Desolation, p.9
Desolation, page 9
Why had none of us thought about that? Even in the short time I’d stayed with the Enclave, we’d passed by enough fields to scavenge miles of that stuff.
I dropped that line of thinking as I saw the next zombie come racing toward me—a female roughly my size. She was so close that I couldn’t turn and try to run, so I tightened my grip around the bat… club… thing and swung.
I aimed for her face but couldn’t quite get the club up high enough, instead smacking her right in the shoulder. She’d been too focused on reaching me to react, and my hit made her stagger past me. I turned around with her and sent the club toward the back of her knee, hoping to make her fall. Not quite, but she ended up in a low crouch as she came around to face me again, screeching with anger.
Bat raised, I got ready to hit her, but something inside held me back.
Sure, she had no qualms attacking, killing, and eating me—and if I was unlucky, not entirely in that order. And she was by far not the first undead I’d attacked or killed. She certainly looked the part—crazed, dirty, clearly not quite human anymore.
And yet—
Swallowing thickly, I forced my conscience back to where it belonged, and swung.
I hit her squarely in the face, the barbed wire biting into and tearing apart the soft flesh. I felt something hard crunch, too, but not enough. She instinctively shied back, which just increased the tearing damage.
What was left of her face looked downright grotesque as she staggered back. Strips of flesh had torn loose, blood leaking out. I’d apparently hit one of her eyes that—mercifully!—remained inside the skull but looked nothing like it should have.
My gorge rose, a visceral shudder running through me.
I’d done this. That was my responsibility.
Fuck.
Movement coming from up close startled me out of my momentary trance. It turned out to be Jared swinging his ax again. With equal ferocity and aim, he buried the blade in the side of the zombie’s neck, pretty much decapitating her—mostly. She stilled and went slack, her partially severed head dropping onto the shoulder I’d hit before, the barbed wire turning the flesh underneath her light blouse to so much minced meat. Blood came spurting out of the open space in her neck, but I only got a glimpse of that before the body hit the ground, the wound thankfully out of sight.
To say I was horrified was an understatement.
I tore my attention away from the gruesomely disfigured corpse to check on our surroundings.
Not a second too late, since the next undead were already coming for us.
But this time, there were seconds to spare that allowed me to dig my toes into the ground and start sprinting forward, and that was exactly what I did.
Only not toward the road where I had been heading before, but toward the forested slope.
Even if fighting a literal uphill battle sounded bad, it was still better than the slaughtering grounds at the bottom of the valley.
Against all odds and expectations, I reached the tree line without anything coming directly after me. Panting for breath with my lungs burning and my vision swimming, I glanced over my shoulder, expecting to find Jared right behind me—only that I was on my own, no living human anywhere even close to me.
I frantically cast around, doing my best to backtrack to my previous position and then extrapolate from there. Over by the road, I found a cluster of men that were putting up a good fight, Osprey among them. But of Jared or Axel, any trace was missing. I finally spotted Blake simply by going for where the biggest holdup and commotion in the streams of zombies were that looked different from a feeding frenzy, finding him going to town on them in twos and threes, still swinging his sledgehammer—and putting a noticeable dent in the zombie population. He kept walking backward, additionally thinning the horde because quite a few decided that it was mealtime now instead of time to die.
Smart zombies.
Not good. So not good. But probably the only way for us to get out of this hellhole.
While I had apparently veered off to the side and away from a lot of the undead’s attention, I found myself confronted with quite a few of the less brave ones now. It made sense, of course. They must have let me pass, only so they could gang up on me now.
Perfect.
The first of them was on me before I could decide what to do next, but a badly aimed smash-and-rake toward his stomach made him decide to stagger back out of my reach. The next one was equally deterred with my club smacking into his temple, but not fatally so. The others quickly learned from their mistakes, staying just far enough back that I couldn’t reach them.
Then they got smart and spread out all around me, including into the trees.
Shit. They were trying to surround me!
I hadn’t had enough time for my breathing to slow down yet, let alone for my lungs to generally get enough air to stop screaming for it, but I couldn’t let any of that matter now. I took off up the slope, staggering and sliding between the trees.
Not all of the smart lurkers followed, but enough that it would soon be a problem once I ran out of air and strength.
I had to stop when my foot got caught on a tree root hidden behind some weeds. I barely had time to regain my balance before the first zombie crashed into me, making me sprawl out on the ground on my front. Almost immediately—too soon for me to be able to roll over and away—another pounced on my back, grabbed the hair at the back of my head, and slammed my face hard into the ground. Since it only met wet earth and weeds, the effect was rather anticlimactic, but it still hurt.
I just about managed to spit out the dirt and raise my head when another one of them grabbed my club and tried to wrench it out of my hand.
Smart fuckers! It was scary how bright they were.
Thankfully, what they weren’t was well-coordinated, because as they started to crowd in, they snapped at each other more than at me, becoming a hindrance for each other.
