Chapter 8: It's Too Late
446 Words
Andrew had barely risen from his knee when it happened.
He was reaching into the plastic bag for more gauze, mind already working through the logistics of moving an unconscious woman through zombie-infested streets, when the breathing changed. The shallow, unsteady pulls of air shifted into something else entirely — a rattling, wet stillness that lasted exactly two seconds.
Then she screamed.
Andrew lurched backward instinctively, the bag dropping from his hand and scattering supplies across the road. The sound that tore out of her was identical to the one he'd heard in the storeroom — that hollow, broken shriek with nothing human left behind it. The wound on her neck had already darkened from deep red to a bruised, mottled purple that was spreading visibly beneath her skin like ink dropped in water.
She'd been unconscious for less than a minute.
She turned in under sixty seconds.
Andrew filed that information away with cold, mechanical urgency as she rolled onto her stomach and began moving toward him. Not standing — crawling, clawing at the road surface with both hands, dragging herself forward with a single-minded intensity that was somehow worse than the ones that ran. Her eyes had gone the same clouded white he'd seen in the storeroom. Her jaw worked open and shut rhythmically, teeth clacking together with each snap.
She reached his boots and lunged.
Andrew pulled his right foot back just fast enough, her teeth closing on empty air an inch from his ankle. He backed up two steps, hit the side of a parked car behind him, and made the decision in the same instant his back met the metal.
No more bullets. Not here. Not with whatever was shuffling around in the fog a block away.
He raised his right boot and brought it down hard.
Once was enough.
The sound was short and terrible and then there was nothing but the distant shuffling again and Andrew's own breathing and the ringing in his ears that refused to quit. He stood over her and didn't move for a long moment, jaw set, eyes fixed on the middle distance.
She'd had one shoe missing when she was running.
He didn't know why that detail lodged itself so firmly in his chest. It just did. A woman running for her life in one shoe on a cold night, and the night had won anyway despite everything he'd done to stop it.
He crouched down, gathered the scattered supplies back into the bag with methodical hands, and stood up.
Grief was a luxury he couldn't spend currency on right now.
He checked his surroundings, adjusted his grip on the bag, and kept moving.
- Writer
