It was Kyle’s world now.
He held his hammer up. It was time for him to reclaim himself. It was time for him to step up and be a man. Mark was right, he told himself. Mark was right and these weren’t people. They were just things and they deserved to die.
He could do that.
He could kill these things, these worthless pieces of shit who had fucked up his weekend. He wanted to relax this weekend. He wanted to chill. Now it was halfway through the week and he hadn’t gotten to relax or chill. He’d been running, stressing out, feeling wounded and damaged and worried.
Not anymore.
It was time for something else.
It was time for Kyle to figure out who he was and for him to own that shit. Was he the type of man who would kill a zombie? Fuck yeah. Was he the type of man who would do it without feeling remorse? That was a little harder.
He spotted another Infected shambling toward him and he lifted the hammer once more. This was a woman in torn jeans and a bloody t-shirt. Like the man before, her hair was matted against her face with sweat and blood. She smelled like death and she looked even worse.
Could he take her down without being a pussy about it?
He lifted the hammer. Alice was slaughtering Infected left and right. It hadn’t taken her long to find her inner warrior princess. Mark was right along with her. There were more Infected coming out now. Eventually, they’d need to stop fighting and shoot the rest before the whole fucking town came out to play or they’d need to get lost until the crowd dispersed. As it was, the creatures were slow enough that taking them out by hand was fine.
It was almost fun.
Kyle could pretend he was in a video game as he fought.
Ready player one?
Ready.
Quest?
Kill five zombies.
Double XP if you get headshots.
Kyle hit the woman and she went down. He hit another, then another. He got his five zombies and by the time he was done, the crowd had thinned and Kyle and Alice were slowing dragging bodies away from the area in front of the library.
“What are you going to do with them?” He asked. The strange zombie, the quiet one, was still lurking around, just watching them. It made Kyle uncomfortable, but he wasn’t quite sure why. He didn’t want to walk over and kill it. It was across the road and down a few buildings, after all, but he disliked the way it watched him.
He disliked the way he thought it was observing him, calculating his every movement.
It was creepy, and Kyle didn’t like creepy.
He turned back to his friends, and when he peeked over his shoulder once more, the zombie was gone.
Chapter 11
Mark showed Alice the most efficient way to move one of the corpses. She didn’t want to ask how he knew. At first, she had been trying to pull them by the arms or legs, but Mark vetoed that right away.
“Like this,” he said, and he showed her.
They would roll them on their backs first, then stand at the head. Squatting down, they slipped their arms beneath the corpse’s armpits and gripped each one tightly.
Then they pulled.
Mark and Alice pulled body after body behind the library to the woods there. She wasn’t sure it was a good idea, hauling corpses to right behind your place of residence, but it didn’t matter at the moment. What was more important was getting them out of the streets, out of the line of sight. What was more important was making sure people wandering by didn’t see a fuckton of dead bodies and wonder where they’d come from or why.
She pulled, quietly moving each body with Mark. At first she kept count, but by the time she got to her fourth one, she was sweating profusely and her shoulders were starting to ache.
“Just a few more,” Mark said.
She nodded, glad for the encouragement, but she didn’t say anything. There wasn’t really anything to say. She was a killer now and she was learning to clean up her messes. It was a weird feeling, really.
Out of all the times she had been crazy or weird or done things that she shouldn’t have, she had never hidden a body.
Not that they were really hiding them now. They were more like, tucking the corpses away.
“Wild animals?” She asked, pulling one into the woods. They carried them a few feet back into the trees, then lined them up. At some point, they might need to bury them or burn them. She wasn’t sure. For now, they just wanted them away from the library.
“Never know what’s going to be hungry these days,” Mark muttered.
“What about the blood?” She asked. “There’s a lot of blood on the road in front of the library. People will be able to know.”
“There’s blood everywhere now,” Mark said. “If someone is driving through, it won’t be enough to make them stop. If they just see blood, they won’t care. Blood can be from anything. If they see bodies, though, they’re going to think there are survivors, which will only mean trouble.”
“Because they’ll want to torture us,” Alice said solemnly. She dropped the body and turned to follow Mark out of the woods. As they reached the edge of the forest, the sun shone brightly on them and she was reminded that the world wasn’t all dark.
It wasn’t all dead.
Even though her world had crashed and died and been buried, the sun still rose. The clouds still moved. The sky was still standing.
“They might,” Mark answered, never one to shy away from gory details. “Or they might just want something.”
“Like rape?”
