"We'll get help. We're going to fix this. It's fine. Everything's going to be fine," he said, yet he could hear the terror in his own voice as he said it. It was as if he was disembodied from himself, watching a scene in a movie unfold. He felt as if he had no control of anything.
But he knew there was only one chance to save her now, one single opportunity that may or may not work.
"We're going to fix this," he repeated, going into action immediately. He knew that time was short.
"Keep her still," he told his wife.
Running back to the truck, he threw the passenger-side door open and pulled out his machete. The blade was not as sharp as it should be, but there was no time to think about that. He ripped a long piece of fabric from an old shirt sitting on the seat and ran back to his daughter.
"We have to hurry," he said, wrapping the fabric around her upper arm as tightly as he could. There was so very little time left.
His daughter recoiled in terror and fear when she saw the bright blade of the machete. Trying to scramble backward, she tried to get to her feet, but lost her balance and fell back into the dirt again.
"Oh my God, no-- no," she repeated it several more times, but Nolan quickly grabbed her by her ankle and pulled himself back up to her. He tried to block out what she was saying from his conscious mind.
"There has to be another way," his wife shouted to him.
"There's no time," he screamed, positioning the blade at the elbow joint. His daughter continued to struggle with tears streaming down her face, her long blond hair falling into her eyes.
"Let go. Oh my God, let me go," she screamed in a high-pitched wail as he grasped her by the arm.
This was one moment that would live on with Nolan for the rest of his life, the moment before he lifted the blade. In the moment that it was resting there on his daughter's upturned arm, he imagined that none of it was real and that he wasn't about to do what he intended to do.
But he had to save his daughter's life. There was no choice.
Raising the machete, he brought it down quickly, before she could get away and end her life as a zombie. Just as he had used all his force on the zombie that bit her, he did not hold back anything when striking the flesh between the joint now. His daughter's scream was deafening in the air, an alarm pounding in his ear like the physical sensation of someone stabbing him with an ice pick. Blood flowed freely from the cut and ran down her arms.
Slicing quickly, he was glad he had retrieved the machete instead of using the ax. Though the pain must have been unbearable, the machete completed the job cleaner and faster than the other would have done. At least he had spared her with that, if nothing else.
One final chop and the cartilage that held the joint together gave way. But the arm didn't rip away. Instead it merely sat there, a stump of its former self, the memory of something once alive and once part of a human being. His daughter on the other hand, pulled herself free now that Nolan no longer had a grip on her. The sight was gruesome as she lifted the stub of her upper arm into the air, almost expecting that the rest of her arm would follow. Yet, there was nothing more than the bleeding, battered end of her extremity. Nolan's wife gasped and held her hand to her mouth in horror.
Nolan stood up, and standing there, hands and machete bathed in his own daughter's blood, he listened to his daughter as she screamed and cried, and he waited.
Part 2: Expectations in a Destroyed World
There was a second moment that Nolan would never forget: the look on his daughter's face when she turned.
When a full minute seemed to have passed, he let himself hope, to truly hope, that it had worked. He let himself believe that he had saved her. Her screaming had not slowed, not at all. But he let himself have that one second of hope, the second where he thought she might live.
Then she stopped screaming. It was as if someone had suddenly flipped a switch. Her face relaxed, and she stopped crying. She brushed some hair back off her face. She almost looked relieved, as if the amputation was of no concern to her anymore.
And in a way, it wasn't. The almost-tranquil look was what Nolan would also remember for the rest of his life. It was a look of peace, assurance, even acceptance. That was when he let himself believe it had worked and that she was saved.
In the next second, the gleam went out in her eyes. With a flick, they rolled back into her head; she convulsed once, violently. Her whole body seemed as if it had suddenly been thrown on a rack and tightened down to the breaking point. Then she convulsed again, just as violently. She pounded her fist on the dirt, and the stump of her arm flailed about several times. Blood flew in an arch and hit Nolan across the chest. At the same time, his wife took several steps back.
"Do something," his wife screamed. "Save her."
But there was nothing to be done. The transformation was already ravaging through the girl's body, eating up blood cells and muscle, taking control of limb and life. Within a minute, the entire process was complete: his daughter was nothing more than an undead monstrosity, an agent of death. Before he could run or reach for his weapon, she was on her feet and lunging at him. He dodged her and barely missed being bitten himself. She was far faster than she had been when she was alive. She came at him again, and he was just able to sidestep her a second time.
This couldn't be happening. This could not be the world he had been born into. This could not be how things would turn out.
Yet, it was, and he had a choice to make, right then and there: let his daughter destroy him or destroy her with his own hands.
When she came at him the third time, he had already picked the ax back up.
"What are you doing," his wife screamed. Tears were coming down Nolan's cheeks, and he could not stop them.
