Quarantined
Day 1- Evangeline
Once or twice, things got too close for comfort. Turning a corner on what seemed on of the quieter streets, toward the outer parts of the city, I nearly slammed into a looter, carrying a TV that looked too big for him. He was a small, pudgy boy with pasty white skin and bleach blonde hair poking out in all directions from under a black beanie. He wore a mile long hoodie and baggy jeans that looked like they’d fall down and trip him and moment. Hanging from his pants was the grip of an oversized handgun. He stopped in front of me. I froze. He started to backup, his eyes wide, staring at the shotgun between us.
“You better get out of here, kid.”
He didn’t hesitate. The TV dropped, crashing with a harsh noise, and then crunching on the concrete as he ran for his life.
As I was passing a residential area, I found myself suddenly face to face with one of the infected. He... it… looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him, for a few milliseconds. Suddenly, he threw himself at me. I barely got the shotgun between us in time, leaving blood stains across my clothes and face as he dropped. A gaping hole marked his chest, I had to have severed his spine, but he was still moving. And, on top of that, I’d called the others’ attention to myself. I cursed, bringing up my boot and slamming it on the first’s skull, nearly crying at the sickening, slurred crunch
I leveled the gun on the closest target; shot; aimed; shot.
For most of my walk, everything was chaos; infected and uninfected together, or perfectly still. Here, there were no uninfected left. I watched one infected drop; two, three; always closer and closer to myself they would drop, twitching, to the ground. I wasn’t even making a dent.
Praying harder than I ever had in my life, I pleaded that the damned things wouldn’t be fast enough to catch me and took off running. My body lurched forward, until I was almost vertical in my running. I raced a block, turned, and fired. A few had stayed after me; others had dropped off, and still more had joined the hunt midway. “Fu-uck….” Swaying, stumbling, I turned back and started to run again, turning a hard right into one of the most horrifying things I’d ever seen.
Dripping, mangled, torn, body after body shuffled the streets. Some lay dead and were trampled, others lay coiled against walls. I turned my head from my pursuers to focus my energy on ducking and diving through the crowd. One swept its arm at me, though the arm was barely connected, looking ready to fall out. Flesh grazed mine, bloody and sticky and torn. It sent shivers down my spine directly into my stomach, which lurched, nearly throwing me to the ground. I stumbled almost directly into a small infected, who gazed at me with eyes so miserably human it made me want to scream. Her mouth opened, wider than a human jaw should, allowing me to see her gritty teeth and the torn muscles in her mouth. Her gaze centered squarely on my neck and I froze, again. Here it came. I had no idea what was going on and yet here I was, standing in the fray like a moron. Honestly, this was natural selection at its best…
There was no bite; only a loud gunshot and the sudden stickiness of blood on my face. I blinked. More gunshots were fired. Down they fell around me, having gotten so close while I’d been distracted that they almost caught me. A lone surviving infected stumbled heavily forward on his left foot, the other sagging awkwardly. He opened his jaw, glaring at me, and I lifted my gun, letting off a shot into his skull. When I turned, I stood on pavement dyed red with blood. I looked up, swinging my head in the direction I’d heard the shots from, and saw, to my surprise, four men standing on the roof of a building across the street. The largest, who had his gun propped on the edge of the roof, lifted his head and laughed as though he’d just had the greatest experience in his life. The man beside him slugged him in the arm, puffing a breath of smoke from his cigar into the air.