“Holy fuck, Alice. Are all of your thoughts so damn dark?” Mark stopped walking to stare at her, but she just shrugged.
“You never know.”
“I meant they might want our water or food or guns. I didn’t mean our bodies.”
“People get weird, Mark.”
“Yeah,” he said, winking at her. “I noticed.”
They rounded the corner back around the library. The bodies were all gone now but one: the one Kyle had been working over for awhile. It was dead now. It was really, really dead. The head was a bloody mess and Kyle was covered in blood.
“I hope you don’t think you’re climbing back onto the couch like that,” Alice said. “Because there’s no way in hell.”
“I’ll get rid of it,” Kyle said, ignoring her comment.
“We took the others out back, a few feet in from the forest’s edge,” Mark told him.
“Got it.”
Kyle grabbed the body and began to pull it. He moved slowly, like he was too tired to bear much more, and Alice felt bad for him. She went to help him and Kyle didn’t protest. Yeah, he was tired.
Mark stayed behind as the two of them pulled the dead Z back behind the library. They tugged quietly over the grassy area that had probably been a lovely place for a picnic, once upon a time.
“There were a lot of them today,” Kyle said when they finally reached the other bodies. Alice let go as he pulled it up to the end of the line of corpses and dropped it. He looked at it for a second. Then his eyes wandered over the others.
What was going through Kyle’s head?
Alice knew what was going through hers.
There were a lot of bodies and they were each different. When you were dealing with the idea of death, it was different than actually seeing it up close. It was easy to think, “Five deaths? That’s not so many.” When you were staring at a line of five bodies, it felt like a lot more, and each one had its own story.
Maybe one had been a mother and one had been a doctor. Maybe one had been a teacher. Alice, Kyle, and Mark would never know, but none of it mattered because the zombies were all still dead. At the end of the day, they were dead.
There were more than five corpses, though, she thought, staring at them.
There were more than ten.
Alice didn’t want to count them. Maybe there were 12 or 13. She wasn’t sure. It felt like more. It felt like they were never-ending.
It felt like she and Mark and Kyle had slau
ghtered the world and they had the stains on their clothes to prove it.
She tugged off her shirt and threw it beside the bodies.
“What are you doing?” Kyle asked, looking away quickly.
“I won’t be wearing these again.” She tugged off her shoes and jeans and threw the jeans on the pile. She awkwardly put her shoes back on, and then stood there for a minute. Bra, panties, and shoes: this was what her life was now. She thought about leaving her shoes, but she didn’t want to cut her feet walking back to the library.
She didn’t think she could handle surviving a fight with zombies only to die because she cut her food and got blood from the ground inside of her body.
Nope.
She’d just look silly instead.
At least she was alive.
She wasn’t even embarrassed about her appearance. She thought she probably should be, but she wasn’t. She was just tired. She was done.
To Alice’s surprise, Kyle looked down at his own blood-covered clothes and also stripped down to his boxers. He tossed his clothes on one of the bodies, then turned back to her.
“I guess we’ll be needing new clothes.”
They walked quietly back to the library, back to where Mark was leaning against the front of the building with his bat.
He looked them up and down. Then he raised an eyebrow.
“You two have fun out there?”
“Not the fun you’re thinking of,” Alice said. “But I’m going to need more clothes.”
“Of course you are,” Mark chuckled. The three of them stood looking out over the road, at the remains of their fighting.
There was a lot of blood: probably more than there should have been. There were a couple of stray shoes and even a set of keys. Mark picked that up quickly and carried it back to the porch. Alice noticed a pile of wallets there, too. She raised an eyebrow, but Mark just shrugged.
“You never know what you’re going to need. It’s best to accumulate resources when you’ve got the chance.”
She opened her mouth to say something snarky, to ask when he thought they were going to need cash again, but before Alice could speak, they heard a different voice.
A new voice.
Someone they didn’t know.
“Hey assholes,” the voice rang out. “Mind putting some damn clothes on? You think everyone in the apocalypse wants to see what you’ve got?”
Find out what happens next in Just Another Day in the Zombie Apocalypse: Episode 4.
Author
L.C. Mortimer loves zombies almost as much as she loves coffee. When she's not on a caffeine-induced writing spree, she can be found stocking up on canned goods for the apocalypse. Mortimer loves reading, playing zombie video games (7 Days to Die is currently her favorite), and spending time with her partner-in-crime: her husband of 11 years.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Author
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Just Another Day in the Zombie Apocalypse (Episode 3) Page 7