14
Sunlight streams into the small yellow plastic tube, waking Faraday. He rolls over and tries to stretch his cramped muscles in the confines of the child’s play tube before he remembers why he is there. He stops abruptly listening for any sounds coming from outside.
He doesn’t hear anything and so after a few minutes inches his way out of the tube. It wasn’t ideal sleeping out here but he needed a place where they wouldn’t be able to spot him and this seemed like the best shot.
He has been watching the creatures for the past week. They are obviously dangerous. He saw some of his old friends from the shelters, missing limbs or parts of their face, wandering around in groups.
They attack anyone that isn’t like them.
This end of the world scenario isn’t what he was prepared for, but he will make do. He lowers himself to the ground, checking around to make sure that none of the walkers are nearby. He figured out early on that they still rely on their senses to hunt.
One of the most disturbing patterns he noticed from his time on the streets with the hordes of undead is that they seem to be developing a group conscience. The creatures hunting the streets now are much more dangerous than the random violence of people succumbing to the disease or transformation. Whatever the hell it was.
That first night they couldn’t communicate. Couldn’t move very quickly. Couldn’t do much of anything. But in the following days they figured out how to moan and when one of them moans they would collapse on that area searching for the cause. They act with a certain predatory instinct that should never be underestimated.
Faraday laughed a lot the first night. Watching those same people who had ridiculed him for so long turn on each other and show their true selves was and irony that he couldn’t help but appreciate.
Then things started to get worse. The more of them there are in an area the smarter they are. There is a theory about early human evolution that states we could utilize pursuit predation to take down the largest animals. We would simply follow our prey until they killed themselves of exhaustion. Sure the animals could outrun humans for a short period, but then they would get tired and stop, and soon enough the human tribe would come stalking along, day after day until their prey died. Humans were like a literal Terminator, always a few steps behind the target until it gave in and died.
Faraday can see a lot of that behavior in these new pseudo humans, undead, walkers, zed, whatever you want to call them. They will pursue until there is nowhere else to run, and muscles fail, then they fall on their prey and tear into them. It is gruesome and efficient. The perfect predator.
Part of daily life for him has always been to have a lot of theories, contingency plans about why things happened and how to get out of them. He shared them with Daniel mostly. And that’s what drives Faraday as he sneaks away from the park sticking to the shadows trying to move quietly.
He wants to find Daniel just like he said he would. And he wants to protect him. He has been searching all around the houses and apartments near the Edge but no luck yet. He feels like he is narrowing it down though and must be getting closer so he continues the search.
He looks up at the street sign, Ithaca Pl. This is as far East as they could have gone he assumes. So he starts working his way back towards the highway. If Daniel were still in the coffeehouse when it went down then he must be close by.
A scream draws his attention and he whips around.
15
Daniel looks around nervously. This is the worst situation he can imagine. But he knows that they need to be out here or they will all starve to death in the apartment.
They watched in the week following the insanity. Slowly but surely. Like an inevitable wave they had lost all the TV stations. The last reports they saw had been bleak. The world was clearly coming to an end. Most of the coastal states were registering casualty rates that approached 80 or 90%. Those numbers didn’t seem possible to them at the time. There had to be somebody taking care of all this, right?
But, as the information continued to stream in they realized it was going from bad to worse. The dead were walking the earth. Hearing that for the first time, even though they had seen it themselves had changed everything. The problem was much bigger than Denver. It was happening everywhere and it was happening faster than anyone could keep up with.
When they realized help wasn’t coming they decided that they needed to figure things out on their own.
They are relatively safe in the apartment and Daniel figures that with how fast things went down there should still be some supplies in the grocery stores. A lot of useless hope that turned out to be. Daniel looks around at the empty shelving. Discarded food containers smashed and useless litter the place. The power must have gone out in this section shortly after the chaos because the food is rotten. The sickly sweet smell of decay and moldering walls sticks in his throat like bad milk.
