With nothing more to gain at the camp, Mort slogged through the snow, at times sinking up to his waist in the drifts. He most certainly hadn't found the hidden path. He climbed, dove, and clawed his way up the hill, scraping himself against hidden branches. The true joy came when he found himself blocked by a buried bramble of blackberries, its half-inch-thick barbs sinking into his legs and crotch before he realized what was going on.
He had to go back the way he came. He eyed the ridge and chose a different path, testing the ground underneath the snow tentatively as his own blood froze on his pants.
Mort found solid dirt underneath the snow, and he tried to climb up over the fifteen-foot ridge once more. The only good thing about the ridge was that the dead would most likely have as much trouble getting in as he would getting out. But he couldn't spend the night out in the cold. He would die, and his body was covered in his own sweat. He already felt it cooling as he gingerly broke a trail through the snow.
Up and up he went, stomping his feet down through the snow, making sure that he wouldn't impale himself on another blackberry briar. He was halfway up the rise when he heard them, the dead, somewhere above him on the other side of the ridge. For a moment, he toyed with the idea of hiking up the river to another exit, but he was already halfway there, and if he went further upstream, he would just have to backtrack to find the small road that led to the compound in the woods. As it was, he was only half sure he could find the compound in the snow. Everything looked different under the blanket of white.
He pressed forward, pausing long enough to load his rifle with as much ammunition as it would carry. He breathed a sigh of relief that he wasn't anywhere near a city. If this had been Portland, he would be dead already. No, the only source of the dead that he knew of came from the highway to the north where a semi-truck had blocked traffic for miles, and the dead had overtaken every living thing. That's where these dead came from, drawn by gunshots or stumbling along the path of least resistance.
Before he reached the top of the ridge, a group of the dead saw him. There were three of them, gnarled and trashed, their bodies broken in several places, the skin gray and stiff-looking. The first approached him, a tall son of a bitch with hands as wide as Mort's head. It reached out to him, stepping to the edge of the ridge, and Mort grabbed its hand and spun, grunting in pain as his shoulder complained. The tall dead man flipped over Mort's back, rolling and tumbling into a patch of blackberries bushes. It struggled to rise, and Mort turned his back on it.
He moved forward, running the last few steps to step into a small clearing. Through the trees, he could see the flat surface of the road thirty yards away. To his left, an SUV sat camouflaged underneath a pile of tree branches, its antenna jutting upwards into the gray sky. The two remaining dead came at him, and he smacked the first across the face with the butt of his rifle. Its teeth flew through the air, and the creature tumbled backward.
Mort let the rifle drop and grabbed the frozen handle of his hammer. He had toyed with giving it a name, like an old friend, but something about the idea turned his stomach. Maybe it was the fact that he wasn't killing evil things like in a story. These weren't evil knights, or demons, or dragons he was slaying. He was killing ordinary people like himself, who hadn't had the luck that he had.
He swung the hammer at a woman wearing a Crossfit T-shirt and tight-fitting workout pants. The image of the woman standing in the freezing cold seemed wrong in his mind. His mind kept telling him that he should offer the woman his jacket because she should be freezing. But she was dead, and he aimed to make her even deader. He swung the hammer at the side of her head and caved it in, dropping the dead woman in the snow.
As the other dead man struggled to rise, Mort fell upon him, smashing the back of his head in. He wanted to stand and catch his breath, but he knew more of the dead would be coming, so instead, he ran to the road and took a left, heading for the path that would lead him to the compound.
Ages ago, when he had been a part of a group of 5 survivors, he had made marks on the trees with his hammer to show the path to follow. The freshness of those wounds had faded with time, but he was still able to see them. He moved quickly, scanning the trees for the wounds he had made in their bark. He used these as guideposts.
Around him, the dead came, slow but steady. He held his hammer in his left hand, his right now useless, his shoulder radiating waves of pain with each step. Adrenaline flooded Mort's body, and his head steamed in the heat. The steam rose up and then curled around his forehead, so he could just barely see the mist out of the corner of his eye. The snow was deep in the forest, and it sank under his weight. Sometimes he would sink fast, into drifts that were deeper than he expected, or he would step on a branch buried in the snow. Each time, he thanked the
