Chapter 7:Help Me!
543 Words
The street outside was exactly as wrong as it had been before.
Andrew stepped out of the pharmacy and paused on the pavement, scanning left and right out of habit. The cold had deepened in the time he'd been inside, the kind of settled midnight cold that meant the temperature was still dropping. Fog had crept in low along the gutters, curling around parked cars and swallowing the bases of streetlights. Three of the four lights on this block were dead. The fourth buzzed and flickered like it was arguing with itself.
He turned right and moved toward the next street, keeping close to the building fronts, footsteps deliberate and quiet. The plastic bag hung from his left hand. His right stayed free, hovering near his holster without touching it.
He was halfway around the corner when he heard it.
A woman's scream. Raw and ragged, the kind that doesn't come from surprise but from genuine, animal terror. Close — one block north, maybe less.
Andrew ran.
His boots hammered the pavement, the dizziness from his head wound surging briefly with the sudden movement before his body overrode it. He rounded the corner at full speed, one hand on the wall to carry him through the turn, and took in the scene ahead in a single fractured second.
A woman — mid thirties, dark coat, one shoe missing — was sprinting down the centre of the road, looking back over her shoulder at the thing pursuing her. It moved in that same lurching, deceptively fast way the one in the storeroom had. Grey skin. Head lolling at an off angle. Arms reaching forward with a mindless, horrible patience.
"Hey!" Andrew bellowed, closing the distance. "HEY!"
Neither of them responded to his voice in any useful way.
He was still fifteen metres short when it caught her.
One grey hand snatched her by the shoulder and spun her around. She had just enough time to scream once more before it drove its jaw into the side of her neck. The sound that followed was one Andrew knew with absolute certainty he would never stop hearing for the rest of his life.
She crumpled. Straight down, like her bones had simply resigned, hitting the road in a heap and going completely still.
Andrew skidded to a halt, planted both feet, raised the Glock with both hands and fired once.
The zombie's head snapped back and it dropped sideways, collapsing away from the woman's body and landing in the road with a dull, final weight.
Andrew stood in the middle of the empty street, g*n still raised, chest heaving, ears ringing from the shot.
Then he moved forward and dropped to one knee beside the woman. She was breathing — shallow, unsteady pulls of air that told him she was unconscious rather than gone. The bite on her neck was deep and already darkening at the edges. He pressed gauze against it from the bag without thinking, applying pressure with one hand while his eyes swept the street around them.
They were exposed out here. Completely and utterly exposed.
And somewhere in the distance, carried faintly on the cold night air, he could hear more of that same dragging, shuffling movement.
More than one. Getting closer.
- Writer
