Austin leads Lilly down a side corridor lined with deserted offices. They pass door after door, each of them locked and showing empty darkness behind their windows. Austin walks slightly ahead of Lilly, holding the torch high in one hand, the Glock in the other. Lilly has both her guns out, ready to rock at a moment’s notice.
In the flickering yellow light, they move past rows of propane tanks, garden supplies, sacks of fertilizer, cords of firewood, coils of garden hoses, and useless ephemera like bird feeders and garden gnomes. The skin on the back of Lilly’s neck prickles with goose bumps as she hears the echoing whispers and shuffling footsteps of the Sterns and Martinez coming from the darkness behind her.
At the end of the main aisle, against the back wall, they make a turn and discover a large hydraulic pallet jack sitting amid the rakes, shovels, and tools. Austin pulls the thing into the aisle—it’s a big greasy hand truck with heavy iron wheels and twin forks that protrude at least eight feet—and he tests it by pumping the huge hand jack. “This might just come in handy,” he speculates.
“Do me a favor, hold the torch up for a second.” Lilly indicates the shadows along the back wall. Austin raises the torch and reveals, in the dancing glow of torchlight, a pile of empty pallets.
They move quickly, slamming the forks under the closest pallet.
Then they head back down the dark center aisle, the wheels squeaking noisily on the filthy cement floor. They start loading the pallet, Austin pushing and holding the torch, and Lilly grabbing the essentials. They grab fifty-gallon jugs of drinking water, cartons of seeds, sharp-edged tools, coils of rope. They make another turn and head down an aisle of canned goods. Lilly starts working up a sweat stacking shrink-wrapped cartons of peaches, corn, beans, collards, tins of sardines, tuna, and Spam.
“Gonna be heroes, comin’ back with all this shit,” Austin grunts as he shoves the jack along the aisle.
“Yeah, maybe you’ll finally get laid,” Lilly cracks, stacking the heavy trays with a groan.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“What.”
“Where’s this attitude come from?”
Lilly keeps working, her guns digging into the back of her belt. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“C’mon, Lilly … I noticed it right away … ever since I met you … you got a chip on your shoulder about something.”
They work their way toward the end of the canned goods aisle. Lilly slams another carton of cans on the pallet and grumbles, “Can we just get this thing done, and get the hell outta here?”
“Just making conversation,” Austin says as he shoves the dolly around the end of the aisle with a grunt.
They head down another aisle stacked with crates of rotted fruit. They pause. Austin holds the torch up and reveals the blackened, shriveled peaches and bananas in their maggot-infested crates. The fruit has decomposed into slimy black lumps.
Lilly wipes the sweat from her face, her voice coming out low and hoarse. “The truth is, I lost some people very close to me.”
Austin stares at the rotten fruit. “Look … I’m sorry I brought it up … I’m sorry.” He starts shoving the dolly deeper into the aisle. “You don’t have to—”
“Wait!”
Lilly grabs him, holds him still. A faint metallic tapping noise straightens her spine, and she whispers, “Shine the torch over there.”
In the flickering glow, they see a row of freezer doors along the left side of the aisle. The stench of rancid meat hangs in the air. Lilly pulls her guns. The last door on the left is intermittently jiggling and creaking, the rusty hinges loose.
“Stay behind me, hold the torch up,” Lilly whispers, thumbing the hammers on both her Rugers, creeping toward the last door on the left.
“Walker?” Austin grabs his Glock and moves in close behind her.
“Just shut up and hold the torch up.”
Lilly moves past the jiggling door, pauses, stands with her back against the freezer. “On three,” she whispers. “You ready?”
“Ready.”
Lilly grabs the latch. “One, two, three!”
She rips the freezer door open, and both barrels go up, and her heart skips a beat. There’s nothing there. Nothing but darkness and a reeking stench.
The odor engulfs Lilly, making her eyes water as she steps back, lowering the pistols. The black, oily death-rot clings to the inside of the dark freezer. She hears a noise, and looks down at something small and furry scuttling past her feet. She lets out a pained breath as she realizes it was just a rat making all the noise.
“Fuck me,” Austin comments breathlessly, lowering the Glock and letting out a sigh of relief.
“C’mon,” Lilly says, shoving her guns back in her belt. “We got enough. Let’s head back, get the truck loaded, and get the fuck outta here.”
“Sounds good to me,” Austin says, yanking the dolly back with a smile, then pushing it back down the aisle, following Lilly toward the front of the warehouse. Behind him, a large figure lurches out of the freezer.
Austin hears it first, and only has time to turn around and see the massive male in dungarees and mangled face barreling toward him. Mandibles clenching and unclenching, eyes the color of sour milk, the biter stands well over six feet tall and is covered with a film of white mold from being shut in the freezer for so long.
Jerking away from it, reaching for his Glock, Austin trips over the corner of the dolly.
He falls down, his gun slipping out of his hand, the torch rolling across the cement. The huge biter looms over him, drooling black bile, the torchlight now shining up at a surreal angle. Flames flicker and reflect off the corpse’s shimmering, milky eyes.
Austin tries to roll away but the biter gets its gigantic dead fingers around Austin’s pant legs. He lets out an angry howl, kicking at the walker, cursing it. The thing opens its mouth, and Austin slams the heel of his boot into the maw of black, sharklike teeth.