by Morgana Wray
His eyes bore a murderous look inside them. The big Riser roared loudly on top of his voice and raised his fist in the air. His large frame overshadowed everything else behind him, as he stood tall before me, bear-like and strong. He intended to smash my head open with his fist.
He would have done it too had a rocket propelled grenade not collided into him at that exact moment. I watched him explode into tiny little charred pieces.
“Diane! You clever little devil!” I screamed with glee.
I was never happier to see the kid, especially with a rocket launcher hanging over her shoulder.
“Where did you learn to shoot that?” I asked, acting a bit aloof, as if I wasn’t about to wet my pants before the kid’s timely intervention.
“I did some simulation online with video games, duh!” Diane snapped impatiently. “I had a keen interest in ballistics before everything went to the crapper. Lucky for you, this beauty was left on her lonesome by some guy that didn’t need it anymore. He had his head smashed open. I’m guessing we now know what got to him before he could bail.”
Her face looked more tired than ever. She seemed to struggle to put down the RPG. If I hadn’t lent her a hand with putting that heavy hunk of metal away, she could have easily collapsed under the weight of it.
We had taken out the big fish. But there were other little ones around. They were still after our blood. They hadn’t turned vegetarian yet, sadly and there was only one grenade in the RPG which had already been deployed in destroying the big, violent Riser that was gunning for my blood. There weren’t many options open to us when it came to fighting off the dead ones left within the fenced facility.
“Can you walk?” I asked, allowing Diane to throw her hand around my shoulder.
“I can limp!” Diane gave a abrupt reply to my inquiry. “Get moving already. We don’t have all day. Won’t be long before those ugly, decaying brain-eaters turn their attention to us.”
“Hey, we don’t know that they actually snack on brains.” I turned to Diane, as I helped her get past the hole in the fence.
Some one had cut through the fence with some sort of tool. Something sharp perhaps? Maybe some bolt cutters?
Sure the angles of the cuts looked about right for that kind of tool. Well, playing detective wasn’t the most pressing of my interests at that point in time. We had just escaped a prison facility which I was unfamiliar with. I wasn’t exactly sure what part of town I was stranded in.
The world we were escaping into wasn’t recognizable. Sure the buildings hadn’t turned into giant alien structures overnight but the haunting silence in the streets sent unwelcoming chills up my spine. I could see scraps of plastic and dirt swirling around in the wind.
The whistling of the wind was the only sound that graced my ears. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there would be something or someone, somewhere, in the corners, just waiting to jump out and take a pop at us.
We were vulnerable and without much to defend ourselves with. We didn’t have a clue what people were like now. Assuming there was anyone left besides us after the plague had swept through our small town and the world at large.
Chapter 5
There was a phone booth. A man with an emaciated, decomposing body was inside the booth. He had died with his mouth open. He must have been speaking to someone he loved. There was still a 50 pence coin in the grasps of his rigid fingers.
Somehow, I didn’t think that there was much use for those in the world that we were in now. I pulled his stiff hand off the phone receiver.
“There isn’t any tone! The line is dead! Shocker there?” I slammed the phone in frustration.
There wasn’t going to be anyone to call. The last time I was out in town, the police had been conveniently evacuated. We were all we had. There was no getting away from that. Even if there were people out there, could we really trust them?
Could we trust their intentions?
There was no need to be civil. There were no lawmen to enforce order. This was the face of chaos staring us in the face. Complete anarchy would surely reign in this new world. I knelt down to check the corpse in the phone booth.
“Barry Sedgefield. This was one gory way to go. Something bit into his chest and sucked out his insides. His heart and lungs and every other internal organ are gone.” I glared curiously at the corpse inside the booth. “What kind of Riser sucks out a guys insides and doesn’t leave a scratch on the rest of him?”
“That is a good question! Seems like Barry was a family man, huh?” Diane gasped, wearing a repulsed look on her face. “Let me know when you’re done desecrating the dead. I don’t want to be stalked by some vengeful ghost that thinks I owe them something for the rest of my possibly very short life. I don’t reckon any of us will be living to a hundred with everything that’s going on.”
Diane was ever the dark cloud hanging over a ray of sunshine. She had to remind me of the very thing I was trying to ignore. I knew that everything around us was working against our survival. The damn undead were like locusts and we were the lush grains that they had their murderous eyes on.
How the hell did we come to this? How did the world get this way?
This would be the question that we would be asking ourselves for generations to come. Assuming what is left of this generation survives the hordes of returned dead that have been unleashed upon humanity by persons unknown. There was certainly nothing natural about the way the virus killed off hundreds of residents in Rosewood and turned them into deranged killers after their cold, dead bodies were reanimated.
Someone with the means had to have done this. My money was on people that probably pulled the political strings on pencil pushers in the corridors of power.
“Looks like Barry here was a family man. There is a little boy and a classy bird in this photograph. She must be the boy’s mom. He must have been trying to reach them. Poor sod. His last call must have been painfully desperate,” I shook my head regretfully, dragging myself up from where I had stooped low.
