store.  I went to the cashier’s counter which ran the entire length of that wall, from the side where the registers were located to the photo processing department on the far end.  Leaning over the counter and scanning the length, I saw nobody back there, either crouching there hiding, or dead.  I almost instinctively called