Decayed:

by Morgana Wray

  “All this time out here, on the outside? Must have taken a lot to get by?” Diane paced about restlessly, using the sole of her feet to anchor herself to the ground beneath her.

  “Let’s just say it hasn’t been a picnic trying to fend off the unsavoury kind of company and keeping well out of the way of things that want to rip out your carotid,” Diane’s Mom tugged on the straps that hung over her shoulders.

  For a minute or two, there was a peaceful expression on Diane’s slightly roundish face. She flashed a vague smile at her mom, and then without warning she collapsed. Her severely emaciated body dropped like a flipping stone.

  Pulling back one of the unconscious teenager’s eyelids, Diane’s Mom shook her head and sucked on her lower lip, “she is dehydrated and malnourished. We have got to get her to the hospital, or to somewhere with saline bags.”

  “Sure! Whatever you need!” I croaked rather uncomfortably.

  I stretched out my hand to help lift Diane up, but it seemed her Amazon of a mother did not need any help with that sort of thing. She had Diane over her shoulder in a matter of seconds.

  I was beginning to think that she did not need me at all.

  “Try to keep up, and cover my six.” Diane’s mom threw a sidearm at me.

  I hugged the pistol against my chest before finally getting a solid grip on it. The woman made me look like a bloody novice, and I was meant to be a bloody soldier. Our walk was long and tiring. My feet ached from covering all that distance on foot. We must have walked a couple of miles, meandering through backways just to avoid being eaten or probably shot at by hostile clans.

  I was told to keep my guard up at all times. I was also told to watch my feet. Some hunter clans had a nasty habit of leaving traps behind. They weren’t the kind of traps that left you in a good way after you fell into them.

  “Is that St Anthony’s? The place looks pretty run down, doesn’t it? Do you think we’ll find anything useful in there?” I whispered in a low tone of voice to Diane’s mother.

  “I have my fingers crossed. My daughter’s life is depending on it. Besides the place is always crawling with Risers. Looters only have a very short window of time to get in and dash out with supplies. There’s always something left behind. Now, quit the chatting and keep your eyes peeled for any unfriendly-looking living or undead folk,” Diane’s mom frowned at me, as we breezed past the front door.

  There were no barricades on the door. It wasn’t locked. It was wide open.

  There were a couple of undead ones loitering in the wide expanse of the reception area. We had to put them down if we were to get past them. I mean I needed to put them down.

  I took aim at one of them. He was big, fat and ugly. I had a general aversion for big zombies. Maybe because they were always the most annoyingly difficult ones to put down. That and the fact that they were always trying to kill me.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Diane’s Mom looked disapprovingly at me.

  “Trying to clear a path for us to get through. That’s the general idea isn’t it?” I hissed scornfully.

  “Here! Put the silencer on before you get us killed by those flesh eaters!” Diane’s Mom tossed the gun part at me.

  I screwed on the silencer and took aim. Shots were fired. I made sure to hit the Risers between the eyes and in the back of the head. Bodies were strewn across the not so neat hospital floor. Dust had built up over the years that the place had been left unattended.

  The Risers were the guards now. There wasn’t much sign that any of the staff or patients of that hospital had survived the plague. The virus must have spread around the hospital wards very quickly. There must not have been much time to effect a proper quarantine plan.

  I had just put down what used to be a very hot nurse. I had seen her once in town. She had long legs and an ample cleavage. Yep, too bad that had to go to waste. There were maggots crawling out of her chin now. I did her a mercy by ending her undead existence. I would have loved to think that she would have been thankful for that, assuming there was any shred of sentience left in her.

  The Risers appeared to act on base instinct. Hunger was the only driving motivation behind anything that they did.

  We walked slowly, and cautiously past the line of bodies that led to brown door. We pushed past the door, taking care not to alert the rest of the Risers in the lobby to our presence.

  The narrow hallway was not very well lit. There wasn’t much light coming through. I almost tripped over my own feet walking through the not so wide space that seemed to have several adjacent rooms on either side.

