This is the twenty-fourth chapter of the zombie serial The Dead Life. You can learn more about the story over at the project hub. This series originally ran on Haunted MTL but is being edited and updated in the lead-up to new installments to continue the story.
You can read the prior chapter here.
Day 25
As Dani passed through the open gate, past the disabled bus, she was confronted with far more ghouls than had been there just minutes ago. She couldn’t be sure there wasn’t another entrance on the distant end of the district campus. The kid’s shots had drawn roving dead toward his presumed position, and Dani began to approach, fireplace poker at the ready.
From what she could tell, the ghouls had begun clustering around the far end of the lot opposite from her, toward a small pair of trailer offices. She couldn’t make out the kid’s position in the area. She had kept herself to a sort of hunched crouch, aiming to make herself less noticeable without sacrificing mobility. She did her best to keep completely silent so as not to alert any of the undead ahead of her. The idea, as far as she had considered any sort of plan at this point, was to get a sense of where exactly the child was. From there, she would alert the ghouls to her position and give him a window to run across the street, where she would meet him afterward. But that all depended on where the child even was, and what his condition was. It wasn’t much of a plan, she would be the first to admit, but she was running on adrenaline and chance.
Dani began to close the gap between her and the stragglers of the pack. By her count, there were twelve of them between herself and the trailers. About eight were immediately surrounding the rightmost trailer from her perspective, clawing and slapping at the siding with discolored, wet hands and broken fingertips. That left four of them that were slowly lumbering toward the rest of the group. They were being drawn, but it wasn’t clear how it all worked.
But what it told her is that the kid was likely in that trailer. That meant he could be safe, but he just as easily might have accidentally let one in, and he was now dead, or even undead. It was a box of suck she was hesitant to open, but if there was a chance she could help him, she had to. These past couple of weeks of fear and sadness, of not being able to do enough for Julie, her neighbor. She had heard the struggle next door and did not intervene. She sat in fear in her apartment as Julie and her boyfriend suffered, died, and returned as inhuman things.
And Dani sat there. Alone. Afraid. Was it possible she could have helped? She didn’t know. She never would, not really. But fuck, she could have tried.
She could have tried.
Dani kept her even pace and approached the back of the closest ghoul. It had not noticed her, still slowly stumbling toward the trailer. She looked the ghoul over and noticed it had been hobbled. The foot had bent in completely sideways at the ankle, and each step ground down the ankle more and more. As the ankle raised from the ground, blood and bits of flesh would sluice off in ribbons, attached and tearing off from the asphalt. The foot was less a foot now and more a foot-like hunk of flesh, flopping uselessly every time the ankle hit the asphalt.
She rolled the fireplace poker in her hand, swung her arm outward, and swung in, aiming the hooked end right above the top of the torn ear of the ghoul with the ground-down ankle. The poker connected with an audible crunch as the ghoul lifted off the ground, collapsing onto its side with a thump on the asphalt. The impact point, covered in closely cropped brown hair, began to leak brownish blood, and small chips of bone carried by the pooling of blood slipped through thin, broken skin.
The ghoul was thrashing violently. Was it in pain? Was it just some rudimentary nervous system response?
It didn’t matter, really. The ghoul began to moan, but Dani thwacked it twice more in the same spot, leaving a sizable crater in the side of the skull. After the first hit, the ghoul had stopped thrashing. But the second hit made the body shudder slightly, and she thought for a second that maybe it wasn’t quite gone as it twitched.
The closest ghoul had apparently heard nothing and continued moving forward. It piled into the crowd, reaching and grasping between the tangle of bodies, trying to find some kind of hold on the trailer.
The sound was maddening. The strange, airy moans punctuated by pounding and scratching of the siding – relentless with no pattern. An hour of hearing that from inside the trailer would drive anyone crazy. She had to get him out.
Dani crouched and tried to listen for another sound. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to hear from the kid. IF he was smart, he was quiet. Maybe she wanted to hear him scream or cry, just as a sign he was still kicking. Something that justified what she was about to do. But there was nothing but the chaotic cacophony of the risen dead against the box that held something they wanted.
