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Chapter 5. Peace
"You've got to be shitting me."
"What?" I hear him ask before I point to the horde of zombies shuffling in the streets. "Oh. Right." The moans carried through the streets as if these monsters were humans simply carrying on a conversation. If only.
Managing to escape handfuls of zombies by evading through dark allies and sewer tunnels underground, it seemed almost hopeless. They were everywhere. In buildings, on the streets, underground. I tried to push the agonizing reality from my shoulders as we clambered up a pole behind a fast food joint. Once famous for their burgers, now used for sniping. On the roof, I pulled out the scoped rifle and leaned against the cool concrete.
"You're going to snipe all of them?" I look into the scope with one eye, looking over the ground and spotting them. "Only the ones that'll give us hell. Sit down before you something sees you," I warn before laying seige from the safety of the rooftop, counting the headshots as they exploded suddenly.
"Let's go." Clearing the road was the easy part as we jumped off of the roof and onto a parked car. The infected were too bust groaning at each other that they didn't seem to us dent the vehicle in our landing. But just because they were stupid didn't mean we would be careless. "Keep firing!"
We fired and emptied clip after clip into zombies, running down the street and looking for the next place that could give proper shelter. In the midst of our scuttling I heard the faint and distinct sound of sobbing. The last zombie fell and I held up my hand to catch Dan's attention. "Keep quiet and your eyes peeled."
We tried to keep the encounters with the undead to a minimum till we could get passed the witch. Something impossible with each grunt of force that was put into pushing zombies away. I followed behind Daniel, elbowing an undead in the face and knocking it over. It was a little late when I realized that the thing latched onto my shirt with one rotting hand to stop itself from falling. Blood imprinted on my shirt as I kicked the thing off, its broken fingernails ripping into the fabric before falling back, pieces of my shirt falling with it.
"Kova!" The hissing whisper of my partner alerting me to more danger. I immediantly looked up at him as he pointed behind me. I turned my head to fin the hung head of a crying child right behind me. I tensed in realization and took quiet and quick steps away from it, catching up to Dan. "Thanks for the warning." We continued, me shoving zombies away and Dan gunning them down with accuracy. We made a pretty good team.
My eyes darted around, searching for anything that would yield a place to rest or a pitstop at least. To our luck a crudely painted sign of a house and an arrow pointing left showed us the way to that place. "Safe house up ahead," I said, taking the step around the corner, the sound of footsteps following behind me assured me Dan was following.
"We did good today, huh?" he asked, his shirt dripping from blood smatters and peices of flesh that had clung to him dring out shoot outs and close encounters. When i didn't respond right away, shoving the thick metal door open, he came next to me to help before looking at me. "You okay?" I nodded stepping inside, holding the tattered remains of my shirt that covered my stomach close. It must have looked like I was bleeding. God, I hope I wasn't.
My thoughts were shaken by the sound of sudden footfalls behind us. Dan quickly filed into the safe house and we both slammed the behemoth door shut just as an arm shot inside, reaching for us. But the momentum of the door couldn't be stopped, the bones fracturing and snapping off and a hand fell to the floor inside. Outside the zombie cried out, scraping at the metal with it's other hand.
Dan and I just stared at it for some time until finally I took a step towards it and kicked it far into the other side of the room underneath the cardboard boxes. I didn't really want to look at it and the noise outside wasn't helping. I sat down and sighed, shouldering off my bag to the ground as Daniel took the time to shoot the noisey SOB. Better get patched up before tomorrow.
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"Ow, ow, ow! Damnit!" Dan looked at me like I was being a big baby about this. The painkillers were taking their sweet time kicking in as he helped me shoulder a joint back into place. I hadn't even realized that my shoulder was popped out from the last time I elbowed the ********. I was bleeding but it had stopped now, a bandage on my ribs.
"Pills not working yet?"
"It takes time," I said, trying to play off my whining to just messing around though it did hurt like hell. He relaxed across from me. I rubbed my shoulder and stared at his feet, catching movement. It looked like he started to say something but stopped. I wondered what he was trying to say. Was it about the cut? It seemed I was wrong when I heard him finally speak up.
"How did you end up like this? I mean, I know why you're here, but how did you killing zombies start?"
I looked to the side, hand resting still on my shoulder before falling away and into my lap. My hands entwined as my thumb ran up and down my hand for comfort. I never really talked about that, I didn't even get the chance to tell Kova or any of the others what I was really doing here or how it started.
"If you met me before this all happened and asked what I thought if zombies took over the world, I would have probably laughed at you. Before all this happened, me and my... Ex-husband had just filed for divorce and the papers were signed. It just wasn't working, no matter how much we tried to make it. Soon after being evicted from my apartment for not having the rent for the fifth time, I went by my parents house for a few days." Daniel had to laugh, probably because he couldn't imagine me not being organized. I tried to smile too.
"This all took place here in Pennsylvania. But soon my mom and I got into a fight about the divorce. I couldn't live with them for much longer and I moved up to New York. I had a friend there and she offered me to crash at her place. I was stuck there while she was out with her boyfriend. Channel surfing I got first news of the infection but the news played it off to some new disease. I didn't pay much attention to it. It was when I heard the sirens down the street about evacuations did I start to worry." I took a deep breath and tried to keep myself strong. I didn't really liked to remember all this but it was good to tell someone. I shifted in my seat, lifting my legs so that my arms could rest over me knees.
"I drove to the mall where my friend and her date were supposed to be, but by then the infection had spread more and into the general public. The mall had been nearly taken over. After searching, I found her hiding in a janitor's closet crying. Something about how her boyfriend was acting strange and he had bit her. She also old me that before that some weird girl came up to him and bit his arm. I didn't know and I dragged her from the closet to go find a security station for some help. By the time we made it to the third floor of the mall, she had gone pale and slow and half the mall was empty.
"I tried to bandage the bite on her neck, secretly freaking out at how bad it was. When I turned to get the tape to hold the gauze shut... She grabbed my hair and pulled me backwards. The supply rack fell over on her but she didn't seem bothered that a sharp peice of metal was now sticking out of her head. I freaked out when she jumped at me, trying to get at me. I reached behind me for something, anything. I grabbed a pen that had fallen from off the desk in our struggle and I just... Shoved upwards. She stopped moving. It was..."
I stopped talking as I remembered how Tracy stopped moving above me an how I could feel somethign warm ooze over my hand and drip on me. How I pushed her off and she just rolled over, pen in her eye. I snapped out of it when Dan cleared his throat and I looked at him.
He tried to crack a joke. "Can't start me off easy, can you?"
It took me a second to regain my composure and smile slightly. "Not a chance."
"How far are we?"
"Almost there. My parents had a house on the corner of Maine. Halfway I think."
He stood and stretched, scratching the back of his head as he looked down at me. "I'm going to get some sleep. How about you?"
"Same here. In a bit." I watched him wander over to a corner with his fire blanket and rest against the wall. In that moment where he slumped forward and slept, I realized why I had told him everything. I had lost my husband, my parents, my best friend, then Sougo and Maggie. I lost everyone and the fear of losing Dan made me spill my guts out to him. That maybe if someone knew, they would end up staying. Instead of rejecting his friendship, I chose to ignore the possibility of Death taking him, or the zombies doing such. But I knew that he was a good shot and I wasn't going to lose him soon. I prayed I didn't.
And since someone was here with me, that knew... I was at peace.
Happy in the ignorant bliss...
But happy anyways.
 SikFox · Fri Mar 20, 2009 @ 05:18pm · 0 Comments |
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