He took the small jar from her, the label faded but still legible on the side; Noxzema or some knock-off replica of it. Well, that much makes sense, at least. When he opened it, however, it looked nothing like the product he knew; instead of a smooth white cream, it was a green color not unlike the foliage around him, with a smell like crushed mint leaves and lemongrass. Something herbally anyway.
She looked at him, waiting for him to put it on.
“What is this stuff?” he asked, a little horrified.
She quirked an eyebrow at him, making it clear she though he was being a silly ass. “A mix a friend of mine made; trust me, it works.”
If you say so. He hesitated, then poked a finger into the sticky goop. It felt all right, at least not all that much different than any other mix he’d used in the past. A little grittier maybe. Now whether or not it worked… with a tsk of annoyance the woman pulled his hand way from the container and drew her fingers across the surface. Smoothing the mixture into the skin of his left hand and getting more before moving on to his arms, face, and neck, then reaching into his shirt to put it on his back. It was an odd moment. Henry hadn’t expected her to invade his personal space, much less to smear her ointment on as if he were an overgrown kid trying to avoid sunscreen. He felt uncertain and his nerves tingled, a combination of nerves about a mixture he didn’t know and a woman that was unreadable but attractive in some distant way.
By the time she was done the sunburn no longer bothered him. Moving his fingers experimentally, he realized the numbness was gone and, even with the thickness of it, the mix had left no greasy residue. He looked up from his skin to see where she’d gone, gathering the words to express his thanks for her help. While he’d been considering his wounds and the medicated ointment’s affects, she’d moved away from him and started a fire.
She stirred it with a branch as she spoke. “Listen, I need you to stay here. Keep the fire going and take care of your wife. I’ll be going to find us something to eat. There’s a gun next to the fire, I want you to use it if anything comes.” She thrust the backpack over one shoulder and carried her rifle in one hand; a moment later she was gone.
The emptiness left by her absence was like the sudden release of an eardrum after a flight, it let in new sounds and a deeper sense of the world around him. Uncertain, he knelt and picked up the gun then carefully put it into his belt before moving his wife closer to the fire. When he’d done that, he drew it and held it as steadily as he could. Sometime in the distant experiences of his childhood, he’d been taught how to handle guns by his father. He tried to tap into this information in preparation, opening the clip to see how many bullets there were before he popped it back into place and switched the safety off.
He heard small sounds now in the distance. Probably nothing more than his mind playing tricks, but the cold sweat running down his face and the stuttering motion of his hands said otherwise. Why in the hell did she have to leave us here anyway? What am I going to do if something actually shows up? Like one of those zombie things or whatever the hell she shot the other night. I wish I had some idea what I was tackling here. If she’s nuts, just…something. She had taken the backpack. He’d known she would do it, but he was disappointed when he’d seen it happen. Now that he was alone with his wife, he realized he would not have been able to search it even if she had left it behind. There were too many variables; too many ways things might go wrong if he didn’t pay attention.
A pale glimmer caught his attention, some distant object he’d seen with the corner of his eye. But when he turned it was gone. Thrown, his grip on the gun tightened as he scanned the trees. Still nothing. From his left there was a scuttling noise, but when he turned there was no sign of what had caused it. He heard it again, this time coming from behind. As he turned, his eyes were drawn upward as a lizard-like creature began its descent. He brought the gun up and fired, missing it entirely. Its teeth gleamed, thin needles so long that they hung from the mouth like walrus tusks. He shuffled to the side, trying to guide his bulk out of its path and barely managing it as the creature landed on the ground nearby.
It weighed no more than sixty or seventy pounds, the weight of a large dog; his assumption that it was lizard-like was wrong. There was a slimy mucus over its body, its skin covered not in scales but some sort of strange net-like pattern similar to it. It rushed at him, eyes blazing. Again, he tried to shoot it, managed to graze its hindquarter only making it angrier. He started to run in order to get out of its path, but within a few feet he ran into his wife and fell over her sleeping form. It growled and tried to charge at him again, gnashing at his face as he lay slumped on the ground. Henry hit its head with the gun, barely evading being bitten. It pulled its head away from him for a moment, but came rushing at him again, this time landing on his chest.