They decided to go to the King Sooper’s that was just a few blocks down the street. Less than a mile away and after a unanimous vote they figured it would be their best shot at finding food, or anything useful.
Daniel and Isaiah, the two who decided to go searching for food work their way to the canned food aisle. Most of it is gone except for a few random cans of refried beans in the very back, some soup smashed and dented rolled under the dusty shelving.
Not enough.
They haven’t seen anyone else alive, or otherwise, in the half hour they have been out here and Daniel is thankful for that. They limited their time to only an hour. Any longer than that he figured and it would be enough time for those things to find them.
Daniel spent the days leading up to this forage mission staring out the windows, watching the creatures stumbling through the streets. He can see vaguely human traits, they group up and seem to moan to communicate. One of the strangest behaviors is that they seem to hide out during the day, staying out of direct sunlight. Those things aren’t super smart by any stretch of the imagination but Daniel doesn’t want to push it.
“Hey man you see anything?” Isaiah calls out a whispered shout. He is wearing a black sweater that they were able to find in one of the aisles. He has the forearms duct tapped and is carrying a crowbar.
They heard on the news that the infection spreads through bites or bodily fluid. And that the only way to stop the infected was to cause enough damage to the brain. So this was the best they could come up with. Duct taped cardboard around their forearms and shins. Like some sort of medieval armor.
Daniel and Isaiah both agreed that the best plan was to not draw any attention in the first place. They brought protection just in case, but Daniel doubts how effective it would be if one of the groups of walkers finds them.
“No, nothing yet,” Daniel shakes his head, “I got a few cans of soup that were rolled under the shelves.”
“That sucks,” Isaiah responds. Rarely, Daniel noticed, did Isaiah say something unless he felt like it really needed to be said.
When he asked him about it Isaiah said he learned three simple rules when he was growing up. Just a set of questions he asked himself before he said anything. Does this need to be said, does this need to be said by me, does this need to be said by me, now. And he said that had saved his marriage on a number of times.
“Well let’s keep looking. We have only been out here for like thirty minutes,” Daniel shifts some boxes out of the way searching for anything that might be useful.
The hope that no one was able to loot this place was dashed when they first started searching. Even in the few days it took for the world to break down completely, desperate people started snagging anything worthwhile. It probably happened right after the first wave of violence, when all the bodies were still on the ground figures Daniel. Then the corpses got back up and that’s when it went from really bad to much, much worse.
“Yeah, you keep looking I’m going to keep an eye on the door. I don’t want those things trapping us in here.” Isaiah says.
Isaiah has a way of thinking of problems before they arise and Daniel figures it has probably saved them all more than once. After all he was the one who got them into the backroom and away from the violence in the first place.
Daniel sneaks down the dark aisles. The tiles are grimy and mold is taking hold in the damp darkness. He holds his flashlight in front of him sweeping it back and forth. The hordes of survivors in here were thorough. The place is ransacked. His back pack hangs mostly empty from one strap around his shoulder.
A pile of boxes in a corner give him some hope and he walks over to them. He lifts the lid and recoils. The smell of rotted seafood assaults him and he steps back, willing himself not to retch everywhere.
He swings his light around and notices a back room. “Hey Isaiah,” he calls out as softly as he can to still be heard, “I found a back room I’m going to check and see if there is anything back here.”
“Yeah man sounds good,” Isaiah says.
Daniel wants to find radios. He told the group that a short two way radio would make communicating on these supply runs so much easier. Especially since it looks like forage runs going to become common if they want to stay alive.
He pushes aside the heavy plastic door. The screech of poorly oiled gears makes him cringe and he pauses holding his breath. When nothing moves he walks into the back room swinging his flashlight around. The place is just as empty as the front. Debris is strewn everywhere and he sees a splash of blood along one wall.
There is no body.
His hands shake, he takes a deep breath pushing further into the warehouse like back room.
The lack of light makes the place seem huge and the meager pool of flashlight is swallowed by the darkness. Daniel’s heart races as he moves along as quietly as he can manage. A wall of boxes provides nothing but Styrofoam.