  We found a stretcher, laying there on its own. Diane’s mom rushed hastily to the stretcher, and dumped her daughter’s unconscious body on the mobile bed. She pushed it like a trolley through the hallway. We checked room after room for saline bags. We finally found one that sort of looked a bit like a lab.

  I say that because I saw a microscope somewhere on the worktop.

  “Shall we start tearing the place apart?” I popped an unintelligent question at Diane’s mom.

  She ignored me and went straight for the drawers and cupboards. She grabbed a bunch of painkillers and antibiotics. She sure knew what she was looking for. She had an almost constipated look when she did not find the thing she was looking for.

  “Shit! Shit! Fuck!” she swore out loud, kicking the cupboard beneath the worktop with her boots. “Why are there no fucking saline bags here? This is a goddamn hospital, isn’t it?”

  “There is no need for the outburst. You don’t want to do yourself some damage for nothing.” I beamed a coy smile at her, dangling a pair of saline bags in front of her.

  Her deathly frown soon turned into an almost ecstatic giggle. She snatched the bags out of my hands and stopped short of giving me a big hug. But there was some gratitude in her eyes when she looked up at me.

  “Go on, wheel her in here!” Diane’s mom beckoned to me, waving her hands in the air impatiently.

  “Yes! Sure!” I ran towards the door to get Diane.

  Would you believe it. I was greeted with a big, manly punch in the face. I staggered backwards and collapsed unto my back like a big sack of potatoes.

  “I am so going to fuck you up if you don’t get away from the kid. I swear to God.” I crawled back to my feet.

  The bearish man with shaggy beard just looked through me like I wasn’t even there. He did not flinch and I had a gun pointed in his face. Then it dawned on me that he wasn’t alone. He had brought some friends and they were all wild-looking.

  I could count about six of them with hunting rifles and axes. The fur around their necks made them look like some sort of Viking invaders. They certainly were not messing about. They had skinned animals and worn their hide.

  How sick was that?

  The men had raised their guns and pointed them at me. I put my pistol out of the aggressive position and raised both hands in the air. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it out of this sticky position. I would have been mad if I had contemplated a different outcome.

  Yep, barking mad.

  Diane’s Mom came charging out of the room like a mad person. She chopped off a man’s hand clean off. It was the one that held the riffle. His throat was slit too in the blink of an eye. The others tried to overwhelm her with their axes but she was a quick mover. She ducked very quickly and avoided the sharp end of the wild men’s axes.

  She stabbed one in the side with her blade and decapitated him the machete in the other hand. His mouth was still wide open when his head fell off. He must have been surprised that he was getting his ass handed to him by a woman.

  I managed to get off one shot and blasted two of the remaining four guys that had surrounded her in the back of the head. She was facing off against two guys, now. It wasn’t a fair fight, but it was fairer than fighting off four armed thugs.

  That got the attention of the bearded dude in front of me. He got angry really quickly after I had taken down two of his unrefined associates. He came
at me with the big ass mace in his hands. He swung for my head, but hit the wall instead.

  I had no intention of letting him paint the wall with my brain matter. I hadn’t been through all the shit that I had been through only to be taken down by a brainless Neanderthal. He wasn’t giving up. He kept coming at me. I was thinking more about helping Diane’s mom than protecting my own skin. I heard one of her attackers scream. She had just stabbed him in the eye with a pocket knife. He took a bullet to the chest too for his trouble.

  The big bearded man was in my face now. Things couldn’t get more dangerous than that. I grabbed his arms and head-butted him in the face. Big mistake. That hurt me more than it hurt him. I staggered awkwardly away from him. I could feel him creep up on me. He was about to cave my head in for sure.

  “Hey big and ugly?” Diane’s Mom shouted.

  The broad-shouldered bearded dude with the mace turned around only to be greeted by a flash of roaring fire in his face. Diane’s Mom swiftly picked up the mace that had fallen from his hands, and knocked him out cold with it.

