What the living take
Chapter 21
This shocked everyone.
"What happened to the food? I thought we had enough to go around," Sasha asked. Being cooped up in the hotel for a day was bad enough on its own — no food on top of it wasn't something they could just sit with. Something needed to be done, and she said so.
"With no electricity, most of the meat spoiled. What we ate yesterday was already going bad — I had to mask the smell with whatever spices I could find," Amy said, barely touching her own plate.
"Whatever's left — how long do you think it'll actually last us?" Leo asked.
"A day," she said, no hesitation, holding his eyes.
"Well. Guess we know what that means," Brad said, smirking. This was his opening. The outside, the unknown — he'd been waiting for an excuse.
As everyone started drifting back toward their rooms, Kaito asked the question that stopped the whole room.
"Is there a local market nearby? Somewhere we could grab canned food. Worth a shot."
Everyone had been so locked into pure survival that the basics had slipped past them entirely — not that anyone could really blame themselves for it, given how much of a long shot it probably was.
"I grew up around here. I know a place," Sasha said. That was enough to send the whole crew to bed with something like hope for the first time in a day.
The next morning proved harder than expected. The first floor was already flooded with the dead — not an overwhelming number, but more than enough to count as a real threat if left alone. Brad took the lead, and the group went to work bashing, smashing, splattering blood up the walls, the windows, the ceiling, until the whole hallway reeked of guts and torn flesh.
With the elevators still dead, the stairs were the only way down — and the stairs were exactly where most of the corpses had gathered.
"Having fun, are we?" Brad barked, caving in skull after skull while the others backed him up, covering whatever he missed. Ten minutes in, the first floor and the reception area were clear, the barricades they'd built lying in pieces, some of them barely holding together at all.
Once the hotel was secured and the road out front was clear, Kaito, Brad, and Sasha took one of the nearby cars, running down stragglers as they cleared a path.
"How far's the store?" Kaito asked, hoping the answer was short — the farther they went, the more danger multiplied for all three of them. Nobody knew exactly where the horde had ended up, and avoiding it mattered as much as anything else. Then there was the freak problem, sitting on top of everything else.
"Not far. Seven minutes, if we push it," Sasha said, already accelerating.
The crew left behind got their own job: scavenge whatever the hotel still had to offer and scout the surrounding area for threats. Knowing their base cold and clean might matter a lot if anything went wrong later.
While the rest of the crew kept clearing heads back at the hotel, Brad's group found the store already in — relatively — decent shape. Windows broken, blood smeared across the glass, the stink of rotting flesh drifting out from somewhere inside.
"Guess we're not the only ones who had this idea," Brad muttered, pulling his bandana up over his nose and mouth. They went in slow, careful not to step on the shattered glass underfoot, covering each other's backs as they moved through the quiet.
"Is anyone here? We need food!" Sasha called out. Nothing answered but silence, which put all three of them further on edge.
"Let's just grab what we need and get out of here," Brad whispered. Despite the mess, some of the shelves still had cans and snacks worth taking, and they filled their duffel bags as full as they'd go, leaving behind whatever didn't fit.
On the way back to the car, Brad spotted someone circling it, inspecting it a little too closely. He ducked immediately, the other two following his lead.
"What is it?" Sasha asked, worried — the thought of losing everything they'd just risked their lives for was almost too much. "Please tell me it's not—" she started praying under her breath.
"Two guys trying to steal our car," Brad whispered, keeping himself out of sight and waving the other two back.
Just as he glanced toward the men again, Sasha's foot caught an empty bottle, sending it clattering across the pavement.
"You hear that?" one of the men said, pulling a pistol from the back of his waistband, moving slowly in their direction. As he got closer, Kaito moved first — dropping one of the duffel bags and stepping into the open, hands raised.
"Whoa — don't shoot! I'm scared, okay?!"
He gave up his own position on purpose, drawing both men's attention ten feet clear of Brad and Sasha, buying them the room to disappear.
"Well, well. Look what we've got here," one of the men laughed.