Dani sighed as she rose from her crouch. She glanced behind her and took several paces back. One thing she had learned about herself in the days since she had settled in at the storage yard was that she was dogshit with guns. Bob had told her as much. But she didn’t have to be good here, just distracting.
She slipped the poker into the pseudo-holster she’d made on her belt. It was a temporary solution and wasn’t designed for anything beyond brute-force functionality. It was just meant to give her a free hand without setting the poker down. As far as she was concerned, it would be best to have a hand on it at all times. The solution was simple: a slit in the belt wide enough for the hooked end of the poker to slip through, but not open enough for the handle to slip through easily.
She unshouldered Bob’s rifle and aimed. Her hands were shaking in her agitation and hurry, and she had to pause. She inhaled and exhaled slowly, feeling more control flow into her grasp. She did her best to line up a shot, and much to her surprise, when she pulled the trigger, she had dropped one of the ghouls instantly, watching a puff of gross spray emerge from the back of the head out of a flap of flesh and bone. The ghoul collapsed so fast it took her a moment to take in the luck here. Of course, Bob didn’t see that one.
But the noise, bright and sharp against the dull moans, hoarse groans, scratches, and slaps, did what it was meant to do, and now the ghouls had begun to turn toward Dani – their attention no longer on the potential prize within the trailer.
Dani took a breath and looked down the sights. She had lined up a shot and fired just as the ghoul had tripped over the recently fallen companion. The ghoul hit the ground hard, and the bullet hit the trailer.
“Shit! Sorry!”
She paused and took a breath. She lined up another shot as the ghoul on the ground struggled to find some footing. It had tripped in her direction, and its crown was mercifully pointed right at her. She fired – another puff of gore, and then a collapse.
The remaining ghouls were well aware of her presence and seemed to pick up their pace, reaching toward her. Their gaits were still stiff and mostly lumbering, but there was a frenzy to it. It was an urgency she had only seen in apparent excitement, a burst of energy as their target was in reach. Nine rotting killers were converging on her, but that’s what she wanted, as fucked as that notion was. They were clearing away from the trailer.
“Kid, if you’re in there, I’m clearing a path! Run!”
She did her best to listen for something from inside the trailer over the gargles and moans of the approaching undead, but it was too much to filter through. She took another couple of steps back and lined up a shot on one of the two closest to her position. This ghoul had once been a young man, maybe a teenager. His left arm was broken, and she wasn’t sure if it was something he’d had before he turned or not. It was impossible not to think of what they once were. As much as she wanted to see them as monsters, she kept finding herself sucked into the speculation of it all.
She pulled the trigger.
Whoever they once were was gone, and their shadow now, too. It was the only thing she and the others could do for them now.
As the ghoul fell forward onto the asphalt, another chorus of wheezing gasps erupted from the companions. For the slightest second, Dani wondered if they were shocked or mourning their fallen companion. She shook her head, shoving that thought as far back as she could, not willing to entertain the notion. It was just the frenzy.
As she began to aim again, the trailer door swung open and slammed into the railing of the access ramp with a clang. The kid emerged, a boy. He couldn’t have been older than twelve. She locked eyes with him – it was hard not to – they were so wide and white, contrasting with dirty and bloodied skin. The kid was a mess, and she had no idea what his condition was besides alive, and for now, that was all that mattered. She did her best to smile at him, an attempt to put him at ease, but a pair of the ghouls had already begun to turn toward his position, alerted to the sound of the door. Breathless shrieks erupted, and she watched their bodies shudder as they caught on to the kid’s presence. The kid scanned the ghouls nervously, his gaze rapidly shifting between them and the stranger with a gun.
“Run to the storage place across the street, you’ll be safe! We’re safe!”
The boy said nothing as he bolted. He swung down beneath the railing and dodged the two ghouls. He began to run from them as fast as he could despite obvious exhaustion. Dani began to follow, but his path seemed strange, as though he was running from her.