He swung the weapon one time, blunt side out, and caught her on the brow. It was a sickening sound of heavy steel hitting hard bone. And it was all he needed to do, and she spun up and fell back in the dirt. Walking up to her quickly, he removed a small revolver from his waistband, a gun he reserved only for the most desperate of situations. Bullets were precious for the ability to end things quickly, but this was one time that they would be worth more than gold.
Nolan's wife grabbed him by the shoulder and tried to pull him around, but she didn't have the strength. He was far too tall and evenly built for her to push him around so easily. Yet, he wasn't even aware of her presence really. It was as if she wasn't even really there. For him, he had only one last action to complete, one last goal that must be checked off.
"I have to fix this," he mumbled to himself. "I have to make this right."
When he looked at his daughter's face, the eyes were completely dead. There was nothing there. There was no one behind them, no human being anyway. Above her eyebrow was the dent from where the ax had struck her. It was a broad indentation that hadn't broken the skin, but had clearly collapsed the bone underneath and seemed to be filling up with blood rapidly, turning a crimson color. It made him sick to see it.
His wife screamed something to him, but he didn't hear it. The only thing he said before he aimed the revolver between his daughter's eyes was "forgive me." When he pulled the trigger twice, his wife let out two loud wails to accompany it and fell to the ground. From each bullet hole, a thick red liquid oozed out, and the girl's head slumped to the side. Then she remained motionless.
"Monster!" his wife shouted from beside him. But he couldn't hear her still. He couldn't hear anything. It was as if the real world around him had ceased to exist. Everything he had ever known was suddenly contorted, twisted up in some disgusting hallucination of gore and death.
Nolan dropped his arms to his side and looked at his daughter. This young girl had been his daughter. And he was being consumed by the sight of her dead body, the corpse of a young girl that had lost her arm, turned into nothing more than a zombie, then been killed by his own hand. It was all over before ten minutes had even passed. Her own father had killed her in cold blood.
Before he co
uld register what was happening, his wife ripped the gun from his hand. When he turned to her, she was saying something, but he couldn't understand what it was. The words simply lost all form and meaning. Even when she pointed the gun up at him, he was hardly aware of it.
"You're a fucking monster," she screamed one last time and pulled the trigger. The blast was short and hit Nolan through the chin and jaw, shattering his mouth, before it emerged from the top of his skull. Parts of his brain flew behind him and landed in the dirt. Falling to the ground, he remained motionless there, one more corpse to add to the pile. She shot into him two more times, burying bullets into his chest. His wife even cried for another few minutes before turning the gun to her own head and firing the final bullet into her temple, six shots in all.
“Decay On The Wind”
Story #3
By
Jack Blare
It was near night fall and the wind blew in cold, sending shivers up and down Jessica's spine. She was late for a dinner with her boyfriend and the sun was already going down.
"Oh crap I'm going to be so late, Donny is going to kill me!" thought the young teenaged red head. She shivered from head to toe and pulled her thin sweater tight. She saw the Green Wood cemetery up ahead. Ordinarily she would avoid walking through a grave yard, especially in the dark like this, but she had been late for her last couple of dates with Donny and didn't want to deal with him being disappointed again. If she just hopped the fence at the other side she could shave a couple minutes off of her walk.
Ignoring her misgivings and the strange feelings of unease in her chest, Jessica headed through the cemetery gates. It was completely dark now and a few snowflakes blew in the wind. Jessica crinkled her nose in disgust; it smelled like rotting meat. Busy concentrating on keeping her lunch down, it wasn't until halfway through the walk that she realized she was being followed. A shadowy figure was lurching along behind her, steadily advancing.
"Damn it!" Jessica thought nervously. "What if I get mugged? Or worse?" She pulled out a switch blade she had for self defence in her purse, snapping the blade out with a sharp click. Suddenly she felt a heavy blow to the back of her head, knocking her to the cold ground. The stench of rot was nearly unbearable and for a second she thought she would throw up or pass out.
"How did he get here so fast?" she thought in terror.
Quickly rolling over, she saw the stranger standing over her, pale hand with yellow finger nails reaching for her bare throat. Acting purely out of instinct she slashed at it with her knife, severing two of the horrible fingers. Thick, dark red blood dripped like syrup onto the thin layer of ivory snow that had fallen in the grave yard.
To her horror the stranger didn't stop. Jessica screamed and slashed wildly at her attacker. For a moment she thought she had killed him, his face looked so twisted and mangled, but then she realized that it had partly rotted away. One of its eyes was completely gone, the other was white, smoky and soulless, devoid of colours, pupils or any sense of humanity. Half of its cheek was just a putrid hole showing the creature's disgusting yellow teeth. Its mouth was open like a hungry wild animal, blood dripping like drool from its jaws.
