Free ZWD: King of an Empty City by Thomas Kroepfl Page B

down on the steps and stared, her hand over her mouth.
                  I eased away from the door and one of them that had his head pressed against the glass started pounding on it with his fist. There was no force behind his blows, but it still made me uneasy. What worried me more was that these six would draw more to the door because they knew food was inside. The last thing we needed was to be trapped. I wasn’t too worried about being trapped because there were plenty of exits around the building. We could slip out of one on the far side if we had to, but still there was that possibility of being trapped and I didn’t like it.
    She walked over to where I now stood at the base of the ramp leading up to the help desk. “If they get through the outside doors we’ll run upstairs and grab our gear, then go out a fire door and slip out the side,” I said. She walked up to the door and stared at them for a long time, not moving. They stared back, some licking the glass with black tongues, others making feeble attempts to break into the building. All of their dead eyes were glued to her. She moved to the side of the doors and all heads turned to her. She moved to the other side and they all followed her over there. She did this several times and turned to me.
    “It’s like those Jesus paintings where his eyes follow you around the room,” she said.
    “Let’s get out of sight before they attract more.” I turned and started up the stairs. At the top, I looked back and she was still standing there looking at them. “Come on,” I urged. She turned to go and as she walked away they started beating on the door more. The further away she got the more frantic the pounding became. Another zombie joined them out of the fog. She ran up the ramp and joined me. I could almost hear them saying, “Food, don’t go.” We continued up stairs to the second floor and I asked what we had to eat.
    “Nothing,” she replied. “Our food has run out just like theirs.”                 
                  “What about the power bars?”
                  “Gone, we ate them like candy.”
                  “We got nothing?”
                  “Nada.”
                  Just like with them, our food had run out and we had to go find some (just like them). Unlike them, we knew where some was if scavengers hadn’t found it.
                  “When do you want to leave?”
                  “As soon as we can. I don’t want to be out after dark. Especially in this fog.” We went up to the second level where we’d been sleeping in the study cubicle and had for the most part made our home. It took ten minutes to gather our things and get ready to leave. We had no food, so we were lighter leaving than we were going in. We were leaving with only four notebooks and some loose pages for our plans. Overall, I think that worked well with the idea of traveling light . My pack’s weight was about thirty pounds, mostly weapons. Hers was maybe twenty. I only mention this because all the survival books say travel as light as possible.
                  Our plan was to leave by the garden exit. It was at the back of the building away from the horde at the front door. Hopefully, we could get down Cumberland and back across I-630 with little trouble. But, since we had this place locked up, we needed to get the key she’d taped into the lock on the front door. It was back downstairs and at the top of the ramp to the help desk.
    She moved around the desk to the back and squatted down; the fewer yummy morsels for them to see the better. I walked down the ramp and up to the door. They all stopped what they were doing and stared at me like a puppy expecting a treat. Not an eye blinked. I reached up and took the tape off the key. One of them shifted and jostled his way from the back of the crowd. It was the father from earlier. At the