REBORN: ENTER INTO THE APOCALYPSE

CHAPTER SIX - Life Saver

"Ray. Ray, please wake up."

Zoe's voice echoed on the second word. 

She knelt beside him on the stockroom floor, both hands on his shoulders, shaking him vigorously.

 His body was completely limp. His veins along his forearms and neck had discolored and it was visible through the skin, branching upward slowly.

He didn't respond.

She pressed two fingers to his neck there was pulse there but it was weak and unsteady, like a phone battery at two percent, but there.

The glass at the front of the store cracked again and it was louder this time. 

Then a sound she had never heard before that doesn't sound human or animal came from multiple directions at once, growing.

She couldn't leave him here.

She didn't know this man, she had met him thirty minutes ago at the fourth aisle. 

She didn't know his last name or where he lived or why his manager had thrown his wages on the floor and made him pick them up. 

All she knew his name was Ray and he stocked shelves and he had taken a cereal bar from her and looked at her like she had handed him something worth far more than a cereal bar.

That was all she knew.

She grabbed him under both arms and pulled.

He was quite heavier than he looked. She was able to drag him for about three feet, then she stopped and adjusted her grip and dragged him four more. 

Dragging him across the stockroom floor toward the corridor that led to Pete's office, her shoes squeaking on the concrete, her breathing was loud in the silence between the sounds outside getting worse.

She got him through the corridor door and kicked it shut behind her.

Pete's office light was on.

She could see his shoes under the desk before she even opened the door.

"Sir." She pushed the door open. "Sir, please come out."

Pete's head appeared from behind the desk. His face was a colour she had never seen on a living person everything was drained out of it, grey-white, eyes too wide.

 He was a large man and he had made himself as small as possible behind a desk in a room with no windows.

"What the hell are those things." He wasn't asking. He was talking to himself, to the wall, to anyone.

"I don't know exactly," Zoe said. "But I need your help with Ray. He's in the corridor and he's unconscious, I can't move him alone."

Pete peered past her at Ray on the floor.

Something changed in his face, it was not out of concern but he was calculating.

"Is he bitten?" Pete asked.

"No, He had collapsed before any of them got in."

"Are you sure about that."

"Yes I'm sure, please just help me…."

"Because if he's bitten." Pete shook his head and pulled back behind the desk again. "I'm not touching him. That God-forsaken lad, always showing up asking for shifts, always making my day harder…"

The glass at the front of the store shattered.

The sound of it came through the walls clearly. Then the sound of shelving units going over. Then the growling, was more and close, moving through the store towards the back.

Pete scrambled out from behind the desk. For one second Zoe thought he was coming to help her.

He grabbed Ray by the collar instead.

"Leave him." Pete pulled Ray toward the office door, toward the corridor, away from the office. "He's dead anyway. We leave him out there and they take him and we have time to get out the back."

"Stop." Zoe grabbed Pete's arm with both hands. "Stop it right now."

"Let go of me you stupid….."

"He is not dead." Her voice came out harder than she knew she had. "He has a pulse and I am not leaving him in a corridor for those things to tear apart."

Pete shoved her backward into the wall.

She hit it hard, shoulder first, and for a second the room tilted. 

Pete turned back to Ray and he was going to do it. He was actually going to drag an unconscious man out of an office and leave him in a corridor as a distraction so he could run.

Zoe looked at the floor and she looked at Pete's back and looked at her own hands.

She crossed the room in three steps and drove both thumbs directly into the back of Pete's eyes.

He screamed and both hands went to his face, then he stumbled backward out of the office door into the corridor and Zoe slammed the door shut and threw the bolt across and pressed her back against it and stood there breathing.

Silence for two seconds.

Then Pete's screaming in the corridor changed character entirely. Higher. Shorter. Then nothing.

Zoe did not open the door.

******

She turned back to Ray.

He was on the floor against the wall, grey veins darker now, reaching up his neck toward his jaw. 

His chest was rising and falling but barely and she crouched down and pressed both palms flat against his sternum and pushed. 

"Ray." She pressed again. "You need to wake up. I need you to wake up right now."

He was still and silent.

The banging started on the office door. Fists, or what used to be fists, hitting the wood in a rhythm that was already splintering the frame at the top.

Zoe looked around the office the filing cabinet, desk, Pete's chair, a coat rack, an iron rod in the corner that had been holding the window open all summer. 

She crossed the room and picked up the rod and It was solid, maybe three feet long.

She walked back to the door and stood in front of it.

The frame cracked at the top and then at the middle.

She looked back at Ray once.

She thought about her mother, two miles away in their apartment, who did not know where she was right now. 

She thought about the text she had sent at 8am. *I'm going to get groceries, back by ten.* It was past eleven. Her mother would be calling her phone and getting nothing.

She thought about how she had almost gone to a different supermarket this morning. The one on Halford Street was closer. She had chosen Whitefield because she had a coupon.

So all these was because of a coupon.

She almost laughed.

The door came off its top hinge and swung inward at an angle and the first one came through the gap with grey face, red eyes, moving fast, and Zoe swung the rod and hit with the side of its head and it dropped and she pulled the rod back and set her feet for the next one.

There were at least four more in the corridor.

"Ray." She didn't look back and she couldn't look back. 

"I don't know what's happening to you but I really need you to get up..please…I can't hold all of them."

She hit the second one.

The third one came through the door and caught her forearm before she could swing and she wrenched free and hit it twice, the second time it dropped dead.

Her arms were hurt and burning.

The fourth one, came through.

"Ray please." Her voice broke on the last word, just slightly, just enough to be real. "Please I don't want to die in a supermarket. I don't want to die here. Please get up."

The fourth one grabbed the rod.

She held on and they pulled against each other for three seconds and she was losing ground, her shoes sliding on the floor, and she thought this was actually the end.

Ray immediately stood up.

He stood up with full strength and ability like someone, not like someone when just regained consciousness but like someone who just built himself up.

He went from flat on the floor to fully upright in one single movement, like a switch had been thrown somewhere inside him.

Zoe let go of the rod and stumbled backward.

Ray caught her before she hit the wall with one hand, with no effort, like catching a falling paper.

He looked at the zombie in the doorway.

Then at the ones behind it and his eyes were clear. 

His veins were no longer grey, they were dark and visible, but the darkness was different now, less like sickness and more like something that was already there.

He placed Zoe behind him.

He looked at his hands once and opened and closed them.

Then he looked at Zoe over his shoulder and said, quietly and completely calmly. “Are you hurt?”

She stared at him.

It was the same man with the same face and something entirely different looking out through his eyes.

"I'm okay," she said. "Ray, what….."

"Stay behind me," he said. "Don't move until I tell you."

He turned back to the doorway.