A New Type of Realism

(23) The Destruction of a Person

I sat up, groggily and asked what the urgency was. Slade's expression turned grim as he stood out of my way, and pointed to the horizon.

"You led them right to our front doorstep." Slade muttered grimly.

..........................

We didn't have long before the hoard arrived at the compound, so naturally, we wasted time by arguing about what we should do.

I had the idea to get into the car and to drive away, but Maggie pointed out that they would just follow us to our new destination. That was if we didn't run out of fuel first. Martin added that a new location might not be as secure as the compound we were in. Slade joked in monotone that we should mow them all down with gunfire, but I had to rain on his parade by pointing out that we had no guns. I didn't even know where Kyle had gotten his machete from; we had no weapons whatsoever. The military must have taken everything when the evacuated everyone from the base.

After ten minutes, we'd argued in circles, and had finally come to the conclusion that this was the best place to stay. However, we had no idea how we'd get out in the long term. We had no one to assemble our radio parts, and no other way to contact the outside world. Even if we set off a few flares, I hadn't seen any plane or helicopter flying overhead since I'd woken up from the hospital.

We would take each day at a time, and hope that the infected would starve; they mustn't have eaten in long time, they all looked pretty weak from what we could see through binoculars.

We sighed in defeat, and decided that the only thing we could really do would be to attempt to fortify our compound, not that it would make much difference. If they got through the fences, we really had no chance; there were hundreds of them, possibly over a thousand. I'd never seen such large numbers of bodies all grouped together, and really had no idea how to estimate how many there really were. No one else had any clues either.

Eventually, all that was left to do was sit and wait for them to reach us.

We were all sat on the roof of the compound like redundant wooden spoons when the first infected reached the gate, and clawed at it, trying to get through to us.

"If they get through, we go back inside through the top window." We were all small enough to fit through the window at the top of the walls in the compound. We'd lent a ladder up against the wall so it would be relatively easy to get down. We'd blocked the doors off, so there was no way for the infected to get in, but if they did, we had multiple exits to consider.

After hours, it seemed like the infected definitely weren't getting through. Maggie had prepared our dinner and had brought it up to us on the roof. We'd eaten in silence as an unspoken fear leaked into the atmosphere from us all. Eventually, we began to tire, and decided to take it in turns watching the infected, who had now spread out to cover the entire circumference of the outer fence.

I was on second watch when I noticed that the first infected had breached the outer fence, and was now attempting to make its way through the inner fence. Its climb through the outer fence had been easy due to the holes made in it by the storm, but it would not find it so easy to breach the inner fence. Unless Cloud got involved. Dread spread through me as the thought entered my mind suddenly.

I looked around for him, frenzied, and spotted him making his way towards one of the many holes in the outer fence. I woke up everyone around me, and pointed him out. Maggie shrugged him off as being a normal infected, and scolded me for scaring Martin. Unexpectedly, Slade's voice cut through Maggie's meek voice.