by Handle, Matt
Curt popped open the soda and handed it to his daughter to wash down the medicine. “I couldn’t find any water,” he explained sheepishly. “It’s warm, but at least it’s wet.”
Jenny dutifully swallowed the pill along with a few sips of soda before taking one of the canes from her father.
“What am I supposed to do with this, daddy?” she asked.
Curt handed a cane to Renee and then held his own up in the air as if it was a club. “Probably nothing, but if anything tries to hurt us, you hit them with it like this,” he stated before bringing down the cane with a quick slashing stroke. “Can you do that?”
Jenny nodded, wide-eyed and scared.
“It’s going to be okay,” Curt assured her. “We’re going to walk home just like we walked here. Chances are, we won’t see a thing we haven’t seen already. Think you can do that?”
Jenny nodded again and Renee tried to give her a confident smile.
The three of them made their way back to the store’s entrance and after Curt scouted the parking lot and the street just beyond it, they set out on their way home.
There was no getting used to the eerie feeling of walking through an abandoned city that had once been so full of life. It was so quiet that when a crow cawed from its roost atop one of the dead wires that stretched across the street, Jenny nearly yelped in fright. The big black bird merely tilted its head slightly and looked at the humans below with idle curiosity. People were so rare these days, Curt momentarily wondered if they were the first the crow had ever seen.
It was as his brain was briefly toying with this question that the ragged and torn member of the Afflicted suddenly launched itself from behind the oxidizing Subaru that was jammed between a wrecked mini-van and a late-model Ford in the lane nearest the curb. The monster looked like it had once been a skinny Hispanic kid, maybe 18 years old with tattoos on both arms, but now it was one of the murderous zombies that the plague had left in its wake. The former teen’s face was covered in open sores, its eyes milky and its black hair matted in blood and god-knows-what-else.
It grabbed Renee by the arm before she could even react and bit deeply into her neck. Blood immediately began to spurt from the wound, coating her attacker’s face and splattering Jenny where she stood just a foot or two away. The girl shrieked as she watched in horror.
Curt leapt to the rescue, bringing the end of his aluminum cane down on the thing’s skull with a sharp crack, but Renee was already crumpling to the cement. Her face went white due to shock and the loss of blood. Even as the monster’s head began to bleed from Curt’s strike, it continued to feed on Renee, gnawing on her flesh.
Jenny screamed again and began to flail at the Afflicted with her own walking stick, beating the monster on its arms and shoulders, but it seemed oblivious to the pain. It grunted savagely as it tore a hunk of the thrashing woman’s throat out with its teeth, sending afresh gout of blood spraying all over the sidewalk.
Her life slipping away, Curt landed another vicious blow, this one breaking the monster’s nose and causing it to howl in pain, but it was too late. Renee died in front of her husband and daughter as the thing sat astride her chest and continued to devour her. Curt cried out in despair as he reached down to haul the Afflicted off of his wife’s corpse. He was ready to strangle it with his bare hands if necessary, when he realized just how desperate the situation had become. The noise had brought more of the monsters, five of them now closing in rapidly from different directions.
As his wife’s killer began to grapple with him, Curt looked at his daughter and yelled at her to run. Jenny stood motionless, the shock of her mother’s death too much to comprehend. The nearest of the newly arrived Afflicted was nearly upon them when he yelled again.
“Run, damnit!” he screamed. “Go!”
The curse word is what broke Jenny’s paralysis. Her father had never cursed at her. She broke into a run, dodging between the cars and making a diagonal approach for the nearest intersection. She looked back once to check if her father was following, but all she could see were the monsters attacking him. They’d surrounded him and were trying to haul him to the ground as they had her mother. She almost turned back when she heard her father scream in agony, but then she saw that one of the things had broken off its attack and was now chasing after her.
Jenny cried hysterically and ran as hard as she could. She was faster that the Afflicted, a flabby middle-aged female with stocky legs that caused it to shamble more than run, but she was tired and trembling with fear. She stumbled twice, skinning both knees on the pavement, and losing her cane the second time she fell, but each time she got up and kept going. She stumbled down a side street, the stores and wrecked cars giving way to weedy lots and a crumbling parking deck.
As Jenny looked for some place to hide, she spotted a drainage ditch that led up to and under the road just ahead. The ground on either side of the pavement was swampy and a culvert was set beneath the road, allowing water to flow under the pavement rather than flood over it. The circular tunnel wasn’t more than 18 inches in diameter, but it was more than wide enough for a skinny 12-year-old girl to squeeze into.
She went feet first, inching her way backward inside the steel waterway so that she could still see daylight in front of her as well as if her attacker tried to follow. There was a good two inches of water in the tunnel and it quickly soaked both Jenny and the stuffed animal she still clung to, but she barely noticed. She was terrified. Once she was safely tucked a good five feet away from the opening, she stopped and waited. Her heart was pounding inside her narrow chest and tears still flowed down her face as she mourned the death of her parents.
A minute later, the Afflicted’s horrible bloated and bruised face appeared at the end of the culvert. It hissed menacingly as it looked inside the dark tunnel for its prey. It spotted Jenny and tried to follow after her, but it was too fat to jam its way inside. The monster howled in rage and kept trying to force its shoulders into the pipe, but all it managed to do was rip its blouse and bloody the pale flesh beneath.
Jenny wasn’t sure how long the monster kept at it, but eventually, it tired of the task and wandered off in search of an easier meal.
Jenny stayed in her spot until she had to pee so badly she was afraid she was going to go in her pants. If she’d seen or heard any sign of the Afflicted, she’d have done just that, but it seemed the creature had left long ago so she slowly inched her away back out of the culvert and looked around. She was alone. There was no sign of the monsters or even one of the noisy crows. Jenny wiped her eyes then did her best to wipe off her stuffed bunny as well before she pulled down her shorts and squatted to urinate in the ditch.
Relieved of one problem, Jenny considered the larger one. All she wanted to do was sit down and cry over the loss of her parents, but she knew this wasn’t the place. She needed shelter and she had to be quick about it. The monsters that had attacked them had seemingly come out of nowhere. There was no telling when or where she might run into another one and now she had no one to help protect her.
Jenny considered trying to make her way back to the apartment, but the thought of staying there knowing her parents were dead brought on another bout of sobbing. She didn’t think she could do it and it was probably too far to travel alone anyway. With no particular destination in mind, she set out down the road in the opposite direction from whence she came. Her immediate goal was to put as much distance between herself and the abominations that had killed her parents as possible.
Although she didn’t realize it, Jenny was wandering toward the highway. After taking a couple turns through the lonely streets full of their abandoned buildings and wrecked vehicles, she saw a motel in the distance. She hadn’t stayed in a motel since she was a young girl. Vague memories of a trip to Disney World with her parents filled her head and she sniffled as a single fresh tear ran down her dirt-streaked face. This motel didn’t look anything like the impressive high-rise she’d stayed in on that long-ago vacation, b
ut it looked better than her current alternatives. She quickly made her way up the street, her feet sore but her mind set. As she reached the motel’s entrance, she looked up at its neon sign, four of its five letters still lit in bright pink color, and breathed a small sigh of relief. In a world where nearly everything looked like death, she thought this place looked like it might just be home.
The End
Author’s Note
I hope you enjoyed this short sneak peek into the back story of two characters featured in my debut novel of the zombie apocalypse, Storm Orphans. If you did, please consider purchasing that book online at Amazon.com and write a quick review of this novelette while you’re at it. Help spread the word!
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