But to survive out there for more than the next few hours I needed more food, a pack, and lots of water.
In the end, it was less of a decision whether I should chance it, but the knowledge that I was dead if I didn’t that swayed my mind.
Enough time had passed that I felt like I wasn’t blindly running into my doom when I inched toward the door and tried it. It opened easily enough—a good sign. It was usually the barricaded homes that were infested. The hinges creaked awfully loud in the dry air, making me wince as I remained pressed against the wall, waiting for something to come bursting out of the house.
Nothing.
I counted to thirty in my head before I looked inside, trying to take in everything at once and get a good sense of the interior. There were shoes and more toys strewn across the small entryway, as if someone had rushed out in a hurry. Beyond I could see into part of the living room with the windows to the yard, and a sliver of the kitchen. Dust covered everything, but it wasn’t just stale air that greeted me. Something had died in there, and if I wasn’t completely wrong, it had had a lot of time to decay. Judging from the size of the town, it had likely generated too few zombies that they’d gone rampaging for the corpses—or so I told myself. The house remained silent as a crypt, and after a few more rapid heartbeats of delay I stepped inside, the squeak of my clogs annoyingly loud on the linoleum floor.
Two more steps and I got a better look at the living room. The reek was stronger there, but except for an overturned plush chair nothing seemed that out of order. I decided to turn toward the kitchen first to check for stocks. Here, things were much less orderly. The door to the pantry stood ajar, and flour and rice were spilled on the floor, next to the dried-up remains of fresh produce. Someone had stacked up packaged food on the counter, but of the useless kind—dehydrated stuff like soups and ramen that would need at least lukewarm water to turn ingestible. The only useful thing I saw was a pack of nuts that I quickly tore open and started wolfing down. No sense in wasting so much precious fat.
Checking at the back of the kitchen door, I saw a few shopping bags, but no backpack or something more sturdy. There was a tray of plastic water bottles in the pantry, too, and for good measure I tore open the wrappings and ditched two of the bottles next to the entryway, taking a few long swallows from a third. Straightening, I gave the kitchen one last cursory look and stepped into the family room. Opposite the hallway by the kitchen I could see stairs leading into the upper floor where the bedrooms must be. Judging from the pictures on the walls, this had been the home of a family with three kids, the mom about my size. Bingo.
The stink of decay got worse the closer to the stairs I got, making me guess that the corpse must be up there somewhere. The first stair creaked as I put my full weight on it, making me stall, my fingers lightly touching the bannister as I listened. Still nothing, but I felt my throat close up as the vague sense of unease deepened. Maybe I should just take the water and beat it. The tote bags in the kitchen weren’t ideal, but enough to hold some water and the first-aid kit. There were other houses in this town. Other towns, too. I knew all that, but something still drew me up those stairs. Something invisible but at the same time strangely visceral, just like a siren song calling out to me…
I definitely needed to stay out of the sun more, I decided, if my thoughts took turns like that after just a few hours. Shaking myself to disband the stupidity, I pushed myself up step by step, as silent as possible but keeping in motion. So, what, there was a corpse up there. Maybe two, or five, and any of them might still be up and shambling about, but I had my bat, and my full body coordination that would let me vault down the stairs and out of the house before any starved, uncoordinated zombie could come after me. Or so I told myself.
Two thirds up the stairs and around the bend in the staircase I got a first, good glimpse of the upper floor. Several of the doors stood ajar but not wide open. There was a discarded suitcase on the floor, clothes strewn across the landing. Still no corpse, but the stench grew worse and worse with each step. No leaves or animal droppings, keeping up with my guess that this home had remained unbreached so far. I felt vaguely stupid for being so on edge but I still remembered that first house I’d searched, with the girl zombie that had almost been the end of me. I vowed to myself that this time around I wouldn’t open any bathroom doors that appeared to have been locked from the outside, likely for a very good reason.
Reaching the landing, I took a moment to orient myself before I turned toward the two most promising doors—the master bedroom and one of the smaller ones, likely one of the children’s rooms. Moving slowly, I managed to keep my clogs from squeaking. Hopefully that woman had had larger feet because I could really do with some good quality running shoes. My fingers touched down on the door handle just as I realized that shoes were likely stored downstairs, behind one of the doors that I hadn’t checked. I hesitated, but then decided that as I was already up here, I might as well get a pack and some clothes that actually fit first. And find out what exactly stank up a storm like that.
The door swung into the room at a light push, making me wince with another creak—only to reveal a room so stuffed full of zombies that they were constantly bumping into each other just standing more or less still, all facing something in the far corner of the room. Or had been facing, until I’d been stupid enough to open the fucking door, drawing their collective attention to me. I froze, staring transfixed at their dead eyes, faces slack but growing increasingly animated as their feeding instinct came alive. Their presence explained the stench, but nothing else made sense. Why were they even up here, just as if someone had stashed them there? And why did none of them look more decayed than, say, a couple of weeks?
