Chapter 9: Turn Around

I wasn't dead yet. My eyes were shut, and I was hesitant to open them. I could feel someone was tending to my wounds. As I peeked to look around, I found that my coworkers were gathered around me. To my side was a boy, Parker, who worked a register up front. He was stitching my arm.

"What the hell," I said as I sat up.

"You should take it easy, you lost a lot of blood," Parker said as he finished my stitches.

"Where did you learn to do that," I asked.

"I was in medical school before the world ended," he said.

"You were going to be a doctor?"

"I was going to be a nurse," he corrected me.

"Oh," I said unenthusiastically.

I searched the floor around me for the whistle Shawn lent me. I couldn't find it.

"Where's my whistle?" I exclaimed.

"You mean your rape whistle," Parker joked.

"It's not a rape whistle."

"Then why do you have a whistle?"

"God damn it, Parker, just give me the whistle!"

He tossed it to me, and I finally got back to my feet. He stopped my bleeding, but my shoulder hurt like hell. That was my swinging arm. As I took further stock of the situation, I noticed someone took the time to change my shirt. I was missing my bra, but it wasn't worth making a fuss over while the store was in danger.

"Why are you helping me now," I asked.

"They killed all the guys in Frozen, and the girls in Floral," Parker told me.

He seemed to be the only one willing to speak to me directly. Everyone else stood behind him.

"So what? You're scared now?"

"You went out into the wasteland and brought back zombies. You got past the bike aisle. Shawn won't save us," Parker pleaded.

"And you think I will?"

"We'll do whatever you say, but we can't win without you," he said.

They only saved me so I could rescue them. If that wasn't human nature, nothing was. They must not have known Shawn sent me on a suicide mission to handle the intruders; otherwise they might have left me to do the job alone. Still, I couldn't count more than 20 people in the break room at the time. If those were the last of our numbers, we weren't looking too good. Half of them were middle-aged men and women approaching senior citizenship, while the rest were teenagers. At least with Shawn's whistle, we had an edge, but I had to take charge if I wanted the store to stand a chance.

"We need guns," I said.

I saw everyone in the room take a breath of relief at the realization that I agreed to help. A lot of them weren't going to make it. Susan in HR was pushing 70; her old ass wasn't about to make it through a war.

"Shawn has the key to the ammo locker," Parker informed me.

"We need weapons. Get knives from Alick in Meat and Seafood, and whatever gardening tools you can find from Home and Garden," I said.

Speaking of Alick, he wasn't in the break room with everyone else. Out of everyone, the Russian was probably our most capable fighter. If he was already dead, then we were in worse trouble than I thought.

"You want us to go back downstairs?" Asked someone in-crowd.

"We can't stay up here forever. Whoever is down there is only hiding because they think they're outnumbered. If they figure out we're all up here, there won't be anything stopping them from ambushing us," I said.

"You know what your doing," Parker praised me.

My ex was a hardcore gamer. He picked a console over me, but not before running me off with game statistics and kill counts.

I sent a team of two over to Meat and Seafood and a group of 4 to Home and Garden. We had to figure out where the raiders were hiding, so I sent a team of our five youngest to check around the store. If they ran into trouble, I figured they'd have better luck getting away than someone like Susan. The remaining 9 of my coworkers stayed in the break room. I took Parker and the whistle with me downstairs. Shawn made it seem like his pets couldn't lose, so I planned to test them out on the first raider to cross my path.

"Do you really think this is a good idea, I don't even have a weapon yet," Parker complained.

"You'll be fine," I said.

"Can't I at least use your hammer?"

"No! Only I get to use Mr.SmashMouth."

I and that hammer had been through too much to let anyone touch it.

"Right," Parker said, passive-aggressively.

We were checking the freezer aisles. I knew those long lines of freezers were the perfect hiding place as long as you had a jacket. Plus, I was hungry as shit, and I wanted to know if we still had ice cream. All we had left was food no one liked to eat, not even during the end of the world when food was scarce.

"I don't like this," Parker whined.

The nurse was not making a good sidekick. Alick was much better, as he brought his own weapons.

"No one likes tofu," I said.

We were near the end of the aisle when a freezer door ahead of us swung open. It was dramatic and startling. Parker jumped behind me, and I got my whistle ready. We stutter-stepped our way closer, but before we could pass the door to look inside, a woman in a pink Eskimo jacket jumped out. She pointed a crossbow at my head but didn't fire.

"Saundra!" I exclaimed as I recognized the scavenger as one of my oldest friends from back in high school.

"Faith!" She said as she lowered her weapon.

"Bitch, what are you doing in my store," I said.

"This is your store?!" She asked.

"I told you I worked down the street from the strip," I said.

She looked good, and that jacket was apocalypse fresh. Still, she had a crossbow. I made the mistake of glancing down at it, and she raised it back to eye level in response.

"So... you're trying to run us out?" I said.

"Its nothing personal, me and my people have been looking for a place to rebuild, but we can't do shit with a demon in charge," she said.

"I get that, but why try to kill me?"

"You work for him," She said, accusing me.

"I don't work for him," I said.

"Bitch?"

"Ok, I work for him, but it's not like that."

"Right, right, and this ain't what it looks like either," she said.

She hesitated before pulling the trigger, and that's all I needed to duck out of the way. I couldn't say the same for Parker.

"Fuck!" The nurse cried out as an arrow nearly took his head off.

He jumped to catch Saundra before she could reload. I started to use the whistle, but Parker had her under control. He took her weapon and turned it on her. Of course, it was still unloaded, but Saundra's dumb ass was too scared to move after being disarmed.

"How many of you are there," I asked as I held the head of my hammer under her chin.

"Faith, your my girl, don't do this," she begged.

I rolled my eyes.

"Bitch, please. How many of you are there," I repeated myself.

"6, there are 6 of us," she said.

"How did you kill so many people with only 6," Parker asked as he waved the crossbow around like it would do something had he pulled the empty trigger.

"Our leader, he killed a demon and got its powers," she answered.

"He did what now?" Parker and I both questioned.