“Head right, out that entrance! Near that bus!”
“Leave me alone! Go away!”
Dani skid-stopped as she saw the kid run into the trashed entrance of the district building. She watched him climb over stacked desks and shelves, into the darkness of the building.
“Shit.” She groaned.
The kid was frightened of her. It was understandable why; companions gone, ghouls everywhere, and a pursuing stranger who had been coming directly for him. From what Edgar had said, the kid seemed to think Edgar had killed the others. How could he not think she was here to finish the job?
Dani glanced behind her, back toward the trailers. The nearest of the remaining ghouls was a good thirty feet away from her position, but that, she figured, was close enough for them to see her enter the building. They might struggle with the pile of office furniture in the doorway, but that was in no way an impenetrable barrier. The darkened entrance made her nervous. She’d be entering a dark place, with no sense of the layout, pursuing ghouls, and a scared kid with a gun. It was hard not to spiral out, thinking of all the bad things that could happen. But he was just a kid, and he needed the help.
Dani’s cuts on the top of her thigh began to throb, and she rubbed at them with the butt of Bob’s rifle. She thought back to Julie and her boyfriend in the apartment next door. Dani could have reached out earlier or been proactive. She knew that.
It was like a damn breaking. Steven. His name was Steven. Why had she forgotten? She knew. She knew the whole time. Steven and Julie. She’d known him well enough to fuck him once, when Julie was at work. She wasn’t sure who had initiated it, nor did it matter. It had happened once. Nothing about that mattered now. All she knew now was she’d pushed his name away in guilt and shame. She’d displaced the tangle of that life and cut and tied around it, like an old net with some shitty repairs just to wring out a little more life from something that didn’t need to eb around anymore. But the damage was still there.
Steven had volunteered to check the neighboring apartments for some food for the three of them. Dani could have gone too. But it was too awkward, knowing what she had done with Steven. And poor, cute Julie, not knowing what had happened. So he went by himself, climbing down from the demolished stairs. And she and Julie pretended to be good neighbors in the apocalypse, making idle chatter as Dani kept a secret from before the world ended. And then Steven came back, a bite on his arm, and they all thought it was so strange that these sick people were biting one another. It had been nearly two weeks of lockdown. They laughed it off and split their share of the food he’d brought back. She could have helped him gather it, even if she’d fucked him once, and it would have been awkward to be around him.
Dani hadn’t mentioned the broadcast to them the next day – they’d been so limited and so low quality, most had been nothing of note. She was sure it was some doomsday jockey ranting into his private radio. But the man, whomever he was, warned about the bites. The broadcast was less than a minute, but it was so important. She listened to it and then said nothing. The pain of being around them with what she did before, it didn’t matter, but it also did, then, and Dani said nothing, staying in her apartment. She locked herself away as she heard panic and fighting through the dryway behind her couch, listening to Julie’s updates on Steven.
“He’s not looking good. His breathing is laboured. I’m scared. Dani, help.” All the markers of the infection were behind the drywall. And yet the shame was too much. Dani sat by herself, knowing deep down what she was hearing and what it meant. And in time, Steven turned. Then Julie turned. And Dani was alone.
One of her cuts had opened again, and she felt warm and sticky blood seep from the broken skin. She glanced down, seeing the small red blotches spreading on her blue jeans.
The ghouls behind her were clearing the distance. Ahead was the entrance to that district office. Inside was the scared kid who shot big Edgar.
The rifle’s weight was reassuring, and for a moment, she entertained the thought of turning the gun around on herself. The world was hard enough before it fell apart. She considered checking out back then – what kept her going now? She waited for an answer to emerge. Some sign that there was a reason to keep at any of this. All she received was a stench on the wind, of death and smoke, and the caws of crows.
The wind also carried the coolness of the January air, and she felt a chill. Maybe it was warmer inside the district office?
She sighed, shouldered the rifle, and drew the fireplace poker from the slit in her belt. She marched to the entrance and began to climb into the dark.
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