The weight on my back lifted, likely as another zombie pushed the one crouching on me off. Immediately, I rolled, taking the club with me. I felt some resistance for a moment, picturing it tearing through dirty, claw-like fingers. Then it was free, and so was I as I staggered to my feet, vertigo hitting me lightly.
It was only a matter of seconds until they’d notice I was up, so I’d better act fast.
That more than actual planning made me take off back down the slope and out of the woods, into bright daylight. Because no way would I have a chance of surviving otherwise.
Almost immediately, several lingering zombies looked up from where they were crouching over their meals, but right now, none of them were coming for me. I ran right past them, trusting that it would stay this way simply because I had few other options.
That worked well for all of ten seconds, when a bunch of faster ones currently running out in the open veered off path and came straight at me.
No way was I going to be able to outrun them—not panting and wheezing, with no clue in what direction to turn.
So I did the next best thing. I hunkered down next to an old, partly dismembered carcass and started tearing at it, hoping that my half-assed “disguise” would work. While I had to fight hard not to retch with disgust. While my soul died a little more.
Ah, the things we do to survive…
The fast ones ran right past me and into the trees, where I presumed some of my tail was by now coming back. One of them took a much-too-close look, though, eyeing me and the carcass critically. Dirty as I was, I might have fit in, and there was plenty of now almost-dry blood all over me to sell it, but I likely must have looked too beefy myself to be that enamored with such a meager meal.
So for good measure, I snarled at him.
His attention fell away, and he quickly caught up to the others.
I was just about to relax when I realized that a lot of the lurkers around me were now fixated on me.
They reminded me of the pink-pants zombie that had followed Kas and me before we’d run into Jared back in Charlotte. Right now I couldn’t tell whether they saw me as their new leader or the next meal.
Casting around while I brushed the disgusting gore on my hands off on some grass, I hoped to see something that would give me an idea what to do next, but I was out of luck. I didn’t even see the others anymore that I’d glimpsed when I’d come out of the trees. Either they were dead or had made a successful exit.
The very idea that I’d been left behind in the middle of a zombie-infested former settlement gave me the creeps.
Well, at least nobody could set me up to get killed now. There was a silver lining to everything!
Sadly, I felt like I was proving right now that I could do just as good a—if not better—job as Jared in that aspect.
My attention snapped to the huts. They were a good two hundred feet to my left, thanks to our efforts to escape. Backtracking was absolutely a literal step in the wrong direction. Also, because the area between my current position and what remained of the buildings was crawling with the undead, busy tearing apart fresh and not-so-fresh food alike.
No way I would make it there without getting attacked, and I was certain that if I went down out in the open, I’d never get up again. Too many lurkers would join in the fray to be able to crawl out from underneath them somehow. That trick only worked once.
But there were some abandoned cars down the valley, the closest only seventy or eighty feet away from me.
I cast one more cautious look around before I took off toward the vehicle, not running outright to avoid triggering the lurkers.
I got a good twenty feet before I had to pass through two groups of lurkers, members of both rearing up and staring at me with aggression.
More out of instinct than deliberate thought, I sent my club into the shoulder of the closest zombie, feeling it scrape over and briefly catch on bone. That gave me the creeps, but it also made him rear back and sneer at the diminutive woman next to him, rather than go toe-to-toe with me. While I was normally not a fan of trickle-down violence, this once I would give it a pass.
More and more zombies looked up, so the next one I passed, I whacked in the face, screaming a little inside at the damage the barbed wire did.
Killing them was one thing. But maiming? Not good. Absolutely not good!
But it worked for what I’d intended. The second zombie went down, the others quickly setting on it while giving me a wide berth.
I reached the car almost unscathed and with what I felt was a couple of seconds to spare.
Looking around one last time, I hoped that now I’d find someone still around, fighting, but no such luck.
A glance through the window, and I abandoned the idea of crawling into the back row. It was full of dismembered body parts, several people having died there.
So instead I popped the trunk, praying that it would open and turn out empty.
It did open, and except for an old, discolored blanket it was empty, but I’d underestimated how much bodily fluids could have leaked through the back row and into the trunk.
A lot. And there were plenty of flies and maggots at work as well on the seepage.
Most but not all of that had ended up on the blanket.
To say every single fiber of my body wanted to recoil with revulsion was putting it mildly.
Yet when I looked up from the trunk, I saw that lurkers all around were slowly inching toward me, most curious, but a few already displaying signs of aggression.
Looked like I was out of options. And the gore in the back row proved that they’d learned how to open doors and windows. But not trunks.
Grimacing with disgust, I did my very best to push the soiled blanket toward the back of the trunk—the seats—and clambered in next to it before I reached up and slammed the cover closed above me.
The last thing I saw were two lurkers rearing up and making a run for it.
The world went dark. Then, the entire car rocked as they slammed into the back before tearing into each other, from what it sounded like.
