Zombie Fallout 9 by Mark Tufo

cloths, I would have started shoving shit in my many cargo pockets. I had my rifle up to my shoulder and scanned every place as rapidly as I could, just kept coming up empty. I should have been feeling more relieved, but, if anything, it was starting to make me feel more apprehensive. It was like that build up in a horror movie. You know something is going to jump out—and would they just hurry up and get it over with so you don’t choke on your damn popcorn in front of your date. My eyes were beginning to involuntarily water from the smell. Although in reality it’s hard to make your eyes water voluntarily, unless you’re an actor. More superfluous words I had not yet written down today. At some point, I’d pulled my shirt over my nose—about as effective as you think it would be. Pretty sure cotton was never supposed to filter out the stench of death.
    I shoved a box of the wet wipes into my pocket. If I didn’t feel like my heart was going to jump up and through my throat, I would have ripped open the package and cleaned up there. I began to back up slowly, once again doing my high-speed scanning. This time, I started randomly grabbing things, without really looking, and putting them in my pockets. I’d tried shoving a box of high-fiber cereal in, and it wouldn’t fit. I carefully placed it back.
    â€œWhat are you doing, Talbot?” I literally had to ask myself what I was doing. My backwards progress to safety was halted, and I was once again moving forward. “You cannot really be doing this, can you?” How can one possibly be asking himself a question and simultaneously ignoring himself? Does that qualify as insanity? Was I losing an argument with myself? I think I’d kept it together longer than most would during these types and multitudes of stress. Apparently, even crazy has a finite quantity. You dip into the well too much, and you come up insane. Is that even possible? My world would have been much better off if my mother had decided she did not want to take her accidental pregnancy with me to term. I would have been a happy-go-lucky non-committed soul running around Heaven, oblivious to all the pain and suffering, which was all the world could ever offer.
    Unlike the store proper, the storage room was dark, not completely though, no matter how much I would soon wish it were. Two windows high up offered enough light for me to see the horrors within. As clean and pristine as the outside store had been, the storeroom was the polar opposite. At first, I mistakenly thought that the room had been painted a deep red hue. That was not the case; it was coated in the arterial spray of blood from countless victims. Gnawed bones littered the floor, making it impossible to walk through without stepping on them.
    Not that I would have. A red sticky mass, roughly an inch and a half thick, had congealed on the floor like an oversized vat of holiday Jell-O had spilled. That it was the accumulated viscera of innumerable people was not completely lost on me, though I wish that it had been as well. I saw what I saw, and I’ll never be able to un-see it. My eyes were taking in things my brain could not register fast enough. I just started instinctually firing. Best to let someone else sort them out. A small stasis pile, that was bad, as bad as they always are, was off to my left. But certainly, not the worst of it; not by a long shot. A group of ten zombies were keeping watch. Yup, that’s what I said. Keeping watch over a trio of humans, or at least a reasonable facsimile of what humans used to look like.
    The three people were nude, which mattered little as they were covered in enough layers of grime and detritus as to still be clothed. The man and the woman were as malnourished as I had ever seen two living people. The child in the woman’s arms had died—not too long ago, from the looks of him. She’d done her best to keep him somewhat clean during whatever had