He works his way further into the back room. It is roughly square shaped and there is a wall of garage doors where they would do deliveries. There is nothing useful to be found. In the back a corridor snakes away from the delivery area.
Daniel decides that his best bet is back there. He briefly wonders if he should go back and tell Isaiah. Those radios sound better than ever right now. But he figures if there was anything coming through Isaiah would be the first to know.
Isaiah’s hissed shout causes him to freeze in place. He turns around as fast as he can and runs for the front nearly slipping on a shattered crate of cooking oil. He sprints toward the front of the store the light casting crazily from side to side.
“Hey man we need to move now!” Isaiah hisses as Daniel clears the aisle and catches a glimpse of outside; a group of undead have spotted them and are walking in their direction with their broken awkward gait. They are collapsing in on the entrance by the time Daniel gets there.
“How did they see you?” Daniel asks his breath heaving.
“I have no idea. There is no way they could have seen me. They must have smelled us or something. They just stopped in place and then turned directly to me,” Isaiah says gripping the crow bar so hard his knuckles are white.
“We can’t go back to the girls or they will just follow us and they might attract more,” Daniel says.
The blare of a horn causes them to look up. A large black van swerves into the deserted parking lot and slams on the gas gaining speed incredibly fast. The undead stop for a moment to observe this newcomer, and then begin walking towards the van.
Daniel’s eyes go wide as he realizes what’s about to happen. The van slams into them full speed and the leading dead are thrown clear. One of them flips over the top of the van like a broken ragdoll and lands with a thud of wet meat. The driver slams on the brakes and tries to burn off speed but the gore from the corpses under his wheel causes him to lose traction and the van turns before slamming sideways into the wall a few hundred feet from them.
Daniel and Isaiah duck instinctively and when they raise their heads the door flings open. Daniel catches his breath as he sees Faraday leap from the vehicle. His head is gashed and blood is pouring down the side of his face into his matted beard but he runs at them at full speed.
“Let’s go,” he calls to them, running as fast as his legs will carry him. The dead who were left after the crash turn back towards him and begin walking in his direction. There are only four left, completely unfazed by what just occurred.
Isaiah reads and reacts to the situation he breaks out of cover into the parking lot. He sprints at the nearest undead, its green t-shirt covered in gore, it snarls and brings its hands forward to try for a grab at Faraday. Isaiah slams the crowbar down on the back of its skull. Blackish oily liquid and bits of grey brain matter spatter as the thing falls face first in a heap and stops moving.
The other undead divide going for the nearest target. Isaiah is moving again before they have a chance to grab him. He brings the crowbar down again into the temple of what used to be a heavy set woman wearing nothing but a bathrobe. Her left leg has been nearly chewed through.
The crowbar striking her makes a sickening crack sound and she falls to her side. But it isn’t enough to keep her down. Immediately she reaches out for Isaiah’s legs and trips him so that he sprawls to the ground, frantically trying to roll out of her reach.
Faraday moves in without hesitation. He pulls out a pistol and shoots three consecutive shots. Bits of brain spatter the parking lot as the last of the walking dead fall to the ground and stop moving for good.
Daniel watches amazed. Everything happened so fast that he never even moved from behind the door where they were hiding.
“Thanks for saving our asses,” Isaiah says as he stands up brushing himself off. There are drops of blood staining his sweater.
“We need to move now,” Faraday says swinging his head around. Daniel still can’t believe what he is seeing. “All this noise and there will be thousands of them here in no time. Get up,” he says, looking right at Daniel.
Daniel stands up numbly. “Tha… Thanks.” He stutters out. Seeing Faraday shoot the gun Daniel suddenly wonders if maybe Faraday wasn’t crazy at all, the way he acted so quickly maybe he really was some kind of special ops or something.
“Yeah well let’s go. We can talk when we get to wherever you’ve been staying,” Faraday says with finality.