The impact made another wave of liquefied people goo slosh into the trunk, and consequently onto me, followed by some dribbles.
I clamped my mouth shut and concentrated on just holding my breath until my lungs burned like fire, forcing my mind to shut down.
As it was, I wasn’t even sure if it would make a difference if I screamed since I could now hear the undead howling loudly all around the car, with several impacts following on all sides at irregular intervals.
But I knew that if I let that scream out, I’d never stop. Not and still be sane.
So I did the only thing I could do: I lay there, in the dark, stinking trunk, feeling like I was getting baked alive with corpse-goo gravy and mostly imaginary maggots crawling over my skin.
How quickly being hungover had ceased to be the predominant reason for my misery.
And this once, I had nobody else to blame but myself.
5
With no watch, I had no way of guessing how much time had passed until the feeding frenzy died down, but it must have been well over an hour. Gradually, the thumps and growls faded away, until that eerie, unsettling quiet from when we’d first traipsed out of the woods settled all over the valley once more. I was sure that the closed trunk must have muffled some noise, so I forced myself to remain still for as long as I could somehow make myself.
Each breath was agony, my entire body primed to purge itself of everything it had ever ingested when that horrible smell hit my brain again. Purge itself again, that was, because even stellar self-control and nothing but water for breakfast didn’t help against this.
And there I’d thought the fetid pool with the drowned people in Charlotte had been bad.
It was almost comical how the apocalypse found new ways to completely gross me out.
I didn’t allow myself to laugh, though. As with the screaming, I wasn’t sure if I could have stopped again if I’d started laughing. And it would be just my luck to get attacked and eaten now that I’d outwaited the worst just because I couldn’t keep my trap shut.
But then the moment came when I just couldn’t stand lying there anymore, covered in what was left of other people’s organs and my own vomit.
Problem was that as I tried to find a way to open the trunk from the inside, my fingers didn’t find anything.
A fresh wave of panic hit me.
What if I was locked in for good? What if I was going to die in here?
Almost worse, what if I wasn’t simply delirious from the heat and stench but was about to convert, and then some unsuspecting asshole popped the trunk down the line only to get eaten by my zombified self?
Well, that last part was kind of funny. And calmed me down a little. But it was a horrifying idea, and not something that helped me calm down—or get out of this fucking trunk!
With no option left—and quite some nervous energy pent up—I instead tried kicking the back of the seats to get them to fold forward.
That didn’t work. But finding the latch that released them did.
As sunlight blinded me, I gagged as the wave of stench that hit me was even worse than what had been going on in the trunk. Plus, there was the tactile sensation of what kept dribbling through the now-created gap.
Squeezing my eyes shut against the glare, I reached across the trunk and unsnapped the other seat as well so I could create a zombie-goo-seat sandwich and crawl out of the trunk onto relatively dry ground.
I remained lying there just long enough to trust my tearing eyes to work once more before I came up into a crouch and carefully glanced out through the stained windows.
All I saw were torn-apart corpses, markedly fewer than when I’d last checked on them.
Damn, but the lurkers had been busy.
The smart thing would have been to remain in the car for a little longer to make sure that the noise I’d inadvertently caused hadn’t drawn more attention, but I simply couldn’t make myself do that. What I did instead was grit my teeth, send a half-hearted prayer out into the universe, and reach for the door.
It wasn’t locked, and not even shut, as I found out. Which worked in my favor now since that meant I could simply push it open without too much fiddling. Right outside was a patch of lush, green grass that looked like the best thing ever. Not throwing myself at it cost me a lot of restraint, but simply getting out of the car and back onto my feet was a massive improvement. It also made it obvious just how drenched in sweat and gunk my entire body was, my shirt and jeans sticking to my skin all over.
As soon as I was standing outside, the urge to run hit me, but I cut down on that impulse. Instead, I crouched down and took a long look around. My club was gone, or buried under too much fresh gore to be found. When still nothing moved, I hastened over to the next vehicle, making sure to remain hunched over to limit how my body was silhouetted against the sky.
When still nothing came for me, I moved over to the next vehicle. And the next.
And when I finally ran out of vehicles, I used random bushes—and in one case even a patch of long grass that had miraculously remained upright—for cover.
All around me, only the insects sang, the afternoon heat beating down on me.
It took me fucking forever to reach the main road and then the point where I’d seen the cluster of men fight for their lives. It was still recognizable since there was fresh blood all over the road, drying but somewhat lighter than the days-old previous paint job. I also recognized the patterns of some of the shirts and jackets that the Militia people had been wearing this morning, only that I didn’t remember their names.
Osprey’s stuff was markedly absent. That was all I cared about.
I didn’t dare linger for long. Already, I could feel the eyes of what felt like at least a dozen lurkers on me, and I didn’t want to put my paranoia to the test. Nobody alive was still around, and it was high time for me to get going.
I couldn’t say why, but it was only a couple minutes later that the realization truly sank in that they had left me behind.
