She hadn’t seen anyone run that fast before, certainly not her brother. Overwhelmed with fear, she froze and closed her eyes and screamed. Something knocked her down. She looked up through teary eyes and her brother hovered over her. He was very stinky. He punched her several times in the face really hard! It hurt so much! She screamed again.
Why would he attack her like this?
She heard a loud bang, and he fell on top of her. She struggled to move, but he was too heavy. She lay there in horror as she wondered if he was dead. But then he got up slowly, a charred, gaping hole in his stomach, and looked behind her. Emily, prone, couldn’t see what he was looking at. Suddenly, his head exploded, and Emily was covered in so much of his blood that she couldn’t see. Goop fell on her shoulder. This time she puked but nothing came out.
She wanted her daddy. When would he come after her?
A thud. She wiped her eyes. A loud noise.
Strong hands grabbed her body and pulled her up. A hand grasped one of hers, and a gruff voice said, “Run with me!” She ran as fast as possible with him, but she was very tired. Tears and blood stung her eyes. They ran out of the neighborhood of houses and into the neighborhood with what her mother called ‘apartments’ and the stores across the street. Eventually, he picked her up, placing her on his shoulders. He was tall with straight, long, brown hair. He also picked up a large gun from off the ground.
“Hold on tight. Don’t let go!” She obeyed, even though he was stinky, but not as much as her brother, and not in the same way. All of a sudden, the sound of his gun going off was almost deafening. She swayed, but she continued to hold on to him. Another creature—pale person with sores—stopped short. He was stinky like her brother. They ran past him and turned around, the creature coming up quickly toward them. The man fired his gun again, this time hitting the creature in the head. The creature plopped down onto the parking lot. When had they gotten to the parking lot?
As she glanced around, she could see that one creature smashed in a car window, reached in, and grabbed a large woman, pulling her out of the window with a strength she had never seen. The woman barely fit through the window. Now the man was running fast. Emily turned her head to look back. The creature struck the woman’s head on the ground several times, reached into her head with his hands, and then with his mouth. Like with her brother.
The man lurched, and she tumbled, hitting her head. That hurt! She cried a little. Soon, the stinky man scooped her up and carried her by her armpits, his gun dangling under her chin, as they raced toward the shops. They arrived at a shop where lots of pretty jewels, like the ones her Princesses wore, were on display. Blood smeared the floor. Blood smeared her Snow White dress. Her face was cool and wet.
The man dumped her behind a counter. “Stay here,” he whispered. “Don’t worry, I’ll be close by.”
“You can’t leave me!”
“Shh. You stay quiet. Be silent, okay? I’ll be right back, I promise.” He ran off.
Vin crouched behind a counter in the jewelry store—hiding and defending the child from any zombies they might encounter.
So zombies were real. Like everyone else, he had thought they were the stuff of fiction. His engineering mind tried to make sense of it all. What kind of pathogen would cause people to come back to life, even after being hit with a shotgun blast, or at least heal quickly, and eat brains? What had his superstitious Aunt Kathy said to him when he was a boy? He didn’t remember exactly, but the gist was, “There are supernatural forces bubbling underneath the surface, just waiting to break out.” Could she have been right?
Maybe it was a combination of the two?
And if it were a pathogen, did someone manufacture it? For what purpose? It seemed the type of thing the new President would do. Soon, the military will come in to “save the day” and impose a communist government. That bitch.
The zombie attacks, as far as he could determine, were over. The zombies had won. He dared to walk outside the store and saw vehicles in disarray, pools and smears of blood dotting the landscape—but no people, living or dead. Presumably, they were now zombies. Still, the prospect of another attack worried him.
He thought about stealing a car—if at this point you could call it stealing—but navigating the clumps of cars looked daunting. And where would he go? Up north? To his town of Ella?
No. Not up north. That was the direction every zombie had traveled. He wondered what would cause them all to move in unison, and it occurred to him that they had moved like a swarm of insects.
Zombies may have flooded Ella. In fact, only one course of action made sense, and it stared him in the face: a facade that read, “Beaver Park Market.”
He went to the back of the jewelry store to reclaim the young girl who by now was weeping in a fetal position. “Stop crying, it’s time to go.”
She didn’t respond to that.
She must not be coping with this well. Damn.
“Um . . . It’s going to be all right.”
That didn’t help.
“Look, I’ll take care of you.” There was a desperation in his voice he wished would go away. “I won’t let anything harm you. Please stop crying.”
She kept sobbing, but at least she looked at him with despair in her eyes, her lips quivering in fear.
