The Price of Humanity

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Three

Zane manoeuvres all three of us through a door way across the alley. He leans against the door, putting his body weight against it and quickly scans the room.

Noticing a table at the side of the room I start moving the heavy object over to the door to prop it up while Zane holds it closed.

None of the corpses have reached the door yet but as soon as they do they will easily push their way through a door that is simple closed.

Once the door is somewhat secure for now, I start to hear the groaning noises. I turn around, immediately on alert, to see Mia raising the wooden training pole up to the walker.

I stalk forward, wanting to take the lead but slow down when I see the fierceness in Mia's eyes. She watches the walker, adjusts her footing and begins to hit it everywhere she can.

She keeps the walker at a distance with blows to the stomach and sides, but that doesn't keep the undead woman occupied for long. Soon the hits aren't enough and the corpse advances on Mia.

She stumbles slightly and I pull my katana out, heading towards them both.

Before I can even make it to them though, Mia hits the corpse on the head and forces it to fall to the ground.

She leans over and hits it in the head two more times to destroy it's brain and make sure it's properly dead and then turns to me with both fear and adrenaline.

I smile at her and take my bag off. I pull out a small piece of fabric from one of the side pockets and wipe the blood droplets off her cheeks.

"Well done." I say, half proud and half sad. No eight-year-old should ever have to do something like that.

"Quicker learner than you." Zane insults me while beginning to check out the floor. Mia tags along with me, moving to the upstairs of the building which seems to be an old baker's shop.

We seemed to come in the delivery entrance rather than the front one.

The front windows of the building have been boarded up with more corrugated metal sheets and the entire place has been ransacked for loot. But that doesn't matter – we need shelter right now, not supplies.

The stairs creak as Mia and me walk up them, Mia walking slightly behind me.

A growling from one of the rooms alerts me to the presence of another corpse and I can see Mia ready to jump into the action again. I give her a stern look and she reads the message correctly, staying put on the stairs.

I step up and into a hallway of what seems to be the baker's home. A shuffling noise reaches my ears and a man, around his thirties and completely overweight moves out into the hallway.

He notices me immediately and begins shuffling towards me on a leg which looks like it could fall off at any second. I raise my katana and, once he gets close enough, send it soaring straight though his head.

He falls to the ground once I pull my katana away and silence fills the small bakery again.

Mia and I clear the rest of the upper floor to find nothing of note before heading back downstairs to Zane, who starts to create a small fire using the couple of book we found upstairs.

The growling outside intensifies during the next few hours and Mia snuggles close into me. Looking at the blacked-out windows and the limited light coming from the outside, I realise it's definitely way past everyone's bedtime.

Zane pulls a blanket out of the duffel bag he's carrying and hands it over to me. Lying back, with Mia still cuddled up next to me, I pull the blanket over us as Zane tells me he'll take first watch.

After a restless sleep, gunshots wake me up later in the night and the limited light from the windows tells me it's still dark.

Mia sits up, pulling both the blanket and my small amount of warmth away. I make out Zane sitting by the fire, which is still lit, he's staring at it, a tired look in his eyes.

"How long were we asleep?" I ask, about to chastise him for not switching watch with me.

"An hour at most." He shrugs, eyes trained on the door to the alley. I groan, rubbing my eyes. That will have to do. Although at least I got some sleep, Zane looks like he's about to pass out.

The gunshots keep firing from outside, probably from the wall.

"The horde reached them then." Zane nods, poking the fire with a stick. It crackles in reply and a piece of burnt paper falls off the pile.

"Did a while ago. They probably figured they could wait it out." Tough luck. You can't wait out a horde. If they smell food, they'll try and get you until they waste away in the sun – meaning they'll try to get you for eternity.

Or until a bigger food source turns up. Luckily for us we were right next to a large community of psychopaths, so they wandered straight past us.

I stand up, putting the blanket around Mia and head upstairs once again. I rub my eyes sleepily as I reach the end of the hallway where a window sits.

Peering out of it and down to the left I see the horde in all its glory in the street. Men stand on top of the fences now, firing all their bullets down into the horde.

It was stupid of them to even think about waiting that one out. There's no bigger food source than them coming for quite a while.

The men all stand in line. Each in a steady position firing down, one foot positioned in front of the other to keep them balanced while firing the guns.

I look over the buildings inside the compound, there's only two I can see from this positioning. One is the science building, the rows of tables and microscopes still in their original positioning after an entire year.

The second looks more like an old storage facility, an old rectangular building with one floor. The window facing me has something leaning up against is so that I can't see what's inside. Might be a useful place to keep a prisoner.