The Lacteri

Lacteri: Chapter 2

Authors Note: I am trying a different writing style fo this story.  It is a mix between my thought process in this situation and kind of like a journal entry. Let me know what you think!  I'm not sure how I feel about this chapter. I don't think it is done yet.

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Chapter 2

It’s been three days, and I still haven’t been able to escape this damned house.  The beasts continuously walk around the area giving me no time to escape.  There are acres of land covered with dense forest around the cottage, but they will find me.

Every few hours I hear a noise.  It sounds like someone is throwing rocks across the massive forest around this cottage.  I have no doubt that that the Lacteri are trying to find a way to get me.  They don’t know where I am yet, thankfully, but they are looking.  They can probably smell my scent in this area, but cannot find exactly where I am.  The trees are covering my trail well, but not well enough considering I have been traced.

I have to move on soon.  One of these days, one of the Lacterus will stumble upon me in my cottage, and by that point, I will have no way to escape.  They will rip down a door, or maybe even a wall and I will cease to exist.  Right now, I just have to wait.  There is nothing else I can do except stare blankly at the unlit fireplace and attempt to plan my escape.  This is not the first time this has happened, but it never does get easy trying to find safety.  They always find me. Everywhere.

The time that I thought I found the perfect hiding place, in Home Depot, they found me.  The place had food, although it was only soda and candy bars, weapons in the form of gardening supplies, and entertainment.  The entertainment was only home and gardening magazines and left over paint, but it was something to do. The store was the safest place that I could find.  There were forests and cliffs on three sides of the place which left only one way to get there.  I figured if they did find me I could attack them one by one with my gardening tools.  The parking lot in front of the store was wide open so that I could see a threat before it attacked and there were very few ways to get in.  That place could have withstood a zombie attack, and I thought it could withstand the Lacteri. I thought I was safe, and for a while, I was.

 I lasted two weeks in Home Depot.  I spent my time reading, racing on the shopping carts and trying to build something useful out of the supplies there.  I made myself a bed out of the rugs and curtains on display, and I was getting used to living this way. It was better than I had lived in a long time.

On the Friday of my second week, I heard a pounding on the supply truck doors in the back of the store.  There were no windows back there, so I had no idea what was happening.  I ran up to the front of the store to see if there was a storm or something that was causing the noise.  When I got there, there was nothing, just a regular cloudy day in Maine. I ignored the noise in the back and went back to reading my magazine. 

A few minutes later, I heard the banging again, but this time there was more of it.  I couldn’t ignore the noise this time.  I grabbed my bag of supplies along with a few extra candy bars and prepared to leave.  I was hoping that the noise was just a couple of bears trying to get some food from inside, but my gut told me otherwise.  It was the Lacteri.  They found me again.

I ran to the main entrance of the store and saw nothing out there so I ran.  I sprinted across the empty parking lot, cursing myself for thinking that this was a good idea, and kept running until I found another house to stay in.  That one only lasted four days. That was more time than I needed to plan my next escape.

I think it has been five months since then.  I’m not exactly sure, but it could be more.  I have learned from that experience not get too comfortable in one place because they will find me somehow.  I was a fool to think that I was safe. I’m not exactly sure what I was thinking at the time, but it was not one of my brightest ideas.  I wasn’t thinking about what I would do if I had to escape.  The wide open parking lot made it terrifying trying to sprint away and I had no barricades on the doors and windows in case they found me.

Since then, the first thing I do before looking for a safe spot is make sure I will have some kind of cover when I escape.  I prefer places in the forest or in a city because there are numerous places to hide in them.  The forests have rocks and trees that I can hide in, and the cities have turned over cars, dark alley ways, and there are hundreds of building with thousands of floors to pick from.

I was actually planning on running to Providence to find safety.  I am almost there considering I started in New York and ran to Maine first.  It sounds stupid going all the way to Maine, but I drove there before this Lacteri situation escalated to the scale that it is at now.  I was planning on getting on a plane to France before they closed the airways.  A small airport in Northern Maine was the last airport to close and I was hoping to escape on their last flight out.  I never made it to the airport.  A mixture of traffic and bad timing cause me to miss the plane by ten minutes.  Those ten minutes sealed my fate for the rest of my life.  I was stuck here in this hell forever.