Days of Love and Blood

cargo bay door for loading.
    That was where I would find sheets of Plexiglas, seeds and fertilizer. The garden section was the easiest to locate since it was right next to the loading dock. I grabbed a trolley and packed twenty bags of fertilizer. A plastic bag I grabbed from one of the checkout lanes served as a container for all of the food seeds I could find. Squash, pumpkin, zucchini, carrots, beets, lettuce, cucumber, peas and everything else that was edible. After loading my camper, I went back for one more run on fertilizer.
    Plexigla s. I needed that next. I wasn’t sure how I would be able to find it and if it would be easily labeled. After searching the wide aisles aimlessly for twenty minutes, I finally came across boxes of what were called acrylic sheets. It looked like Plexiglas to me.
    The boxes were heavy and cumbersome and it took me several minutes just to wrangle one box onto the trolley. I needed the widest pieces available. They had to be big enough to fully cover a window. A few sheets of these in a large box were problematic to maneuver at my stature.
    I only managed to load four boxes in all. I would have to come back again with someone to help. I wasn’t sure if I would even be able to get these boxes into the camper and the sudden idea of tying the trolley to the back of the R.V. made me laugh out loud.
    “Are you laughing at me? You are, aren’t you? You’re laughing at me, you stupid bitch.”
    I drew one of my swords and whirled around, looking down the darkened aisle in both directions. No one was there. The shelves next to me quivered and a sudden sliding noise pulled my attention upward in time to see a large cardboard box wrapped with white plastic ties falling at me. I flinched to the side and the box grazed my back hard, smashing to the ground with a loud cracking of the ceramic tiles inside. The pain from the scrape made me cry out and also propelled me to quickly move behind the carriage for protection. Another box landed in the place I had been standing only seconds before.
    “Come down,” I yelled to him. “I promise, I won’t hurt you.”
    “But I’ll hurt you.”
    “Okay, so come down and hurt me. Come on. Double dog dare you.” I stood up and let him look at my face. He was out of place in a hardware store, wearing a sweater vest and collared shirt with a tie still neatly tucked within. His face bore another story. A lesion ran from his left eyebrow down the side of his face, reaching his neck. His skin was ashen grey and the whites of his eyes were completely blackened, as if he was possessed by a demon. “Come on, come hurt me if you can. I want you to.”
    He looked frustrated and glanced down several times while loudly wheezing through his teeth, as if he was trying to make up his mind. He finally turned around and began to scale down the shelving, undoubtedly desperate to kill me. Before he made it to ground level, I slipped up behind him with both hands squeezed tightly around the leather handle of my sword and thrust the tip of its blade through his neck. I didn’t remove my sword until his body stopped quivering and his knees buckled, his full weight giving way to the sword which suspended him. His body fell in a heap at my feet.
    The snapping of hard soles against the concrete floor had me spinning around to locate the direction. A voracious scream penetrated the air followed by an unequal echo in a lower tone. I left the trolley and swiftly darted toward the loading docks. I didn’t know how many there were and it was too dark to see. It felt as if they knew where I was, like I was being stalked.
    Once in the main corridor I ran full speed to the side entrance where I was parked. I could hear the shuffling of feet behind me and a few more nonsensical cries. After a short run I could see the open cargo door and my camper just beyond it. I ran through the open passage and back out into the light but not before I turned around to see if any fast runners were behind me. What felt like a brick wall hit my abdomen and I fell backwards onto the ground. I looked up to see an aged man with a bat and dangling red drool hovering over me. My sword had fallen away from me and I couldn’t reach for the second one. I could barely move with the wind knocked out of me. I held my arm up and braced myself for the second blow while the man raised his bat up high with a toothy, devilish grin upon his face. He screamed and looked up while bringing the bat down, allowing