Episode 8: No Control

Episode 8

"No Control"

Mark and Jess ran outside of the storage room, everyone was waking up confused. I was wide awake, the first thing I did when I woke up was turn the power on. Not long after that, I heard the sound of a vehicle arriving. I ran up to the roof and grabbed the silenced rifle from the gun box we had set up there. I looked down on the road and couldn't believe my eyes. There were military trucks outside, about three of them. I saw a bunch of soldiers get out. I didn't want to spook them, so I headed down from the roof. If this were just a regular band of survivors, I would probably try to scare them off, but this is the military. They are going to help us! Everyone looked at me when I got down.

"Well?" Patrick asked me.

"It's the military." I said.

Everyone smiled, were they here to rescue us? What if they bring us to a big sheltered city? Maybe they have cleared a city, maybe there is a safe zone out there somewhere. I headed to the food court doors, excited.

"Everyone stay back, we don't want to overwhelm them. I'll go alone." I said.

Things were really starting to look up for us, I took a deep breath and opened the food court doors. As soon as I opened them, I saw a soldier wearing a gas mask. He caught me off guard, the solider punched me in the face and I fell to the ground. More soldiers appeared and they tossed small canisters of something in the room. Smoke came out of them and everyone in the food court started coughing, and fell to the ground. I almost couldn't breathe, my eye sight started to blur, and everything went black.

I woke up tied to a table. I looked around the room, my head hurt. All of our weapons were stripped from us. I was tied to the food court table. I was beside Kayla and Sabrina. What was going on? I saw soldiers everywhere, scouting out the food court. They walked around like they owned the place.

"What's going on?" Patrick yelled, I saw him at another table.

The soldiers seemed to ignore him, more soldiers piled in, and started packing things in here, like they were setting up base camp. They brought in ammo boxes, food boxes, and lots of guns.

"Hey!" Patrick yelled, "What the hell is going on?"

"Should we get General Gus?" a soldier asked another one.

"Don't bug him, he's busy. He'll speak to the civilians when he is ready."

"What is this? We at least deserve to know why you knocked us out with that gas and tied us up!" Patrick yelled.

The soldiers ignored him, and kept moving boxes around the food court, making it their own base. Patrick kept on yelling at them, until a soldier finally walked up to him. The soldier punched him across the face.

"Shut up." he said to Patrick.

Patrick looked back at the soldier and gave him an angry face.

"If I wasn't tied up, you'd be dead." he threatened the soldier.

The soldier laughed and walked away, the soldiers kept bringing stuff in the food court, and more and more soldiers piled inside. After about twenty minutes of that, a big man with grey hair walked in. His grey hair was buzzcut, and he had a fluffy white beard. His uniform had a name tag on it, which said, "Davis," He ordered the soldiers to do some things, like make sure the mall is secure, and ordered them to different places. Was this General Gus the soldiers were talking about? He looked at Patrick and walked over to him, he sat down at the food court table beside him, Patrick wanted to kill him, I could tell. I hope he keeps his cool, this guy looks powerful, he could probably order all of the soldiers to kill us when he wanted.

"Hi," he said to Patrick, "My name is General Gus Davis. You are?"

"What do you guys want?" Patrick asked him.

"Sorry for the hostile entrance, sometimes my soldiers can get carried away. We had to throw in the knockout gas incase you people wanted to hurt us."

"We sure as hell do now." Patrick threatened.

"Oh come on, let's be friends. We are only here to help. What's your name son?"

Patrick gave him another angry face, showing Gus that he didn't like him, but he finally decided to give over his name.

"Patrick." he said.

"Patrick, that was the name of my nephews name." Gus said.

"What happened?"

"He died, like everyone else these days. Now where can I find your leader of this group?"

"Here." I called out.

Gus looked over at me, got up from the table and walked over to me. This guy was big, bigger than Winston. He wasn't fat, although he was a little chunky. He was mainly muscle though, I've never seen an old man so muscular before. He looked around the age of sixty or something. He sat down beside me.

