From the Ashes, You Crawl

Chapter Fourteen; Flashback

Gerard did not know how long it was later when he awoke inside his dirty hole. His crusty pale eyelids pulled themselves apart as he twitched awake. There was only the sounds of his shaky breath as he sat with his knees to his chest, arms pulled deep beneath his black hoodie. It stank inside the dumbwaiter of body odor and urine. Gerard coughed, rubbing his nose as he remembered the sickening images of last night. 

The woman who had jumped from the stall, blood gushing from her lips, her shrieks as Gerard shut her in the door, the fire of the gun into her skull. Every memory. Sprinting with the cart through the street up to the house, how they beat through the doors and windows, his hiding, his sobbing.

Everything.

Gerard cried out for a moment before he remembered the creatures outside from the night before, and he cut it short, clamping his hand over his mouth as he listened. There was only silence and the sounds of his terrified breaths.

He was alone.

Gerard crawled to the opening, and he pushed out the trick panel, peeking into the dim light of the early morning of the apocalypse. He parted his chapped, pale lips and searched the vacant room. Gray light filtered in through the dusty windows, reflecting off the floating particles and whisps rolling along the air. There was not a sound anywhere. Perhaps, that was the most un-nerving, yet calming aspect of it all.

Gerard stepped out from inside his panic room into the room where there was a pile of cans in what appeared to once have been a kitchen. Gerard had never been inside the old home when he lived hear years and years ago. He stood for a moment, letting the gray light from the shattered windows fall over him. It was quite dark, but Gerard could sense it was day. It felt different comparatively to the nightmare before. He let out a sigh of relief, rubbing his throbbing leg as he limped cautiously towards the first room where the furniture had been what seemed like years ago, a barricade that didn't help one bit.

Gerard stopped in the archway, his hands trembling as he backed his shoulder against the archway, peering into the room of furniture. Just as the room of food, it was void of anything despite the furniture and the shopping cart full of food tipped on it's side. On the floor, there were two places much darker than the rest of the wood floor, but Gerard didn't allow him to think of it. He dropped to his knees and scooted across the floor, moving towards the cart. With shaking hands, the man pulled open a box of saltine crackers. They were soggy, and slightly moldy, but Gerard was so hungry, he didn't care. 

After a feverish bought of frantic snarfing of crackers, Gerard backed away. He felt dehydrated as he lifted his face and realized something felt different about the room he sat in. Something was wrong, but he just couldn't place it.

His leg hurt. Now, it had somehow surpassed the point of moderate ache that he had felt when exiting the safety of the dumbwaiter to complete and utter fire pit. Gerard set the empty box away as he rolled up his mud and blood stained jeans, wincing. He rolled the pant leg up past his knee where the new and mostly fresh wound still beamed back at him.

It was black, coarse, midnight black. There was rotting, red flesh surrounding it, and the smell could have killed a herd of cows. Gerard gagged, clamping his hand over his pale and chapped lips, body clenching as he ripped the pant leg back over the stinking wound. It took him several minutes to regain his composure as he sat there, trying to forget the engrained memory of the hole in his leg. The infected, seeping hole that was growing larger and more sore.

He was rotting from the inside out.

Gerard cried as he sat there, rubbing the place on the outside of his jeans. He needed to control the infection, the pain, or he would not live. That much was entirely certain. Gerard did not want to live. The thought of living made him want to cry even more than the thought of letting himself rot, but he could not die. Not now. Not like this. What justice would it be to his dead brother, or his dead mother if he pressed a gun to his head and said goodbye? There would be none.