by Rosaria, A.
“Where did you find this whack job?” slipped out of Sarah’s mouth. She groaned. She sounded like a bitch. Especially after the man rescued her. The whole time he said nothing and only stared at her while grinning like a baboon. He must be feeble-minded, or going from the wrinkles on his dirt-caked face, suffering from dementia. Yet his shredded body was a body most twenty-somethings would envy. Not even Jake approached the muscles he owned. Sarah caught her eyes lingering a little too long and glanced away into Priss’s disapproving frown.
Sarah sighed. “Mr… ahem…” She realized he had not offered her his name. “Thanks for saving me.” Sarah bowed a little, not knowing why. The goofiness must be infectious.
Sarah pulled Priss closer. “Tell me, where did you find him?”
“I literally bumped into him. I believed at first he wanted to kill me, but he just stared at me. Real creepy like. Just like he is doing now. I told him about us, that we needed help, and he followed me back.” Priss punched Sarah’s shoulder. “And you, you promised me no heroics.”
Sarah scratched the back of her head. “They cut me off. I really had no choice, I had to fight.”
“It was a foolish plan to start with.”
Hindsight was a bitch. Foolish indeed. She recognized it now. Eight against one. Way bad odds. “I’m alive, that counts.”
“Not thanks to yourself.” Priss punched her again, harder. “Don’t you ever do that again. Not to me.”
Sarah rubbed her shoulder. “Ahem, sir… who are you?”
No response. Only smiles. And eyes full of mirth on her. Sarah sighed. “Guess it’s okay we stay over for the night.”
“No way, this place creeps me out.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. The red and feeble sunrays slowly retracted out the single window. “And it won’t be creepy outside?”
The man stood and stretched. His head almost touched the ceiling. He shut the window, locked it, and nailed a stained plywood board on it. The room fell into darkness but for the light that came from a small stove heating a pan with water. He did the same to the door. Sarah opened her mouth to ask him what he was doing. The man raised his index finger to his lips, silencing her. His job finished, he ushered out three cups, and poured the hot water in them. He used a single bag to make tea. Sarah and Priss greedily accepted the offered cups.
“It’s getting colder,” Sarah said.
The old man looked up. Sarah pointed to a thick fur blanket. “It’s cold.”
“Hah, cold,” the man said, his voice grating. “Cold, cold, cold, they didn’t want to believe me when I revealed all this global warming was crap. A big fat hoax. Well, it’s cold now. Cold, and getting colder by the minute.”
Sarah and Priss watched wide-eyed.
“Global warming, suckers believed in that shit. Too bad they are not around anymore for me to tell them ’I told you so.’”
The old man glared at Sarah and Priss. “You don’t believe me?” He waved them off. “Well, bah. It’s the big space-exploration boom all over the country that caused this all. Man’s crazy need to explore the universe. No, I know this.” His face grew serious for a second. Sarah felt cold fingers caress up her spine.
The part about global warming being fake she believed. It was getting colder all the time, even before the nukes fell. But aliens from outer space causing the cold? By nuking the country? She knew better. It was their own big fat government who nuked the world. Or more to the point, the people puppeteering the government from behind the shadows. Damn, she was joining him into conspiracy theory bull crap. Whoever or whatever didn’t matter anymore. The world was as it was now. There was nothing she or anyone else could do about that.
“And what caused the zombies? Spacemen?”
Priss slapped Sarah. The disapproving frown again. The old man didn’t get Sarah’s sarcasm and nodded with a serious look on his face.
“They wanted to explore space… and they got us fucked… totally fucked.”
The old man leaned back against the wall. He stretched out, grabbed the blanket, and draped it over himself. He fell back into silence. Sarah stared dumbfounded at him.
“Who wanted to go to space?”
The old man started snoring.
“What does space have to do with zombies walking the Earth?”
Louder snoring.
“Hey, spaceman, answer my question.”