"General Gus Davis." he said.

"Jeff." I replied.

"Now, I understand that you people might be angry, and want to harm us. I don't blame you. We came into your territory, and pretty much have taken it over. If you will let me explain, then maybe you will realize we are not that bad."

"Go ahead." I said.

Everyone in our group who was tied to tables was now looking over at us, they wanted to know why we were attacked.

"Alright," Gus started, "Let me begin. If you watched the news a couple months ago, you will know that Toronto was promised to be a safe zone, and the military would have it under control. As you can see, it did not happen. This is because we didn't have enough manpower. A lot of soldier showed up to try and save the city. A lot of soldiers ditched us though, as soon as the news hit of the apocalypse, most of them ran off with their families and forgot about the army. When we needed our men the most, they left. So there were only about one hundred or so soldiers trying to save Toronto. There were thousands of the infected though. So we were outmatched, most of the soldiers died. We are all that's left. My crew of around thirty soldiers."

"So why are you here?" I asked him.

"We simply need someplace to stay, we saw the lights on here and we figured this would be our way off of the infected streets. We are arriving here to set up base camp. We will let you stay though, don't worry about that Jeff."

"So what you are saying is, that you are taking our home from us? You are taking control?"

"If you put it like that it doesn't sound very good now does it?" Gus said, "We are taking control, that is correct. We need somewhere to stay and survive like everyone else. Think of it this way though, you now have more protection than ever. All of these soldiers are here to protect you. The only difference is that I am now in charge, and you follow our rules."

I couldn't believe this was happening, the army wouldn't do this. Would they? I don't even know anymore, this world is a screwed up place now. The soldiers united us, and confiscated all of our weapons. They stored them away in the storage room of the food court. They locked the room up and it was now off limits. They have now opened the full mall, and soldiers were everywhere in the mall, I didn't like this. I didn't feel safer at all, I wanted to have this place as ours again. We had things going so well. They were wrecking everything, I saw Gus order a few soldiers to go and get rid of the garden because we don't need it anymore. They have a ton of food. They erased our crosses we made for our fallen survivors, they didn't care. We weren't aloud to go outside the food court anymore, it was too dangerous for us civilians. We were prisoner, stuck in this food court with nothing to do but sit here and survive the apocalypse. By the time it was night, Gus's team had fully taken control of the mall, Gus had soldiers stationed at every part of the mall, it was impossible to escape. All of the soldiers slept in different parts of the mall. A few soldiers stayed in the food court at all times to watch over us, the other ones just set up their own little home in different shops. Gus's home was in the hardware store, they same one we got the respirators from. Gus also ordered a curfew for for all of us, we had to be in our sleeping bags by ten o'clock. The power to the mall would be shut off at nine o'clock.

It was now ten o'clock, and the power has been shut off an hour ago. We were now ordered to go to sleep. I stayed in my sleeping area in the food court, with Sabrina, Kayla, and Brandy. Ten soldiers were in the food court, watching, making sure we didn't try anything. I was afraid to speak, I didn't know what they would do.

"Jeff," Sabrina whispered to me, "I'm scared."

I looked over at the soldiers, they couldn't hear us if we whispered quietly. I looked back at her, and comforting her.

"It's going to be okay, we will think of something." I whispered back.

"What does that mean?"

"We will get out of here, we're not going to live like this."

"We're just going to ditch our home?" Sabrina asked me.

"Does it look like we have a chance against these guys? Gus has over thirty men, and they all are heavily armed. We have nothing except the clothes on our backs. We have to escape. It's the only option, unless you want to stay here for the rest of your life and be prisoner. That's up to you."

"Hey!" a soldier yelled, "Shut up! I hear you two whispering. I don't know what you're talking about, but I'm not deaf! Get to sleep!"

Shit, they could hear us. At least they didn't hear what we were talking about. We were going to have to find another way to communicate.

