Mark as almost with us.
“Don't” I told the girl as she rose, knowing it was a stupid thing to do. She couldn't understand me, and even if she did she didn't care. I was just meat to her. The girl lunged, ready to hook my flesh with those fingers of hers. I pulled the trigger.
Click.
Shit! I hadn't chambered a round. It was standard safety procedure with a rifle in the biathlon. It meant that the weapon couldn't accidentally go off while you carried it from target to target. I'd been so caught up in filling the bottle with gas and then the plain shock of seeing this girl to think.
She got her fingers on my coat, dragging herself and those nasty greying teeth near for a bite, her eyes fearsome – and green, the fire inside them was green – when Mark's hatchet split the girl's skull from above with a crackling wet sound that reminded me of breaking celery.
The girl went down in a spray of clotted red. Her blood already beginning to freeze and coagulate in her veins. She twitched and writhed face down for a moment until Mark hit her again.
“Let's get the hell out of here,” he said turning to fetch the backpacks only to see several more of the walking dead, adults this time, shamble stiff and awkward from the rear of the building. Two more from the not-at-all-abandoned-car in the drift.
“Shit!” I screamed as still more of them rounded the tree lined bend in the road from farther down the snow covered road.
“Go!” Mark yelled at me as I drew back the bolt and chambered a round. “I'll catch up.”
He dashed back to the store's doors where he had dropped our packs, his hatchet still dripping with gore and chucks of blonde hair clinging to the blade.
With slow steady breaths I raised my rifle, found my mark, breathed out and held my breath.
A sharp resounding crack as the small calibre shot pierced the nearest...lets just say it, zombie, as it closed in on Mark's position. I got it in the ear as it turned in profile. The bullet penetrating its brain and causing its legs to buckle under it.
My paralysis gone, I slid the bolt again sending the shiny copper cartridge snipping away from me catching the winter sun like a jewel.
Mark rushed back to my position, snapping his boots back into his skis as the groups of the dead began to converge into a throng.
We didn't waste any time, pushing off at speed, skis sliding over powdered snow as we gained distance.
*
Exhausted we made it back to the cabin. We didn't stop, even when our lungs screamed and our muscles ached; we were far too frightened to stop. The fact that there were so many of them, the dead, out here in this isolated and mountainous region was bad news.
Mark suggested that the infected might be migrating, or that they were merely following the food; hounding the survivors. It was also a possibility that they were following some half remembered impulse. During the winter a large percentage of those in the city would take a holiday around this time to cabins and ski resorts. Could it be that they were just reacting to some vestigial routine left in those corrupted brains of theirs?
Collapsing into the cabin, we locked all the doors and windows. Mark got to work restarting the fire while I sorted through our shoplifted bounty.
“This all we've got?”
“All they had,” Mark replied. He looked tired, wearing the physical toll of our trek.
It looked like we weren't the first ones to think of raiding the little supply store. I counted up our new rations. It wasn't good.
“God, they followed us for ages. They're slow but relentless,” Mark said, rubbing his hands together in front of the fresh fire. I stripped off my boots and parka to join him.
“Once we were out of sight it was fine,” I told him. “Besides, it'll be dark soon. I doubt a living person could find their way around outside once night falls, never mind some rotting corpse.”
Mark gave me a weak smile.
I could tell what he was thinking but thankfully neither of us said it. What next? We weren't in the head-space to deal with that question just yet. We would have to address it, and soon if we were going to make those supplies count. I didn't fancy starving to death up here.
There had been mention of using the gasoline we'd collected to thaw out the rest in the tank of our car, but there was no guarantee that is what was wrong with it in the first place. Besides the roads were snow clogged. The gas would help light fires and maybe torches once the batteries in our single flashlight died. Better to keep it for that.
