Ascension

healed up. Not to mention that blood on your shirt there. And you.' Draper said, pointed at Ruben, 'Lemme see your hand gramps.' Draper extended his hand and tentatively Ruben held his left hand out. The black man's skin made a sharp contrast with Rubens as he turned it over in his own. 'Not a fucking mark on it. Now, I may be just a Colonel, but I don't know how an old man who gets fourteen stitches in his hand less than two days ago can show me the same hand without even a scar on it now. Pretty goddamn nice trick if you ask me.'

Ruben slowly took his hand back, 'So what do you want us for?'

Draper's ivory teeth gleamed white as he looked at them with a huge smile on his face.

Chapter 10 — Katie

'Head south east. Yeah that was a good idea.' The problem was the map. Katie had gotten familiar with the streets of Chicago on the lake shore for her original mission as a sniper with Randy. She had only a vague notion of where the highways went outside of the city and had ended up on highway fifty seven heading almost due south out of Chicago. Now the sports utility vehicle was dead.

'Out of gas. Dead as a three day old zed.' Katie was good at many things, she could knock the eye out of a sparrow at five hundred yards, she could take most people she ran into out in close combat, she could field strip and make minor repairs on her weapons, however, she knew next to nothing about cars and less about how to get electricity to work at a gas station when the power was out. And the power was out everywhere.

The only good news was that once she made it into the outskirts of Chicago there were no zombies to be seen anywhere. Now she was in a small city named 'Kankakee' and the place was a literal ghost town.

'Just add in a few tumble weeds blowing across the street and I will get really creeped out.' she said to herself. Her car had died near exit three fifteen, where the services offered were 'Gas — Food — Shopping' and a large billboard listed it as the exit for the Northfield Square Mall. Other shopping included a 'Farm and Fleet', where Katie thought she might have luck with getting some supplies.

Looking at the car one last time she decided there was nothing else she could scavenge from it. Reluctantly she shut the door, remembering what Heath had done, she left the door unlocked and set the key in plain sight on the seat. 'Maybe someone can fuel it up and still use it. Maybe I will be back with some fuel myself.'

Katie made a beeline directly to the mall, the place had a cleaned out feel to it, nothing was moving and the glass doors she was heading towards were propped open or broken out all along the entrance she could see. She held her shotgun in a ready position and she was wearing the oversized shoes to protect her feet from the glass littering the ground. There was a corpse holding one door open. By the look of him, he had been a zombie, his skull was blasted open.

'What did that? Probably a shotgun.' His body was decayed, with flesh slumping off of him to sag to the ground, giving the impression that he was melting. Moving inside she darted to one edge of the door and ducked down beneath a large planter full of wilting vegetation. Giving her eyes a moment to adjust, she scanned the area inside for movement. 'Nothing.'

There was a store directory not too far from the entrance and she approached it, looking for a place to pick up better shoes, then a woman's clothing store. Katie found both just around the corner from where she was standing and didn't waste any time moving out. She paused in the four way atrium looking at the upper level and down as much of the vast mall as she could. There was movement on the upper level. And bodies, so many bodies, spread out in the south hallway.

The shambling zombies on the upper level didn't seem to spot her, they were involved in an epic battle with some of the malls indoor plant life. 'If I stay to one side they might not even hear me.' She thought, planning her route mentally after she ducked back around the corner out of sight. The zeds couldn't see her, but from her position she could see the bodies sprawled in front of the major retailer that anchored that end of the mall. 'So much for going there to get stuff as my backup plan. I'll keep heading north, I ain't wading through corpses for underwear and shoes.'

Nodding to herself she darted around the corner and did a quick jog towards the store she wanted, a familiar shoe place with a sunny, bright logo. Katie hadn't counted on the darkness inside. The store was on the lower level and the mall was of a more modern design, with plenty of ambient light, but 'ambient' only goes so far in the dark recesses of a shopping mall. The back of the store was lost in the shadows, at least the security grill was up and open, alleviating one worry that Katie had thought of when she decided to come in here.

'Wouldn't you fucking know it, my size has to be at the far end.' Katie wore eights, and following the sizes down she could estimate where they would be. 'Dash and grab?' She thought, 'Or find a light? Do I want to shine a light in here?' To give herself the option she looked around for flashlights, however, there were not any in sight, nor was there one behind the cash register. There was, however another corpse. This one too, was dead. It was the body of a young teenager, female and bloated from days of lying behind the counter. The youth's head had been smashed open, and though the decomposition and darkness made it hard to see, Katie suspected the woman had died from being eaten.

Katie crouched behind the counter to get out of sight from outside the shop and to plan her next move. There was a peg board near her back full of socks, absentmindedly Katie grabbed a bag of socks her size and kicked off the man's shoes, she would not leave here without footwear. Now how would she get the shoes she came here for?

'Patience.' That is one thing being a sniper had taught her. You could never have too much patience. She waited for three or four minutes to let her eyes adjust fully to the gloom, the light from outside, surprisingly, was enough to let her see the back of the store. It was empty. At least 'her' aisle was. Taking her bag of socks with her she crept down between the rows of shoes until she found some athletic shoes in her size. Instead of dashing back to the front of the store as she had planned, she took her shoes to rear of the store then quietly crawled the length of the place looking down the aisles, empty. It was just as she had thought when she was crouched behind the counter. There hadn't been any noise at all from inside the store, just the quiet scuffle from outside in the plants versus zombies struggle that was going on upstairs. Patience was a virtue sometimes. Now she could sit at the back of the store and anything coming in would be back lit and probably half blinded by the darkness to which her eyes were accustomed.

Pulling a stool to the middle of the aisle with the size eights, Katie tried on the shoes. She ended up going with a black pair of Nikes, the first pair she had tried on. During that time one of the zombies fell from the second level to the floor out in front of the shop, the zombie was laying there squirming on the ground, too broken to get up and walk. This one was a heavy white male, with a bald head and a sleeveless denim jacket. The guy rolled around on his bloated belly and Katie was wondering if he was fat from before he was turned or if he was bloated from decomposing. If it was decomposing then humanity might only have to wait for nature to take its course to be free from the zombies, otherwise it was going to be a long fight.

Katie grabbed a large canvas purse from an accessory rack near the front of the store and put a backup pair of the same shoes and her extra socks in it before stepping out to examine the zombie, which was still twitching on the floor in front of the store. Again she crouched down, this time just a step outside of the shoe store, and watched, slowly counting off the time in her head as she looked at the guy.

'Not decomposing.' She finally decided. Katie realized she could be wrong, the man might have been turned yesterday, which is why the eagle tattoo on his arm was still in good shape. That tattoo had decided her, this guy had just been fat; he was not bloated or swollen from decomposing. The artwork from the ink on his massive arm was not distorted or disfigured in any way, had the zed been decomposing she would have expected it to be different in some manner. Going on a couple of admittedly unsupportable assumptions, such as he had died more than two weeks ago and he had been here most of that time, she would have expected to see some decay by now. 'Damn. Nothing is ever easy.'

The zombie was not making any headway on getting to his feet. 'He is a slow one too, probably won't heal the damage from that fall anytime soon.' If healing was actually what they did. Katie still