The Living

Chapter 1

     I walked over to the three zombies I'd shot and took a closer look at them. Zombies. I still couldn't wrap my head around it. Fine, lets call them walkers, at least I'll only sound half-crazy when I'm talking to myself then.

     All three were head-shots, it seemed to be the only way to be sure they were dead. The rest of their bodies had refrained from much decomposition, although there were some rather serious wounds on one of them, possibly from an accident. They smelled rather bad too, but It was a smell I was coming to associate with walkers, and I was even getting used to it a little. 

     The one that interested me most though was my look-alike. Now that I could see him up close though, he didn't look all that much like me. My facial features were stronger, mostly in the jaw, and I had tanner skin than he had. His eyes, where there weren't popped blood vessels messing things up, looked to be blue, and I had hazel.

     That wasn't the interesting part though. He looked less dead. His skin was the color of death itself, but it wasn't decomposing like the others. I tried to calm myself, think rationally. Maybe he'd been turned after the other two. It was just so hard to stay calm these days. I breathed for a while, and stared at the bodies some more.

     I had a sudden urge to know who they were, so I bent down to find out. One of the larger fellows hadn't had an ID on him, but the other did. It said that his name was Bill Norman. He was 37. Organ donor too.

    The others name was Brandon Larson. He was 25, 3 years older than me, and apparently already married. I looked at all the pictures of his two daughters that he'd kept in the wallet. They were probably about 1 and 3 years old when all this happened.

     I couldn't believe that I'd actually pointed a gun at him and wanted to shoot him from the very bottom of my heart. This is something I needed to remember, I told myself. There wasn't any cure for what they had, I helped them as best I could. Perhaps there was one more thing I could do for them though. These may be walkers I shot, but they were people once, and everyone deserves to be remembered.

     I pocketed the two IDs and stood back up. I had been checking the forest line up and down the road ans constantly as I could remember to since I'd shot my gun, but no walkers had shown up yet, which was precisely why I'd chosen this place to stop. Still, I didn't feel comfortable here anymore. Walkers seemed to have much better hearing, possibly because of taking a hit to vision and feeling, but also possibly just because they were walkers. All I knew was that plenty on walkers heard that, and if I waited long enough, I'd see 'em coming.

    Deciding it was best if I headed out now, I walked over to my car and got in. It roared to life, and I found that I still enjoyed the sound nearly as much as I had before all this. Some things never changed.

     I took off, pushing the car like I'd never been able to do when I had to worry about cops and other drivers. After cruising at about 100 for a while, I saw some heavy traffic up ahead. I slowed down, then stopped. I could see the exit ramp up ahead, and beyond that what looked like a never-ending river of cars. That settled that then.

     I drove on the grass on the right side of the road, slowly making my way to the exit ramp. A few times, walkers stumbled out from between the cars on the road, but fortunately there was enough traction on the ground to let me go plenty fast enough to outrun them. Some of the bloody things were fast though, full on sprinting even. One of 'em managed to make me a little uncomfortable at the 10 mph I had been going, so I sped it up a little bit.