Another Zombie Apocalypse Tale: Part 3

Two Weeks and Four Days Since the Apocalypse

The sun warmed my skin as I took another bite of the burrito. The cheddar cheese, eggs, bacon, shredded potatoes and peppers were like an explosion of flavor on my tongue, and I was ashamed I ever took breakfast burritos for granted. I’d always opted to skip breakfast, because there was always something about needing to lose a few pounds.

God forbid a person have a body, I thought to myself. I guess I’d gotten what I thought I wanted though, I’d lost a few pounds. More than a few pounds.

This morning was the first I’d looked at myself in the mirror in two and a half weeks, and I looked a step away from the grave. Emaciated, ribs poking out, cheeks sunken in. My skin was oily and dull, as well as my hair. Running for your life everyday and rarely finding something to eat will do that to you.

“You’re looking well this morning.”

I stiffened at the voice, pulling my elbows closer to my body and huddling over the last few bites of my burrito. I glanced up at the man who spoke. The one who’d ‘rescued’ me and brought me here.

Rescued. Hilarious.

The morning after I’d been brought to this place, they (the guy standing before me and some woman named Marge) had thrown me into a room with a living corpse. I’d gotten out alive, just barely. It had managed to take a nice chunk of skin out of my trapezius muscle, but I had turned its head into a puddle of mush with a shower rod.

The man sat down next to me on the ground, our backs to a sunbaked cement wall of a business building turned apartment complex. I scooted over to create more space between us, and kept my eyes on the chain link fence about five yards ahead of us. I squinted against the sunlight as I surveyed the fields of dirt and rocks beyond the fence.

“How many of those things have you eaten?” He gestured to me as I tossed the last of my burrito in my mouth. It was more tortilla than anything else, but it was still the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten in my entire life. Well, in this era of my life.

I didn’t answer his question. I had plenty of words I’d like to say to this guy, but I had a feeling he wouldn’t give a damn. His bearded face was often set in stone and he wasn’t a fan of making eye contact.

He let out an ever so quiet sigh but remained where he was, leaning forward to rest his arms on his knees. He was wearing lightly stained jeans, and a green t-shirt—a color of green I’d describe as army green, though my sister would have said forest green if she were here. Along his arm closest to me, from his fingers to up and under the sleeve of his shirt, was an intricate tattoo with ribbons, thorns, and cursive writing. 

My sister could read cursive. It was a foreign language to me.

“I am sorry about throwing you to that gad,” he said. He flexed a hand and started picking at a callous. “This place isn’t bad compared to some, but they are a bunch of cold-blooded scientists, always poking and prodding…” He cleared his throat. “As you already know.”

I snorted in agreement. He and that woman named Marge may have been the goons to toss me to the living dead, but they had been ordered to by the people in charge, all because of the doctor who had been looking me over.

I’d assumed the doctor—as annoying as he was—was just making sure I was healthy, but apparently, he was trying to see if the bites of the living dead would make me sick and turn me into one of these corpses with a hunger for brains.

The three scars I had prior to being brought here apparently weren’t proof enough that their bites had no effect on me. They hurt like hell, the one from my sister more so, but I didn’t get sick. No fever, chills, headaches, and/or clammy skin. None of that. I remained healthy. If not in pain from getting bitten, as one would be.

After the doctor and Marge had pulled me from the room, me passing out from blood loss, I’d been in the infirmary recovering for the past three days, where I’d heard snippets of why they threw me to the dead.

Today was my first day out, first day eating real food. First day in the sun not currently running for my life.

Yet.

The man interlaced his fingers, tapping his thumb against his knuckle. “Anyway, I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

“Why did you bring me here?” I turned to face him, hoping that scowling at him with my most unimpressed seventeen-year-old expression would unnerve him enough to either tell me the truth, or get him to leave me alone. Either way worked for me.

He glanced at me, making a millisecond of eye contact, before he returned to examining the ground or his hands. “I didn’t know you’d been bitten before. I mean, I don’t…” He puffed out a breath. “I just thought I was doing the right thing.”

“Right.”