A gunshot rang out, and another, startling Henry as it fell to the ground, its eyes now empty sockets oozing a grey-green pus onto the ground just to the side of him. He had time to look up and see that the woman had returned before he felt the urge to vomit.
His unconscious wife spoke in her haze, the bleakly pale features of her face outlined in the dried blood from their accident. “Henry, go back to bed, it’s only a dream.”
He was very pale, struggling to keep from throwing up whatever remained in his stomach after all this time since their last roadside meal. He lost the battle and scurried over to the side of the road in a last attempt at courtesy before throwing up in the weeds at the side of the road in ropey, mostly liquid strings. When he was done he looked back to find the woman examining Rachel with frantic eyes.
“It didn’t attack her, did it?” Her tone was urgent and openly concerned.
He gasped, finally able to breathe and responded. “No, it-it just went after me.”
“Well there’s news both good and bad in that, Henry. She hasn’t been bitten, so she won’t become one of them, but if it didn’t touch her she may be very close to death. I suggest you brush up on your shooting by the way, you could have been killed.”
“You were watching?”
She turned and looked at him. “No, I heard it in the woods. Be glad you weren’t bitten, the change is horrible. You must die and feed on your own kind.”
“If she-?” The thought she might be hurt badly enough to die hadn’t entered his mind.
“Yes, if she died and was infected somehow before it happened, she would become like them. That’s why we have to find a village. A village of real people. I don’t think we can reach the gateway before she gets worse. It may be a while longer before I can get you back. I’m sorry.” She did indeed seem genuinely sorry; her eyes looked Rachel over as she thought over the potential outcomes.
Henry thought about this as he slumped to the pavement in a near deadfall. The gun he held skittered to the ground a few moments after he’d pushed the safety back into place; it was a stupid thing to become unaware of his grip on it, but he was lucky and it came to a rest a few feet from him without firing. What am I going to do without her? She can’t go like this, not without everything being figured out, not without…I don’t know, I just don’t know.
This world was strange and dangerous; he knew that now. What would happen if his wife became one of those things? What if the woman he’d been following around was delusional? What if they never found their way out of wherever it was they’d ended up? Maybe the village is nearby, but god I doubt it, not with all this weird shit that’s been going on. Regardless, I’m going to have to do something to help her. That’s the biggest thing really, making sure Rachel stays safe somehow. The biggest concerns should be maintaining Rachel’s health and trying to find a way into that knapsack. If I can get in there maybe I can start getting some answers about where I am and what we’re tackling here. Then I could get Rachel and me sorted out; get us out of these woods and off this road wherever they are.
He gazed into the fire, thinking about how to go about it as he watched the woman walk to where she had exited the wood
s, out of the corner of his eye. She knelt there and picked up something white. When she came close enough to the fire, he saw that it was some sort of rabbit, a very large one. It looked two or three times the size of a normal rabbit and had extra limbs. She carried it to the fire, doing the skinning and gutting process quickly. He felt a little disgusted, wondering if it had been mutated by something, if maybe everything here had. The woman looked up as if she knew what he was thinking and muttered something to herself.
“What did you say?” he asked, but there was no answer.
She carefully set up a makeshift spit from her backpack, putting the rabbit onto its wire frame. Surprisingly, it held the weight, and despite his disgust, his stomach rumbled with hunger at the sight of the prepared body set out to roast over the fire. “What happened here? What’s happened to the people, the animals?”
She looked up from washing her hands with water from a canteen, looking startled and dismayed. “Do you really want to know? Ask yourself that. How badly do you need to know the truth?” Satisfied with his silence, she said nothing else and busied herself with stirring the fire as she attempted to build the flames higher. Quickly, unnaturally so, the rabbit began to cook on the spit. Fat hissed in the fire and soon the smell was growing strong as the rabbit cooked. The quiet was dense, like a blanket that had fallen over everything for a long while. Between it and the fire drifting around in front of him, Henry started to feel a little hazy, almost drowsy.
