THE APOCALYPTIC RISE OF ADAM

Chp 3 - Joy In Chaos

Relief flooded Adam’s heart as his mother picked up the call.

“Adam? Adam, is that you?” She asked hesitantly, then her voice strengthened with hope.

“Yes, mummy. It is me!” Adam whispered with happiness as he cupped his hand against the phone.

The street was still deserted, and all he could hear were shouts from afar, but he didn’t dare speak out loud. “Are you okay, mom?” he asked urgently.

Instead of answering, he heard his mother shout. “He is alive! Caleb, he is alive! My son is alive!”

“Shh, don’t exert yourself, Marriane,” Adam heard his father say as he came closer.

Tears rolled down Adam’s eyes unexpectedly at the joy of hearing his mother’s voice out loud.

She had become sickly lately and had been bedridden on and off for months even before this happened.

Sometimes, her voice would be so weak that Adam would barely hear her.

Yet, they had always encouraged him to not worry so much about them and to try to make a life for himself.

“I will take care of my wife. You take care of yourself,” his father would always say gruffly when he sent money to them out of his meagre earnings.

Adam smiled and repeated again and again that they should stay safe and wait for him.

He was glad to hear from his father that they had enough food stored in the basement for the next two weeks.

Adam then disconnected the call minutes later with momentary relief in his heart.

His parents were doing fine at the moment, but he wasn’t sure for how long that would continue to be the case.

Though his father had been as stoic as ever as he was speaking in his mother’s presence, Adam could hear the tremor in his voice.

Only God knew what he had seen while trying to shield his wife from the horror happening around them.

He needed to get to them as fast as possible.

Maradoit was about 120 miles from Joville. Adam knew he had to be fast about any preparation he might want to make.

Since he had no intention of going back to his apartment to face the zombie that he locked in, he intended to just keep moving and gathering whatever he could along the way.

He also thought of  his younger sisters, who were about 200 miles away from Joville.

His sisters were studying math and physics at Chicago University and were still on campus when the zombie outbreak started.

They had been able to call his parents when the school authority first isolated them in the safest building of the school.

They were also safe in the meantime, but their numbers were no longer going through, and Adam knew he couldn’t waste time getting to them as well.

If he could still travel by plane to fetch his sisters, the 500 bucks in his wallet might be of some use, but now, with apocalypse befalling, what could a few pieces of paper do?

Adam thought of what he could do as he started moving stealthily away from the building again.

“First thing first, I must not attract attention to myself,” he thought as he spotted the expensive supermarket that he had not been able to shop at for months now.

“Second, I must get all the supplies I can lay my hands on. Thank God for the storage space I have now. I should be able to keep things away without people seeing them.”

He saw that the supermarket door was left open, and he headed for it without hesitation.

He had to run across the street, thereby exposing himself, but he had no choice.

Thankfully, he was able to cross without encountering any zombies. Though there was lots of blood on the floor, at the counters, and even on the vending machines, there was nobody around.

Adam tried his theory about the spatial storehouse as he stretched out his hand with the image of the storehouse in mind.

The storage space materialised out of the thin air again just as the first time, and Adam reached into it with the sword in his hand.

He let go of the sword, and just as if he had kept it on a shelf, the sword firmly stayed against one side of the storehouse.

Excited, Adam withdrew his hand again, and the storage vanished.

"Cool,” he muttered to himself in excitement.

Once he was sure that no zombie or human was around, he immediately recalled the storage space again and started grabbing things randomly off the shelves and tossing them inside the storage.

One cool ability he discovered was that, as he tossed them inside, the storage automatically arranged the goods into compartments.

Fruits.

Canned food.

Beverages.

Frozen food.

Dairy Products.

Grains and cereal.

Vegetables.

Down to snacks and candy, none were mixed with another category.

With a wide grin on Adam as he momentarily forgot his woes and just did the kind of shopping he had only dared to dream about in a long time.

The sort where he doesn’t have to worry about the price.

As he came to the pastry part of the supermarket, he ignored the blood smear on the once-clear show glass as he reached for the chocolate cake inside it.

Pain flickered in his heart again as he remembered that the cake was Anastasia’s favourite.

He had once had enough to buy it for her, but since things changed for him, she always reminded him of how cheap he was—that he couldn’t even afford something as small as a cake.

He shook himself out of his morbid thoughts and took out two of the cakes for good measure.

He fleetingly thought of what happened to her before firmly shutting the door on any thoughts of her, and he tossed the cakes into the spatial storage a little too aggressively.

One of them entered, but then the other fell to the floor.

The sound, as small as it was, sent dread through him as he quickly looked around to be sure that he was still alone.

Then he looked back at the cake that fell with surprise.

That was when he noticed that the spatial storehouse was full to the brim and wouldn't accept anything else.

Filled with disappointment, he looked around at many other things that he still needed in the supermarket, but he knew that there was no use in bemoaning his fate.

He would have to make do with what he had.

Adam tucked the spatial storehouse away as he saw the clothing area next to the bag aisle.

He quickly stripped off his bloodied clothes and replaced them with black jeans, a black polo shirt and Air Jordan 12 OVO black sneakers.

He couldn’t believe the fact that it took brain-eating monsters and an unmanned supermarket for him to get to wear the acclaimed $100,000 shoes.

It was kind of sad, and he remembered the snotty attendants who had always sneered at him when he spent minutes checking out things he could afford before buying daily necessities in the supermarket recently.

He wished they didn’t suffer much before they died.

He took two more pairs of clothes and shoes, all dark colours, and grabbed a sturdy-looking army-style backpack from the rack to stuff them in before he left the supermarket.

Adam checked the streets well before he ducked out of the supermarket again.

He had not gone far, though, when he heard a snarling sound from his left.

He looked sharply towards the balcony of a house where a couple of zombies were.

A male and a female.

“I can outrun..." His thoughts were interrupted as the male jumped from the two-story building balcony.

“What? They can jump from that high?"

Adam thought in amazement as he started running and tried to remember how he had been able to call forth the orb of blades the first time.

As running feet gained on him, cold sweat broke on his forehead as he was unable to call forth the orb.

“Shit! I can’t die now! Not this way!”

He screamed in his mind as another door burst open, and a teenage zombie lurched out too.

Hell!