Now his eyes met mine and stayed, searching for forgiveness or, at the very least, understanding. “Would you rather be out there, laying half eaten in a ditch? Or in the fields with a gad trying to bash your head open?”

I held his gaze, wanting to be as impassive as possible. He was the one who brought me here. He was the one who went out of his way to save me from a horde of dead. He was the one who could have stopped them from throwing me into the room for a showdown with the dead.

“The burritos are pretty good,” I said, unable to lash out at him the way I would have liked to, because he was the only one currently making an effort to make sure I’m okay. “The company on the other hand, shabby,” I added.

My stupid lips quirked with a smile so it likely appeared that I was joking. I was not. The company was shabby. I hadn’t met a single person here yet who didn’t have an agenda for me. This guy’s agenda was all for his obvious hero complex.

“Yeah,” he agreed, returning his attention to anywhere but me. “You’re not wrong.” He glanced at me, and his own stupid lips quirked with a smile to match my own. “The burritos are pretty good.”

Despite myself and the disdain I felt, I laughed. An odd sound that didn’t fit the current life situation, but it was a real, humored laugh. Which made the man smile in a way that I knew wasn’t something he did often. A genuine smile that made the eyes squint and sparkle with something other than fatigue and grief.

The moment was short lived.

“Good to see you both getting along,” a woman’s sing song voice greeted us.

I again pulled tight against myself, morphing my face into something that hopefully resembled calm homicidal rage—if that were a possible expression to achieve. I turned my gaze to see Marge, the woman with the brightest and fakest smile I had ever seen, and I went to a school where everyone was faking a smile in order to make the most friends, in order to be on top, in order to control everyone.

She stood in front of us, her hands clasped by her stomach in an innocent gesture. Her red hair was done in two braids, one over each shoulder.

“Well,” she said, fake grin in place. “Mr. Maddock would like to speak with you…uh…” Her bright face faltered and she gave me an apologetic look. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Not ‘sweetheart’, that’s for sure.” I leaned back against the wall, and relaxed a little. Adults hated it when teenagers relaxed. It meant that we didn’t give a damn about them, and they hated it when we didn’t give a damn about them.

“Uh.” She glanced at the bearded man, who had also leaned back but his arms were crossed over his chest and he avoided eye contact with her. “Well, Mr. Maddock would like to speak with you.” Her smile returned.

“Couldn’t need to speak with me that bad if he couldn’t come find me himself.” I stretched my legs out, crossed my ankles, and squinted up at Marge. I gave the wound on my shoulder a tentative touch. It still pulsed with a deep ache. “The doctor told me to take it easy for a while, said I shouldn’t be moving around too much.”

He didn’t tell me that, but she probably wouldn’t know that.

“Okay. I will relay your message to Mr. Maddock.” She glanced again at the bearded man before she walked away, her steps hurried and awkward.

I had an urge to make fun of her but something stopped me. Maybe because it was the apocalypse, the dead were trying to bash the living’s heads open to eat their brains, so making fun of a woman doing whatever the hell it was that she was doing to survive seemed tactless.

Tactless. The world has hit rock bottom and I’m worried about being tactless.

“We should go see him before he has too much time to simmer,” the bearded man said, wiping his palms on his jeans before getting to his feet. He turned to me and held his hand out. “He’s not someone you want to piss off.”

“I take it you’ve pissed him off?” I looked at his hand then up into his eyes.

He didn’t look away, which was the only reason I allowed him to help me to my feet. We walked around the building into the town square composed of ten buildings encircled by a chain link fence. The fence was bordered with cars and cut tree branches of various sizes to create a barricade.

I walked beside him as he led the way to Mr. Maddock’s office in a single floor building, next to the tall and wide building I had been taken to my first day here. My hands curled, nails digging into my palms, at the sight of it. An all too familiar sick twisted in my gut, and I wanted to run.

Maybe I should have.

Marge’s irritation was blatant for a second as her face contorted with a snarl before she smiled a greeting at us, and waved for us to follow her into Mr. Maddock’s office.

