The Bar

Fifteen days. That’s how long Steven and his friends were holed up in that bar. Fifteen days since things changed. The group started out as thirty, but they were down to twelve after the others took on the illness.

Jackie was the first to succumb. Steven tried to deny the obvious, but he knew it was time to do his girlfriend in when he woke to her groaning and writhing in her restraints, her hungry mouth frothing. He made Jessie do it, though. Jessie was Steven’s best friend since kindergarten. Jessie knew Steven couldn’t pull the trigger, even if it meant he would die with the rest. But dying wasn’t the part that scared Steven or Jessie. It was what came after.

The days were hellish, but the nights were worse. During the day Steven, Jessie, and the others busied themselves preparing supplies, organizing, checking weapons and making sure their ammo was sufficiently stocked. During the day the fiends were less active.

Steven felt terror at night. He felt he was marooned on a barren island, surrounded by an ocean of those ravenous abominations. He and the survivors were desolate, their neighborhood bar turned from a place of solace to an infernal pit of anguish, pandemonium, a nightmare. The group members took turns staying awake, on guard. Not that it  helped anyone else sleep better.

While Steven sat at the bar reading by the light of an oil lamp, he tried to ignore the sounds from outside. He ignored the groaning, the screeching, the banging on the boarded doors, on the boards that covered the windows where the glass had been broken the first night. Steven wanted to listen to music, but he had to stay vigilant, and besides there hadn’t been electricity in days. His iPod’s battery was long dead, like almost everything else.

Steven felt a sharp and familiar pang in his abdomen. The food supply was low. The group had been surviving on rations of canned meats and pickled vegetables. One of the women in the group had arrived with a sack full of peanut butter jars. There wasn’t any bread, but the peanut butter was like manna and honey. Even that supply was diminishing, though, and there weren’t many jars left of pickles, olives, Holland onions, and spicy green beans, either. Steven thought he would have to go out for provisions in a day’s time. He didn’t know where in the Hell he would find them.

The group’s first trip was a catastrophe. The team was ill equipped, and their inadequacy is what led to Jackie’s illness. It was more a waste of ammo and energy than anything else. Steven also felt it had revealed their sanctuary. It seemed like there were more crowding around the bar after that day. Or maybe it was because Steven and the group were the last living humans in the city, and the monsters knew it.

The sounds outside increased, and Steven pulled at his own hair in frustration. He hummed to himself. He shouted at them to shut up. He put his fingers in his ears.

The banging was louder than before. The groans more rapacious. Steven thought more had come since the night began. He stroked the shotgun in his lap. He checked to make sure the rifle was still hanging by its strap from the back of his chair.

A moment later, shrieks came from inside the bar. Steven froze. His face and limbs were numb. Then he heard the unmistakable shuffle, the sound of dead feet dragging across the floor.

Steven leapt from his chair and hit the alarm, alerting the rest of the group. The ringing of the bell drowned out the groans and shuffles. Steven wanted to hear them then, to know where they were.

He took the shotgun and the high-powered rifle and climbed onto the bar. At the first sight of a body, he aimed the shotgun and fired a blast of buckshot at the encroaching mob. Steven fired two more rounds.

There were so many. Their dead fingers clawed the cuffs of Steven’s standard issue BDUs as he climbed from the bar onto a platform above where glasses hung. He loaded the shotgun and fired three more slugs. He wondered where the other group members were.

He hadn’t grabbed the bag of shells when he abandoned his place on the bar, and now Steven was out of shells. Aiming the M16, Steven was able to fell more of the animated cadavers, but not many. Not enough.

A back door broke from its hinges; a dozen bodies poured through, tumbling over each other in a stampede of undead hunger. He recognized Jessie, and then he knew. He knew what happened to the rest of the group.