Brendan couldn’t help but to let out a bitter laugh at Sarah’s comment, shaking his head slowly. “I don’t know if God’s here anymore,” he murmured darkly, knowing what she’d said was meant to be a joke, but he couldn’t stop his own retort from leaving him. He shook his head again, feeling slightly bad that when he was put under pressure or was genuinely scared he became the world’s biggest jackass. “I think it may be too early to tell,” he murmured, “not that I want to be around more of those things for the sake of learning.” His crystalline gaze rounded on her when she spoke and his brow furrowed a bit.
Instead of some smart retort he could make, he bit his tongue and merely looked at her. Once she apologized, he looked away, knowing that the both of them were under a lot of stress from the situation they had been thrust into. They were bound to react in ways that weren’t normally like them. “You don’t have to apologize. I can be an asshole when I feel backed into a corner. It’s not personal, at all,” he explained, running a hand through his hair. He took another cursory glance around the hallway, to be sure there wasn’t anything else that could come at them. A soft laugh left him at her next comment. He could have turned it into something more downhearted, to say that they wouldn’t have a home or wages to have taxed or have to take rent out. Pointing that out wouldn’t help out their situation at all, so he decided against it.
“We can sleep in now, too, if we wanted to,” he added with a wry grin. He took once more glance around the office-type room, knowing there wasn’t many places for anything to hide from the two of them. Brendan turned back to Sarah as she spoke next, readjusting his grip on the meat tenderizer. “True,” he noted, nodding a bit. He hadn’t even realized they were talking in terms of teaming together, but he wasn’t about to have a go at survival alone. “C’mon, let’s check the next room.”
He slowly stepped out of the study and started down the hallway toward the next room. If he had to take a guess, he would have bet the next room was a bathroom or bedroom of sorts. They didn’t have many rooms left to check, which Brendan found slightly relieving. “Do you think we should try to stay here as long as possible then?” He asked, shooting a glance over his shoulder to Sarah. He drew in a deep breath of air, stopping just in front of the slightly cracked open door. “We’ll search for stuff later,” he murmured, deciding that it was best if the two of them checked the place for more zombies before they started to gather materials. He pushed his toe in between the door and the frame and nudged it open quickly, raising his weaponized kitchen utensil as if to strike. He breathed out a slightly sigh of relief when there was nothing initially in the small bathroom, but there was the matter of the closed shower curtain. He grimaced a bit as he eyed the flimsy fabric.
“If there is something hiding in the shower, that is way too B-Horror movie,” he murmured to himself as he slowly stepped into the small room. He reached over to the counter and grabbed bottled soap from the countertop. He tossed it at the shower as a precaution, satisfied when he heard it slip through the fabric and onto the bathtub floor. He strode over to the shower and quickly pulled back the curtain, glad when he found it was completely empty of zombies.
Abby studied the axe in her hand for a few moments, completely oblivious to the fact that Kennedy found her newfound accessory so funny. She weighed it a bit in her grasp before glancing up to meet his gaze. A small twitter of a laugh left her, more nervous than anything. “Let’s not count on it. I tend to underdeliver…or…I used to,” she murmured softly before shaking her head a bit and letting out a dry laugh. “Is it past tense now? Living before all of…” She paused motioning outside. “…this?”
Another laugh left her at the mention of compromised masculinity and she shot a look over at him. “You look pretty manly to me. And getting pizza in the face of an apocalypse and shoving pretty much only bourbon in your bag is pretty damn manly,” she jested with a wry grin. “It’ll be better for you to be warm than to worry about masculinity anyways. I’m not going to judge you and I could potentially the last living person you see,” she added with a small shrug. She realized how grim that sounded, so she quickly said, “My opinion is pretty important, I guess.” She offered him a cheeky grin.
She glanced around the store as he mentioned everything they could pick up to place in their bags. “We should each get at least one first aid kit. In case we were to get split up,” she said softly, stomach dropping slightly at the thought of facing zombies alone. She swallowed hard and shook her head a bit, not wanting to voice just how scared she was. Though, when he admitted he’d had a similar reaction to the heat kicking on, it made her feel at least a little better. “I guess we’re both a little jumpy,” she murmured with a slight grin. She started toward the pharmacy area of the store, thumbs tucked under the straps of her bag.
Abby made a point to stop by the end cap where she’d found her scarf, grabbing one of Kennedy and chuckling quietly to herself in doing so. Grabbing a few first aid kits for the two of them, she drew in a deep breath of air before rounding the pharmacy counter to look for what she could. However, the sight that greeted her behind the counter had her stopping abruptly and staring wide-eyed at the floor. One of the pharmacists was sprawled on the floor, leg completely ripped from the body and pristine white lab coat was splattered generously with blood. “Oh my God,” she breathed shakily, immediately recognizing the man. They were merely acquaintances, making small talk whenever Abby had a prescription to fill.
She closed her eyes for a brief moment, drawing in a deep breath of air through her nose. She could do this. She could make it a point to not be affected by this. This was her reality now and there was no option but to face it. Opening her eyes, she directed her gaze to the shelves instead of the corpse on the floor. How he got this way, she didn’t want to know. All she knew was the quicker she found pain killers, the quicker she could get away from the dead body.
July 3rd, 2017 at 03:14am