Mr. Maddock was an average man. Average in height, weight, looks—blond hair, brown eyes, sloped nose, fat cheekbones—and attitude. Whatever the hell that meant, but that’s the vibes I got from him. He looked me over, bored, an eyebrow raised. He leaned against his desk, littered with maps and lists, and steepled his fingers.

“Everyone pitches in here, miss,” he said, his voice as average as his looks. “There are several jobs that need filling, but because of your…condition…I have a proposition for you.”

“My condition?” I gave him what I hoped was a blank yet bored look.

“You don’t reincarnate as a gad when you’re bitten,” he said without missing a beat, despite his hesitant words just moments ago. “I’ve seen three of my friends, my wife, and my two kids get bitten and become brain hungry lunatics. You, little miss, are something else.”

“What if I don’t plan on staying here?”

He didn’t like that reply. His eye twitched ever so slightly, and I wondered if I just signed my death warrant. A pretty big part of me didn’t care because I felt like I was already in hell. Might as well make it official.

“I wouldn’t advise leaving,” he said in the way the gangsters on movies spoke when threatening someone. Slow and articulate.

“Of course, you wouldn’t.” I continued my blank, bored expression.

Marge tsked and gave her head a slight shake, like an upset mother chiding her kid. The bearded man shifted from one foot to the other, clearing his throat in a quiet, warning way. Perhaps he was uncomfortable that I was poking the bear. Some bear. A real bear would have mauled me already.

“What’s your proposition?” I asked. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe.

Mr. Maddock remained quiet, his nostrils flaring and relaxing as he took subtle deep breaths. Marge put her hand on his shoulder and leaned down to whisper in his ear. Whatever she said helped him relax enough to offer a tentative smile.

“Since you don’t get ill when bitten, we need someone who can go out and scavenge for supplies. Food, medicine, batteries.” He paused a beat before continuing. “We have a primary list and secondary list to help guide your judgment on what to grab if it’s available.”

“Huh.” I slow blinked. “Just because I don’t reincarnate, as you say, doesn’t mean the dead can’t catch me and bash my skull open.”

“It wouldn’t be just you,” said the bearded man. “I’d be on the team. As well as a few others.”

“But you,” Marge interjected, “can get into trickier places that are infested with gads with lower risk of becoming one of them. Hospitals are full of them, and that’s where most of the supplies we need is.”

I raised my eyebrows in indifference. “Why would I agree to that? It sounds worse than going it on my own. Especially after you locked me in the room with a hungry corpse.” I gave Mr. Maddock a pointed look before giving the same look, but with more disdain and contempt behind it, at Marge.

“We had to know—”

“There are better ways to find that out,” I said, snapping my attention back to Mr. Maddock. “Like these scars.” I pushed my arm in his face. The two crescent shaped scars a bright pale under the white fluorescent lights. “These should have been proof enough.”

He’d pulled back from me, his eyes widened just a little at my outburst. He looked at my scars, swallowed, then looked up at me. “We had to be sure.”

I snorted. “Sure. Sure. Have a nice life.” I turned on my heel and strode out of the building. The sunlight blinding and hot, making my skin prickle with sweat. I didn’t have a plan, save for getting as far away from this place as I possibly could. Maybe I should have played along, gotten some supplies from them, and then made my dramatic exit.

My sister always said being rash would bite me in the ass. She was proud of herself for that little rhyme, too.

“Wait up a sec,” the bearded man called out. I could hear the jogging rhythm of his boots on the ground as he hurried to catch up with me. Not that it took much. My short stride compared to his was no contest as he fell into step beside me.

I didn’t get a chance to hear what he had to say because an alarm blared out, cutting across the courtyard and parking lots. A sharp sound that instantly made my blood turn cold and my hair stand on end. Every muscle in my being went rigid, ready to take flight if that were the case.

“What is it?” I asked him as I scanned my surroundings, expecting the dead to crawl up out of the shadows cast by the buildings. I swore I could hear the moans of the dead around the sound of the alarm.

“There’s been a breach,” he said, reaching a hand out to me.

No sooner did his fingers graze my skin than a horde of corpses lumbered into the courtyard. Their arms outstretched, fingers curling and grabbing, as they searched for something alive to bust open and eat.