Chapter 298: Needles, and Thread, and Zombies... Oh My!
Lingyun looked down at the containers before slowly returning most of them to the shelf. He kept one jar of purple glitter and held it up as though the color changed everything.
I stared at it for several seconds.
Glitter was terrible. It escaped from sealed containers, appeared in places it had never been carried or had been seen by the light of day, and refused to leave even when people begged and vacuumed seven times. If Lingyun opened that jar inside my house, I would still be finding purple sparkles in my bedroom ten years from now.
On the other hand, it was purple.
I took the jar from him and placed it in the cart. You never know when a glitter bomb would come in handy. Maybe I should pick up a few more.
Lingyun smiled as though he had won something. He hadn’t. I had simply decided that the glitter belonged to me now.
The men continued following me through the aisles while I looked through the embroidery thread, fabric, and fake flowers. None of it was necessary, which was probably why I was having such a good time.
I had spent most of two lifetimes collecting things because I needed them or I thought that they would be useful for something. Food kept me alive. Medicine stopped injuries from becoming death sentences. Weapons made sure other people couldn’t take whatever I had managed to keep. Other things could be traded for something I desperately needed.
But purple thread wouldn’t save anyone.
I simply wanted it, and at this point in my life, that was enough.
I held up two bundles of embroidery thread and looked toward Lingyun. "Which one looks better?" These two were both black, but one was a darker black than the other.
He studied them with far more concentration than the question deserved. "They’re both the same color."
"No they aren’t," I replied, rolling my eyes. I put both of them into my basket. Who was I kidding? I was never going to choose. "They’re completely different shades," I smirked at him, knowing that it was going to drive him insane.
"There is no way," he replied, his voice getting higher as his eyes widened. "The purple ones were different, I’ll give you that, but these two are just black."
"Whatever you say," I purred before picking up at least one of every color.
Who knew that picking out embroidery threads would be so much fun?
And now, there was no reason to limit myself when no one was going to charge me for any of it. In fact, the more I looked around the store, the less sense it made to leave anything behind.
There were shelves filled with yarn, fabric, paints, beads, needles, glue, fake flowers, storage boxes, and things I couldn’t identify but might decide I desperately needed later. Maybe I would learn to sew. Maybe Yuche would discover a hidden passion for scrapbooking. Perhaps Lingyun would take up knitting and make everyone ugly sweaters.
Stranger things had happened since the end of the world.
The store had remained untouched for months, but people were marking the surrounding streets as their territory now. If I left everything where it was, someone else would eventually come inside and decide that it belonged to them.
That seemed more than a little wasteful.
I could take the entire contents of the store before we left. The men didn’t need to see how it happened, and the people watching from the roof definitely didn’t need to know what I could do.
I quickly emptied the store room in the back, not even looking or thinking about what I was taking. Yeah... I had a problem when it came to supplies, but I wasn’t about to change anything about me now.
I was still considering how to get everyone out of the store for a few minutes to take everything on the shelves when something scraped across the floor near the rear of the building.
The sound was quiet enough that Lingyun continued explaining why the flowers around my warning should be purple and green, but Zhou Chenghai stopped pushing the cart and turned toward the stockroom.
The sound of scraping came again, followed by a heavy thump that made one of the shelves tremble.
Lingyun’s hand moved toward his gun while shadows gathered near Yuche’s feet. Zhenlan stepped around the end of the aisle and focused on the closed stockroom doors.
I looked down at the thread in my hands and sighed. "Needles, and threads, and zombies... oh my."
Lingyun glanced at me. "You don’t sound all that surprised."
"I was hoping for one normal shopping trip. That didn’t mean I was expecting it."
"We passed territory markers and armed scouts on the way here," sighed Xu Zhenlan like that should have explained the zombie in the back room.
"That happened outside the store. It doesn’t count," I replied. I thought that much was obvious.
Something dragged itself across the floor on the other side of the doors. It moved slowly at first, but the sound suddenly became faster and ended with a violent impact that bowed the metal outward.
I carefully placed the thread in the cart even as I grumbled under my breath, "I knew this was going too well."
The stockroom doors burst open before anyone could answer. Huh, I guess I couldn’t pull zombies into my space. That was probably a good thing considering how I just took everything without really thinking about it.
A grey hand curled around the edge of one door. Its fingers were too long and bent in too many places, while hardened black nails scraped against the metal as the creature pulled itself through the opening.
Its shoulder appeared first, followed by a head twisted at an angle no human neck should have been able to bend. The zombie dropped onto all fours, its knees bending backward beneath it as though the bones had been broken and rebuilt incorrectly.
It was faster than an ordinary day zombie. Its body had changed enough that it no longer moved like anything that had once been human, but I had already seen what happened when the virus continued growing inside the dead.
This one was different. It was stronger than the others.
Mind you, it wasn’t stronger than me. Just a lot uglier.
The creature lifted its cloudy eyes and focused on the five of us. Its jaw opened wider than it should have, stretching until the skin split at the corners of its mouth.
Lingyun drew his gun.
"Don’t get blood on the thread," I warned. "It will ruin it."
