Another whack from behind him. He willed his petrified neck muscles to stretch and allow him to turn his head, and behind him was this new living stranger, his fearless savior.
He was a hulk of a man, towering over Emmit and the cluster of walking corpses like a small mountain. He looked like a hobo clown; his clothing was a patchwork of multicolored fabrics, the stitching crisscrossing the back of his bulky coat large and sloppy. His entire outfit had been handmade, and the thread he had used to sew it looked much too thick to be anything but custom. Emmit could not see his face, but he watched the long weapon in his hands as it rose above his head and swung swiftly to the ground, over and over again. Between his quilted legs Emmit could see the writhing body of the policeman, its head now reduced to a small mound of gray curds and bone that looked like blackberry jam as it splattered against the snow. This man was beating the zombies to pieces with a club, a long wooden shaft with a pointed rock lashed to the end of it.
Like a caveman, he thought, scatterbrained.
This man did look rather like a caveman. His chestnut hair was long and wavy, collecting studs of snow and ice as it blew in the wind. He whirled around to glare at Emmitt, his eyes wild and his cheeks and nose a rosy red above a long and bushy beard. He appeared to be wearing war paint. There was a large black handprint covering most of his face, the finger marks extending up over his wide eyes and ending just under his hairline. Emmit could only stare at him unthinkingly until he realized that the man wasn't wearing paint at all; he had been scarred by the touch of one of the creatures. He lifted his own heavy arm and stared at it through his frosted glasses. He had a black handprint as well now, staining his skin like a bad tattoo.
"Hey!" came that deeply thundering voice again, and Emmit let out a little cry of shock. "You better wake the fuck up or you're a dead man!"
Emmit nodded absently as he looked frantically around them, his narrow face resembling a deer caught in a set of high beams. The dead people were packed shoulder to shoulder in places now, bumping into one another and tripping over each other, wedging themselves between tree trunks until they couldn't move and instead began reaching for the two men desperately, their decaying fingers clutching at the empty air. Their voices were becoming a growing roar that rivaled the sound of the wind. Emmit could hear the same old accusations they had already aimed at him, but intermixed were several new words grunting and hissing from the zombies' smiling mouths:
Hitman.
Murderer.
Killer.
Were the strange psychic zombies calling out the truth about his savior in the patchwork outfit? Did that mean the things they were they calling out about him were the truth?
Suddenly the titan of a man was charging at him like a raging bull, pumping his arms at his sides with the club slung across his back. Emmit could see the bloodied rock poking up over his bulbous shoulder, and half expected the man to clobber him with it next.
"Follow me, stay on my ass and for fuck's sake don't let them touch you!" He boomed, passing Emmit's paralyzed body like a speeding freight train. Emmit didn't have to think about it for very long. He turned and sprinted after the man, panting and gasping as his thin shoes punched through the snow in rapid succession. Behind him, the swarm of corpses had closed in, overwhelming the spot he had been standing mere moments before. They looked like the world's happiest, drunkest mob of protestors, if those protestors all happened to be dead and deteriorating even as they shuffled around the woods.
Emmit ran until his body felt like it would shut down from exhaustion. The bearded hulk never lost any pace. He leapt over fallen logs and ducked under low hanging branches with such ease that he had to have known these woods like the back of his own hand. They hadn't even been following the path markers. It was either keep up with the man or die trying.
There were a few of the corpses wandering aimlessly through the trees, grinning up at the gray sky as the two men shot past them. There were no more hordes, however, and for that Emmit was eternally grateful. He hadn't even had time to process his own name, and now here he was, dying of hypothermia, running from the living dead and chasing someone he knew nothing about towards a mysterious camp he'd never seen.
His shoe snagged something under the snow and he sprawled forward into the fading light, instinctively bringing a hand to his nose to keep his glasses on. He landed heavily on his side, knocking what little breath he had left out of him. Miraculously, the snow felt like a hot bath. He wanted to rake it over his entire body, build a nice little igloo for himself, and go to sleep. He didn't think he had the strength to stand again anyway. He was too weak for this survival stuff. He was done.
Then he felt a gigantic hand close over the back of his shirt, and he was being yanked to his rubbery legs like a marionette.
"It isn't much further," the man with the black hand on his face said, quiet now but his voice still shockingly loud in the silent woods. Emmit imagined the man's vocal cords as two thick leather belts, vibrating like tuning forks when he spoke. "Keep moving, we have food and a fire. You'll survive. But
