Soft Apocalypse Read Online Free PDF Page A

Colin. The Winn-Dixie was getting close; I decided there wasn’t enough time to get into the nuances of sirens.
    The Winn Dixie was almost empty. Cortez and Jim and I went in—they were less likely to refuse our business if there were only a few of us. The sole woman at the row of checkout counters looked agitated as we pushed open the electric doors, but she didn’t say anything. We set about shopping.
    “Hey, what about these?” Cortez said, holding up a package of Oreos.
    “We should stick to the list,”Jim said, closing his eyes as he spoke—a classic Jim mannerism. “We can’t afford to buy empty calories.”
    Cortez tossed them back on the shelf, huffing. “We’ve got to enjoy ourselves a little, or we might as well be dead.”
    A shrill voice up by the registers grabbed our attention. We hurried to the front of the aisle to see what was going on.
    The checkout girl was tossing stuff into a cart, and she looked scared as hell.
    “Stay!” she shouted, pointing at a woman standing near the entrance.“Don’t come in,just stay!” The woman looked like she was in excruciating pain—she was moaning and gasping for breath, weaving noticeably, her hands dangling loosely at her sides.
    “Jesus, what’s wrong with her?” Cortez whispered.
    “Here.” The checkout girl pushed the shopping cart toward the woman. It rattled along part of the way, then veered into a cake mix display, knocking boxes to the floor. “Just take it and leave!”
    The woman took a flaccid, spastic step toward the cart, then another. It was horrible, the way she walked. Her teeth were gritted in pain, her cheeks wet. She latched onto the cart, used it to steady herself as she jerked slowly, slowly toward the door.
    Cortez ran to get the door for her.
    “Are you crazy?” checkout girl screamed. “Stay away from her!” Cortez’s sneakers screeched on the linoleum as he stopped short.
    “What’s wrong with her?” he asked.
    “Just get out of here before I call the police.”
    “Fine, fine, we’re going,” I said. “But we need this stuff.” It wasn’t half of what we needed. “Just let us check out first.”
    “Twenty bucks. Leave it on the counter and go,” she said without looking into the cart Jim was pushing. Cortez pulled a twenty out of the pocket of his jeans and dropped it on the counter. The checkout girl was looking off to one side, tears in her eyes, biting her bottom lip.
    The rest of the tribe was resting in the shade of a Dollar Store.
    “We need to get out of here,” Cortez said to them, running ahead of Jim and me. “There’s a virus here. A woman came in, she looked like a zombie—”
    “Filthy gypsies! You did this.” A skinny man with long hair and a Confederate flag t-shirt appeared around the corner of the building, from the front lot. He had the same horribly loose walk and agonized expression as the woman in the grocery store. And he had a pistol. My bowels loosened as he lifted it, his hand trembling viciously. Someone screamed.
    “Kill you all. Every fucking last…”
    The gun dropped from his rubbery grip and clattered to the pavement. He cried out in frustration, glared at us like we were the devil. Then he bent to retrieve the pistol and collapsed. He lay cursing, his nose and cheek bloody from pavement burn.
    We ran. Carrie had grown up in Vidalia, and led us out behind the Dollar Store, through a small patch of woods and into a neighborhood. A few streets away there was a railroad track that would get us out of sight in a hurry.
    “What was that?” Jeannie said.
    “They’re like zombies,” Cortez said. “I swear, they move like zombies in a George Romero film.”
    “It’s some sort of neurological disease,” Jim said. “But a highly contagious neurological disease? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
    Through the open window of a little yellow house, we heard screaming. They were screams of agony—mindless, full-throated howls.
    “This way,” Carrie said, cutting