Westmarket

Company Meeting

10:30 pm, Wednesday, October 2.

Darkness descended upon the building as evening crept over it. The day had been spent debriefing the survivors of the morning carnage, a plan of action slowly being formed. Stephen could see how Foucalt easily slipped into his role as leader of the group, the wirey, thin man seeing it as an extension of his managerial position. Jared Strome was obviously not happy about this, but his small attempts throughout the day to usurp Foucalt's death grip on leadership were met with snide remarks and brooding sneers from the younger portion of the crowd. He'd been force feeding them his success spiel for far too long, and they were all long wise to its ineffective rhetoric. Their rebellion had evolved into a coup.

"We have to start getting organized," Strome said, but this time he was the one needing motivating. "Get some tents set up, camp out properly. We'll go through our daily routines, all of us, and we'll get all the items that will be important in the coming days. Shampoo, cologne, hair dryers, shaving cream. These are the things that mark us as a success, that give us a human edge. Smelling good and staying clean. We'll need to iron out some of the cotton shirts that are hanging over there, maybe grab some of those faux silk ties. Can try to look the part, even if you can't feel it. That's how you climb the mountain. You just hold on with all you got and keep going."

"I don't care how smelly we get, I just want to live." Evan tossed a wrapped sandwich from the grocery deli section at him. "If we're going to be stuck here a few days, I know what I'm doing. Grabbing a bag of Fritos and parking myself in front of Call Of Duty 5 with my best bud, Dan."

Foucalt glanced at the sandwich Strome now had in his hand, his brow pursed as he thought on it. "If we are trapped here for a while--and from the amount of those things sliding against the windows we will be--we need to organize our necessary supplies, such as food and water." He rubbed his chin, wincing at the small scab that had formed where Strome had bitten him early that morning. "We need to hunt down every freezer we have in stock and start loading all the meat and other frozen items into them. We can't afford to lose what scant supply of food we may have. Right now it may seem like we have a lot, but if we're here longer than a week, we need to be able to properly wait this thing out."

"No," Strome said, his jaw set against it. "What we need to do is pack up what supplies we can, and get out of here, under cover of darkness, so those things can't find us. We go to the city, and we seek out help. The government has to have sent in the troops by now, we need to contact the authorities."

"I've 911'd the hell out of my cell phone," Beatrice shouted at him from the depths of the restaurant. "Nobody answers. There's no one waiting on us, and even if they find us, you think they're going to let us just walk out of here? They're going to assume we're all infected." She checked Robert's temperature with a digital thermometer, and liked what it revealed. "This dummy got lucky, he's okay. But no soldier out there is going to come in here armed with a thermometer to check your health. This is a crisis, they're going to do what they think is necessary. You got to anticipate there's no one out there willing to help us. Foucalt's right, we wait this thing out and see what we're dealing with first. I'm not wandering into that hell pit for no fool."

"Speaking of wandering," her sister Jeanine said, and she pointed at the elderly woman who mindlessly coursed up and down the front lobby, seeming to have about as much awareness as one of the grey hunks of animated meat slipping against the windows. "Got to keep an eye on that one. Don't let her near the doors or the windows, she might open them and let them things in."

"Don't let her in the bathroom, either," Dan added. "She made a real mess in there last time."

Cheryl sat across from him at a table far from the window, her arms crossed as she watched the old woman shuffle towards the plastic wrapped remnants of the undead thing Strome had beaten into wiggling jelly. "What's she doing here? Shouldn't she be in a hospital?"