REBORN: ENTER INTO THE APOCALYPSE

CHAPTER FIVE - Zoe

Ray grabbed the shelf and held on stiffly.

The white in his vision had begun to disappear slowly. The store sounds came back with sounds of trolley wheels, a checkout beeping, music from the speaker above the third aisle. 

He was still bent and  Zoe still had his arm.

“I need to call someone,” she said.

“No.” Ray adjusted and pulled himself off the shelf. "Don't. I'm fine."

"You are not fine, you almost just hit the floor now."

"I'm fine." He looked at her directly. "Please don't call anyone."

She stared at him for a second. She had that kind of face that didn't hide what it was thinking. She thought he was being stupid and she was deciding whether to respect it or ignore it.

She let go of his arm but didn't walk away.

Ray breathed and counted and waited for the next round of  spikes. 

It would surely come. 

In his previous life the symptoms had hit in three different waves before the final blackout arrived. He was somewhere in between the sequence right now.

He had maybe twenty minutes.

"You should leave this store," he said.

Zoe looked around the store then back at him. "Sorry?"

"I'm serious, you need to finish your shopping somewhere else today and not this place."

Ray felt this was the only thing he could do to save her life at the moment, for someone who had saved his  life once.

He owes her one.

"There's literally no one else on this aisle. You just told me you're fine and now you're telling me to leave." She crossed her arms. "Which one is it?"

Ray had no answer for that.

He picked up his crate and started moving toward the shelf and she fell into step beside him because apparently she had decided she wasn't going anywhere.

He remembered the first time they met in fragments, sharp and memorable fragments.

He had been stocking this exact aisle when the first wave hit him. He went down hard with no warning, just floor. 

The blackout lasted for six  hours and when he woke up he was surrounded entirely by zombies, but they refused to touch him.

They stood still and surrounded him like they were waiting for him to command them

But before he woke up, Zoe was there.

And she was also there after he woke up, but this time around she was dead and torn to pieces.

A woman at Whitefield on Crescent Street stayed with the unconscious man for three hours trying to save him from the zombies.

She locked the store entrance from the inside and she kept two other people calm. 

When the first zombies broke through the glass at the front she told the other two to run to the back and she grabbed a fire extinguisher off the wall and stood between the door and Ray's body.

Amidst the attack she had half-dragged him to the hospital to stabilize his wounds but unfortunately he got rejected because they thought he was infected.

She had administered first aid treatment on Ray with the available resources she could find, she had bandaged him and closed his wounds.

But when Ray came to be amidst the horde of zombies he could immediately recognize her, her flesh were badly torn and unrecognizable.

He was not letting that happen again.

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Ray."

"Zoe." She nodded at the crate in his hands. "How long have you worked here?"

"Two years."

"And your manager just threw your money on the floor." 

It wasn't a question. She had just  seen it from the shop floor through the office window. "And you just picked it up."

Ray said nothing.

"You should have left it there," she said.

"I need the money."

"Doesn't mean you pick it up off the floor while he stands there watching." She said it simply like she was stating facts. "That man will keep doing that to you as long as you keep picking it up."

Ray stared at her.

She was already looking at something on the shelf, completely calm, like she hadn't just said the truest thing anyone had said to him in months.

The pressure behind his eyes returned.  This time it was harder.

He put the crate down on the floor and leaned against the shelf and pressed two fingers to his temple.

"Ray."

"I'm okay."

"You're not." She stepped closer and lowered her voice. "Are you sick? Like actually sick?"

He almost told her. He opened his mouth and the words were right there.

“Yes, something is about to happen to me, and four days from now this city is going to be unrecognisable, and the last time this happened you died trying to save me, so please go home and lock your door and don't open it until I find you.”

He said none of that.

"I haven't eaten today," he said instead. "That's all."

She reached into her basket and handed him a cereal bar without hesitation. He stared at it.

"Take it," she said.

He grabbed it and stared at her in surprise.

*****

Ten minutes later he was in the stockroom and the third wave hit him and he sat down hard on a pile of water bottles and put his head in his hands.

This was it, the one right before the blackout.

He had three problems and no solution to any of them.

First, Dani was in St Emmanuel right now with black lines on her face and maybe two hours before she turned completely.

Second his mother was in the same hospital in the same condition and the Project X team was waiting for Ray to come in.

Third, Zoe was on the other side of that stockroom door and he had not convinced her to leave and she was exactly the kind of person who would stay.

He reached for his phone to call Wolfe, to tell them to start on his mother and Dani immediately without waiting for him, and his hands were shaking so badly he dropped it on the concrete.

He picked it up.

No signal.

He stared at the screen. Full bars thirty minutes ago. Now nothing with a low signal, at zero. Seems like  something had cut it entirely.

He stood up and moved to the stockroom door and pushed it open and stepped onto the shop floor.

The store was empty.

It was not normally empty. It was wrongly empty, three trolleys were  abandoned in the middle of the aisle, one on its side. A checkout screen was still running and nobody was behind it. 

The front entrance doors were closed and the lights above them were off. The background music had stopped.

Zoe was standing in the middle of the fourth aisle exactly where he had left her, she was completely still and staring at the front entrance.

Ray followed her gaze.

There were people outside the glass doors. They were not  walking past but they were standing. 

There were more than six or seven of them, they were standing still and pressed their head on the  door.

Their eyes were red.

Zoe turned and looked at Ray across the store.

"Ray," she said quietly. "Those people outside…"

"I see them."

“They were normal five minutes ago, I watched them change.” Her voice was steady but her hands were not. 

“What is that? What is happening to them?”

Ray looked at the doors. Then at Zoe. Then at the doors again.

It was already four days earlier than he had imagined.

The apocalypse was four days early and he was standing in a supermarket with no signal, a blackout thirty seconds away, his sister and mother in a hospital across the city, and a woman in front of him who had already died once protecting him.

The glass at the front entrance cracked.

"Get to the back," Ray said. "Right now. Move."

She didn't argue this time.

They both ran.

Ray made it four steps before his legs stopped working and the white came back and swallowed everything whole.

His last thought before the floor came up to meet him.

“Zoe was not supposed to die again, not this time.”