AM13 Outbreak Shorts

One Year On - Fourteen (Oliver)

Oliver

"What the...?"

My voice box aches as I try to push myself up, but I'm stuck, frozen in place. My brain throbs as I try to recall what's happening here. Why is my face sticky? And why the hell can't I lift my hand up to feel my cheeks?

The world is bright at first, too white for me to see anything, but it soon returns back to view but it isn't right. It's weird. Upside down.

"I know," I mutter to Danny, who's about the only thing I can remember in all of this, while he claws at my arm. "I don't know what's going on either."

I try to place everything, to figure out how it all works now, but it doesn't quite make sense. I don't even know where we are...

"Oh wait! The car, of course...we are in the car. Danny, I..."

But as I turn, it isn't my friend's face looking back at me. It's a stranger, what used to be a man, with graying skin detached from the bones of his face, hanging down like baggy clothes on a stereotypical orphan. Black blood slips from him and splatters onto what I now see is the roof of the car touching the ground. I honestly don't know how it took me so long to notice because the stench is horrendous.

I guess I just know that as the smell of the world these days.

"Argh, shit." I try to scoot backwards, to get the hell away from this beast, but I'm all the wrong way and strapped in. "Danny, where the hell are you? I could use your help right now!"

The ice cold fear that he might not actually be with me right now reminds me of another time when I got a friend killed through my stupidity. Enrico, my police buddy, got killed because I needed to help Katie.

That actually brought the nightmare of Ryan into my life.

Now, again because of Ryan, because I cannot stand to be around him, Danny might be dead too.

My shaking fingers try desperately to get me out before this man climbs further through the broken window and he manages to take a chunk out of me. I can't have that, I can't die too.

"Shit, come on...come on...!"

By some miracle I pop free, but that only sends me cascading downwards towards the roof of the car, smacking myself hard on the metal. Luckily, my survival instinct kicks in and I shimmy myself out of the car, into the stinking fresh air.

"Oh my God." They are everywhere, surrounding me. Danny too, if he's around somewhere, I'm not totally convinced that he is. "How the hell am I going to get out of here?"

I dart my eyes everywhere, desperately searching for my escape, but the panic has my eyes blurry. I can't really see past my nose.

I might actually die here, I might finally lose my battle against the undead and my own sanity. This is the one time I might not survive.

This is it.