Holly and Jack bickered back and forth about whether we should try to barricade down the frozen foods aisle. I quietly sneaked away as they busied themselves, stacking up cardboard boxes to block the vampire's line of vision to our lair.

Armed with only a cell phone, I crept toward the origin of the scream.

A cold breeze came raging through the back of the Walmart. Shelves were knocked over. A crushed box of Cheerios was scattered across the floor. A door was swinging aimlessly in the wind and banging against the wall. I raised my hands to my face to shield myself from the wind.

Droplets of water pelted my skin. No. It must be my imagination. The rain couldn't be falling in here. After I rounded a corner, the wind subdued a little. I took in the gruesome mess in the hallway leading to the cargo bay area.

The vampires had come through this way. I could tell by the smears of blood on the wall. There were handprints of red on the plaster. The teenaged girl, who had been with the family in aisle four, had met her end here. Her body was still warm. She didn't die long ago.

Half of her face had been eaten, and her right leg was ripped clean off her body. Her open eyes with the eyelids ripped away, and her missing lower jaw made her look perpetually surprised. Touching the remains of her neck, I felt no pulse.

It was as though the dead girl was trying to tell me she didn't expect to die that day. No, she probably woke up that morning, brushed her hair, put on that green sundress, painted her toenails, and thought she would meet a boy today. Now, the leg with the matching toenails laid across the room with several hunks of meat gnawed off it.

I stared at her limp, rag-doll body, unable to tear my eyes away. She had once been so pretty, so healthy, so unlike me.

Her wide, lifeless brown eyes told me she didn't expect to be fatally kissed by a vampire today. Well, I didn't expect to still be alive at this point. I stepped over her corpse as I headed to the loading zone cargo area. Carefully making my way around the pool of blood around her body, I continued down the hallway.

In the cargo bay, I found two remaining humans — the toddler boy, and his father. The crying boy was cowering in a corner. His father was defending him with a pistol in one hand and a blowtorch in the other. I walked up to the rusty railing overlooking the cargo bay. I couldn't explain it, but I was suddenly very aware of my heartbeats.

It's strange how as you face death, suddenly you become very cognizant of being alive. My body wanted to run, to leave these poor people behind. Yet, I stood there, staring — no —gawking, uselessly.

"Run, Roger!" The father yelled. In one sudden motion, he grabbed the boy in one arm and shoved him overhead onto the walkway beside me.

The father emptied a couple of bullets into the nearest vampire. When the pistol clicked and failed to fire, he threw aside the gun and picked up a nearby piece of scrap wood. I watched him beat the vampires back toward the open door. I ran across the walkway and grabbed the boy. As I backed away towards the door back into the store, I saw a vampire bite down on the father's neck.

*

I scrambled back into the store, clutching the wailing toddler boy in my arms. His unrelenting screams attracted the attention of every undead creature within miles.

"Shhh, shhh," I said as I smoothed back his dark, tangled hair. I even tried bouncing him up and down to calm him down. Although he was just a little boy, he still weighed a good thirty pounds or so. The effort took a lot out of me, and I felt my chest tightening up again.

I sat down on one of the plastic crates piled against the wall. The boy's sobs were dying down. He was tiring and it was just as well. We both needed a moment of silence to rest. But we wouldn't have anything like that tonight. I heard footsteps approaching. I closed my eyes and prayed that it wasn't more vampires.

"Ailith? Ailith! Where did you run off to?" I let out a sigh of relief as I heard Holly's high-pitched voice. The expression on her face said she was about to give me a piece of her mind. In a hurry, Holly approached me and I saw that Jack not far behind her. They lingered an arm's length away. Momentarily, they exchanged glances as they uncomfortably evaluated my eyes to see if I were still human.

"I-I had to go save him," I explained and gestured to the sniffling toddler in my arms. "They killed his father."

"Are you crazy?" Holly demanded and seized me by my upper arm. "And you're wet!"

"It's just water," I said. "The cargo bay wasn't rained on."

"Hey guys, can we fight elsewhere?" Jack interjected. "We're not alone here."

The lights in the hallway flickered, and we all reflexively ducked. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up now. A vision of the toddler's father with the arteries and veins hanging out from his half severed neck floated back into my memory.

"There's a refrigerated room with a lock in the basement," Jack said and pointed to the nearest stairwell. "I think we can lock ourselves in there until they're done feeding."