The moment was broken when she kneeled on her side of the fire, looking into it. The movement had caused his eyes to snap over to her and now she let her eyes drift between the hottest part of the fire and Henry. “How does it feel to be safe?” She asked softly. The question seemed absurd at first and he prepared to ask her what her question had really been, but he knew he’d heard her right all the same.
How to answer her…well, in light of the most recent events I guess I’ll just assume she means before I got here. “I can’t really say. I’ve never really tried to see it as a feeling or something that I might lose, not really. I guess I took it for granted.”
She nodded. “We’ve forgotten too.” Dazed, she turned her attention back to the fire. “It’s been a long time since…,” she said softly. There was silence except for his wife’s confused mutterings. Solemn, they both looked into the flames, thinking of nothing.
The silence was broken as his eyes began to follow the sparks into the night sky. There was a snapping sound and when he looked back at her he realized it was the sound of her taking down the spit and placing the rabbit on a cloth. She took a sharp knife from the backpack and cut down through the meat and bones. When the rabbit was cut into easier to manage portions she took some of the meat and put it into a cup. She took a heavy pestle from another pouch on the backpack and began to grind the meat, adding some sort of apparently medicinal liquid to it. She took the concoction over to Rachel and poured it into her mouth. What he saw of it seemed thin and easily soluble. He watched quietly, trying to see past the woman to his wife. Rachel took it with vague grunts and lay still as the woman moved away from her.
“What did you give her?” he asked; worry crept into his voice.
“A mixture no more harmful than the one I gave you for your sunburn. Mixed with the meat it should nourish her. She has to eat something and it may help heal whatever is wrong. I can’t guarantee you anything.”
Still concerned, he watched her breathe.
“She’s sleeping,” she said and handed him some of the meat. With some reluctance, he began to eat, soon finished and received more from her. The woman ate quickly and efficiently, leaving only bones; he tried his best to follow suit. The meat was soft and sweeter than he’d expected, it tasted good. Neither of them said anything as they ate, looking at each other over the flames like wolves sizing one another up across a field. When he had eaten all he could stomach he lay down in the dust, too tired to care. He sensed something above him as he drifted off and his eyes shot open. When they did he saw her putting a blanket over him.
“Sleep as long as you can. I’ll keep watch; we may reach the village by sunset tomorrow.”
The village, he thought, and the backpack. After the past two nights, I deserve something. Yet I…he was asleep before he could finish the thought.
Chapter Two:
Dead Man Walking
When he awoke, he found himself in as much danger as the previous evening. Strange things, so old their skin stuck to their bones, ambled into the camp, struck down by the woman’s bullets as they tried to capture the three of them. Henry managed to get out from under his tangled blanket and stood. There were several of these creatures; exposed grinning teeth seeped with some unnamable ooze, and nails clogged with shredded bits of grass reached out for him with savage zeal. His wife’s presence was revealed to him as he heard her voice, muttering from behind some branches. A group of them was carrying her out of the covered area, clearly proud of their find.
The woman ran toward her, throwing off the creatures like brittle twigs as she went. Her face blank, she pulled out her machete, the arc of its path cutting through the air like a broadsword in another era, striking them with the force of her blows. Limbs flew away from their bodies, teeth still gnashing as if their heads were still connected to their bodies
Finally realizing Henry was free, she threw him a gun and continued into the fray, fighting the creatures as if she faced insects instead. At least ten of them lay on the ground, some in still moving pieces, and others, thankfully motionless. Turning, he looked around, aimed and hit one of them in the shoulder, the brittle pieces of its arm thrown several feet from where it stood and becoming tangled in the branches of a tree behind it. It fell over from the force of the shot, its balance thrown completely off. Seeing no other creatures around him, he let the hand that held the gun fall to his side; it was a mistake.