“He must have called to tell her he wasn’t going to make it home. A very heart-breaking end to what was a beautiful story. They could have made a great movie out of that. What a waste,” Diane lobbed a rock that was at the tip of her toes into open space, across the other side of the street.
It cracked the window of a nearby building. She must have been feeling a bit frustrated with our rather dim situation. We were free but our freedom seemed to have no point. There was nowhere to go. And there seemed to be nobody to talk to besides ourselves.
She didn’t have much in common with me. I was an older dude who knew more about cars than people. I had never raised one of those whiny, complicated and unthankful things called teenagers before. I was way out of my depth.
I had no idea what would make her happy. Or what would completely send her off the rails.
I was at a loss. I had to protect her from the flesh-eating Risers and I also had to make sure she wasn’t being diabolical to her own self. I didn’t have any sort of rulebook. This was open season on humans and I was just clueless.
All I had was the stun baton and the pants on my waist, and the shirt on my torso. Yep, that was about it in nutshell.
As if we weren’t having a bad enough day, the window Diane smashed seemed to have triggered some sort of burglar alarm. The screeching noise from the burglar alarm was certainly loud enough to travel a couple of yards.
We would have been lucky if there was no Riser lurking around within the sound range of the blasted alarm. We might have as well rang the dinner bell and offered ourselves up on a fancy plate to the undead cannibals.
“Kid what the fuck did you just do? Why did you have to do that?” I shook Diane like a tree in the roaring breeze.
“Let go! Don’t be such a douchebag!” Diane snapped angrily at me.
“The Risers. They are here. We have got to get off the streets. They must have heard that crash from the rock you threw and the loud noises from the burglar alarm. Smooth
, really smooth move kid,” I dragged Diane into an alleyway.
There was a large dumpster there. I threw her into it without consulting her on the matter. I figured I could lead the Risers away from her. I could run. She couldn’t on account of her being in a bad way.
“Stay down, kid. I’ll take care of this,” I whispered some words through the narrow opening between the lid of the dumpster and the lower part.
“Don’t be a fucking hero. Who the fuck am I going to talk to if you get your ass killed.” Diane yelled from the confines of the locked dumpster. I had deliberately locked the dumpster to prevent her from risking her life to help me out. It was a tactical move. Or so I told myself.
Truth is I was soft on the kid. Even though she didn’t know it. I guess she was the closest thing to having a kid to look out for. I was ready to do battle to protect every strand of hair on her. I was not going to let those mingy undead things hurt her.
“Hey, dumbasses! You want some chow! Come and get it!” I shouted out to the gang of undead Risers.
They heard me alright. They came after me for my flesh and blood, very quickly. Their growls were more destabilizing than the actual thought of them biting into my flesh. I knew fully well what they were capable of, yet I goaded them into chasing me.
That was it. I didn’t have any grand plan of taking them out.
I had barely run a reasonable distance when I fell on my belly. One of them crawled over me. I jabbed the shaft of the stun baton into his snapping jaw. I shocked the hell out of his head, causing his eyes to redden. They popped right out their sockets and exploded.
“Shit! That was a damn good shirt” I flicked away parts of the Riser’s eyeballs off me.
His collapsed body lay on the floor beside me. The rest of the pack of Risers hastened their steps, edging ever closer towards me, their teeth clattering and their hands stretching out to claw and scratch at me.
“You want something to eat! Chew on this you fucking cannibals!” I barked, cramming the stun baton down the gullet of one of my undead attackers.
His insides turned black and somehow the rest of him turned black and emaciated, like a husk. His crumpled, rigid body smacked into the ground very quickly. He was withered and his eyes seemed to have collapsed into their sockets.
“You Kentucky fried his ass. That was some move you pulled there. The Risers must be vulnerable to electricity. It must cause their cells to degrade quickly. Some sort of advanced necrosis, maybe.” Diane hovered over the body of shrivelled Riser who I had just barbecued with the stun baton.
“How? How did you get out of the dumpster?” I scratched my head. “the flesh munchers? You took them out?”
“Yeah. I did. With this. Amazing what you can find amongst people’s rubbish.” Diane flashed a nail gun in front of me.
She had buried nails in the foreheads of six of the Risers that had attacked me. She had done it so stealthily that I did not notice her take them out. That kid was more resourceful than I gave her credit for. She wasn’t the helpless damsel that needed rescuing. I was starting to feel like she was saving my ass half the time.
“You did good kid! You did good!” I patted Diane on the back.
Our jubilation was to be short lived. Some more Risers came pouring into the spot where we were stood. They shoved through the narrow backroads and were heading straight towards us. Diane had her nail gun ready. I had just a stun baton that was running out of juice now. There was barely a faint buzz, now, when I pressed the stun button.
There were more of them than we could possibly have put down between the two of us.
“They’ve got us cornered!” Diane screamed.
“Then let’s give the bastards hell! Make them choke on whatever morsel they are going to tear off us!” I yelled back at Diane.
That said, we took a fighting pose and readied ourselves for confrontation. Our teeth were laid bare and our hands held unto our repurposed weapons. We needed to believe we could have a fighting chance so we did not cry or show weakness. Our faces were dull like cold iron.