  “You can thank me later for saving your ass. Talk about being soft in the head.” Diane’s Mom smiled, offering me a helping hand.

  She pulled me off my knees. I was still feeling concussed from smacking my head against the forehead of the bonehead of a man that attacked me.

  The bearded man was strapped to a chair. The sharp ends of the barb wire he had been subdued with poked into his skin. Blood had caked on his skin. The smell oozing from him was anything but pleasant. He must not have had a decent shower for weeks or even months. The fungus on his clothes were tell-tale signs that he might have been slumming it in the woods. The guy was as stubborn as a mule. He didn’t seem to be forthcoming with the kind of answers that his female captor was looking for.

  “How many of you are out there? Are they tracking us now? How big is your clan?” The intimidating bald woman gnashed her teeth, cupping the wild-looking man’s chin in her hand.

  He did not utter a word. He just chuckled as if he did not grasp the urgency of questions being lobbed at him. He did not have a care in the world. His eyes seemed aloof in a spaced out kind of way. He quite possibly was on some sort of stimulants-the kinds that keep your brain in a happy place.

  He wasn’t going to feel the pain under the influence of such psychoactive drugs. He had taken a few blows from Miss biceps and barely broke a sweat. His nose was bleeding and still he kept on chuckling like a goddamn psychiatric patient.

  That was certainly another level of crazy.

  “You find this funny, do you? You won’t be laughing when I am done with you, asshole!” Bald woman smacked the chuckling restrained man in the mouth, almost dislocating his jaw in the process.

  I just stood there like a fig leaf. I should have stepped forward and intervened but I was so in awe of the badass woman that I just froze in the corner of the room where I was stood. The brutality of how shit was going down had unnerved me a bit. I didn’t have the stomach for that kind of stuff. I always found such tactics a bit too much for my tastes.

  I struggled to look both tormentor and tormented in the face. There was a sense of guilt that I was being complicit. But I knew things had to go down this way for our own good. The guy in those metal straps was not a good person. He would gut us in a heartbeat.

  So I just stepped aside and let the muscly woman do her thing.

  I watched the bald woman in the room hack off fingers from a Riser that had been strung up in really tight knots within the constraints of good old fashioned bed restraints. She must have been a patient there before she turned. She must have been transferred there from a psyche ward or a prison. Her name tag was still hanging over her left breast.

  She was a Susan. That was a sweet and simple name. I recalled that I had never dated a Susan. I certainly would not consider swapping mouth fluids with an undead Susan. That would just be grotesque.

  “Last chance Jack Nicolson! Do you have people out there watching this place?” Bald woman pressed the heels of her shoe hard against the battered man’s crotch.

  That must have made his man parts sore. I really did not envy him at all.

  “I would talk to her if I were you mate. Protecting a bunch of scallywags that let you get caught in the first place isn’t worth getting your balls crushed like a piñata.” I tried to reason with the guy in the chair.

  “You’re funny. Maybe they’ll kill you last when they get here,” the man in the chair spoke slowly, wearing a menacing look on his bloodied face. “I mean, who doesn’t like a piss taker?”

  “Time is up, asshole! Let’s do this the painful way!” the hulking bald woman screamed in the subdued man’s face, cramming down decomposing, unsanitary fingers down his throat in a very savage way. Of course, he did not swallow the fingers willingly. It had to be forced down his throat with the end of a retractable pocket knife.

  He got sick. He got sick really quickly. His eyes looked as if they were going to pop out of their sockets and his skin swelled like he had just been stung like a bee or something. He threw up some really disgusting juice out of his mouth and soon started to talk all sort of incoherent nonsense.

  “Guess that worked then. He’ll soon tell us even what we don’t want to know. Riser blood always has a way of loosening the tightest of tongues. This fool is no exception.” Bald woman grinned.

  “He doesn’t look too good.” I croaked. “He needs help!”

  “Nah! Why waste good medical gear on him?” lady with shaven head hissed. “He is as good as dead anyway.”