Adrenaline slammed like a freight train into me as my survival instinct took over, wiping my mind clean of thoughts that just distracted me and would get me killed, and instead forced me to focus on the important things. A room full of zombies. All of them in better physical shape than I was at the moment. Even with the bat in my hand I stood no chance of downing even one, let alone all twenty of them. There was only one thing left to do.
Run.
Chapter 27
I turned around and threw myself down the stairs, not caring how much of a racket I was making. They’d seen me, and they’d definitely made me out as edible. The only chance I stood was to get as far away as quickly as possible before they made it through the funnel of the door and stairwell. The howls rising behind me gave me some extra speed, and I slid across the living room, my clogs finding purchase on the carpet, but the carpet not on the floor. I used my free hand against the wall to propel myself into the entryway where my water was waiting for me. I couldn’t carry both the bat, the water bottles, and the first-aid kit, that much was obvious—and now I had no time whatsoever to waste on cramming them into a bag anymore. Shit.
I debated quickly, but then dropped the bat, ignored the kit, and just grabbed the water bottles, one in each hand, as I vaulted out of the door and down the porch. I could use the bottles as a club, but I couldn’t drink wood. A crash behind me let me know that at least one of the zombies had already made it into the lower floor, fighting the same carpet that had almost tripped me. My lead was less than ten yards, probably only seven.
There were only fields to my right—and the shallow river, not much of a natural border—in the direction I had come from, so I took the other, running down the street deeper into the village. From the very corner of my vision I could see two shamblers burst out of the door and onto the porch before my eyes teared up too much to focus, but that wasn’t exactly necessary. Fuck. How could I have been so stupid not to realize that the stench couldn’t have been coming from a single, long desiccated corpse?
And what the fuck had so many zombies been doing crammed into a single room?
None of that mattered now, a fact that I was reminded of when howls and growls grew louder behind me—and from my left, and right, further down the street. There wasn’t much
to the town, only four or five blocks, and already I was past the middle of it, yet judging from the sounds all around me it was practically teeming with zombies.
Perfect. Just perfect.
With my eyesight shot to hell, I tried to listen hard to pinpoint where exactly how many zombies might be coming from. As I passed the next intersection, I got one answer—the mob on the right was pouring out of another building that looked way too small to have contained that many of them. The road ahead was still clear so I forced myself to run faster, even if growls and howls came from the left and up ahead, just out of sight where the road merged into another and prairie took over once more. At the speed that I was going I wouldn’t make it in time.
Of course that was the moment when my left clog had to snag on a crack in the road and almost sent me onto the asphalt. Cursing, I kicked off the shoe, then the other, and put every ounce of strength I had into making it to where road gave way to grass. Only twenty more yards. Fifteen. Ten. The angry screams behind me made me mobilize energy that I hadn’t thought was still in me—or maybe that was just the food finally kicking in—sending me flying toward that line of demarcation that wasn’t really one. It was highly unlikely that the zombies would just stop there—but it was something, and right now anything I could aim for sounded like a good idea.
Five yards. Then I was crossing the street, vaguely seeing shapes come for me from the left. My toes dug into soft earth rather than asphalt, making the impact of my weight just a little lighter on my soles. I fully expected one of the zombies to slam into me and take me down any moment now, but it didn’t happen. Instead, the howls and screams turned more aggressive, and it took me a moment to realize that the mobs were tearing into each other rather than come after me in a joint effort. I forced myself to keep going and only look back when I was another twenty hard pants further away from the town. Oh, enough of them were still following me to make me try to go faster, but the better half of them were tearing into each other in one giant mass of decaying bodies.
Turning back around, I tried to find another spot I could aim for. There was a tree in the middle of the grass that looked great for that. Just as I reached it, the grass thinned out, a track, little more than a deer trail, veered off west. Not stumbling through the tall grass was a no-brainer, even if it slowed the zombies down about as much as me, so I switched route. I followed that path about ten minutes—a small eternity—before I had to slow down a little, the contents of my stomach threatening to make a reappearance. The zombies were still after me but some were starting to fall back. Not enough to lose interest, but from what I could tell only about ten were within half a mile of me. Still far too many to allow me to do more than slow down a little, but better than the entire pack. If I was lucky, the others wouldn’t catch up.
Yeah, because luck was something I could count on.
Even with the sun slowly dipping toward the horizon, it was still hot, the air glimmering in the distance. Sweat was stinging in my eyes, adding to the constant flow of tears that the brightness already forced out of me. I’d lost the straw hat in my flight but couldn’t really find it in me to care.
Very soon I could hear the frontrunners grunting and growling behind me, making me speed up a little to gain more distance between us that they’d eaten up in the meantime. Up ahead, to the right, I saw a few buildings—a ranch, from what it looked like. I debated trying to lose them there, but it would have been just my luck to run into even more shamblers hiding in the barn, so I simply kept on going. Another mile or so and I slowed down once more, exhaustion taking over now that the worst of my fright was ebbing away. A glance behind me confirmed what I’d guessed before—there were about fifteen zombies coming after me, strung out in small groups and clusters. I was surprised to realize that the first three all seemed to be females. I would have expected males for the most part, their longer legs somewhat of an advantage. But maybe they’d been more aggressive and had gotten lost in that weird brawl that had broken out between the different groups? What had been up with that?