Chapter 6
We were expecting to be torn to shreds. We knew the pair of us did not have the stamina to take on that many undead assailants. Their black mutated eyes were keenly focused on us. They were aware of us. We knew those things had bad eye sight but they certainly weren’t that blind that they would just scurry past us without ripping our guts out first.
The clattering noise of metal jolted me a bit. My hands shivered slightly on the handle of the stun baton.
Could more hell be raining on us from above? I hoped not!
A woman with bulging biceps that would put the Rock dropped in from above me. Wielding a machete, she commenced lopping off heads without as much as doing the curtsey of saying hello to us. Her eyes were cold, blue and fierce. Her unusual haircut made her even more eccentric. The bandages on her knuckles came in handy for smacking Risers in the face when they got too close. I was forced to contemplate whether Abraham and Michonne from the walking dead series had hooked up to breed the perfect Spartan-a flawless killing machine.
That woman definitely had moves and I wasn’t much older than she was.
Can you believe it? And I was nearly pushing fifty!
I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why she did not use the rifles she was lugging around on her back. Would have made the job less tedious and messy. But then she didn’t look like the type of person that did things the uncomplicated way.
She had made the fight a lot more even. We were motivated by seeing the brave warrior lady in action. I soon started shoving the stun baton into the eye of the Risers. I watched their faces disfigure and become as if they had suffered third degree burns. Their skin literally shrivelled on contact with some electricity.
It was fun watching the undead things turn into a charred necrotic mass before my eyes. I burnt the hell out of them and I enjoyed every second of killing their asses a second time.
“Get a load of this you dead fucks!” Diane yelled, ejecting fast flying nails into the faces of Risers stupid enough to try to take a bite out of her.
We were soon done with massacring the mob of undead that had set out to eat us. No treats for those flesh eaters today.
“You can thank me later. Get over the shock and follow my lead, ladies. We don’t have long before more of the undead folk pick up on our scent.” Bald woman beckoned on us, wincing rather impatiently.
We couldn’t stop gawking at her face. There was what appeared to be a singular long scar running down her face from beneath her lower eyelid-the one on the left.
“I am not much to look at. I know that. That mark you’re looking at is the least of what could happen to us out here. The Risers aren’t the only things we have to worry about while we are out in the open.” Bald lady went on a rant at us, doing her best to speak calmly to us.
We must have seemed like very backward mentally challenged people trying to catch up to what things had evolved into now.
“Mom? Is that really you?” Diane’s jaw dropped, and her eyes widened as if her whole face had been frozen by some sort of freeze ray.
“Why are you calling me that? What are you playing at, Blondie?” bald woman snapped, looking genuinely awestruck by Diane’s sudden outburst.
Diane pushed past me, desperate to prove a point to the stranger we had only just met. I hadn’t seen her move that fast since we escaped from the hellhole we had been stuck in for God knows how long.
“Hey! Hey! Diane! You’re low on blood sugar! You’re not thinking straight!” I stuttered a bit, clumsily attempting to dissuade Diane from making a fool out of herself.
My hands were involuntarily clutched unto her wrist.
She did not take kindly to that. The look she beamed at me was threatening enough to eviscerate the whole of Washington in the blink of an eye. I felt as if I should have crawled into the ground beneath my feet.
I had to swallow whatever words I was hoping to say to Diane. There was certain
ly that strong intuition that she wasn’t going to be very receptive towards whatever was going to come out of my mouth.
What did I know? Who the fuck understands how the female mind works anyway?
I politely retracted from her and let her go.
She placed herself right in front of the fearsome bald lady, and turned her back to her.
“Take a look for yourself if my word isn’t good enough for you! Look at it!” Diane flicked the long mane of hair off the back of her neck.
“Holy shit! I thought.. I thought you were lost to the plague!” Bald woman’s lips trembled as a single tear drop rolled down her cheek.
I watched the two females basically fall into each other’s arms, getting all soft and emotional like a pair of soggy marshmallows.
“What about dad? Is he?” Diane raised her eyes, glaring inquisitively at her newly rediscovered family member.
There was a brief shake of the head. Then the release of a sombre, regretful voice, “he didn’t survive the outbreak. I had to put him down myself. He was lucky. He didn’t have to go through all the bad stuff I have witnessed in the past six years.”
There was a brief pause. The bald woman before us wore a heavily burdened look on her face. You could tell from all the marks on her hands that she had been through a lot. There were battle scars all over her. I had a sneaky feeling that the scars that were left on the inside ran far deeper than the ones that had blemished her skin.
Not that she was the kind of woman that had soft skin.
Diane struggled with finding the words to say to her mother. She had held them inside for so long that she just found it nearly impossible to know how to let them out. They must have pressed heavily on the inside of her chest. Her feet were restless and her eyes failed to make direct contact with those of the woman she had been longing for so long to be reunited with.
Well, here we were and nobody was finding it easy to say Jack. Seriously, it felt like there was some sort of radio silence between long lost mother and daughter.