  Not long after she had finished her little speech, the man in the chair started to scream uncontrollably. The agony in his voice was more than most people could endure. Before long, I could see movements beneath the bloodied T-shirt he was wearing. The contours pushing up on his stomach was simply just unnatural. You’d be forgiven for thinking you were on the set of Alien. But this wasn’t make belief.

  This was the real deal. I had wiped my eyes about three times to make sure that I wasn’t stuck in a really bad nightmare. Nothing could have possibly prepared me for what happened next. Thankfully, I hadn’t had anything recently to eat or else I would certainly have spilled my guts on the floor. Dirty undead fingers soon tore their way out of his belly, leaving behind a drooling corpse bound to the chair.

  “Ah, clan boneless. That is the one clan that trains a man’s mind to withstand such unnatural amounts of pain.” Bald woman scratched her jaw, as she sighed heavily beneath her breath. “I should have known.”

  “So what now? Do we keep moving or do we hole up here?” I raised my voice, quizzing the tall, muscly woman.

  “Diane isn’t fit enough to be moved. She needs a couple of hours to get all those fluids in. We have got to gather everything we can use as a weapon, and make sure whoever is stupid enough to come after us regrets their decision. Every bullet has to count.” Diane’s mom rolled her eyes from side to side, wearing an almost panicked look on her face.

  I had seen battle. I knew when someone was masking anxiety with a straight face. Something was surely rattling the hulking woman’s cage. She didn’t seem to be the kind of woman that scared easy. But yet those steely blue eyes of hers seemed spooked.

  “Yep, I’ll do that! You do know I’ve got your back, whatever comes through those doors for us!” I placed a hand on Diane’s mum’s tense shoulder.

  There was some tenderness-a shred of vulnerability flickering between her eyes-but that soon faded into a stern discontented glare. I withdrew my hand. She wasn’t into hold-my-hands-and-share-our-feelings type of thing.

  She held unto her daughter’s hand, and focused on her gaping mouth. At least Diane was breathing. She did not need a ventilator. I had a soft spot for the kid but that paled in comparison to a mother’s devotion. I was just some guy who helped the kid pull through the apocalypse of undead hordes. That was pretty much the sum of what I did for her.

  Not that I was banging my own drum.

  Takin
g one more look at mother and daughter, I walked briskly out of the room. I went to find the bodies of the men that we had both cut down together. There was a corpse in front of me. He was missing an eyeball. The hole in his face was giving me some slight irritation. I bulked at the fact that I had to rummage through his pockets and belongings for useful weapons.

  I found a lighter in his side pocket. That would sure be handy for lighting a fire to keep warm, or scorching up someone’s face with a can of air fresher, like Diane’s mom did earlier. That woman was ruthless.

  Chapter 7

  We had driven quite a distance in a car that Diane’s Mom managed to hotwire. We couldn’t have carried Diane’s unconscious body all the way from the hospital. So, we helped ourselves to an ambulance. She convinced me that she knew exactly where to take us. Somewhere where we would have a fighting chance against what was coming. We were being hunted. I knew that much. But the steely-eyed woman in my company would not say why.

  She was as tight lipped as a Republican’s purse.

  We finally got to a place that seemed to be at the edge of the border. Near the walls that kept us locked in. It was a large expanse of land with meadows. The place wasn’t gated. We just drove straight through. It did not seem like the owner of the property cared much about defending it. That was my impression at least.

  We stopped in front of a large bungalow with a shed that was all chained up on the outside. I dreaded to think what was locked up behind those doors. Perhaps something the owner of the property wanted kept away from prying eyes.

  I was kind of hoping this guy wasn’t one of those that had several screws loose in all the wrong places. We were trying to be safe and not looking to get our asses chopped up into tiny, little, inconspicuous pieces. I had all my toes and fingers intact. I definitely wanted to keep it that way.

  The screeching sound of something mechanical moving caused Diane’s mom to pause in her tracks. I instinctively followed her lead and kept my eyes peeled for trip wires, or any nasties.

  I had no idea what kind of headcase we were going to be dealing with.