Chapter 52: Unlawful
Dion raced himself toward the shattered glass doors of the gas station, being illuminated by its white light.
His footfalls gradually slowed as he approached the broken glass sliding doors.
Once he was right before them, they scraped themselves open and a slight, delicate chime resounded in the air, welcoming him and notifying whoever had been meant to be at the cash register that another customer had come in.
Glass crunched beneath his dress shoes, and his senses had still been on high alert.
One of his hands had been a little wide, calling back for the blood that he had used to kill the zombies out there.
Suddenly, standing right within the place, his hand gestured swiftly towards the wall behind the cash register on his right.
There, the blood arrow that had been whistling through the air increased its pace as he gave it a little more mana.
Then the shattering of concrete resounded, and finally the wet, squelching sound of bone and then brain being torn through.
{You have felled a Level 10 Destitute Zombie, harvesting its essences.}
Dion had deliberately tried to avoid punching a hole through any of the things that were on the wall as much as he could have.
Thus, he hadn’t squarely blasted through the head of the zombie corpse that was falling to thud hard over the ground; his attack had torn through the back of the thing’s head.
Thankfully, that was still enough damage to kill the thing.
’That should be the security camera room, or maybe the break room...’ he thought to himself distantly.
Some of the zombies that had been outside had been those wearing the blue working outfit of the attendants, although because the place was self-service, and it had been at night when everything went down, there weren’t many of them in the first place.
Dion’s eyes drifted around the place as finally the scent of foodstuffs and the usual cool, muted scent of the gas station filled him.
It had been a real surprise for him to find that he really hadn’t been repulsed by eating normal human food, when he had tried to do so back in his own room.
That part of him making those considerations was what had taken him forward to the deli counter first of all amongst everything.
The power here hadn’t been cut, so looking at all of the pies and foodstuffs there, while they weren’t as fresh as anyone would like normally, they were still in a generally edible state having been contained in the sealed glass displays of theirs.
In those spaces as well, they had been left to be warmed well enough.
Dion’s hand as he vaulted himself over the deli counter dipped within each of the counters, and in running flashes of red light, the foodstuff began to disappear into his treasury.
As he jumped himself back over the counter, he held a pie in one of his hands, the wrapping of it crunching in his hand.
Dion went on to plunder more and more and gradually lost himself to a faint hum of a song, silently reminiscing that it had been a while since he had heard himself play the piano.
Shelf after shelf, and fridge after fridge, were emptied by him as he munched on the pie.
It did nothing to make him feel any fuller than he was, and a part of him even wondered where the hell it was all going when it all felt as if it was air falling into his stomach, especially now after his growth spurt. But that didn’t matter.
He was eating it for the indulgence of the flavour.
The metal of a Smoke fizzy drink popped and hissed open, and he took large swigs, walking back down towards the front of the gas station, his head thrown back.
His hand threw high, and the crumpled wrapping of his eaten pie tumbled through the air to land perfectly within one of the bins towards the deli end.
As he did all this, a slightly sleazy grin came over him.
How could it not? All of these things with long shelf lives would become immensely valuable through the apocalypse.
With his new direction of having to form a group along his way, he had to secure resources for them, as well as things to be able to potentially trade with other survivor groups.
’I should find a pharmacy if I can along the way.’
Dion had never been a sickly boy.
He hardly ever got sick, to the point where perhaps over the past ten years he could maybe be generous in saying that he had been sick enough times to barely fill a hand, and that was him being generous for the sake of it sounding more believable.
Even when he had been getting sick, it was never anything worse than a slight hay fever.
’There was that one time I got alcohol poisoning though.’
He almost grimaced at the one semester holiday when he had forced Shoji to stay indoors with him for so long that when they finally did end up going out... they nearly drank till they dropped.
At the memory of it all, he let out a wistful, slight laugh to bury the ache in his chest.
Thereafter, Dion crossed around the cashier’s counter, and his eyes fell upon the things that would likely become one of those amongst the most valuable things in the apocalypse.
There were cigarettes, condoms, batteries, basic painkillers, and, lined to the top of the shelves, were over a dozen bottles of different alcohols.
’And I should pass by a liquor store. I’m sure there will be some alcohol lovers powerful enough to survive that I can fleece for something to trade them with as well.’
Now this, he knew where he could find.
With this being said, having cleaned out all of the shelves, Dion’s hand had raised high above himself and the blood that had settled over his wrist changed into the form of a hammer.
Dion, with a full, unashamed, sleazy grin, struck down hard, shattering through the thing and sending money fluttering about.
The way that his treasury worked, as he found, was that so long as something was in about a few dozen centimetres from him, and he was aware of its presence and concentrated enough on it, he could pull them in.
That was why despite not touching them, all of the money that went flying about within his range disappeared in red flashes within moments.
Taking all of the money, Dion hurried himself out and he first of all went to one of the cars that seemed unusable.
He immediately went to its back, and his hand clutched on the boot opening mechanism; he yanked hard, tensed, and grunted.
The sound of its mechanism breaking resounded, and the back whined open.
"This one doesn’t have any..."