March 6th

This is Jimmy Varn, and I am still alive but hurting pretty bad.

I got back late from my Wal-Mart trip. I was pretty messed up. I downed a lot of painkillers and slept. And dreamed. And woke up screaming a few times. Shit.

So, the Wal-Mart was where I expected it to be. I carried the wheelbarrow all the way there and tried not to think about the return trip. Ha, I had no idea what the return trip would be like.

I should have known better when I saw the outside. It was a fucking massacre in the parking lot. The bodies were thick on the ground. It took me awhile just to push my wheelbarrow up to the doors. I worried that they might have been shot by survivors inside, but the corpses were a mix of having been eaten and having been shot. Quite a few of them were just bludgeoned. I’m not fucking CSI, I couldn’t tell what had killed them.

The inside was just as dark as I suspected. Navigating by flashlight was scary as shit. You never have enough light, even when you are pointing it right at something. Spinning the flashlight around on things that make noise just makes you blind as you try to follow the light.

And there were noises. I could hear the moans of zombies. I couldn’t see them, but inside that Wal-mart I could certainly hear them.

Even from the front I could tell this place had seen a war. There were a lot of bullets, and a lot of physical violence. I have bashed enough skull brains to know when zombies had been taken out by brute force. What I couldn’t get over is how many dead there were. I had shot zombies outside Home Base for weeks and it was a puddle compared to the lake of the dead that was there.

I started with the food. I went to the grocery side and began taking stock. A lot of it was cleared out, but not everything. The frozen foods were thawed and rotten but I stocked up on cans. The inside was creepy but gathering food perked me up. Having a choice in soups delighted me more than I would ever guess.

I was trying not to make any noise. Sound echoed pretty bad in there. I was trying to be quiet and I guess I wasn’t quiet enough.

There was a strange whistling noise that I heard for just a second before pain exploded in my shoulder. I half spun in pure shock at the pain. It burned like fire. I instantly thought I had been shot with a bullet, so I was really confused when I saw I had a goddamn arrow in my shoulder. I stared at it and wondered what the fuck it was.

I heard the whistling sound again and I dropped to the ground. Another arrow lodged itself in a big can of Crisco above me. My brain spent a second thinking that maybe I should add Crisco to the list.

My shoulder flared with pain and I got my brain working right.

“Quit shooting!” I yelled. “I’m not a zombie!”

“I don’t care!” someone yelled back.

An arrow lodged itself in the wheelbarrow.

I got pissed. I meet another survivor and they are all Ted Nugent on me.

I fired back. I couldn’t tell where they were, but judging from the angle of the arrows, I had a good guess. The arrow was killing my shoulder, but I was pissed.

My lunch is done. I’m having two cans of Beefaroni seasoned heavily with garlic powder.