Furniture was strewn about and there was a body in the center of the floor. Just one.
“Ken,” Alice whispered, but Mark clamped a hand over her mouth and pointed. There was an Infected in the corner. It was near the body, but no longer chomping on what used to be Ken. Covered in blood, the creature, or zombie, or whatever it should be called, was looking at Ken.
It wiped its mouth with the back of its hand, as if satisfied after a meal.
Then it looked up.
It looked straight toward them and immediately started charging the door.
“Parking lot!” Mark called, and they hurried through the door behind the stairs that led to the parking lot. They heard a loud thud as the creature threw its body at the door again and again. “Move!”
Alice focused on her car and yanked the keys from her pocket. The car was in the first row, luckily, and only about 20 feet from the door. She hurried and unlocked the driver’s side door, then hit the locks for the rest of the car. Mark and Kyle both piled in the backseat with their bags and weapons.
“Go!” Kyle said. “Let’s hit it, Alice.”
She started the engine and began to drive. She knew the main road by their apartment complex was trashed, so she took the back parking lot exit that led to a side road. Hopefully that one would be a little more clear.
Hopefully that one would offer some sort of escape.
Hopefully they weren’t all about to die.
***
Alice peeled out of the parking lot and cringed at the squeal of her tires. She had lived in Holbrook for all of a year, ever since she graduated from college, and she hated how expensive it was to live there. Everything cost money and even now, even with the world around her falling apart, all she could think about was how much it was going to cost to fix her tires if she messed them up.
Mark hollered directions from the backseat and Alice did her best to follow them. Her ex-military neighbor was smart and attentive. She probably should have let him drive, but somehow, Mark seemed comfortable in the back, looking out the windows. He was watching everything, she realized, taking it all in.
Mark had spent a year overseas. Maybe more. She knew it was at least a year. Afghanistan, maybe. Alice wasn’t really sure. What she did know was that Mark was ready for anything, even if he didn’t own his own gun. She could see the wheels in his mind turning, formulating some sort of plan.
What was going to happen to them?
She could see from the road that they hadn’t wasted any time leaving town. Bodies were piling up. On the side road she had taken, people were running around screaming, trying to load up their cars, and sitting on their roofs.
“That’s not going to help them,” Kyle commented. “They’ll get dehydrated and die anyway, or they’ll starve. That’s the worst place they could go.”
“They’re scared,” Alice said. “They don’t know what to do.”
“Rule number one of a crisis situation is ‘don’t panic,’” Mark told them. “They might not know what to do, but they’re definitely panicking. Kyle is right. You can’t go sit on the roof and hope the zombies will somehow decide to go away. They aren’t going away. This isn’t some fictional story with a happy ending.”
Alice turned down another road and slammed on the brakes immediately, but she wasn’t fast enough. She slammed into a stopped car ahead of her and groaned as her chest hit the seatbelt. She heard Mark and Kyle muttering curses from the back of the car, but then they both started yelling at her to get out of the car and run.
That was when she saw it.
Alice lifted her eyes and looked ahead at the horde approaching from ahead of her.
That’s what it was: a horde. There was no other word for it. Zombies upon zombies were walking down the road, making their way around cars and bodies, and they were all headed straight for the trio.
One word echoed in her head.
Run.
Just Another Day in the Zombie Apocalypse is now available for purchase on Amazon. You may order your copy here.
Never Look Back: A Dystopian Novel Page 19