I don't know if it was the stress of the day or the warmth of the fire, or the two of us working so well together, but I leaned forward to kiss my husband. His whiskers soft and ticklish against my skin. He didn't react for a moment, quiet shock, then he kissed me back. And just like that we were pawing at one another with desperate need. Violently tugging the clothes from the other and attacking them with our mouths and hands. An urge, near frenzy seized me. We made love wild and insistent in the fire light, the cabin slowly warming around us as the last of daylight fled, bleeding first orange then pink then blood red. If we had looked outside for longer than a glance the world would have been blood soaked. A scarlet horror.
I straddled Mark's lap as he sat, grind ourselves together. I'd never been a noisy lover, too self conscious. It always seems a little fake, a little crass to me, all that moaning and screaming. But now, here, I was calling out wordless cries of need and pleasure.
I could feel the driving heat of him filling me up, his hot lips searching out mine, occasionally stealing away to suckle at my nipples. Hot with a fervour we hadn't felt fully since the early days of our marriage.
So caught up in our passion were we that we didn't here the footsteps, the steady crushing of snow under foot, approach.
It wasn't until afterwards, as we embraced breathless and exhausted from our lovemaking that we realised we'd had an audience. Dozens of eyes glimmering with firelight, catching it like wet pennies, staring at us through the cabin windows. Grim voyeurs.
I shrieked.
Mark rolled me off of him racing for the hatchet as I pulled my thermal vest and underwear back on. Nude except for his socks, Mark dashed across the small room, the fire sending shadows skittering across the walls. I could hear them now, the dead at our doors and windows. Rasping moans and growls and snarls. Death had not been kind to the faces pressed up against the window glass. Many had begun to rot. Add to that the severe injuries that had killed them and they were a walking horrorshow. The cold had done its work as well, freezing whole sections of exposed flesh, causing some of it to crack like clay exposing the bone and putrescent muscle beneath. Maggots clawing through open wounds hung frozen in flesh by the cold. More than one had long icicles dangling from the chin or eye ridges. There was a light crackle as they moved, akin to kindling taking flame, as skin and tissue fractured in the cold as they twisted and writhed. Whatever rot had corrupted them in the city had been frozen in time as these things had wandered into the mountains. Freeze-frame images of terror and death.
Mark had his hatchet and hit the door at a run, making sure it had been locked and bolted. It had. The windows spiderwebbed as claws scraped the panes.
I was already fetching up my rifle when they broke through. Grasping arms and heads filling the hole where the window had been. Now those snarls and growls turned to utter screams of rage and hunger. Broken fingers slashed at the air.
Without a thought Mark began hacking at the limbs nearest to him, rending arms and fingers, cracking skulls. There wasn't much blood, just a dark sludge that slopped and pooled on the walls, half-frozen like roadside slush.
“Mark, no!” I screamed having seen his mistake before he did. The glass from the window littered the floor around him as he flailed at the encroaching monsters. I lined up my rifle but he was moving about so much I couldn't take the chance I'd hit him.
His socked feet burst with scarlet as he trod on the shards. With a guttural shout he buckled in pain, but he didn't hit the ground. The crowd of the dead man
aged to latch onto him as he fell. First one and then another and another until they had Mark bent backwards as they hauled him closer to the window, pulling him back as though they might just yank him outside altogether.
But they didn't.
Claws and mouths found his flesh everywhere. He screamed in abject pain as the flayed skulls and rotting faces gnawed at him. Taking the time to pull on my boots, I raced over to help him, the glass crunching underfoot. Using the but of my rifle I broke one's skull then turned the muzzle on another blasting the tiny .22 round through its brain. Another whack with the rifle butt broke out teeth, but there were just too many and Mark's blood washed over him like a crimson sheet, steaming in the cold air.
Nails raked my arms as I tried to pull Mark away from them and those grotesque sounds I could hear from the throng; of flesh being stripped away, of chewing, of gristle snapping.
With a final tug I got Mark free, miraculously.
A dark miracle perhaps.
