Henry walked across the baseball field towards the other dugout; he was no longer in much of a hurry anymore. Killing that man had taken a toll on him, he had already stopped to vomit in the dirt and on the third base before he made it to the fence.
He reached for the fence and wrapped the fingers of his left hand around the links and rested his head on his forearm. Henry let the baseball bat collapse on the ground beside him with a hollow clank.
"What have I done?" Fresh tears started streaming down his face. "I just killed a man..." Henry spat on the ground to his right.
"How can I live with myself?" he continued to sob. "I cannot spend the rest of my life in jail."
In the distance, a loud bang interrupted the silence and shook Henry from his momentary lapse in attention.
He reaches up and wipes the tears away from his face while looking in the direction of the noise.
"It sounded like the noise came from up Commerce Drive. I wonder what's going on?" Henry looked towards the sound and took a few steps to see if he could see more further away.
Another explosion, this one louder than the previous, shook the ground violently and threw Henry backwards. The world around him is spinning, and a bright flash of light has temporarily blinded him. The world is silent again for him, and it is quickly replaced by a high pitched buzzing noise.
"Dammit!" He said as he tried to push himself up off the ground. "I do not want to know what's going on over there anymore. Screw that, I'm crossing the highway."
Henry reached down and picked up the baseball bat and held it up to look for the cleanest spot on the barrel and placed it on his shoulder as he stumbled out of the baseball field. To anyone watching him from a distance, he would have easily been confused for one of the monsters or blindingly drunk in the middle of the day. At this point, Henry was not sure which one was worse.
He walked across the parking lot full of empty and abandoned cars, dead bodies and a strange collection of shoes that he just could not comprehend. Henry stopped and looked at this strange sight. Piled beside the back tire of one of the empty hatchbacks was a small pile of mismatched shoes and sneakers.
"What was someone trying to do?" Henry glanced at it sideways and kicked at the pile of shoes as he stood there.
Henry's heart melted and was instantly full of regret.
Buried underneath the pile of shoes was a red-haired doll dressed in a purple outfit. The child's doll, damaged during the happenings earlier in the day, was missing an arm, and part of her leg was broken off. That did not stop some little girl from taking the time, in the midst of all of the chaos, to give her beloved doll a proper burial.
Henry, filled with tears, bent down and did his best to recreate the careful pile of shoes that the previous owner had painstakingly stacked in a show of remorse and sadness.
He stood, looking at the shoes one more time, trying to remember the proper way to give a blessing from when he attended church when he was younger. Satisfied with what he remembered, he said a little prayer.
"God, I do not know if you're out there looking after everyone today, but if you could stop everything you're doing and keep this little girl safe for a while longer I would be forever grateful."
Henry turned and started to walk away.
"Oh right," Henry turned around again, "Amen."
He continued his progress across the parking lot, carefully checking around the corners of cars as he approached them to make sure that he was not going to be ambushed by another supposedly dead body.
"That's only going to happen once today," Henry said as the memory of the dugout came flashing back to him.
Everybody that Henry saw on his slow progress across the expansive parking lot was either missing a limb, portions of their stomach, or the head. And there was no way someone could still be alive with that much damage to their body.
Nearing the end of the parking lot, Henry began to get a little more nervous. He was no longer close to the safety of the forest, getting to the trees now was going to be a sprint of at least two minutes, and that was a pace that he could not keep up with how his body was currently feeling now that he was empty after vomiting so many times.
On the bright side, the hearing in his ears was starting to get better, much of the ringing and disorientation he initially felt had passed. The only thing he was still feeling was a nagging headache from the shockwave and explosion when his head slammed into the ground.
Henry took the time to look around the area to make sure that he was not being followed now that he was entering an area that was fully exposed. To his right, all Henry could see was the far end of Commerce Street with a couple of car dealerships, a coffee shop and an old run down motel.
Directly behind him was the parking lot and the playing fields full of dead bodies and destruction.
To his left, was where the worry was. No more than 100 meters away was the side of the Civic Centre. Most of the cars in this parking lot would belong to people who would have been inside the centre watching their kids have their weekly hockey practice. Henry could not imagine the number of people trapped and dead inside that building.
The edge of the Civic centre went right to the sidewalk, allowing the people arriving via bus to gain access to the facilities quickly. Henry could not see around the building to know what was down there and how many monsters were ready to ambush him.
Henry knew that this end of Commerce Street contained mostly fast-food places, coffee shops, a couple of hotels and a strip mall full of women's clothing stores. "At this time of day, Commerce Street should be a complete and total zoo of people and cars. Where is everyone?"
He took a few steps beyond the safety of the last line of parked cars and carefully peered down the road looking for any signs of danger that might be hidden by the building.
What he saw down there should not even be possible if Henry had not seen it for himself. Cars littered Commerce Drive, they were upside down, up on the sidewalks, wrapped around telephone poles. There were two cars through the front window of the coffee shop; he did not think the shop was big enough to fit two cars, let alone ones stacked on top of one another.
Next to the Hilton chain hotel was the billowing smoke from the gas station. There was not much left of the gas station, and the hotel was missing most of the front half of the building. Henry could see sheets, curtains, and towels fluttering in the wind was those rooms were now exposed. A couple of beds and dressers were piled in the parking lot on top of a minivan, most likely having fallen out of rooms after the explosion settled.
Henry shuddered to think what that explosion would have felt like if he had been where he was standing now, being sheltered by the Civic centre probably absorbed much of the shock but had still managed to throw him on his ass.
"Wow. I could have died from that explosion."
He continued to gaze up the street looking for more people, hoping that someone survived that blast, or would be out looking for new shelter.
The one thing Henry did notice when he looked up the road, despite all of the evidence of death and destruction – the broken glass, blood stains, and pieces of limbs and flesh –? was the total lack of bodies on the ground.
