All it took was a single glance to know what they were.
Cutter stopped in his tracks and looked down the avenue,
counting silently. Automatically he did a mental accounting of what he was
wearing and which of his weapons he’d brought along. Unlike so many others he
had not given up his makeshift armor, nor had he given way to moving around the
city without his guns. And he had seen others walking the streets without even
a bludgeon to protect them. So many had grown complacent that they were
beginning to think the danger was past, that the dead were no longer a grave
threat to the city.
All they had to do was to see what he was seeing and
whatever that sense of security they had all felt would have been proven to be
nothing more than a bad idea.
The dead were there.
He didn’t bother to count, but knew at a glance that there
were scores of them. And when you could see that many, there was good reason to
conclude that hundreds were around.
“They’re coming from the countryside,” Ron said.
A few other people had been going about their ways on the
street and their gazes, too, had been drawn to the irregular movement of the
things that were heading their way. Apparently there had been no other people
closer to the edge of town to see them approaching, and so no warning had been
given. Or, quite possibly, the people who had first encountered them had been
taken out before they could sound an alarm of any type. If there had been
screams, they had been snuffed out before others could hear them.
.45 pistol. Hammer. 30.06. 100 rounds, all told. These were
the terms foremost in Ron’s mind. Next, he tried to recall where Jean and
Oliver said they would be. They had all decided to go scrounging for supplies
that morning and each had gone in separate directions with specific goals in
mind. If the others had made the same progress Ron had made, then each of them
were more than two miles from home. There was almost no possibility he could
find either of them and get back before this herd of the dead came staggering
into city center.
Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked. The hope came to him as
he watched the figures advancing stiffly, implacably. It had been so long since
he’d seen more than one or two of the damned things that he realized that the
sight had shocked him. Something like nausea scratched at his gut.
He began counting the ones directly in front of him, and as
he got to twenty-five he not only realized the situation was a bad one, but
that it might be worse than he could imagine. His hand going for his rifle, he
took it from his shoulder and peered down the barrel, using the scope to take a
look northward. As soon as his eye met the lenspiece he saw a dozen new deaders
rounding the nearest corner, their pale eyes staring hatred, lips drawn back to
reveal teeth prepared for ripping. They were hungry.
As he stood, deciding his next move, someone came running
down the street, a young man of no more than twenty years, his black hair
streaming behind him in the cold air. The guy raced right past Ron and did not
stop, did not even pause as he went dashing madly down the street, headed for
city center. At least there was nothing to block the fellow’s way. The street
had been completely cleared of the wrecks and debris that had cluttered it. The
Colonel and his men had bulldozed the stuff away, hauled it all onto empty lots
or dumped it at the ends of streets they weren’t planning to use. Now the roads
were almost the way they’d been that last time civilization had been intact and
things like road maintenance was something other than fantasy.
Turning to watch the other person, Ron was staggered to see
that there were dead coming from that direction, too!
“Watch out,” he yelled. His warning was heard and the man
skidded to a halt just as a pair of zombies crept out from a darkened alley,
their hands clawing at the youth who was well out of reach because of Ron’s
call.
At first Ron was relieved to see that the man was armed, a
9mm pistol suddenly in his bare right hand. But he knew what would happen
should the guy start firing. The shamblers would come from everywhere, and
they’d move at a much faster pace, aroused by the sound of gunfire. To one of
the dead, the report of a discharged firearm was almost like a dinner bell.
They would come from everywhere at once, zeroing in on the thing they wanted
most of all.
And, of course, before he could ask the young man to hold
his fire, the gun went off.
Two shots pierced the relative silence, precisely. A Glock, Ron thought, recognizing the
sound. At least the man could shoot, the tops of the skulls of the nearest pair
of deaders turning into bloody fragments. The duo went down in a heap of
dessicated flesh and tattered fabric. But, as always, there were more moving up
to take their places.
They were new dead, Ron saw. These were zombies from the
wilderness. The creatures had not been witness to the constant withering fire
of the citizens of Charlotte. Colonel Dale and his army had never blasted these things, teaching the survivors
that they were the ones who would be going down for the count, seeing their
fellow monsters cease to exist in explosions of lead and brain matter. All they
knew was that urge to gnaw living flesh. If there was fear in their rot-eaten
brains at all, that fear was vague and forgotten and had never been rekindled
in them.
Most of his attention drawn by the escaping man, Cutter
almost failed to see that three zombies had staggered to within a dozen feet of
his position, coming out into the sunlight from a dark and bare walkway that he
had thought led only to a loading dock. Now, though, he surmised that the
concrete path between the buildings either went all the way through the block
to the next street, or that the zombies had been filtering into the city for
many hours and had already found places to wait in hiding.
One of the things groaned, its voice the dead’s equivalent
of a curse. He hated the sound and it brought back the loathing he had felt for
the damned things before the Colonel’s plans had given them all a sense of
security and normalcy. “To Hell with it,” he said, his jaw set and his teeth
grinding.
The .45 bucked in his gloved hand. The zombie that had
uttered the sound went away in a shower of atomized flesh, its already ruined
face vanishing as a vast flower opened gory petals across the space that had
been its skull.
Another of the deaders
was right behind it, filling the space almost instantly. This was like the
worst of times, a return to the days when the living corpses had filled the
city and made it their own, when the simplest task of moving and scouting was a
dangerous undertaking. Ron’s thoughts kept going to Jean and Oliver, then back
to his own situation. He had to keep telling himself that if he didn’t
concentrate on the here and now then the welfare of his family wouldn’t matter
at all. Because if he didn’t worry about himself, he’d die.
Ron heard someone screaming for help. He risked a glance in
that direction and saw the man who had passed him earlier was in a bad
situation, surrounded by the lurking mass of hungry monsters that now poured
out of one of the partially blocked alleys.
“Damn,” he said, knowing that he had to try to save the guy.
There were two zombies directly between himself and the
trapped stranger, so there was nothing to do but go through them. Ron fired the
.45 and the bullet plowed through the head of the nearest of the pair. But he
knew that he couldn’t just shoot his way through the mass; there were far too
many of them to take out that way. Eventually he’d run out of ammunition and
that was a situation he didn’t want to face; not ever.
Rushing toward the second of the two he brought his boot
down on the side of its bare leg, aiming for the outside of the knee. There was
a snapping sound and the leg bent inward, toppling the semi-naked thing. It
fell to the left and sprawled on the street, scrabbling for some way to right
itself. They couldn’t feel pain, but with a shattered leg there was no way it
was going to stand upright again. Cutter left it clawing at the asphalt as he
pushed forward.
“This way,” he screamed at the man with the Glock. “Don’t
try to go north,” he yelled. “This way!”
There was just a second’s hesitation as the man paused,
trying to decide whether or not to heed Ron’s advice.
But that was all the time the zombies needed to close the
small gap behind the man. Ron was not able to close his eyes as the mob
descended on the unfortunate soul and bore him to the ground.
“Just like old times,” Ron whispered. There was a hint of
panic in his mind and he fought hard to contain it as the monsters around him
suddenly lost interest in him and concentrated on the meal that screamed in the
boiling center of the mass of killers in the street.
Turning his back on the action of tearing arms and bloody mass, he trotted easily away. He could make it back to his home with no trouble, he figured. And if something truly did rise up to block his way, there were any number of good places where he could retreat if he had to find refuge. Or the Colonel’s people would certainly emerge from their fortresses to kill back this resurgent plague. As he dodged from point to point along the recently cleared thoroughfare, he kept expecting to hear the approaching march of Dale’s cadre or the orchestrated precision of their rifles. But there was only the sound of his footsteps and the occasional groan of the living dead.
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