“Ah, hell.” I groan.
There’s another groan behind me and I scurry quickly up the last two stairs I’m still sprawled out over. When I spin around to look behind me I want to scream. It’s a crawler. A no leg having, teeth at your toes, scare the bejeezus out of me crawler. I hate these things. I hate them for the very situation that I’m in right now – they come out of nowhere. Taking a zombie down on purpose in order to end them the way I just did, that’s one thing. But Risen like this guy who slither across the earth at your feet like a snake, that’s messed up.
He’s coming for me now, reaching up and pulling himself with that incredible, undeterred by pain zombie strength that he has. He’s on the landing with me before I can think to move and then his hand is on my ankle. I kick at his face with my free foot, making contact with his nose and breaking it violently. It makes a sick, satisfying crunch sound, but it doesn’t stop him. I pull myself backwards, reaching for the ASP with desperate fingers. He’s climbing my leg now. His hand is on my knee, bringing his face level with my foot and I have the terrifying thought that he’ll bite it through the worn material of my tennis shoe.
I finally grip the base of the baton and bring it around, crashing it into his forearm. I repeat the process and he finally lets me go because he has to. The bone is broken. I crabwalk away from him without thinking and end up in a room. It looks like it used to be an office of some kind and I back into a heavy metal desk that refuses to move, to give me room to escape. I’m trapped. And he’s coming, pulling himself into the room after me using his one functioning arm and groaning incessantly.
I quickly lash out with my foot, swinging the heavy wood door closed on his face. He’s too far into the room, though, and I only succeed in slamming it against his skull. It bounces back at me as he continues to groan. Feeling frustrated, angry and scared, I kick again. The door smacks him in the skull, pinning his head between it and the frame. I kick again and again and again, beating his head between the two sections of wood. I’m kicking over and over, hoping it’s enough and that eventually I’ll hit that sweet spot on his temple just wrong, just hard enough to kill and he’ll go down for good.
Kick, crunch! Kick, crunch! Kick, crunch!
There’s a heavy crack and I know I’ve gotten my wish. I kick one last time and let the door swing back at me after it makes mushy contact with what’s left of his head. I don’t look at the mess I’ve made. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before but I do want to be able to eat later and actually enjoy it so I stand up slowly on shaking legs and step quickly over what’s left of the guy.
Today, I have emphatically decided, is for suck.
And it’s not over. This day is never ending. I still haven’t scored my water and I just worked up quite a thirst with my leg workout back there. I take a moment to calm down, to breathe easy and remind myself to be careful when what I really want to do is run through this building as fast as I can, get my water from the roof and run back out again. Time efficient, but deadly. So I don’t do it.
Turns out I needn’t have worried. I make it to the roof without further incident but when I arrive, my heart sinks. The door, which I normally keep latched firmly, is thrown wide open. Someone has been here. I pass through the opening slowly, scanning the open space and hoping against hope that I don’t run into the living.
I luck out. There’s only a Risen. She’s wandering around aimlessly on the far side of the roof opposite my rain system. I’m tired and grumpy so I ignore her and her pencil skirt office attire for now. Maybe I won’t have to engage her at all.
I move quickly to my rain barrels which are actually Rubbermaid rectangular storage containers, the kind people used to put holiday decorations in and shove in a dark corner of their garage 90% of the year. Now they sit attached to a series gutters I ripped off the sides of buildings and secured to each other so they run side by side, creating several long lines of water collection that feed down into a pasta strainers I fit in the lid of each tub. They keep leaves and other debris out, including frogs, but I’ll still have to boil it when I get home just to be sure there’s no bacteria. Or I would have to do that, if there were any water in the tubs.
They’ve cleaned me out. Whoever the bastards were, they took my entire water supply from this roof. I throw the lid off each tub even though I can tell from just nudging them with my foot that they’re empty. Every last one of them.
“Dammit!” I shout.
All of that for nothing. The zombie in the hall, the crawler in the door, this one coming at me now here on the roof. All of it. All for nothing. I risked everything and now I’m going home empty handed.
I kick each tub across the roof and watch as one trips and tumbles over the edge. It stuns me for half a second, just long enough to think it’s a bad thing, and then I flip a switch and think it’s the best thing ever. I grab the gutter work and launch it over the edge as well, chuckling when I hear it clatter loudly to the ground. I’m breathing quickly and feeling crazy. I’m so angry, something I haven’t felt in forever. I got a taste of it when Ryan dropped into my world and blew it up, but this is different. This is frustration and rage. It’s pent up for miles and I don’t know what to do with it. What I should do, healthy or not, is stow it. Now is not the time for this.
I drop the other gutter fixture I was holding in my hand and let it fall carelessly to the rough rooftop. Watching the Risen girl come at me, I can’t bring the numb. I can’t find the calm that I strove for on the way up here and barely managed. I need it to do this right, to make sure I survive and keep my head on straight, but it just won’t come. I back up as she stalks me slowly and clumsily. I let her walk me to the brink. The backs of my legs hit the lip that rises above the edge by just a few feet, just enough to trip a person and send them tumbling down to their death. It’s a dangerous feature and I wonder how that ever made it in the pearly white, disinfected, overly sanitized safety net world that existed ten years ago.
Look out! Coffee is hot!
Knives are sharp!
This End Up, numbnuts!
This woman is older than me by at least twenty years and deader by about four. She didn’t make it. All of her warning labels were gone and the world was too much for her to figure out on her own.
Beware: Zombies bite!
I’m not ashamed to say I feel superior to this chick. She has years of experience on me but I survived and she didn’t. She may have had a 401K, a husband and an Audi, but at least I still have a heartbeat. One that’s thrumming wildly in my chest as my breath comes hot, hard and fast into my lungs.
It’s all of these emotions, all these things I’ve forgotten and gotten on without that are now literally bursting through me, seeping from my pores and smothering me from the inside out. There’s so much, too much.
And it’s gotta go somewhere.
When Corporate Kelly makes her big move and lunges for me, I drop down to the ground on my knees and spring forward. I tackled her at the thighs, standing up when I make contact and lifting her bony body onto my shoulder. Then I push on her knees and flip her forward, over my back and over the edge. I send her off the roof face first to kiss the pavement below. And I turn and watch it happen. I wait for the impact and when the smack! echoes back up to me, I throw my arms in the air, signaling a touchdown.
If that move doesn’t get me the Heisman then justice is dead.
I’m still pissed about my water, or lack of, when I get back to my neighborhood. I’ve still got some rabbit, though, and some veggies that I can eat raw instead of boiling. And I still have a home to go back to, so that’s a plus. I haven’t been ratted out yet just as I dared to instill a little faith in humanity again. Of course that’s over now that humanity stole my stuff, mainly my life sustaining resource. But that’s okay, because Ryan’s different and I actually choose to believe that.