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By Root 385 0

” to remove the parts of a crossbow. She’d found this in an abandoned fallout shelter in Minnesota about a year back. The shelter’s doors had been opened sometime previously by an explosive of some sort, and most of the useful supplies—like food and gasoline—had been looted long ago. The only useful things Alice had found were the programmable Timex that had just warned her of the Umbrella satellite’s pattern of flight and the crossbow. The former probably had been left behind because no one cared what time it was anymore. As for the latter, it was an esoteric weapon, one few people were capable of using properly. No doubt, it had been abandoned as being archaic.

But sooner or later, the bullets would run out. A crossbow could fire pretty much anything that was long, skinny, and hard, and the world had a lot more of that lying around than refined metal.

So Alice took the crossbow.

Now she assembled it and aimed a bolt right at the former gas station attendant’s head.

“Sorry about this, Stevie,” she muttered as she fired.

The bolt nailed Stevie right between the eyes, the tip coming out the back of his skull and pinning him to the bodywork of the pickup truck.

Confident that the place was now free of undead, Alice got back on the BMW and drove into the gas station.

She tried each pump in succession. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Then half a cup before nothing.

“Damn.”

Looking over the station itself, she saw that it included a minimart, which was boarded up from the inside. Probably Stevie’s coworkers had barricaded themselves inside to protect themselves from Stevie and his fellow undead. She grabbed one of her guns, pretty much at random, and kicked open the door. Wood splintered easily at the impact from her boot.

The stench hit her nose a lot harder than her foot had hit the door. Alice would have thought that after all these years, she’d be inured to the smell of decay and death, but no such luck. The Enco’s minimart was overwhelmed by a miasma of rot.

A lot of the smell came from the refrigerator units, which were full of liquids that hadn’t been kept cool. Her nose refused to inhale, and she breathed through her mouth as much as she could without hyperventilating. What food was still on the shelves had gone an unfortunate green color. Tons of empty containers—cans, bottles, and more—were littered about the floor.

Slowly, Alice moved through the minimart, peering into the shadowy darkness—the only light was what came in through the door she’d kicked open—her gun cocked and ready. Whoever was in here certainly didn’t starve. Based on the buzzing sound, there were plenty of flies, but they couldn’t have opened the cans, so there had to have been a human being in here once.

The flies’ buzzing grew louder as Alice moved further inside.

She leapt aside and whirled the gun around before her conscious mind was even aware of the clattering sound.

The metallic clinking of pennies falling on the floor was all she heard. Looking down, she saw that she’d up-ended the penny tray by the cash register with her elbow.

For a brief moment, Alice barked a laugh. “Ass-Kicking Alice” reduced to being startled by knocked-over pennies. If One could see her now, he’d laugh in her face.

Well, no, that wasn’t his style. He’d just look at her disapprovingly.

The sad thing was, One would’ve thrived in this new world. He lived for this sort of seat-of-the-pants, everyone-for-themselves life that the remnants of the human race were now stuck with. Instead, he had been reduced to a pile of cubed meat in the corridor that led to the Red Queen’s CPU in the Hive. An ignominious end.

But given the way life tended to end for people these days, he was probably better off.

Alice turned around—

—and smacked into a thigh with a meaty thud.

Again, she leapt to the side, raising her gun, but it was unnecessary. The thigh belonged to a body that was hanging from the ceiling. The rotting clothes, which looked similar to those worn by Stevie outside, covered rotting flesh. In the dim light, Alice couldn’t make out what this guy had hung himself