Life After Z

Chapter 1 - Cooper

The boy was wheezing again. I was starting to hate the noise of his breath rattling through narrowed airways more than the scraping and shuffling of reanimated feet dragging on the ground. At least I could do something about the Zs. One quick jab with my machete or a squeeze of a trigger and those reanimated feet would become as silent as a dead body should be.

Problem and solution.

Before the world went to shit, Sebbie's asthma wasn't a big deal. It was a problem that had a reliable and concrete solution. He would start to have trouble breathing and then take a hit of his inhaler. The medicine would do its job and the potentially life-threatening situation would be resolved. But now that eighty-five percent of the population were mindless vessels for some sort of infection that actively sought out and craved living human flesh, there were no pharmacists at the local drug store or even pharmaceutical companies producing the life-saving chemicals. More to the point, within the last eighteen months practically every single drugstore has been completely stripped.

The reason why Sebbie's labored breathing was pushing me towards panic was that he had used up his last inhaler last week. Thus presenting us with one mammoth of a problem. The little six-year-old boy that I have been doing my absolute best to keep alive over the last year and a half was going to suffocate if we didn't find albuterol to get into his system soon.

"The next town will have something," Lucas stated with confidence I knew he didn't feel. But I was the realist and Everett was the pessimist while Lucas had somehow found a way to persevere as an optimist in this god-forsaken apocalypse.

"The next town will have a stockpile of inhalers and Sebbie will be just fine," Lucas murmured again and this time it almost sounded like a prayer. I glanced in the rearview mirror to see the burly red-headed man cradling the small child in his arms in the back of the cab. A flick of my eyes toward Everett told me all I needed to know about his state of mind. He knew that we were on a fool's errand. The last four towns that we had hit hadn't had what we needed and we had wasted precious fuel and ammo in our fruitless pursuit.

But what else were we going to do? Our only purpose these days was survival. We didn't have jobs to go to or our family and friends to entertain. We had our group and we had the present. Our past was too painful to reminisce about and the future was too scary to hope for. All we had was right now.

And right now we needed to find some medicine so that one of the only good and pure things left in my world would see another sunrise.

I shifted down a gear and slowed our fortified eighteen-wheeler down to a crawl to survey the outskirts of the small hamlet that we were rolling up on. The place looked dead. More than that, it looked to be completely inhabited by the dead. Chaotic debris littered the streets and abandoned cars were parked haphazardly in the middle of the road and on the sidewalks as if their owners fled in a panic.

The truck rolled to a full stop and I watched a few Zs amble ungracefully straight into a side of a building only to bounce off and try again at a slightly different angle, reminiscent of one of those round robotic vacuum cleaners that always seemed to clean the same two feet area no matter how long you ran the damn thing.

"This looks promising," I said in a low tone, not wanting to interrupt Sebbie's concentration as he attempted to take deep breaths. "Doesn't look like any survivors are holed up here. Maybe it hasn't been stripped bare."

"No reason to speculate. Let's get in there and do what we need to," Everett declared in his dangerously lethal-sounding voice. I clenched my jaw and shifted into gear. He was right. It didn't matter if the streets were packed with Zs or lined with guys patrolling with AKs. Sebbie needed us to step up. And we would, no matter what this little town threw our way.

I figured main street was as good as any to start looking for a drug store and used the reinforced front bumper of our big rig to push a couple of abandoned cars out of the way so we could squeeze through. We had learned the hard way that it was better to take the time to get our truck as close to the buildings we were going to scavenge as possible. The reinforced shipping container we hauled acted as an impenetrable bolt-hole if we were to get overrun by Zs.

The thing about a safe place to hide, they only worked if you could get into them before the danger got to you. So even though it took precious time, I maneuvered the truck through the minefield of artifacts from a past life as Lucas, Everett, and even Jen kept their eyes peeled for any sign of survivors.

That had been another hard lesson we had learned. Survivors were more dangerous, cruel, and ultimately more lethal than the Zs. It was like the entire world had decided to act out The Lord of the Flies and by now we knew better than to audition for the part of Piggy.

I stopped the truck on the far side of the street across from a mom-and-pop drug store that had the door kicked in. Even from here, I could see empty shelves overturned causing my gut to sour. Movement within the store caught my eye, but it was slow and unbalanced. Meaning that some poor fuckers were caught in an endless loop of wandering the store until they stumbled on that open door.

The store was cleaned out and full of Zs.

Worst case scenario.

But we couldn't not look. We had to check. I had no clue where we even were or where the next town was. We were low on fuel and the sun was about to set. We had come this far and we would have to get out of this truck and double-check.

Had to go through the motions because the alternative was to do nothing and watch as Sebbie slipped away from us one painful breath at a time.

That was not an option. So going into that store so that we could grasp onto the hope that we were actually doing something to help was the only way forward for us.

"Jen. Get in the back with Sebbie. Lock it up. Wait for us," I declared and caught the slight tightening of Jen's lips. She didn't want Sebbie to suffer and always supported us as we went on med runs, but I was pretty sure she was the least maternal woman I have ever met. She hated it when we left her to watch over the kid. But she wasn't a fighter either and would cause more problems than she would solve if she went in with us. And someone had to stay with Sebbie.

Jen gave me a tight nod and walked through the door that we had jerry-rigged between the cab and the shipping container, disappearing into our living space. Lucas carried his wheezing boy behind her and I checked the clip in my handgun. We were also running dangerously low on ammo. After we found Sebbie's meds we needed to stop and stockpile the rest of our supplies.

If we found Sebbie's meds.

Because if we didn't find them, then I didn't know if the other things would matter anymore. Didn't know if we would be able to continue on if we failed that little boy.

What would be the point?