He took a few steps out into the road, cautiously looking both ways before stepping out onto the pavement. He continued to glance all around him, trying to spot any danger before it spotted him.
Being out in the open like this made Henry nervous, constantly being on the lookout while he crossed the road made him anxious and he sprinted the last few meters across the road and into the parking lot of the car dealership.
A nervous Henry dashed behind a row of cars and looked at the parking lot for any sign of movement. He began to breathe slowly to try and catch his breath.
Henry leant over and placed his face on the pavement. The pavement felt cold on his face as the sun had yet to reach this part of the parking lot. He used his new position to look underneath the cars to see if he could see anyone hiding by the cars.
r /> He took a few deep breaths trying to find a way to get himself to relax and calm down. After a few more breaths he was beginning to feel calm and relaxed. He took a few more deep breaths and closed his eyes as he exhaled.
Henry snapped his eyes open and sat upright.
"I cannot get this relaxed." He slapped himself in the face to wake up. "I'll die if I fall asleep out here."
Henry slowly got to his feet and stretched his back out.
"I cannot wait for all of this to be over. I'm going to get the most expensive massage package from the spa and spend an entire week there." He smiled as he groaned with relief as the joints in his back and shoulders cracked.
"Let's get to the store, Betty." Henry held the bat out in front of him so that he could look at it while he spoke to it. A brief look of terror crossed his face as he finally understood what he just did. "Did I just talk to the bat like it was my best friend? I think I've been through too much today."
Henry picked up the pace a little as he continued towards the back of the parking lot of the used car dealer so that he could cross the highway.
As Henry got further into the parking lot, his concern for his safety slowly disappeared as more of the roadway became visible. All four lanes of the highway looked abandoned for years. There was debris, refuse, and dried blood covering the asphalt as if an art student had decided to make a large exhibition in the most inconvenient location they could find.
Henry dropped his bat and with a wide-eyed and expressionless face, walked up to the fence and laced his fingers through the links.
"What happened up here?" Henry said, the noise broken the silence of the highway and several animals scurried into the nearby bushes frightened.
Looking up and down the road, he saw there was not a single thing that did not appear destroyed. A white pickup truck was resting on its roof flattened by a green minivan what was now perched precariously on the truck as if it was put there on purpose. The cab of the truck was crushed flat, and the windows of the minivan were destroyed, and the passenger side door was almost off its hinges, a tattered green jacket is blowing in the soft breeze caught in the seat belt.
The only car that appeared to be untouched was a little red sports car with a soft-top retractable roof, the kind of car that divorcees drive or middle aged men who are going through one of their mid-life crisis'. The top of the car was down, and there did not appear to be any damage to the car. It was not until Henry looked closer at the car did he realised that the car was originally grey and that the red was blood splattered all over it.
Henry shivered after seeing a mental image of what must have happened for that much blood to be in the car.
Cars and trucks sat motionless on a stretch of road that was one of the busiest within the closest four counties. It was hard to imagine the last time that this road was as quiet as it currently was.
A pungent smell of rotten meat wafted across the highway and hit Henry directly in the stomach. Henry gagged and turned sideways as if to vomit, fortunately for him there was nothing left in his stomach for him to expel. That also meant that he got to gag and dry heave some more.
Henry turned back towards the source of the smell and saw an 18-wheeler transport truck upside down in the valley of the median. At least, he thought it was upside down. The wheels of the trailer appeared to be on the roof if there was a roof left. The contents of the refrigerated truck were all over the highway. Cartons of eggs and bags of milk were broken open and rotting in the early morning sun; the sight was just as terrible as the smell.
Looking at the tire tracks on the road provided no answers as to any cause of the mayhem that he saw before him. Skid marks were swerving all over the road. Some were easy to follow as the tire tracks ended where a car was; while other tire tracks ended where there was nothing to be found even close by to the track.
What Henry saw on the highway did not give him much hope for finding anything other than monsters past this point.
He tried to spit onto the ground beside him, trying to get the taste of bile and vomit from his mouth. What spit that he could manage clung to his lips and would not fall to the ground; his body knew how precious this water was right now.
Henry took a couple of deep breaths, hoping that nausea would fade away once he calmed down.
A single tear rolled down his cheek.
He absentmindedly wiped the tear away, quietly wondering if he was crying for the people who have died here or if it was his tear ducts reacting to the dry heaving that he had just finished doing.
Henry straightened up and looked at the barricade before him. Running to his left and right was 4 kilometres of high-density chain link fence. The barrier was a good 9 or 10 feet high with a roll of barbed wire along the top. The fence was erected about ten years ago after some car accidents caused damage to the car dealerships and chain stores along the highway. The barbed wire was added a few years ago as an aid to help prevent robberies as some thieves were scaling the fence and dashing across the highway to evade capture.
He stood and looked at the fence in either direction looking for any damage that might make getting to the store a little safer and less dangerous. Any of the cars that he saw that were close to the fence did no damage to it.
"Well, I guess that's a benefit to paying the extra for the high-quality steel fencing. Maybe I should have done that too?" Henry thought about the damage that was done to his fence over the years by the kids in the neighbourhood. "Might have saved me money in the long run."
Henry looks carefully in each direction, taking a few steps backwards to gain a better perspective on his current problem, which way to go to get around the fence. To his right was a continuation of the parking lot for the car dealership and past that was another car dealership, but going in that direction would take him further from the Wholesale store. To his left, was the service building for the car dealership, some independent stores and a strip mall, this would bring him closer to the store but would also bring him closer to any potential danger as well.
As Henry thought about which direction to go, he was caught up in his thoughts and did not hear the faint sound of shuffling that was coming from behind him.
Chapter Twelve