I closed my eyes and went to sleep, and woke up the next morning. I was woken up by something though. There was a loud clap and I jolted up. I looked around and saw some soldiers making a bunch of noise to wake us up.

"Wake up! Rise and shine!" they yelled.

We all sat up and tried waking up, this was a real pleasant start to the day, what were they doing? Gus walked in the food court with a box, he dropped it down on the ground.

"Breakfast, you can't miss the most important meal of the day!" he chuckled.

These guys were crazy, I'm not sure what happened to them while they were on the road, but something really bad must have happened to them.

Mark got up and started walking towards the box, I was afraid to see what was in there. He opened the box and there was a bunch of packaged food in there, it was military food. What was wrong with the stuff we had? We had a whole grocery store supply of stuff in this mall. We don't need to be eating this. Mark had the same idea as me.

"Hey," he began, "We have a supermarket in the mall, which has tons of normal food we can eat."

"That food is for us." Gus said.

"What?" he asked, "This is not right! Why are you guys doing this? You're supposed to be keeping us safe, and now you're doing this?"

"Keep that up and you won't get anything, be grateful." Gus said.

Gus was playing the nice guy act yesterday, but today he is showing his true self, and asshole. He is selfish and greedy, I wonder what made him like this. There must be a reason. I stood up and walked over to the bin, I kicked it over and all the packaged food fell onto the ground. Gus looked really offended.

"We're not eating this. We want our food that we have here. We did have fresh fruits and vegetables but you guys ruined all of that! You tell us that we should be grateful, but you are the ones in our home!"

Gus looked at me, and his eyes were filled with rage. He gritted his teeth, and reached for his pistol in his holster. He slowly put his hand on it, this guy was insane, I wouldn't be surprised if he shot me. He then closed his eyes, and brought his hand away from his gun. He really wanted to shoot me, but he was controlling himself. He then started chuckling, and then walked out of the food court, laughing. I looked around me, everyone was confused. Even Gus's own soldiers were looking a bit confused.

"Go on and get this cleaned up." said a soldier, pointing to all of the spilled food.

I guess we shouldn't be complaining, some people out there are starving to death, and we are complaining about what food we get. I don't think that was the real reason I got mad though, I think I got angry because Gus was treating us like we were below him. This place was ours first, and he should give us some respect.

"Come on!" the soldier yelled again.

I sighed and started picking the food up, everyone else starting helping.

About an hour later, we all gathered around a food court table. The soldiers were on duty, and a few were standing by the food court doors making sure we didn't leave. This was the perfect time to plan what to do. We needed to escape.

"So how are we going to pull this off?" Jess asked.

"We could get someone to sneak a gun off of a guard." Mark said.

"No, that wouldn't work. Being stealthy is almost impossible, they have the place locked down too heavily," I said, "The only way I see doing it is to start a riot."

"Riot?" Sabrina asked.

"We need to overwhelm them. People may get shot during this, but if we time it right, and make our moves right. We could charge out of this place, and run right out of the mall. We know this place better than they do."

People looked around the table at each other, everyone looked like they had different opinions on this situation.

"People will die," Jess began, "If we do this, someone is bound to get shot. Probably more than one person too."

"I don't see any other realistic way other than charging out of here." Patrick said.

"It's a chance we have to take." I said.

"If it doesn't work, we will all die." Jess argued.

"If we don't do this, people will die. Gus is crazy, I wouldn't be surprised if he kills us all before next week if we don't do something!"

Jess sighed, she knew there was no other way. It is possible to sneak a gun off of a guard, but it is highly unlikely that it will actually success. This is our only option that has a decent chance of working. I won't lie, people will die. I could die, Sabrina could die, Kayla could die, nobody knows.

"So when is this happening?" Jess asked.

"They seem to be weaker in the morning. Not as many of them are on guard. They are on high alert from noon through the night. In the morning, they are all waking up and some of them aren't even at their posts yet. We attack tomorrow morning, get ready."

I looked over at Sabrina, she gave me a look of concern. She was nervous, she knew this was our only option though.