The snoring continued. Priss placed a hand on Sarah’s pointing arm and lowered it. “Leave him be. He’s crazy.”
“Come on, he finally says something then shuts up like that?” Sarah said. “Hey, Spacey, I know you are not sleeping.”
“Stop that. And ranting about conspiracy theories is not conversing.”
“Spacey!”
“Sarah, stop yelling. It’s night.”
Sarah sat back down, not realizing she had gotten up. It was late. Any noise could attract things she didn’t want attention from. She peeked around the room. The only source of light came from the glow of the dimming embers. She could barely view the large woolen blanket in the corner of the shack. She grabbed it. Heavy quilt. She twisted her nose up. And musty. She huddled close to Priss and draped the blanket over their shoulders.
“We’ll get fleas from that,” Priss said.
“Don’t see you moving away from it.”
Priss nestled against Sarah. Sarah felt their bodies’ heat spread over to the blanket. It made the cold bearable. The old man’s breath steadied and his snoring stopped.
“We should follow his example,” Sarah said.
She felt Priss nod from under the blanket. She herself wasn’t so sure she could sleep tonight. Within minutes she heard a slight snore from under the blanket. Sarah sighed and leaned her head against the wall. How did she manage to keep getting herself into shit? It was the choices she keeps making. She should have stayed. She could have dealt with it and lived a regular life. Well, as regular as it got in a world infested with the walking dead.
Sarah shut her eyes. No, she witnessed how in an instant things could turn bad. The people who had held her captive for six long months belonged to a tightly organized government with their own army of guards. Guards armed to the teeth, ready for anything, or so they thought. Guards who manned tall walls served to protect their sheltered, luxurious lives. They even ran schools. In the end, the guards failed. The walls crumbled. That place stood tall and mighty for a time, and if Priss was right, there were many such places spread around the country. Places where the rich expected to ride out this crisis. Them and their servants. Without the constructs of the old world, the relationship between master and servant could not last. As soon as the servants realized there was no real boot holding them down, the luxury ended and the city burned.
Priss’s body felt nice and warm against hers. Sarah’s muscles relaxed. Her breathing evened out. Her thoughts became foggy. She gave in and descended into a slumber. A hard thud against the wall sent her eyes flying open. The embers in the pit had died out, leaving the room in complete darkness. Without a way to ascertain the time, she didn’t know if she had slept a minute, an hour, or many hours. Sarah held her breath and concentrated. Footfalls outside.
“Priss?”
Light snoring answered her.
“Hey, Spacey.”
She didn’t know if her whisper would reach the old man. Louder. “Spacey!”
Something slammed against the wall.
“Quiet,” a whisper answered her. She had to admit, when not ranting, his voice had a nice, deep sound to it.
“What time is it?” Sarah asked.
“Shh…”
She heard quick banging on the wall followed by footsteps on the roof. Priss stirred in her arms. Sarah rested her against the wall without waking her. She got up and approached the spot under the roof where she heard the sound. She hit something and send it clattering over the floor. The old man hissed a warning. The sound on the roof stopped. A second later, whoever or whatever was on the roof started thrashing. T
he roof shuddered with the force unleashed on it, but it held. Priss jumped awake. “What’s going on? What’s happening?”
Both Sarah and the old man shushed her. The silence returned inside the cabin. The thrashing outside kept a while longer. She concentrated to hear anything. Only their breathing. Silence. Was it gone? A loud bang made Sarah jump. Something hit hard, sending the door inward against the beam barring it. Again and again. From outside, a shrill scream went up, sending a chill running up Sarah’s back.
“It’s an enhanced,” Priss whimpered. Sarah heard the girl crawl to a corner furthest away from the door.
The banging kept on. Whatever the old man utilized to bar the door, it worked. The door held. Sarah started to suspect this was not the man’s first encounter with an enhanced zombie. After one last frustrated try, the enhanced went for the windows. Blow after blow. The wood cracked. Frenzied, it kept trying to get inside to feast on the yummy food waiting for it. Sarah concluded they stood no chance in such an enclosed space and in the dark. These monsters could see all too well in darkness. Not that it mattered. Even if she had all the light she needed, the three of them had no way to offer any credible defense in this space. They barely could maneuver without bumping into something or each other.
