Last summer, I challenged some of my students to help me with some columns over the summer. They gave me the first and last lines of a potential fictional short story. My task was to take those lines and write the middle. It was a lot of fun, so I’ve asked my students to help me again. This week’s inspiration was the last of three provided by Jordan Horejsi.
One day I’ll go to the grocery store and NOT end up spending $150. That’s what I always told myself, but once I got going down those aisles and saw fabulous deals, how could I pass them up? I mean, who knew when my favorite brand of pizza would be that cheap again? Okay, I knew it was a cycle when it came to sales, but I was a sucker for them anyway.
My wife always said we should just empty out everything we had at some point. That was a decent idea, but I always liked the idea of having plenty of food in the house at any given time. It’s not like I expected some major calamity and had a bunker mentality, but one never knew if the power would go out for a few days or a major winter storm would hit, trapping us in our home until all the snow could get plowed off the streets.
So there I was, strolling through the produce, trying to find some bananas that weren’t already ripe and ready to eat. I needed some that were pure green mixed in there so they’d last until my next visit to the store. I had no sooner located the right banana combination and put them in my cart than I turned to keep moving toward the apples and slammed my cart into another one that veered into that particular aisle.
“Hey!” I yelled, startled. “Watch it!”
A scared-looking man looked up from his overfull cart. “Oh, sorry,” he stammered before pushing the heavy object away from me. I looked after him in disbelief. There’s no reason he would have to be in that much of a hurry.
Then I looked again. That guy was heading right for the front doors; he wasn’t going to pay for a cart that proably had over $200 worth of food in it! “Hey, wait!” I shouted before stalking toward him.
Suddenly, he came to a halt. Ah, reason had set in. But when he turned around, his face was terrified. “It’s too late!” he shouted. But then he seemed to steel himself and barreled out the door with the cart anyway.
By this time, some store employees were coming over to confront him, but they stopped in their tracks rather than chase the shoplifter out the door. Why would they do that?
When I looked closer out the front windows, I saw something out of a nightmare. There were people all over the parking lot, shuffling around. Wait a minute, I knew what this was. There was probably one of those cosplay zombie 5K chases going on or something. This guy was just trying to draw attention to it.
But then I saw the man with his cart get attacked by the horde. His screams echoed into the store, and I realized we weren’t dealing with some fantasy world anymore. I had never really gotten into The Walking Dead or any of those other zombie shows or movies, but some common sense had to set in.
“Lock the doors!” I shouted at the employees. But a manager had the thought before I did since she was running over to shut off the automatic function on the doors so they wouldn’t just open when the zombies shambled toward them.
By now, people everywhere in the store were panicking. Someone got on the intercom and told everyone to move toward the rear of the store. If we were out of sight, maybe the zombies wouldn’t attack the store.
My mind raced. If I had to be stuck anywhere during a zombie apocalypse, a grocery store was as good a place as any! I joined the other customers and all the employees as we moved toward the back rooms where the pallets of boxes and cans were stored until needed as inventory. Nobody really knew what to say; we were all a little numb yet.
I wandered around in the storage area; it was tough for me to stand still when I was nervous. Suddenly, I heard a crash and looked up. I saw a human figure moving slowly toward us from a different room in the back. He was followed by five more. “Shoot!” shouted one of the stockers from the store. “Someone must have left the back door open for the salesmen!”
I looked around and noticed a pallet full of oranges. I grabbed boxes to skail the round fruit all over in the path of the oncoming danger. The zombies tripped as they encountered the citrus, but I had undone myself as well. The oranges scattered everywhere, and as I turned to run, I stumbled as well. I hit my head on the floor.
I heard screaming all around me. And then I heard another sound, a deep breathing, sort of a guttural noise. I turned my head in time to see a zombie right on top of me.
The next time I opened my eyes, I had only one thing on my mind: food. But not the food I was used to eating. And that’s how I died and came back, though not as I would ever have imagined.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is skail, which means to scatter or spill, as in, “The gardener tried to skail the seed in an orderly fashion to grow straight rows.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!