Among the Dead

Carrie

Carrie

She waited intensively at the top of the stairs watching the door, waiting for the rattle of the dead wanting to come in and get them.

While she waited, she loaded her cross bow and watched the others get ready as well. They had wedged a sofa in front of the door to stop anyone getting in and brought in a large table, turning it to the side to huddle behind as they lay out an assortment of guns and knives from their belts and pockets. Carrie sat holding her crossbow in sweaty hands and her rate pounded against her ribs; she'd rather the dead attack already instead of waiting around like they were.

As soon as she wished it, the door started to shake and slowly started to push the sofa away, millimetre by agonising millimetre.

She jumped and almost pulled the trigger in surprise. She expected to hear gun fire soon after like she was use to with Bert; shooting before he knew what really was behind the door. Rick and the others seemed more reserve about when they shot. The house was silent apart from the door slowly being pushed open and the scratching.

Carrie blinked at the unexpected noise. She was use to sleeping with mice running around her, but normally when the dead was so close, they hid and nothing was heard.

She looked down the hall where she thought the sound was coming from; there was nothing that she could see straight away to make the noise, not even a mouse hole. There was a small table at the end on the hall, with a vase with fake flowers on top and a large painting hanging above it.

The door stopped rattling for a moment and everything went quiet.

Carrie looked back at the men and noted their look of confusion. They probably couldn't hear the scratching as well as Carrie could; probably just confused why the dead had left them as quickly as they did.

The scratching was driving her crazy; nothing just the silence and the scratching. As quietly as she could, she got to her feet and went to investigate.

The noise was coming from the end of the hall; from behind the painting.

She was completely convinced that she was going to find a mouse in its little hole, that when she pulled the painting back and saw an eye on the other side of the hole, it took her a moment to realise what she was looking at.

The pale eye blinked and a hungry grumble made Carrie stumble away and scream as loud as she could.

"She's worse that Polly," Dean grumbled from down stairs.

Carrie dropped the painting and staggered back as skin peeled fingers poked through the hold and started pulling the plaster away. She brought up the crossbow from her shoulder and shot towards the hole; missing it by a foot.

"Move Carrie," Tom shouted as the men reached the top of the stairs.

Carrie scrambled away as she tried to reload her crossbow.

The gun shot was so loud it made her jump and dropped everything in her hands. She gave up trying to get anything to work and ran behind the wall of men with varying sized guns in their hands.

"We'll have to wait until it comes out before we can kill it," Rick explained, even with the little training they had done with their guns, their aims weren't perfect and such a small hole made a hard target.

As they watched the dead had managed to get its hand through the hole and was reaching out towards them.

"We could always stab it," Lewis suggested and started to lower his gun.