Better off Undead

Chapter 54: Unfinished Business

He woke spitting and coughing up water. He jerked up to his hands and knees and heaved violently for several minutes. When he was done and his breath was coming more or less regularly again, he collapsed and rolled over onto his back. For a long time he simply lay there, breathing and blinking back the dizziness, trying to remember who and where he was.

For some reason he didn't quite understand, the world kept spinning around him whenever he opened his eyes. The motion just made him feel like being sick again, so he mostly kept his eyes closed. Slowly he could feel the throbbing ease in his temples and his breath finally slow to a reasonable pace. There was something cool and comforting about lying there like that, in the mud, and he felt like keeping his eyes closed and just letting himself drift back off to sleep.

But he was cold, and whenever the wind blew he shivered uncontrollably. He realized he was soaking wet, as though he had just been swimming. He opened his eyes and looked down at his body and saw that he was, indeed, wet from head to toe. He suddenly felt very sick and rolled onto his side just in time to cough up some more water that had somehow managed to escape the first expulsion.

His mind was clearing now, and through the hum of noise buzzing in his ears, he could make out one sound that stuck out from all the others. It was a sick, wet sound, like two muddy blobs being regularly slapped against each other.

He looked up, and saw some hideous, horrifying creature stumbling toward him.

He let out a yell of surprise and started to scramble away. Barely had he started moving, however, when he completely lost his balance and tumbled along the ground until he dropped, rather unceremoniously, into a stream of flowing water. He kicked and thrashed for a moment until he realized that the water was not that deep, and the current was not that fast.

Letting his feet sink to the streambed floor, he pushed himself up and out of the water. The coldness of the stream burned in his eyes and through his body, waking him up still more and relieving some of the remaining grogginess. The creature – a zombie, he now realized – was still staggering in his direction. It was all the more determined now, but its limbs were sticking in the muddy bank and it kept being pulled down more and more every time it tried to take a step.

Eli crossed to the far side of the stream, figuring that even if the zombie made it to the stream, it would never be able to cross the flowing water.

For a moment he knelt there on all fours and tried to get his bearings. He tried his best to pull up his last memory before the blackout, to see if he could remember anything about a stream or a clearing, but nothing came to him. He remembered... he vaguely remembered standing at a cliff, looking at... something. What was it? And what had happened next?

His eyes settled on a plume of dark grey smoke rising out of the trees in the distance. Suddenly, it clicked into place. There had been a car crash. He had been in a car, and something had happened. He... he must have been thrown from the vehicle. That explained his aching limbs and his throbbing head. He looked down at himself, and realized he was trailing blood in his wake. He had cuts all over one of his arms, a nasty looking gash on the other, his shirt and pants were torn, and blood trickled out from under his clothing. His right side was in particular pain, and he probably had sever bruising along his abdomen there. Maybe even a broken rib.

Despite his traumatic condition, all told he was actually quite lucky. A car wreck forceful enough to fling him from the vehicle and deposit him in a nearby river could easily have been fatal.

There was the sound of a splash behind him, and Eli looked back to see the zombie had collapsed face first into the stream. The noise had been enough to shake away still more of the shock. Pushing through the pain, he rose and followed the stream back into the woods, toward the rising smoke.