“Spacey, do you have a gun?”
Knife and sticks would not do.
“Nope.”
Figures. “A flamethrower, then?”
In a serious tone, Spacey again said, “No.”
Sarah shrugged. The old man didn’t get sarcasm. “Have you got anything we can use to defend ourselves with?”
Sarah heard steel rasped against leather. The old crazy coot swung a hatchet side to side. One knife, one hatchet, and one hammer were all they could brandish against an undead being that sprinted faster than Usain Bolt and possessed night vision. They were screwed bad.
A pale fist broke through the outside blinds. Glass shattered. The fist banged hard against the plywood Spacey applied to bar the windows from the inside. A frustrated wail shuddered the cabin. Fists pummeled the plywood. Cracks expanded. A gleam of light slid inside. Pale fingers wormed through a wide crack and yanked, splintering the wood. Again. More light entered the cabin. A high-pitched scream of pain went up, and the pale arm vanished, covered in wisps of smoke.
Hatchet in hand, Spacey rushed to the door. With a quickness that defied his age, Spacey yanked the bar from the door and pushed it open. Bellowing, he bolted outside. Sarah followed, unsheathing her bowie knife. The faded moon hung heavy in the sky. At the horizon, gold streaked the air, chasing away the darkness. A white figure, smoke layered over its skin, fled toward the tree line. Spacey sprinted in hot pursuit. Despite showing agility Sarah would never have guessed of his age, he couldn’t keep up. The enhanced vanished into the shade between the trees. Spacey growled a challenge.
Sarah sheathed her knife. That was close. Too close. If the enhanced had found them ten minutes earlier, they would all be dead.
CHAPTER THREE
Sarah stood in front of the cabin, observing the damage. The window shutters lay torn to pieces, spread over the ground. And so did the wood Spacey had used to bar the windows and door. Ragged, broken bits of wood were all over. There was no way they could make this work for another night. Even with an undamaged cabin, it would be pointless. The enhanced zombie knew their location and would at sundown have all time to crack the shell to gain access to the juicy stuff inside. Sarah was not interested at all in being juicy stuff. She observed Spacey rummage through the debris and every so often he stuffed something into his backpack. He must have reached the same conclusion she did.
Priss joined Sarah, staring inside the cabin. “We must leave now.”
Sarah nodded. The more distance they put between them and the enhanced, the longer it would take for it to track them down, and the bigger the chance they had in escaping. It being so close on their heels, the chance was great that it would find them anyway, and to survive, they needed better shelter. Sarah had hoped they would find something in the town nearby, but it was too close. With luck, they might find a place to stay, and with more luck, they’d stumble on guns. Sarah didn’t like the odds of that happening, but it might turn out they had no other choice.
“What about Spacey?” Sarah said, jutting her chin at him.
Priss twisted her nose up at the old man in shorts with the body of a god. “We go our own way.”
“Come on, he saved us, we can’t leave him behind,” Sarah said.
“If we split up, at least one of us has a bigger chance of surviving.”
“He’s six foot tall, has longer legs than you, and he is a man. He’ll cover more terrain than us.”
Priss shook her head. “He’s an old man.”
Sarah pointed at Spacey. “Does he look like an eighty-year-old grandpa?”
Priss glared in disgust at Sarah. “Eww, you like him.”
Sarah blushed. “Stop it, I’m being serious. If we split up, we are the ones with less chance of surviving. We can use him.”
“You do as if zombies can track our distance by smell.”
“Stupid, slow zombies won’t, but do you want to bet an enhanced is that stupid? It will figure out the same thing I did.”
Priss grew silent and stared at Spacey as he slung his backpack over his shoulder. He brushed past them and said, “Bye, bye,” and plodded up to the mountain, away from the direction of the town.