Then the path angled yet further south until it hit a road, going west again. I switched onto that, wincing at the still hot pavement singeing the raw soles of my feet, but it made for easier going. I ran faster for a while before I had to slow down, my breath turning from pants to wheezes. The water bottles seemed to weigh a ton, and more than once I debated letting the fastest zombie catch up so I could smash its head in and be done with it. But I wasn’t sure whether I still had the strength to manage that and have enough left to continue running, so I kept on going. It was still more endless dragging yards further down the road that I realized that the distance between me and my pursuers remained roughly the same. Actually, they seemed to fall back whenever I slowed down somewhat, as if running hard gave them more of an incentive to give chase. With no other option than to keep going, I started varying my speed to verify my guess. About an hour in I even chanced stopping for a moment so I could wrench a bottle open and drink some, but that brought the entire horde coming after me with a vengeance—so no more stopping.
This was shaping up to become one hell of an endless day.
I kept on running, and when that got too much, I walked, until the approaching zombies forced me into a lumbering run again. Temperatures dipped as the sun disappeared behind the horizon in what I really fucking hoped wasn’t the last sunset I would ever see. Been there, done that, and found it highly overrated. I no longer worried about freezing during the night as being in constant motion would easily take care of that. My feet ached but the acute pain from earlier in the day had long since started to dull. My muscles ached, but with no chance of respite I forced myself to ignore that. The hard sprinting out of that town had cost me a lot, but with the speed I was going now I felt like I could keep this up for a while. Eventually the first bottle was empty, making going somewhat easier now that my burden dwindled to one, leaving me with one arm free at all times. My head hurt and I felt slightly dizzy from what I guessed was a good sunstroke that I’d given myself, but I didn’t really worry about that. Should I really drop down with exhaustion, the zombies would take care of me within minutes. So either I made it, or not. There was a strange kind of comfort with life narrowing down to such a simplistic duality. I didn’t have enough energy left to worry, so no more playing guessing games about why the zombies had congregated in that town that couldn’t have had more than a double digit population to start with.
It was just me, my bottle, the road, and the zombies.
Night fell, turning everything into deep shades of grays and blues. The road remained warm underneath my feet, what had bothered me all day turning into a slight comfort now. A town came up ahead and I wondered if I should have gone around, but I felt too exhausted to try so I just kept on going. In passing I heard some banging coming from a house or two, but otherwise it was completely deserted. My undead train of followers was still after me, although I wasn’t sure if one or two didn’t drop away between the buildings, deciding to go for easier pickings.
It turned darker still until only the stars lit up the sky, no moon out tonight. The road was easy enough to follow, so that’s what I did, the constant low shuffling and growling behind me keeping me just alert enough not to trip over my own feet. The contents of the bottle dwindled, until I dropped the empty plastic husk where I walked. A little later my body proved that it was still working somewhat, if inefficiently, as my bladder demanded to be emptied. Taking care of that between hops and haphazardly paced brief stops wasn’t exactly a clean solution, but I was beyond caring. Anything that didn’t make the zombies come after me full speed was a good solution, so that’s what I did.
More farms and abandoned cars I passed. Once I tried wrenching open a car door to maybe snag something from the inside but it had rusted shut, barely splayed open enough that I could get one hand into the gap. The resulting noise drew agitated howls from the zombies, so I gave up on that endeavor. Maybe once the sun came up I could try again. Or better
yet, try to lose them in a town, playing hide and seek in abandoned houses. I wasn’t sure if I still cared what happened to me. It was getting so damn hard to think. All I could do was move on. So that’s what I did.
Suddenly, there was a dark shape looming before me, somewhat solid, on four legs. It let out a huffing, grunting kind of sound that made me skip over to the other side of the road immediately as I stopped. Was that a fucking bear? Were there even bears in… Nebraska, I thought I’d read on the license plates of too many cars to ignore.
I wasn’t even frightened as I stared it down, more like dazed and confused. It didn’t rear up on its legs or give one of those growly shouts, but I wasn’t sure if bears even did that outside of dramatic scenes in bad movies. It looked menacing enough, although it was smaller than I’d thought bears got, but then that was probably just the grizzly bears up in Alaska. Or not. Mauled by a bear was a quick way to die. I could think of worse. Hell, just this morning I’d escaped much, much worse. And ending up as meal to a living thing was a lot better than becoming zombie chow.
The lead zombie gave a triumphant scream less than ten yards behind me, sure that now it had caught me. The bear sniffed the air before it turned away from me, and with one hard leap went after the zombie, close enough that I could have brushed along its flank had I extended my arm. I didn’t. I didn’t even turn around to watch what was going on—the sounds made that more than apparent. I just started running again, down the road, too perplexed to fully appreciate what had just happened.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 2 | Books 4-6 Page 64