Z The lord of the zombies

Prologue: Nobody is normal...

"Colón found people who ate human flesh; the neighbors called them cannibals..." 

PEDRO MÁRTIR DE AUGLERÍA.

The rain was beating hard on that window with its wooden frames and broken glass; some drops entered fiercely splashing the boy's face, while he messed up every drawer and rummaged through every shelf he could find in the small kitchen. But the search became difficult since he was in the middle of the darkness of the night, and if he didn't hurry, his old plastic flashlight would extinguish its light at any moment.

He opened the last drawer and a smile spread across his face when he found what he had been needing for so many days. He quickly stuffed his treasure into his backpack and stood up, but at that moment, something behind him blocked his way. He felt a scorching, rotten breath on the back of his neck. His body trembled and he turned around in a hurry. He could watch with disgust as two cold and inert spheres of a grayish iris were lost pointing in no particular direction.

It was about a girl, or at least that was before. Judging by her whitish skin with severe decay deterioration all over her body; with just a shadow of hair peeking out of a skull that was open in two parts; and of an extremely slim build, it gave the certainty that she could no longer be called human.

The girl bellowed a grotesque guttural sound before throwing herself on the attack. The boy recoiled in fear, crashing against a blue marble counter and was barely able to interpose his arms to contain his attacker. Right at that moment, to aggravate the situation, another monster entered the kitchen from a door to the left, followed by another, who approached from a second entrance to his right.

A thunder echoed in the distance. The boy cursed. He fumbled with his hand somewhere on the marble counter, found a can opener but discarded it, it wasn't what he wanted. He kept searching quickly until his fingers found what he needed. In his twenty-four years of life, he never imagined himself having to pierce the forehead of a fifteen-year-old with a kitchen knife. Now it was everyday routine.

He tossed the girl's corpse to his right to block one of the monsters; for his size and wrinkled older man's appearance, he would possibly be the girl's father. He used that time gap to slice through the jaw of the creature that had entered from the left; who, due to his small build and resemblance to the fifteen-year-old, could be the younger brother. In that second, when the father could compose himself, the young man had already plunged the knife into his eye. The creature groaned before falling to the ground.

The boy rushed to take his backpack and slung it over his shoulder to get out of there. In the hallway, he could hear the desperate grating of footsteps at the top of the stairs, eager to descend. He wasn't going to stick around to find out if there were more relatives wanting to say hello, so he sped across the hall.

The boy rammed the door with his shoulder, managing to get out of the house, and although he imagined that his problems would lessen when he got outside, it only got worse. In a dark meadow surrounded by trees, a lightning bolt ripped the sky showing in a second with its light, dozens of creatures that were advancing towards the house.

—Shit...

There was no time to think, only to kill. He grabbed his gun and kept running. If this was his last night, he wasn't going to drop without a fight. Without slowing down, the boy raised his gun to the front with confidence and conviction. He took aim at any of the many shadows approaching him, and then... he fell.

A branch sticking out of the ground caused him to trip and fall to the ground, crashing his face in the mud. His weapon escaped from his hand flying after the feet of one of those creatures. The boy crawled back in despair, rolled over and was on his feet in a second. He then tried to run in the opposite direction, but more monsters were closing in from the house, leaving him without any possible escape route.