Desperately Jessica rammed her small knife into the creature's one remaining eye, driving it in to the hilt, all the way into its rotting brains. It made a horrible screeching sound and recoiled from her, falling onto the ground and going still, a pool of blood forming around the mangled remnants of it's face.
"Oh my god I killed somebody!" Jessica's mind was racing a million miles a minute. "But that guy was already messed up." she thought. "Like he was already dead for a long time."
She didn't have time to think however, as two more man-sized shapes lurched out of the darkness, a man and a woman. Jessica recognized them as the Matelands, they were in the paper the previous week, both had been killed in a violent car accident. Yet here they were, standing and walking like they were alive, but still bearing the horrid wounds that had supposedly killed them. Mrs. Mateland was so badly burned that her bones were showing in places and her flesh was peeling off like shredded scraps of burnt paper. Mr. Mateland didn't look much better, with one arm torn off and a large piece of metal impaling his ribs, where his heart should be.
Horrified and disgusted, Jessica tried to tug her knife out of the dead creature's eye socket but the blade was lodged in his skull. The couple advanced towards Jessica with an unholy speed. They were so close that she could see their deathly pale outstretched hands. Their bloodied finger nails and the wedding rings that still mockingly glinted from their former owners' swollen and bloated flesh caught her eye. She gave the knife one more valiant tug, but it was in vain. Jessica panicked, just barely managing to escape their hungry grasps.
She knew there was a mausoleum at the top of the hill in the centre of the cemetery.
"Maybe if I can get there I can lock myself in until help comes." she thought desperately.
She ran like she had never run before, leaving a trail of little foot prints in the untouched snow. As she neared the doors of the hill top mausoleum more dark and twisted shapes of zombies emerged from the murky dusk, coming from all directions and moving fast.
As she desperately fled up the hill she slipped on the snow and fell flat on her face. Before she could haul herself up the slippery slope she was on, one of the zombies had reached her. It was a fat and drooling specimen, wide white eyes devoid of anything even remotely human. She saw only an abyssal hunger. Acting out of pure instinct she kicked back with the heavy studded black leather combat boots that she wore all of the time, one, two, three times. She felt the front of the zombie's skull give in and it flopped down motionless as a rotten dead fish, its brains partially crushed and oozing a thick black liquid.
Fighting down the urge to vomit once more, Jessica thought, "Well at least I know how to kill them now. Go for the heads."
She had no time to dwell on her discovery; more and more of the undead monstrosities were advancing, shadows lurching through the unnatural fog. Jessica stumbled to her feet, heart beat hammering like the snare drums in one of the punk bands she spent nearly every one of her free weekends seeing out in the city. She scrambled up the hill towards the mausoleum, the snow icy cold under her hands as she pulled herself up just in time to escape the bloody, infected yellow claws of a particularly fast zombie. It was wearing a tattered girl scout uniform and Jessica had a horrible feeling that that... thing had once been her eight year old neighbour, Sally Allan.
Jessica reached the old, wooden doors of the mausoleum just a few seconds before the hungry mob of zombies closing in behind her. She tried the handle but to her disbelief and terror the door stayed shut. "Is this really where it ends?" Jessica thought. "Getting ripped apart by walking corpses in the middle of the county graveyard, just seconds from safety?"
In desperation Jessica did the first thing she could think of and planted a heavy kick on the weathered old door with her trusty steel toed combat boots. To her relief and surprise it swung open immediately.
"Wow. I'm glad my parents made me take all of those exhausting karate classes when I was younger." she thought, bemused.
Jessica slammed the door shut just in time; three pale severed fingers writhed on the floor like insect legs; the lead zombie must have been already about to enter the old mausoleum when she slammed the heavy old door. Using a nearby pew, Jessica created a makeshift barricade for the door. Hoping that this would hold them out until she could figure out a plan, she turned and walked into the nearly pitch black mausoleum.
The only light in the building came from three small candles burning at an altar at the far side of the mausoleum. The air was dank and stuffy, stinking of an odd mixture of scented candles, mould, and rotting meat. The walls of the building were completely covered with little nooks, each containing a small urn and the ashes of a dead human being. Jessica pulled out a lighter, igniting it with an echoing click and using the weak light source as her only guide through the darkened mausoleum.
Jessica rolled across the floor, once again just barely escaping a zombie's ravenous grasp. She crawled and leapt over the pews desperately seeking an escape route. The Death Priest was close on her heels, clumsily following her, like a fat, putrid shadow. As she ran through the darkened mausoleum Jessica collided with something sharp, heavy, and metallic. It crashed to the floor with a deafening clanging sound. It turned out to be a large, antique silver cross. It looked like the edges just might be sharp enough to use as a weapon. Without any other option she seized the cross and aimed it at the Death Priest's distended gut as though she were a pikeman in the 1600's facing down an enemy cavalry charge.
Tales of the Zombie Apocalypse (Issue #3 | October 2015) Page 2