The "Us" in Virus

~2~

The dentist surveyed his surroundings. There was not much in the parking lot, mainly looted cars with no wheels and more toppled shopping carts -- nothing that could really aid him in his long trek home. He knew the general direction of his cabin, and his short professional career in curling had given him the stamina needed for such a journey. The problem was carrying all of the water bottles back. He sure as hell didn't want to push his gimpy shopping cart an upwards of 40 miles with that god-forsaken perpendicular wheel taunting him the whole way. So he searched the surrounding area for half an hour, looking for anything that could help him. Through rubble, trash, dirt, the dentist fervently searched for nothing in particular. It was futile. 

And what made it worse, he was getting thirsty.

The dentist eyed the Aquafinas. He really didn't want to upset the packaging of the Aquafinas because he didn't know what his journey had in store, and didn't want to impede his ability to carry them in any way. But they were so tempting, and he was so thirsty. 

Suddenly, he remembered the bottle of Dasani left in the parking space. He trod over to it, picked it up, and muttered, "I guess this will have to do." 

He then poured out the bottle, the water seeping into the ground and returning to the pit of Hell from whence it came. The now-empty Dasani bottle would make the perfect rainwater collection apparatus. 

Having scoured the parking lot and found nothing, the dentist resigned to keep the shopping cart for the time being. Then, with a pop of his knuckles and a curse at the shopping cart wheel, he started home. 

It was extremely slow going. Shopping cart wheels are not all-terrain. They were meant to spin on finely waxed grocery store aisles, not over gravel and debris. They struggled to roll on the uneven sidewalk, to maneuver around the bodies. The turn radius of this sucker was wider than that of his monstrous Ford truck -- well, what was once his monstrous Ford truck. 

After a while, the dentist's ears picked up on a faint sound. He slowly stopped pushing the cart so that the rattle of the metal would die down. 

He closed his eyes and listened, trying to isolate the distant sound over the whistling wind and crackling trashcan fires. It was lost for a couple of seconds, but then it surged up again. His ears picked it up, and he instantly knew what it was. It was the same sound that he had heard so many times when giving people root canals. The same sound he had made when his ex-girlfriend told him she was pregnant. 

It was the sound of wailing. 

The dentist decided to go check it out, not for any moral or altruistic reason, but purely out of curiosity. He didn't need the rattling of the cart compromising him in a potentially hostile situation, so he pushed it over into the parking lot of an abandoned craft store and covered it with some orange camouflage fabric.

With the cart skillfully hidden from plain sight, he followed the sound. It took him in the direction he had been going along the main road, but then he had to turn left down an alley. The wailing was getting loud now. Screams, cries, pleading. They were echoing off the narrow, grimy alley walls. He crouched down amid the scattered trash bags and crept forward. Slowly, a courtyard emerged to his right. He peered around the corner and took in the scene.

It was an open space the size of a tennis court. Maybe once it had been prim and maintained, but now it was decrepit. A plaster statue of some buxom goddess lied crumbled on the ground, and some ungodly cross between Adolf Hitler and PePe Le Pew was haphazardly spray-painted on the far wall. But, shockingly, that was not the worst part. What was worse was the line of prisoners. 

Under the spray paint, people in surgical masks were lining up disheveled men, women, and children against the wall. Whenever one of the prisoners tried to escape, a mask-wearer would smash them on the head with the butt of a rifle until they either got back in line or crumpled on the ground. The children were crying, grasping their mothers' legs, and the masks were screaming for order. Eventually, the cries died down to whimpers, and the prisoners accepted their fate. They compliantly lined up on the wall and stared ahead with wet, vacant eyes.