Selina looks at the hammer in his hand. “Are you seriously going to use that?”
“If I have to,” Dan says, trying to sounds more confident than he feels.
NINE
From behind the shack a narrow path runs into the woods where it’s quickly swallowed up by the greenness.
Dan looks down to see a trail of blood drops on the ground. “Looks like he followed the path,” he mutters.
“You want me to lead?” Selina asks.
“No,” Dan says quickly, surprising himself as he walks past her. “I’ll lead. I’m the one with the weapon.”
Perhaps I’m not a complete coward after all.
Selina sends him a faint smile, and Dan feels a jolt of excitement and pride. It’s a short-lived pleasure, though, and is soon replaced by fear, as they venture deeper into the forest. He clutches the hammer tightly, listens intently for any sounds, looks around for any movement. He keeps blinking to keep his eyes from watering. The only sounds come from birds singing, the only movements are branches bobbing in the high-noon breeze.
Dan keeps anticipating a one-legged zombie jumping out in front of them. The hammer begins to seem like a silly idea. He might as well be walking around with a bouquet of flowers. He would never be able to successfully defend himself from an attacking zombie at close hand; it just doesn’t work like in the movies. To take down a zombie with a hammer, you’d need several hard, precise hits to the head, and the zombie would still have plenty of time to attack you between blows, as it wouldn’t be deterred by pain or fear.
Why didn’t we take the rifle?
But he knows why. As long as none of them knows how to use the damn thing, it would probably be even less useful than the hammer; at least using the hammer doesn’t take any particular skills.
“The blood gets less and less,” Selina remarks, pulling Dan out of his head.
He looks down to see she’s right. Only a few, scattered blood stains are visible on the forest floor.
“Perhaps he found some way to close the wound,” Selina suggests with an unmistakable sound of hope in her voice.
“Yeah, perhaps,” Dan mutters, feeling still more convinced the trail of blood won’t lead them to anything living. He thinks it more likely the dwindling blood is a sign that the body from which it came is simply empty.
The only thing still giving him hope is the fact that the trail leads away from them. They have to be the closest humans around for at least a few miles, and that means the closest prey for a zombie. So why would it be walking away from them, if it really was a zombie?
Perhaps it picked up the scent of something better …
It feels like they have been walking forever, but it’s probably no more than ten minutes, when the forest suddenly ends. They step out into a ditch and find themselves right by the road again, a few hundred yards from where they turned into the forest road.
Dan looks in both directions, and his heart leaps when he sees the police officer walking by the side of the road a fair distance away in the shade from the trees. He’s facing away from them, headed towards town, and his gait is completely crooked, since one leg is notably shorter than the other.
“Oh, shit,” Selina gasps. “There he is!”
She’s about to run after the policeman, but Dan grabs her by the arm. “Wait. He’s no longer …” He doesn’t need to finish what he’s saying, because at that moment, the officer stops and turns around in an awkward movement.
Even at this distance, and despite his itchy eyes, Dan can make out the milky white stare of the zombie. The blood has been gushing from the broken nose and drawn what looks oddly like a bib on the front of the shirt.
That’s why it couldn’t smell us, Dan thinks dimly. Its nose is completely busted up.
But even though the nose might have been put out of play, the mouth seems to work just fine, as the zombie opens it wide, snarls at them and starts staggering towards them.
“It’s too late,” Dan hears himself say, as he begins backing up, dragging Selina along. She doesn’t need much persuasion, though she seems to have a hard time taking her eyes off of the dead policeman.
She finally manages to look briefly at Dan, her face pale now. “We need to … how do we do it?”
Dan holds up the hammer hesitantly, feeling anything but eager to use it on the zombie. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
“But we have to,” Selina pleads, looking from Dan to the zombie still coming towards them. “We can’t just let him … hey, look!” She points.
Dan looks past the zombie and sees the car coming. It’s a black BMW and it’s going way over the speed limit, the roar of the engine growing quickly louder.
The zombie seems to sense the potential meal coming quickly closer, because it turns around and wobbles out onto the road, headed straight for the car. In its eagerness, it slips on the amputated leg and falls down on its hands and knees.
What happens next takes place within a few seconds of time, yet Dan picks up every detail.
The police zombie struggles to get back up. The BMW is way too close to avoid it, and even though the driver locks the brakes, the car runs right over the zombie. The body is thrown around violently underneath the car like a wet sock in a tumble dryer, arms and legs flailing helplessly before it comes out behind the car, rolling round in a series of somersaults and finally coming to rest at the side of the road.
The car, which has made a long track of black rubber on the asphalt, comes to a stop not far from where Dan and Selina are standing. The engine is still going. Through the smoke from the
