“Alvin.” He spoke the name as if it were an obscenity.
The road leading to the Barnes’ house was dotted with undead, but the tanker was powerful enough to mow them down with minimal resistance. The truck’s transmission was similar to the standard transmission on his old car, but for some reason Noah couldn’t get the rig moving over thirty miles per hour.
During the seemingly endless drive home, it began to drizzle. Noah repeated a prayer. “Please be ok. Please be ok.”
There was a break in the density of bodies on the half-mile stretch of highway leading to Noah’s house. His heart fluttered. Had he passed the front of the horde? He wondered.
The truck was too big to navigate up his winding driveway. Noah stopped the rig in front of his mailbox, which had been snapped-off at the base and pushed into the drainage ditch. He left the engine idling in the road, jumped out of the cab, and ran up the driveway.
Noah stopped short at the sight of his family’s home. The front door was kicked-in, and a few corpses milled about outside. Hunched silhouettes passed across sections of windows where the boards had been torn off. The baritone moans of what sounded like a couple dozen corpses droned from inside the house like a beehive. But there was no gunfire. No screams. No signs of life.
His stomach turned, and his body began to teeter from side to side. She could be locked in the attic—or the basement, he thought, still unwilling to give in to the obvious. Dad would have stuck her somewhere for me to find, if he had any sense left in him.
There were far too many to kill. Noah’s eyes narrowed as if searching for an idea somewhere in the distance, and, after a moment, he spotted it.
He ran back to the truck. A few frontrunners to what remained of the second half of the horde were already within throwing distance. Noah hopped into the cab and grabbed his backpack. After unbuckling one of the straps, he tied it around the pull cord that hung from the ceiling and let it drop. As the pack dangled, the air-horn let out a loud, steady belch. Every corpse within a mile radius perked up at the sound of the horn. Noah jumped down from the cab and slammed the door.
He skidded down the ravine in the direction of the canal, stopping beside the mouth of the drainage pipe that ran beneath the road. Noah slowly plodded through the pipe, careful to keep his splashing to a minimum. He stopped at the far end and waited in the shadows. Eventually a steady line of dead streamed down the driveway, eager to investigate the noise emanating from the road. When the flow of corpses tapered off, Noah climbed the streambank and ran up the driveway.
With machete drawn he flew through the front door. The kitchen looked like it had experienced an earthquake. The breakfast table lay on its side with two of its legs knocked off, and the matching chairs were trampled to pieces. Broken cans of food were strewn about the floor, liberated from their shelves by blasts of buckshot that blew the cupboard doors right off their hinges. The acrid scent of burnt gunpowder mixed with the aroma of preserves and the all too familiar stench of rotted flesh.
Noah stepped over a faceless body before entering the living room. There he found a few more bodies with pulp for faces, but no Charlie or Abby.
He moved upstairs. There was a hole in the wall outside the first bedroom, which was the guest room where Alvin had stayed.
Dad switched to slugs, thought Noah. He was running out of ammo.
Peering through the hole he saw a man and a woman hunkered over his father. They tore chunks of flesh from his body like hyenas feeding on a zebra carcass in a nature documentary. The shotgun lay beside Charlie. Several spent shell casings were strewn about the rug, along with three motionless corpses, their heads reduced to unrecognizable stumps by close-range gunfire.
Noah dashed into the room. “Hey!” He blurted.
The corpses turned their heads but didn’t attack. Their current meal still warm, they went back to eating. It was the first time Noah had gotten the attention of the undying, only to be promptly ignored again.
He charged, swinging the machete with such force that it decapitated the first corpse’s head clean off. The headless body knocked into the woman and pushed her onto her back. Before she could recover, Noah plunged the blade through her torso so hard that it pinned her to the floor like an insect tacked to a setting board. She pulled at the blade, managing only to mutilate her hands and nothing else.
Noah stood hunched over his father’s mangled body, shoulders slowly rising and falling as he regained his breath. There’s nothing left, he thought. Nothing. Tears rolled down his cheeks and fell onto his father’s neck.
Suddenly his father coughed spraying blood over his chest. Noah’s mouth gaped. He knelt beside Charlie and took his hand.
“Dad?” His voice creaked.
Charlie’s eyes fluttered open. He squinted at his son, as if trying to place a face he hadn’t seen in years. “Y—you shouldn't have left,” he said between shallow gasps of breath.
Noah winced. “I know. You were right about Al. I didn't see it.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I protected him.”
His father nodded slightly, and then his eyes rolled into the back of his head. The blood that pooled in his bite wounds lessened as his heart grew weaker. Charlie’s grip tightened and then relaxed.
Noah cupped Charlie’s hand and closed his eyes, trying to reflect on his father’s passing, but