I fell on my ass, tiny fragments of glass puncturing my skin. I barely felt them. What was left of Mark slumped inside against the wall beneath the window. His chest and arms covered in a slick coat of gore, brilliant and demonic in the dancing light from the fire. Bite marks and slashes covered the flesh on his arms and torso, but it was his head that they'd done the worst damage to. His lips had been torn away exposing raw gum and shining teeth. His cheeks were strands of ragged tissue and one of his eyes had been gouged or perhaps sucked out. Both ears and indeed most of the skin from his scalp had been peeled away, leaving a clotted knot of sinew and mucilage shaped like a skull. It reminded me of a roast chicken, picked of meat, leaving only scraps clinging to bone.
I howled in absolute soul crushing agony. I think something broke in me then, something deep inside, something vital. Huffed out like a birthday candle. Vomit sprayed from my lips to join the glitter of glass while sobs racked my body at what they had done. It had happened so quickly, like a school of human piranhas.
Worse still, is what happened next. A black cosmic joke at my expense.
Mark began to move.
First just small twitches, then all too soon he sat up, his stripped jaws parting, his tongue – chunks bitten out by his attackers – lolled like a slug as he screamed. For one horrible moment I wondered if he was still somehow alive, but the roar of ungodly rage that erupted from him told me he was not. They had turned him into one of them.
A monster.
Recoiling from the corpse I scrambled backwards, away from Mark's rising form, fresh tears streaking my checks. All around me were the sounds of the dead grunting and calling out for my flesh, hammering with fists and faces at the windows and doors trying to get in. But Mark was already inside. He rose a scarlet nude with a ragged dripping skull for a face, the hatchet now clutched tight in hand.
“Mark, no!” I felt foolish for attempting to plead with the beast, but it was more anguish at the violation of his memory. Black ichor and gore ran from his mouth to drip from his chin. His remaining eye glaring balefully at me, corrupted by violent trauma, and burning with a weird, unnatural luminescence.
Mark lumbered towards me as I in turn backed away from him. Sight blurry with tears I knew what I had to do, I could not hesitate, there was no time. If I didn't shot Mark, he'd be on me with that hatchet of his.
With the slender .22 LR raised at him I could cherry pick where I shot him. Used to hitting targets at 180 meters a human body a few feet away was no challenge.
“I'm sorry,” I sobbed and pulled the trigger.
The shot wasn't as loud as it felt, but it hit him right were I'd aimed. Directly in the centre of his forehead. A tiny dot appeared then dribbled a thin dark rill, the back of his head popping as the small bullet exited his skull. His head snapped backwards and he looked ready to keel over.
I let out a weeping, sickening breath of disgust at what I had done.
But Mark didn't fall. He rocked back on his feet then steadied himself, turning to glare at me as he raised the hatchet, cords of muscle flexing.
No! He had to be dead, really dead. I shot him in the head, just like you're supposed to. My mind shot back to the encounter at the supply store gas-station. The dead man I'd shot coming after Mark. I saw him go down, saw him fall. But we'd fled so quickly...was it possible that he'd gotten back up?
And the little girl, Mark had cleaved her skull?
Did she get up as we skied for our lives?
Oh god, this is no virus, this is something else entirely!
I had no time to ponder this growing realisation as Mark lunged forward leading with the angry blade of his hatchet. I shrieked and fell back again, this time running out of room, my back meeting the wall.
I flinched as he swung.
The blade bit into the thick wood of the wall behind me sending chips scattering out from the impact. I screamed in terror as I slid down raising my rifle almost vertical and shooting Mark in the head again. This time the bullet entered under his chin and out the top of his head painting a tiny red spray on the ceiling above him.
He just looked down at me and made a grotesque guttural wet choking sound I could only translate as malicious laughter.
Sliding along the wall away from him, careful to avoid the flailing arms grasping through the windows, I saw that it wasn't just murder on Mark's mind now that he was dead. Naked except for those bloodstained socks I saw his erection bulge and twitch, slick with his own cooling blood. As he stalked closer to me, it bobbed, flecks of his own gore dripping from the shaft.
He was still making that disgusting laughter as he approached.
