She had no idea where she was running. All she knew wasthat she had to get away. She had to get away from the carnage that washappening just over the rise. A highway, swollen with unmoving vehicles, bodiespiling up as hordes of the dead swarmed over the trapped occupants. Suzy riskeda look over her shoulder. He wasn't there, the handsome man who had helpedwasn't following. By now he was probably dead. His name had been Dustin; add itto the growing list of people, including her brother, that had died within thelast 12 hours.
She saw the first one crest the rise as she stoodknee-deep in cold, rotten water. Was it him? No. It was not him. It was alumbering man, huge even from this distance. His uncoordinated steps moved himcloser to her, and then he hit the edge of the slope, tumbling down awkwardly,arms and legs incapable of stopping his descent. He came to a rest at thebottom of the slope, shreds of flesh hung from the ashen skin of his snappedarm.
The creature looked up at her, teeth bared as itattempted to extricate itself from the mass of branches that it had come torest in. New tears in its flesh had no effect upon it. It was of one mind, onesingle purpose. It wanted to kill her. It wanted to strip the flesh off of herbones. It wanted to eat her. The terror welled up in her once more, and thereasonable part of her mind shrunk to the back of her brain; the wild-eyed partcame forward and sent her splashing through the pond. She ran straight ahead,not even thinking, and planted her hands against a rough concrete wall, a soundbarrier erected to protect the occupants of the houses on the other side fromhaving to experience the constant noise of the city's always busy freeway.
Her fractured mind clawed at the ridged stone wall,searching aimlessly for a way to scale the obstruction that separated her fromescape. In an effort to try and scale the fifteen-foot wall before her, sheplugged her fingers between the ridges of stone that comprised the surface ofthe wall, designed to break the sound of the freeway with their irregularshape. She was three-feet off the ground when she lost a fingernail and fell tothe ground, too frightened to even swear at her failure. She clutched herruined finger to her chest, wrapped in a fist to halt the stinging pain of asuddenly missing fingernail.
Suzy chanced another glance over her shoulder to see thecreature fording its way through the rotten pond. Her breath came in raggedgasps, but stopped altogether as she saw more creatures pop up over the rise ofthe hill. All along the ridge they came, stumbling, tumbling, tangles of limbswith only one thing on their mind.
She should have stayed in the car.
As the closest creature neared her, she began a half-jogthat took her along the length of the wall. Her left hand trailed along thecold, ridged barrier as she ran towards the sun. The wall ended a half-mile upthe road, back in the direction they had come from. She could see the way. Aline of the undead was marshalling from the highway towards the wall, slowlymoving, threatening to trap her between their advance and the wall she nowhugged for support. She picked up her pace, breathing raggedly, her legs thumpinginto the ground, tired legs, stretched to the limit, filled with an ache thatshe could not stop to quell. Her pursuers had no aches. They experienced nopain.
She was closer now, but so were they. Sweat cooled on herbody in the chill morning air, her breath puffing in front of her face, hangingfor a second and then disappearing. Suzy felt as if she were a child playingsome obscene game of tag, only the entire world was "it" and thestakes were life or death. There would be no running inside the house for acool cup of water from a pastel-green plastic cup.
She was five-hundred feet from the end of the wall whenthe first creature managed to reach her. It was a woman, or at least it used tobe a woman, somewhat shorter than Suzy. She had been tan, and until recently,she had been alive. Fresh blood plastered the woman's shirt to her chest, hercurly blonde hair backlit by the orange sun. Her hands reached out to Suzy, andshe slapped them away from her, putting on a burst of speed.
They were there now, about twenty of them between her andthe end of the wall. They were slow and spread out. There was a chance. Itwasn't hopeless.
A wind kicked up, and a helicopter appeared in thedistance, not a regular old news helicopter, but something far more deadly. Ithad the look of the military about it, sharp angles that screamed death. Itflew low, and it flew fast, the thumping sound of it approaching faster thanthe actual helicopter itself. It crossed in front of the sun, and then itcreated a sun of its own, spraying thirty millimeter rounds all around her.
The bodies in front of her exploded. Arms flew into theair amid clouds of dust and clods of dirt. She watched as one of the creatureswas cut in half twenty-feet away; the ragged ends of the woman's body lookedlike raw hamburger. Globs of gore flew through the air, splattering herself andthe wall.
The noise was deafening, the thump of the helicopter'srotors as they sliced through the air, the screams from the freeway, theexplosion of the helicopters gunfire, and the shredding of ground and flesh.When a hand wrapped around her, from behind, she couldn't even hear her ownscream.
The pilot of the helicopter swore and swiveled the Apachein line with the woman. When he saw blood, he signaled the gunner sitting inthe cockpit below him, and he loosed another volley, turning the woman and herattacker into pulp. He shook his head as he turned back to the freeway. Itwould have been nice to have saved at least one
