There’s the sound of a shotgun & I know the life we’ve been living
is over before I’m even sitting up in my bed. I put my jumpsuit on
& grab my crutch & guns. My brother’s already in the hallway
when I open my door.
“I guess somebody found an old map listing this place for the militia.”
“Yeah,” he says, “I don’t know how big of a group it is yet, did you see
anything?”
“No. I never took the boards off my windows. They’ll know somebody’s
here, the generator’s running.”
“I guess we’ll need to sneak out.”
“To where? We can’t even fit everybody in the car. Maybe we
can take them out & get their supplies.”
There’s a voice downstairs yelling, “The power’s on! Somebody’s still here!”
There are some gunshots.
“See who you can find to get in the car. I’ll see what’s going on
downstairs.”
“No, I’ll go downstairs; the kids are calmer around you.” I’m already
on my way downstairs before he says anything else. When I look out
from the corner of the stairwell there are the bodies of two of the kids
on the floor of the hallway. One of the marauders comes out of one
of the rooms & I get my shot off hitting him in the head, but the sudden
movement throws my body off & I fall down. Two more come out
of different rooms & being on the floor keeps them from seeing me &
I shoot them both before they can find where I am to even aim towards.
I can hear some of them running this way & yelling. I crawl to
the nearest body & take his gun & in his backpack I find three
pipe bombs. I find & take his lighter from the right front pocket of
his jeans. I hope my brother’s out by now. These guys are pretty
serious. I mean, killing kids like this is fucked up. They
probably planned to cook them up later.
I feel the bullet coming into my right shoulder at the same time I hear
it fired. I make my way for one of the open rooms & another shot’s
fired hitting the calf of my good leg as I get out of the hallway.
I light one of the pipe bombs & throw it in the direction of the shooter.
The blast is stronger & hotter than I expected. It shakes the
building & the temperature is raised fifteen degrees. I hear
a voice on a radio from one of the bodies saying, “What the fuck are you
doing in there?” & another voice answering, “Fuck this shit.
Somebody’s shooting at us. Send in some dogs.”
I hear some noise coming from the end of the hallway beyond where the explosion
was. I peek my head out & there’s some light from some small
fires the bomb started. Coming my way are three zombies with their
arms cut off at the elbows & their legs cut off at their knees with
bricks tied to all four stumps. They have on metal collars &
belts with ten-foot lengths of chain hanging on them. They’re moving
slow because they’re scared of the fire. I light & throw another
one of the bombs at them & when I peek out after the explosion the
ceiling’s caved in so that the entrance is closed.
My shoulder & leg are bleeding a lot & I can smell it & I can
taste blood in my mouth. I crawl out & get my crutch, but when
I try to stand my shoulder & leg hurt too much & I fall down.
I drag myself down the hallway towards the other exit. Halfway there
I cough up some blood, but I keep dragging myself towards the door.
When I get to the door I pull myself up with the handle & unlock it
& fall out onto the sidewalk scraping off most of the skin on my left
palm with the door still held ajar by my body. I can see that our
car is gone & that the marauders probably have about twenty cars in
the front parking lot.
I hear something from behind me & then I hear a gun shot & feel
a bullet coming in my back & then out my chest. I’m so numb it
doesn’t even really hurt; I just feel cold & I slump down to lying
flat on the ground. The shooter walks over to me & steps on my
left arm at the elbow & says, “Fucker.” The sound of a shot comes
just after I close my eyes.
to
Zombie Kisses #3
back
to Zombie Kisses main page