“Hey,” Sarah said. “Spacey, wait.”
He didn’t stop.
“Spacey!”
“You really should stop calling him that. Let him go, he made his choice.”
Priss followed the road leading to the town. Sarah eyed the path Spacey had taken. The old man must know something. Why else avoid the nearby town? He must have a better plan.
“Priss!”
Priscilla stopped. At least once in a while, someone listened to her. Sarah gestured to follow her. As she whirled towards the way Spacey had disappeared into the forest, she caught the look of horror on Priss’s face. Sarah flashed her teeth. It was a gamble if Priss would follow her. And it was a greater gamble following the conspiracy nut. Yet a gut feeling told her it was the right choice to make. The town was a dead end to die at.
She cashed in her first bet when a sullen Priss joined behind her. After a hundred yards into the forest, they heard crackling branches ahead. Sarah followed the sound. Priscilla kept to the back. They found the old man. All around them there was no visible path. He whistled a tune as if he was alone out on a stroll and knew where he was going. They marched for a mile like that.
“You don’t have to stare like that at his ass,” Priss said. “He could be your grandfather.”
“I’m not.” Sarah bristled.
“You’re drooling.”
Sarah scowled at Priss. “Very funny. NOT.”
The little brat was teasing her, payback for making her follow her. No way she wanted his old ass. In fact, she didn’t want a younger one, either. She didn’t have time for these things anymore, great firm ass or not.
“You’re still gawking,” Priss said.
There was little else to look at. Sarah gritted her teeth and mumbled something not very nice.
“I heard that,” Priss said with a smirk.
Damn her. They walked for miles, in which Sarah did her best to look anywhere else but at the old man.
“Are you going to ask him—”
“I’m not going to ask him out on a date, or anything like that. Jeez, Priss, leave me alone.”
“Cranky much? I meant if you were going to ask him where he’s guiding us.”
Sarah blushed. She hurried to Spacey’s side so Priss didn’t notice her flushed cheeks.
“Ahem, sir, do you know where you are going?”
Silence.
“Spacey?”
The old man sighed. “Yes?”
“Do you know where we are going?”
Nothing.
“Space—”
/> “Yes?”
“Do you—”
“Yes, yes, yes, I know where I am going.”
“Where?”
The old man sped up his pace. “Away.” He ducked under a low-hanging branch. Sarah almost went face first into the branch.
“Away, where?”
“You’re not coming with me.”
“Going where?”
“Away.”
“Where?”
Spacey stopped. He turned around, frowning. Sarah turned where he was looking. She hadn’t spotted any zombies, not a single one all day. The old man set his eyes on her. He had pebble dark-brown eyes. He eyed her with an intensity that no sane man ever looked at her with. For a fact, neither did the few crazy ones she met before. “There is a small village up there, but you can’t come along. It’s dangerous.”
“Why?”
“Because of Space.”
Sarah sighed. Not that again. A howl in the distance stopped any rant she feared Spacey would start. Spacey glanced in the direction from where the howl came. His mouth opened and closed again. He grabbed her wrist in a firm, bordering on painful grip and dragged her into a fast trot. “Little one,” Spacey yelled over his shoulder at Priss. “You best follow close.”
He let go of Sarah, rummaged through his backpack, and took out an old T-shirt. Sarah wondered why he didn’t cover his scar-covered body if he carried clothes with him.
“Tear this into pieces.”
“What?”
“Just do it.”
She needed to perform gymnastic feats to stay in balance while hurrying after Spacey and at the same time tearing the T-shirt into strips. Spacey scooped a thick branch from the forest bed. He grabbed the torn cloth strips from Sarah and wound them around the branch, making a torch. The sun was still high enough above the horizon to give them some light to go by. Sarah wondered why he was making a torch. Another howl behind them. This one was further back than the first one. A third joined. A fourth. Howls sounded all around them. Priss hurried to Sarah’s side.