The Fast and the Dead - Day 3

Every instinct that told people to be frightened of dead bodies kicked in and screamed at him. As he edged towards the door, nothing happened. The body stayed where it was. There was no movement, no scrabbling of fingers against the floor. It was just a body laying still.

He stepped into the hallway and paused for breath. Quickly finding a stairway that lead up and down, he descended to the first floor. The coffee shop may not have been looted, but it wasn’t spared all damage. It looked like rats and other small animals had been at work. He ignored the counter and headed for the back of the store. Any restaurant needed to have a large cold-room, and that was where he was likely to find what he needed.

The door to the large refrigerated room swung open, though not easily. The hinges were corroding and the floor was a mess with scattered droppings and other bits he didn’t care to examine too closely. Stepping in, he noted the room was about the same temperature as the rest of the building; the power had been off for a long time.

The cold-room had been sealed better than the rest of the place and been spared the ravages of infestation by vermin. He ignored the boxes of napkins and cutlery and such, and searched until he found several boxes of bottled water. Sighing in relief, he drank several down without hesitation, the water feeling cool and refreshing even though he knew perfectly well it was room temperature.

His most pressing need taken care of, he quickly but methodically went through the rest of the stores. There was little he could use; mostly ingredients for making doughnuts and other baked goods. There were packages of sprinkles; he stuffed his pockets with those. They were pretty much pure sugar, but they’d given him energy and something for his stomach to work on if he couldn’t find better.

After about 10 minutes he started feeling antsy again. He’d been in one place far too long. There’d been no sign of movement outside, but he didn’t want to chance becoming trapped. Grabbing a large plastic bag from a box of them, he filled it with more water bottles and cautiously crept out of the cold-room, keeping his eyes on the large barred windows.

No movement on the street he was facing. Keeping low moving slow, he peeked around the counter to view the side with the fenced enclosure, where he’d climbed up to enter the building. He sucked in a breath; on the other side of the street, shambling aimlessly, hair in crazy disarray, clothes ill-fitting and terribly stained, flesh rotting; it looked much like the body upstairs, only this one was up and walking.

Some people shied away from calling them zombies. He’d heard all kinds of terms; ghouls, deadels, rotters, walkers, the living dead, the restless dead, even the living-impaired. He didn’t care what they were called, as long as it was from a distance. He bit his lip.

If he went outside now it would likely spot him. And then it’d start that incessant moaning. If there were others in the area, and he was sure there must be by now, they’d home in on it and he was screwed if he was still anywhere near. On the other hand, it was just the one. They weren’t exactly difficult to outrun once they were in a decayed state like this one.

Other options. The stairway that had brought him down from the second floor had also gone up. He could try the roofs. This wasn’t a great area for roof-hopping but he’d passed beyond the area of real skyscrapers. He might be able to get some additional distance, and a better look at the state of the roads. Decided, he hefted his prize and carefully retreated to the stairwell and began to climb.

The Fast and the Dead - Day 2

He took a deep breath. The air was tinged with filth and corruption, some from the recent troubles, some not yet worn away by time after the days before. The smell of the lake lay under it all, faint this far inland—the lake. Water. They couldn’t swim. Water wouldn’t actually stop them, they could wander as long as they liked across the bottom, but if they couldn’t reach up to the surface, they couldn’t get to you. If he could only get to a boat …

He scanned the streets, doorways, windows and alleys around himself. Still no sign, but it wouldn’t last. He couldn’t sit still for long, not here. Not in the middle of this death trap.

Skin crawling with the feeling of exposure, he trotted down the street. He wanted to run, but his energy was flagging already and he couldn’t afford to burn it all right away. It’d be gone too soon as it was.

Brick and glass facades faced him from either side of the street. Trees still grew in many places, while others had long since been broken down. Old power lines lay lifeless on the streets and walks in places, but he paid them no mind; it’d been years since they carried any charge. Colorful urban graffiti was still visible on many of the old brick walls under newer layers of dirt, soot and in places, blood.

A loud growl came out of nowhere. Whirling around, heart pounding his blood like a drum, he whirled around—but the street was empty. He realized with a pang that he was hungry; very hungry. It had been hours since he’d had anything to eat or drink, and he’d been moving fast for a long time in the heat.

A shop with a painted green brick facade boasted a sign that read ‘Little Nepal Restaurant.’ Like everything else around, it was quiet as the grave, large picture windows dark and barred, the glass intact, the door locked. There’d been nothing edible in there for a long time.

He hurried on, keeping an eye on the signs he passed as he went. Hunger would leave him a little weak and very uncomfortable. Water would have to be found much sooner.

An intersection brought him a promising looking old coffee shop; like the restaurant he’d passed, all the windows were unbroken and one of them, a smallish window higher off the ground, was unbarred. He hoped this meant that the place had gone unlooted. It was just barely possible he might find something of use inside.

The trick would be getting to the window. It looked like it could be part of a second floor to the place. A small fenced off area below the window looked like it could once have been a street patio. The fence was iron, rusted now. Not nearly high enough to provide access to the window. It might offer access to the broken old ‘Coffee Place’ sign above the street level windows. If the sign would hold his weight for just a few seconds, he should be able to reach the window and get in.