"You know an awful lot," Holly observed. "Have you worked at a Walmart before?"

"Actually, I just googled the floor plans for this building. My phone was working just for a second there while you two were sleeping. We need to hurry; there's no time to argue."

We all jumped as a stack of crates was knocked down. It wasn't a vampire. It was a woman. She was one of the family members who had been in aisle four. It was the boy's mother.

"Roggie?" A middle-aged woman who was bleeding with a wound in her side asked. Her sundress was torn and her hair was a mess over her face. She didn't seem to notice the blood dripping down the side of her leg as she stumbled into the hallway. I saw an enraged glare on her narrow, bird-like face as she saw me holding her son. "What are you doing with my son, Roger?"

"S-sorry!" I stuttered and dropped the squirming boy to the ground. I held onto his small hand, though. I had to make sure the woman was still human. I took a step closer toward the wounded woman. In the back, I heard Holly sniff angrily at me from under her breath that I wasn't throwing the annoying child away with both hands. "Are you okay, miss? Do you want to come with us?"

"Where's my husband?" The woman asked, glaring at me as I continued to hold onto her son's hand. As she came closer, into the flickering light of the hallway, I saw the blood staining her dress still ran red. She wasn't one of the undead.

"Your husband's d-dead," I whispered. "The vampires got him and your daughter."

"DEAD?" She hollered and reached out for her son's arm but her balance was off. She had to reach out to brace herself against the wall. "I don't believe you. Jason was a quarterback . . . on the football team! He isn't DEAD; I don't believe a word coming out of your mouth! The vampires couldn't have taken him, they couldn't! And my daughter, she's a sprinter. There's no way they were taken!" The woman started shaking her head and leaned against the wall as though her knees were weak from grief.

Denial. I knew it well. I felt it too with my mother and with Grace. There was something else, too, a sense of déjà vu as though I had been through this before. Then it came, a memory of the smell of roses, a small cold hand in mine.

Another fatherless boy.

Slowly, I let the boy's hand go. I couldn't explain it. I sensed the danger before any of the rest of them did. It was a story that had been told before, and it was happening again before my very eyes. I lied to Holly. The wetness down the boy's shirt, it wasn't water. I felt the sticky slickness between my fingers, where I had held onto his soaked clothes.

The boy was wet because he was caught in the rain.

The mother leaned over and dropped to her knees before her son. Sobbing, she wrapped her arms around him and pressed his face against her neck. It was a fine motherly thing to do. It was reflexive. Natural. I would have done the same if I had a son.

"Sto—" I started, but it was too late. The boy almost seemed to grin as he caught the scent of blood flowing down his mother's leg. The boy sank his teeth into his mother's neck and ripped out a giant hunk of her soft flesh. She backed away, her mouth gaping open. Her hand went to her bleeding neck, but it was too late. The boy vampire crawled toward and sank his teeth into the bloody wound in her side. As he ripped out her guts and spilled her insides across the filthy floor, Jack and Holly grabbed my arms and dragged me into the stairwell.

"Get a hold of yourself!" Holly snapped. "We need to save ourselves!"

Finally, I saw the wisdom of her selfish need to save herself. We all needed to be more like Holly if we were going to live to see morning.

As we hurried (as best we could) down into the pitch blackness of the basement, Jack found the handle of a large metal door. He opened it and herded us inside. It was still cold inside the walk-in refrigerator but only mildly so. Maybe it had shut off during a recent power outage and failed to turn back on again.

Jack securely closed the door behind us. Holly switched on a flashlight she had tucked into her jeans. As Holly and Jack went to figure out how to lock the door from the inside, I reached into my pocket and drew out Jack's cellphone. Although the phone was passcode protected, I could see the last three messages he received.

Unknown sender:

Help is coming. Get into the basement.

Protect Ailith Ying.

Your life depends on it.

I didn't understand. Not only was Jack's phone working, but he was also receiving orders from someone? Who? Why were they interested in me? I couldn't make any sense of it at all. So much so — that I didn't even notice the light the cellphone was shining on my face.

Jack did.

"Gimme that!" Jack yelled and roughly snatched the phone back from me. His face was absolutely livid as he buried the phone deep into his jean pocket. "Geesh, what the hell? Can't you help us and do something useful instead of snooping?"