The Great Wreck Read Free Page B

my orbit and get around behind him until he was
gone. I don’t have anything against the homeless and I’d try to help them out
if I have a few bucks in my pocket, but this one was clearly crazy, a burnout
that had dragged in from the desert drifting through the parking lot as he sang
some hymn to the Good Lord Jesus stopping every few feet to hold his arms up to
the sky, thanking God for something or another then shuffling on. And I didn’t
have a dime on me anyway.
                With his heavy overcoat and ratty
knit beanie perched on the back of his sunburned and peeling face he scanned
the cars looking for anyone who might be trapped waiting. His teeth had parted
ways with a brush many years before and the sandals he wore were held together
by wire.
    He’d smile and tap.
Usually the driver would ignore him. He’d smile and tap again and if the driver
cracked their window, launch into some crazy-ass story. Sometimes this yielded
some change from the driver, sometime a few bucks. Most of the time, the driver
did as I planned to do: put their car in gear and move away from the oncoming
social wreck of an animal stumbling in their direction. Poor fucker.
                Then I heard a scream. It split the
hot air like a razor through flesh. It rose high into the hot, metallic air
bouncing off the store walls and asphalt drilling into my ears like madness. It
was joined then by a dozen more, then a hundred more.   Every single person’s head in the parking
lot, drunk crazy dude included did a hard snap towards the location of that
terrifying sound. For a second, everything was still. Even the hot, pissed off
breeze died down, waiting to see what would happen next.
                And what happened next I would never
be able to get out of my mind. What happened next was seared into my memory
with a blow torch and would wake me screaming from my sleep every night until
the day I died. Around the right side of the supermarket, they came. Hundreds
of them, bloody, torn, gaping, mad with whatever disease had infected them, and
screaming like banshees at the top of their lungs. A few people had been
exiting the market and were immediately swarmed by the mass of people. I could
not comprehend what I was seeing. Three badly mutilated people dived onto a
small girl holding a shopping bag and began to…well, to feed. They smashed into
her so hard they knocked her out of her shoes, like three tight ends making the
tackle. They bit, and tore, and ripped in such a fury that the girl never had
time to scream. More of the others descended on the girl’s now torn corpse and
in a few minutes, the body of the girl was gone. Two others who had been near
the little girl suffered the same fate. It was like watching human piranha at
work.
                That was enough for most of us
watching from our cars. In an instant, nearly everyone tried to move at once.
The crazy bum suddenly found alacrity and focus running in the opposite
direction of the screaming horde but he had only taken two steps before someone
in a Cadillac ran him down first crushing his pelvis, then his head in their
haste to escape the oncoming rush of death. A few of us, like myself and the
pretty young lady next to me, were frozen in terror. Not trying to escape the
parking lot probably saved my life by avoiding all the cars making a mad dash
towards the street. Too many of those fleeing smashed into other cars and the
swarm of infected descended on them jamming themselves into the now shattered
windows of the wrecked cars and devouring those within. The screams were
overwhelming and reached the magnitude of a jet engine.
                Not moving may have saved my life
but it surely did not save the life of the girl parked next to me. The horde
began to flow around the cars trying to break into any that had occupants. A
group spotted the girl in the coup next to me and zeroed in. She screamed as
she saw one of the infected