He’d have to break the glass first though. A pair of long-empty newspaper vending machines were chained to a rusted no parking sign a few feet from the fence. They were too big and heavy to throw. He was about to try one of the few remaining scattered white plastic chairs within the fenced enclosure when he saw a crumbled area of curb at the corner.

“Perfect,” he muttered to himself, surprised at how dry his throat felt. His tongue was drying too. Hefting a chunk of broken concrete, he reared back and let it fly at the second story window. It sailed through with a loud crash and tinkle that made him wince and cast anxious looks up and down each street; the intersection was a four-way crossing and until just how had been silent.

No reaction. No movement. He almost wished they would show up. He’d spent hours trying to get away from them but now that he had, he couldn’t help feeling like he was in the calm before one hell of a storm.

He relentlessly shoved the thoughts aside and braced a hand against the coffee shop’s stained wall, climbed up onto the low rusty iron fence. He stared up at the sign above him and winced again. It projected out from the wall well enough, and would give him plenty of hand-holds, but it was as old as everything else on these streets. Even when it was new it was never intended to hold a man’s weight. He wasn’t the biggest guy in the world, about 5’8”, 150 lbs, but he was going to have to get off the sign and up and over to the window pretty fast. He was no athlete.

He also didn’t have time to second-guess. Either it would work or it wouldn’t. He shoved those doubts away too.

He balanced himself as well as he could on the very narrow fence, keeping a hand on the wall, and leaped as high as he could. His arms flailed a bit as he tried to catch the sign, scrabbling at the plastic, and then he was down. His leg flared in pain as he landed wrong; he bit off a cry of pain and surprise.

More surprise than pain, thankfully. He looked around quickly; still nothing. A few quick test steps told him he’d be able to walk, though running would be pushing it.

“Wonderful,” he muttered. “Just what I needed.” He looked back up at the sign again. There wasn’t much option really; this was the best prospect he’d seen all day.

He climbed back up again and leaped, a little more awkwardly than before. His hand slammed into the sign, breaking the plastic, but it held. He gripped tight and managed to swing himself up enough to grab the top of the sign with his other hand. His weight was too much for it; he heard it creaking and groaning as the flimsy backing of the sign began to twist and pull.

Hand over hand he made his way across the Coffee portion of the sign to his left; the window was above the big ‘C’. He needed more leverage; he swung his legs to and managed to snag one of them on top of the ‘f’. The groaning protest of the sign got louder; something popped within, but it kept on holding.

He was sweating, making his grip on the plastic sign more difficult; he shot a hand out to grab the window sill and caught it. Squeezing the sill tight, he managed to grab it with his other hand, keeping his injured leg on the sign, his good leg against the wall. Arms groaning in protest, he pulled himself up as though doing a chin-up and groaned. The inside of the sill was covered in broken glass.

His arms were getting dangerously sore, but he took a hand off the sill and punched as much of the broken glass still in the frame inward as he could. He then quickly and carefully brushed the glass off the inner sill; he still managed to get a small cut, ruby blood welling up from the side of his hand. It wasn’t bad. “Won’t be bad until they smell it, anyway,” he muttered as he pulled his way inside. Talking to himself was becoming a habit.

He was in a small office, probably belonged to some manager of the coffee place downstairs. It was musty, smelled like a place that’d been sealed for months. Stale air, and—and there was a corpse laying on its side against the far wall, far past putrid, dessicated with age, most flesh gone, empty eye sockets seeming to stare right at him. He paled and fought the urge to scream, started edging his way to the office door.

The Fast and the Dead - Day 1

THE FAST AND THE DEAD (FIRST DRAFT)

by Gordon S. McLeod

He’d never have thought it could be so hard to outrun something so slow. They couldn’t even maintain a regular walking pace, for crying out loud! But he had to keep moving fast. In the past half hour he hadn’t been able to slow below a rapid walk, and his legs and chest were beginning to protest. That old movie’s gag about cardio being rule #1 didn’t feel so much like a joke right now.

He risked a look around. He was making his way through a drab city block. Grime covered every surface that hadn’t been washed clean by rain; stains that could be rust or worse discolored concrete walls and walks. Barred windows faced outward defiantly, many with broken glass letting hot air gust in. In most cases the glass was broken from outside. In some, it had broken outward from within.

The only vehicles on the streets were rusted out hulks. He saw nothing moving, which filled him with great relief and awful dread; there were no immediate threats. He would stand out like a beacon as soon as he moved.

He considered his options carefully. Hiding, trying to wait it out was futile. They were slow but they’d arrive in the area soon enough, and then whatever it was that drew them to him would give him away. He didn’t know what it was. A smell? Heat? The sound of his breathing, of his heart beating? Whatever it was, hiding was unreliable. He knew that. If you were very lucky, you might get away with it for a little while, but sooner or later you’d slip up in some way you’d probably never know about, and then you were done for.

That left moving on. He felt horribly vulnerable in the streets. They were broad, and he’d have no problems at all getting away from a few, but if they massed up in any numbers he was as good as dead.

He looked at the buildings around him. They were too tall, too uneven. No way to travel across the roofs, at least not in this part of the city. That was a shame; in some places it could be done, he knew, and they’d be unable to follow for any length of time.

Even better would be to find a vehicle. Even a bicycle would be better than being on foot, at least while he was in the city. He wasn’t going to hold his breath though, and he put the possibility out of his mind.