Searing pain ravaged my shoulder as in my panic I'd back up against the free standing cast iron wood stove we'd only minutes before been making love in from of. I cried out at the sudden burn only to have that agony joined by another as Mark grasped my vest and tore it away leaving deep bloody scratches between my breasts.
He had no face any more, but I could still read something in that fleshless horror... lust. Nightmarish images flooded my mind of him hacking new orifices to violate as I writhed screaming, his blade cutting, his cock gouging at my wounds.
I wanted to be sick at the very thought. My own horrible imagination at work, yet somehow I knew it was true. Mark's undead body wanted to destroy me in every way it possibly could. The others would devour me alive as Mark raped and mutilated me.
With the scent of my own scalded flesh in my nostrils I did the opposite of any vestige of intellect still in that skull might expect. I lunged at him, pulling him close to me in a parody of a loving embrace. As we unbalanced I turned, using his weight against him forcing his torso against the scolding iron of the fire.
Smoke and stream erupted from the flesh as it made contact. The stink of burning meat filled the room, sending the monsters at the door and windows wild.
Rolling away I fired yet another shot, this time into Mark's kneecap, shattering it – the sound of rotten damp wood breaking. As Mark began to peel himself off the ironwork I scanned the area for something I could use, anything that might disable him.
The plastic bottle of gasoline lay inches away.
Flesh clung in molten strands like pizza cheese from his back and arm, Mark slowly rose back to his feet a living nightmare.
Before he could fully pull himself free I acted. Uncapping the bottle and dosing him in fuel. He was so close to the open fire the liquid ignited instantly, bathing his body in flame.
It didn't stop him. It didn't even seem to phase the creature at all. All I seemed to have accomplished was turning a flesh hungry zombie in to a flaming flesh hungry zombie.
“Shit!” I cursed.
The hatchet lashed out in quick deadly arcs. It was a tight little dance we were doing around the small cabin. With one knee blown out Mark was slow, I decided to make him slower. With precision accuracy that would have won me medals, I shot out his other knee, then his elbow, in quick succession. Effectively immobilising him. The copper cartridges tinkling to t
he floor and glowing in the firelight.
Working quickly I moved forward trapping the wrist holding the hatchet under my boot and bringing the rifle butt down to shatter his grip. With fingers bent at wrong angles I yanked the hatchet free, careful to not burn myself as the flames consumed Mark's skin then flesh.
The flames had already charred half of him a cracking carbon black. His teeth snapping at me, his free hand reached for me with fiery fingers.
Desperately dodging away with my prize I watched as with only one fully operating limb, Mark's burning corpse attempted to drag itself across the cabin floor after me.
I had enough time to hack that hand free before the first of the other zombies was pushed, by sheer weight of numbers, through the window. Ragged shards still clinging to the frame like teeth dug into the frozen flesh of one of the monsters as it slide over them, disembowelling itself in the process.
I had no time to waste.
Pulling on my trousers and parka, not bothering to even zip it up, I made my way to where we'd left the backpacks and skis. The gasoline pool and Mark's smouldering twitching form had spread the fire. Parts of the wall and floorboards were already ablaze and the room was rapidly filling with smoke.
Shouldering both packs, I had my rifle and hatchet, All I needed to do now was get out of the burning cabin before the flames or the undead took me.
I heard the door finally give in, breaking apart under the throng of zombies battering at it.
The smoke stung my lungs, forcing me to breath through my scarf, as my eye burned and streamed tears. In moments the cabin would be an inferno. Hopefully it would consume the dead as they poured inside. One of the window frame blazed, the zombies flailing to get in scorched flesh waving like burning brands. With the door destroyed they entered en mass, but there must have been some sort of crowd mentality still lingering inside those ravaged rotting minds, as the zombie unable to enter through the windows or by other means, followed their brethren. Perhaps it was reflex or some vestigial instinct, whatever it was they thinned out around the windows to follow the rest through the front door.
Dead of Winter Collection Page 2