Day 11, part 2
I went back into the city. Hit a hardware store. It was boarded up, so I smashed one of the windows and got in. That attracted a few of the zombies, and those that didn't hear that heard the moans of the others. It's strange how they can surround you so fast, when all they are doing is walking.
People always used to laugh at Romero's zombies. How could anything so slow be a threat? Well, the real world's version aren't exactly the same - running at night, can be incapacitated with enough damage to the body, and spread by infection - but nonetheless, we underestimated how difficult it is to deal with, essentially, a flock of threats. Zombies aren't like an army, or a horde. They're more like...water, flowing around something, looking for weaknesses, and constantly there, never waiting.
That was our big advantage as a predator: our endurance. We don't have sharp claws, and, although a human bite is bacteriologically deadly and quite capable of slicing through flesh, we just don't have the jaw size to kill larger mammals. But we can run virtually anything on the planet into the ground. And now, we have something that can run us into the ground.
The first zombie got through the window as I was tearing apart crates in the back. You'd think a hardware store would have batteries, but they didn't. Or, rather, they had had them, and now didn't. There were various other bits of miscellaneous junk, some of which I packed away for melting as scrap iron, but no batteries.
Another zombie or so managed to infiltrate the store through the broken window before I was finished opening the various crates. Most of the horde, however, were stacked up against the back of the building, trying to tear through the roll-down door of the loading dock. This gave me the opportunity to flee out the front, just dodging away from the grasp of a last zombie making his way through the bare shelves of the store.
I made it to a more deserted area, and considered my options. I could have returned to home base, but I really wanted those batteries. So I went back in.
It wasn't long before I attracted attention again. There was a large building nearby, and so I decided to try it. I busted through a door, and found myself on the other side of an emergency exit of a movie theater. It struck me that a movie theater wasn't the best place to find batteries, but it was what I had, so I went with it.
The inside of the theater was fairly dark, but I managed well enough. Exploring a bit, I found a small kitchen, and inside one of the supply drawers, batteries! I suppose no one thinks to ransack the cinema during an apocalypse. I certainly hadn't, not on purpose. I found even more inside one of the employee booths for the projectors, and even made my way up onto the roof, where I found the sun-mummified body of another survivor. I suppose he just ran out of food.
It was working my way back down into the theater when I her shuffling steps. They'd found their way in. Coming around a corner, I came face-to-face with one. Fortunately, I had expected that, and brought my hammer down on his head before he could grab for me. After that, I snagged one of the cheap paintings off the wall for my hideout, and ran for it.
This outing was far less difficult than some of the others. Of course, I stayed on the fringes of the city this time. The concentration of biters seems to be denser closer to the city center. Nonetheless, I'm grateful that it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected. Or, perhaps it is because I expected it to be so bad that made it less so.
In any case, I'm alive, I'm back home, and I have batteries. A good day.