Zach looked from Chelsea to me and back to Chelsea, “Fine, but don’t expect too much from me. I’ve never swung a bat, but I probably could catch on quickly. Just don’t make me do anything too intense today, okay?”
“It’s my training schedule, but don’t worry, I’ll go easy on you.” I lied.
We made our way out to the field equipped with three baseball bats and a wrench. I was fortunate that my basement was filled with the aluminum bats. My father had been an avid softball player as he aged and my brothers and I had all played little league baseball and each had a bat of our own. Needless to say, I had a plethora of aluminum clubs to smash faces in with.
The training started with us jogging around the field, which took Zach some convincing to do. He finally agreed to do it, whether it was because I promised to carry the wrench with me as a weapon against the contaminated or a motivation for him to run, I don’t know, but it worked.
We completed our lap and Zach and I stayed back as Chelsea kept on running. “She’s a real workhorse,” Zach said through gasping breaths. “I barely made that.”
“Well, you’ll feel it tomorrow, trust me,” I said as I pulled over the bucket of baseballs and his bat. “We’re going to work on your swing now. Show me a practice swing.”
He took the bat and held it in a right handed stance with left handed grip: the left hand above the right hand while facing the plate from the right side. He took a swing full of stiffness and off balanced feet. He shook his head in disappointment, “I told you I was bad at this.”
So I would have to start him out more fresh than I thought, “Well, yeah. But it is somewhat easy to pick up. Let me show you,” I walked behind him, placing him in an open stance. I fixed his hands and aligned his knuckles while spreading his feet wider and bending them at the knee. “Do you feel the balance here?” I asked.
“Well, sort of,” he replied.
“Take another swing.”
He swung again, this time he almost fell forward towards the plate. “Nope, not feeling it.”
“You’re not putting your hips into it, and your wrists are stiff as boards,” I moved over to him and placed my hands on his hips. “Don’t worry, I very much like my girlfriend and am doing this in her defense.”
“Not what it looks like to me,” Chelsea said as she passed us, completing another lap. She laughed as she kept jogging towards the next baseball field.
“Whatever. Just rotate your hips like this and give your wrists good movement and your swing will be much more fluid with power,” I said. “Now swing again.”
And he did, probably the most glorious third swing ever taken by an individual. I doubted that I was an amazing teacher, but he did catch on quickly. This was good. We moved on to soft toss so that he could get a feel for the swing.
We were doing the soft toss for about fifteen minutes when Chelsea approached me from behind, tapping me on the shoulder and pointing to the end of the field. “Contaminated, over there.”
“Good,” I said, finding my wrench. “Zach, stay here but pay attention to how I fight.” I began to make a light jog over to the contaminated who met me half way, hissing and sputtering blood from the mouth as he went. I hoisted the wrench over my head and slammed it down on the contaminated, crushing the left side of the head with the hook of the wrench. It collapsed to the ground in a second.
“You see?” I said as they began to make their way over. “Nothing to it. They’re generally stupid creatures and easy to take –“
“Daryl move!” Zach said, whipping out a small revolver from his pocket.
Not wanting to question the man with the gun, I rolled to my side. I looked back and saw that the contaminated was still moving on the ground, its head gushing blood but the body moving in my direction. Its arms were stretched out, clawing for my flesh. The legs of the creature were snapping, trying to push it forward and to me. The contaminated was effectively crawling towards my body until a shot rang out through the field, loud and echoing. The remainder of the contaminated’s head exploded in a fleshy red and white of blood and bone chips.
“Easy to kill, sure,” Zach said, putting the gun back in his pocket. “We should get inside before more of these things show up to investigate the gunshot, now!”
Not thinking anything of it, we gathered our things and ran inside the house right before more of the contaminated showed up in the field. “Why didn’t it die?” Chelsea asked as we made it inside.
“I don’t know, but tomorrow we will find out.”
Chapter 16
We were at the kitchen table, watching out the back window at the mess of contaminated flocking to the field where we were training. It must have been over one hundred of the contaminated walking around the field, hissing and yelling at nothing but the air. They were loud, kind of like the obnoxious dads that would be on the sideline of middle school football games yelling at the top of their lungs at the children on the field. Zach’s nose was pressed against the window.
“Okay,” I said breaking the nervous silence. “What the hell happened out there?”
“You hit it square on the head, tearing half of its face off,” Chelsea replied. “Why was it able to
