She landed on top of it ten feet from where they started. Rage burned and pulsated under her skin as if trying to escape through her flesh from the core of her. The Infected wedged its legs between itself and Allison as she tried to pin it down and thrust them out, throwing Allison onto her back. It climbed onto her and its jaws snapped at her face as she squeezed its throat with her hands, keeping it pushed away from her. Allison’s body burned, and rage consumed her. A growl escaped her lips as she tightened her grasp on the Infected’s neck and pulled its face a mere inch from her own.
“Get the fuck off me!” Allison snarled and cast her arms out, hurling the Infected into a bush.
She bounded to her feet, picking up a thick, broken tree branch. Allison glanced up and saw the Infected surge through the brush, scurrying toward her. She lifted the branch and swung.
A loud crack rang out as the branch made contact with the Infected’s head, and it collapsed to the ground. Allison gasped for air, trying to catch her breath as the rush of heat subsided and the rage melted back into her core.
She looked down at the Infected, perplexed by what she saw. It was just a body; the neck where the head should have been was just a bloody, jagged hole, the nub of its spine a sickening yellow.
Allison looked down at her hand. Blood speckled her skin. She gazed down the shaft of the branch until her eyes landed on the end. Half of the shaft was gone, replaced with newly exposed wood stained deep red. Blood dripped from it, landing like raindrops. Tissue adorned the point like tulle draped from a wedding arch. She threw it down and ran to the backpack man. His eyes were glazed over, still rimmed with tears, and fixed on the sky. A cavernous hole in his neck so large Allison could see through to the grass below accompanied his missing cheek. She stared at the pool of blood as her pulse slowed to normal.
The rumble of a vehicle startled Allison back into action. They followed me. She tried to get the backpack off the man but the chest clips wouldn’t release for her either. She glimpsed a knife on his belt. She pulled it from its cover and jerked upward, slicing through the straps, freeing the bag from its former owner’s corpse. She rolled him over and slipped the bag off his back.
“I’m sorry. I tried to help you. I’m so sorry.” She lightly ran her hand over his eyes, closing them before she stood and darted back to her truck, stopping only to snatch up her gun and empty magazine.
She hopped behind the steering wheel, tossing the backpack to the floorboard on the passenger’s side. She shifted the truck into gear and raced off down the road as tears blurred her vision. She used some towels to wipe away the sticky gore from her exposed skin while she quickly examined her body for injuries, finding none.
How did I knock its head off? How much force does it take to do something like that? The incident at Sandra and Dave’s with the table and door came roaring to the front of her mind. She had hoped it was a fluke. This proved it wasn’t. Allison was different now. The girl who considered shopping at the mall cardio, the girl who struggled to carry her chem book, intro to business book, and laptop at the same time, now had super strength. She could literally knock someone’s head off with one swing.
Gabby would get a hoot out of this. Gabby would compare her to Spider-Man and plan out how to use Allison’s strength for good. Before all this, back when the world was normal, Gabby would often tease Allison about her lack of any athletic ability. Physical tasks were never Allison’s thing and now that she was more than capable of doing them it was just one more thing to mark her as different. Different from Gabby, different from who she was before, different from everyone. The last thing she wanted was to be different. Allison did not want to be one of those former Infected that people talked about in quiet voices, debating back and forth about whether the rumors of special abilities were true or false. She just wanted to be normal. But the days of normal were long gone.
As she drove she glimpsed Infected in the distance, but none of them headed in her direction and she continued to drive. They must have learned long ago that they can’t catch vehicles. She exited the fire road, merging onto a paved street as she consulted her map. Her hands trembled as she traced the lines. She needed a safe place to rest.
Allison found a rest area obscured from the road by overgrowth. She pulled in just as the sky turned a dusky orange and the sun sank beneath the horizon. She parked the truck behind an abandoned RV, making sure it wasn’t visible to anyone who pulled in after her. Then she cracked down her window and listened. No sounds. No Infected, no people, no black truck. The sky faded to black and she drifted off to sleep.
Allison startled awake to the rumble of an engine. The fog of sleep clouded her mind as she tried to make sense of her surroundings. Headlights pierced through the trees ahead and then disappeared as an engine cut off. They’re here.
Allison grasped the gun on the seat next to her. Shit, it’s empty. Voices whispered on the other side of the RV and small lights flickered as the bodies belonging to the voices rounded the side. Allison was
