Chapter 7: The Apartment
Cans clinked softly in Adam’s bag as he moved between the shelves. He grabbed anything edible—beans, tuna, meatballs in sauce, even canned peas. Anything could be useful. He also found a few bottles of water, one still slightly cool, as if it had recently sat in a working fridge. For a moment, he stood there, absorbing the absurd normalcy—stocking up for a trip, except this time, his life depended on it.
By a large, dried bloodstain next to an overturned bread rack, he spotted a backpack. Larger, sporty, black with red stripes. Adam knelt, unzipped it, and looked inside. He found a few schoolbooks—a math textbook, a folded Polish language notebook, and a thin journal. He stared at them for a moment without moving.
Then he reached in, pulled them out, and tossed them aside without ceremony. The books landed on the floor with a muffled flutter of pages. Without hesitation, he repacked all the supplies and medicine from his old bag into the new backpack.
Adam’s fingers were fastening the last zipper when the silence shattered.
Footsteps. First one. Then another, then more—the pounding of boots on tile growing louder, like an oncoming storm. Short breaths, ragged shouting, heavy steps. He sprang to his feet, as if launched, and turned toward the entrance.
The door burst open.
Three people stormed in—two men and a woman. Young, maybe in their twenties, dirty, sweaty, with torn clothes. They stumbled in, nearly knocking over a shelf. One of the men turned with a knife in hand and shouted:
"Close it! Close the door!"
The other man managed to shut the entrance, but it was already too late—through the window, they could all see them. Zombies. Not a few. A whole wave of rotting, shambling bodies, chasing without pause.
"Hey!" the woman shouted, noticing Adam. "You! Help us block it!"
Adam looked at them—standing just steps from the entrance, the door behind them barely closed, jammed hastily without any real support. To their left, at the end of the drinks aisle, was a large window—cracked, webbed with fractures, letting in light from the street.