Barely a second later, something took it from his grasp and fled into the brush before he could see it. Startled, he turned toward the brush he’d heard it move into; the sight before him was miles away from the one he had seen before he’d lost his gun. The woman had been bound with vines, and two of the creatures were leading her, while his wife was being carried by two others. The sight had left him motionless but the urge to run began to build in his muscles and he started to turn in an attempt to act on it, not realizing that his hands had been tied to his feet as he watched them take his companions prisoner. He too had become a prisoner.
He fell over and rolled a few feet, landing at the cut off knees of one of the creatures. Its barely formed mouth wound into a vague smile of satisfaction, his gun gripped in its bony hand. It gestured for him to stand, pointing the gun at his head. He got up, twisting to free the tangled ropes that bound his hands to his feet from each other, and began to walk. The woman walked beside him, grumbling to herself. He looked forward and watched the creatures move. His wife was at the front of the line, carried gently by the same pair that had picked her up earlier in the battle. The gun was still pointed at his back by the shortened zombie. It grunted as it walked, not used to walking with such awkward stumps, the damage clearly done by the woman; it had not been enough.
From suburbia to this, he thought, and watched the creatures move into a camp only about five hundred feet from their own. A bony moss-covered thing stood near the bonfire; its head bore a shining helmet like that of an ancient Roman soldier. It pulled its jaw open with atrophied muscles, and to Henry’s horror, began to speak. He didn’t understand what it said, but it appeared to be giving orders to the other zombies. From behind him, a low moaning sound rose, and as he turned to see what it was, he was knocked unconscious.
***
When he came to they were in a long, low hut made of branches and woven reeds; it was at least fifty feet in length and twenty feet in width. The woman was on the other side of the room, lashed as he was, to a heavy metal loop buried in the floor. She was conscious, the anger and fear mingling on her face making it clear that this
place was a nightmare to her and anyone that came to be here. Her hair was free on her shoulders, tossing as she attempted to pull the metal loop out of the ground with little success.
They weren’t the only prisoners in this place, he saw, looking around. In a dark corner lay a young girl who appeared to have been both starved and repeatedly raped. In another corner lay a man with no eyes; he reached out toward the fire at the center of the room, groaning. There were others, girls and women mostly, who didn’t appear to have been here as long as the girl and the sightless man, but long enough to have suffered some of the same tortures. Glancing over them again, he realized that one woman held something in her arms. It appeared to be a baby, but it sickened him to look at it. Its head was mutilated and scarred, it should have, in fact, been dead, and yet it continued to drink from its mother’s breast. It must have been one of the hybrid children, part human and part zombie. The mother looked into space, either horrified by the child’s existence or refusing to believe it.
When he looked toward the open door, he saw one of the zombies coming. Night had also returned in the time he’d been unconscious; the stars briefly revealed by the opened door flap startled him, the passing of time was a shock. The creature looked at him and snorted as if disgusted. Moving past Henry, he stopped in front of a girl no more than eighteen, and potentially much younger; she was near his daughter’s age. Her clothes were still intact, possibly meaning so far she had been spared what the others had suffered, but that respite was about to end. The sneering laughter that came from the creature as it bent toward her made it clear what his intentions were.
The zombie remained horribly intact, exposing itself by removing the thin strip of fabric that amounted to its loincloth. Its movements were savage and spared her no illusions about how she would be treated. It tore away her clothes as she pulled as far away as she could get, her back pushed up and into the weave of the hut’s walls. Naked and exposed, she wept, kicking at its clutching claws as they pawed at her flesh. Her attempts to escape only made it angry; it pinned her body to the floor by the throat. The crippled look of its decayed flesh belied its strength, she could not force it from her and soon he was between her legs, ramming himself into her as she wept and cried out her horror, blood and other things pooled beneath their moving bodies- and he could no longer look at it. For a moment the girl had become Henry’s daughter, and the creature had been raping her before his very eyes. Rage grew inside him, but he didn’t dare to challenge what was happening. There was little he could do to save her now, not with his wife and the woman’s safety to consider along with his own.
Other Dangers: Slipped Through Page 2