Chapter 3: Cow

Alick was a 60-year-old Russian man who immigrated to the USA after serving 30 years in a Russian prison. How he managed to land a job as the butcher of The Buy and Sell escaped me, but I often avoided the man altogether. Being forced to work together was less than ideal, but it was better to have Alick as a partner than having to do a suicide mission alone.

He carried several knives in a trench coat while I had only a hammer I picked up from a storage closet. That's all we had with us when we left the store. Shawn wouldn't let us take anything more. No food, no water, not even a fucking gun, which we sold plenty of.

"We need to find a supply of meat, where the hell do we get meat in the apocalypse," I raved as the giant of a Russian man and I left the store's parking lot together.

"We find a cow; we take it home," he said.

He lived in America for years before everything went to hell, but the Russian motherfucker understood English as well as I understood rockets.

"We need more than a cow," I said.

The bombs were done falling. The fires were done burning. Floods were done drowning. But people were still dying. The city was nothing but ash and rubble. The sky was always full of clouds, but the rain never fell. Walking through midnight in the mid-day is what it meant to live in that hell.

There were so many bodies. Everywhere we turned, corpses were lying and rotting. Most of them were in bits and pieces here and there, but from time to time, we'd find a whole. Living breathing people were nowhere to be seen, and it made sense. Who would be crazy enough to walk out in the open?

Me and the Russian. That's who.

We were unfamiliar with the state of affairs everyone else came to know. The Buy and Sell gave such unparalleled protection to its employees that we were clueless when pushed from its sliding doors.

Where do you find meat products in the apocalypse?

"Beast is best when won, even in hell," my Russian companion stated to my dismay.

We should have been wiser. There was a reason no one walked the streets. Everyone wasn't dead, but the abundance of death should have warned us. We knew the world was no stranger to paranormal entities. Our store manager was a demon, and yet we missed it.

Those rotting corpses.

They were doing more than decomposing. They were the reason streets were empty. They were the reason for silence, but Alick and I didn't know that. We walked around town, breaking into restaurants in search of meat. Most of the places we checked were looted long before we arrived. There was nothing, or at least nothing edible, so we ventured further and further away. With each step, we put distance between ourselves and The Buy and Sell.

By nightfall, we checked more than two dozen former restaurants and had nothing to show for it. I wasn't expecting our job to be easy, but I wasn't expecting it to be so fucking hard either.

We had to make camp for the night. In what used to be a "Del Taco" Alick and I rested our feet. The building was partially boarded up. Someone must have been hiding there for a while.

The end of the world hit everyone hard, and there was no disputing that. I knew the worst places were inner cities because of the few radio broadcasts that survived. Logically most people moved away from high population areas like downtown and the town's center, but we had yet to encounter a single living soul. There had to be people out there, The Buy and Sell had customers to swindle after all. For there to be no one, not even a scavenger or serial killer, was haunting.

"There's no way we're gonna find food out here," I said as I took a seat on a table, finally lowering my hammer to lay it beside me.

"Still waters run deep," he said.

Alick held blades in his hands without a sign of rest. I wasn't about to tell him to relax. I wouldn't say I was afraid, but skepticism was heavy. Still, I needed rest. My seat became my bed and Alick my watchdog.

The wind was a voice singing in the shadows. With my eyes shut, my body cold, and danger lurking, I subjected myself to the cruelty of sleep. No dream was sweet, and no nightmare could ever be true enough. Perhaps I said a prayer never to see morning. I knew I would never see blue skies again, and sunlight would be a lover distant as any in that place.

And then, like thunder, it came. I sprung up from my table made bed only to find Alick stabbing at hands breaking away the windows defenses.

"Alick," I exclaimed as I stayed at a distance.

He wasn't enough to fight them on his own. The zombified dead quickly broke through the door.