“I’ll leave as many signs as I can,” Greg was telling Ken. “Something that you’ll recognize, but I’ll try to make it something that won’t tip off the...whatever the hell they are.”
“Okay,” Ken agreed, but Nancy could tell that in his heart he didn’t expect to ever see any of Greg’s signs. “We’ll find it,” he lied.
Nancy peeked out the kitchen window. “They’re mostly gathered around the East side of the property,” she told the men. “I think we should take off out of one of the West-side windows. If we can make it to the trees the terrain might slow them down.”
Ken nodded, turned to Greg again. “Once they follow us to the trees, you make damn sure that no eyes are on you and then you run like mad, you hear me?”
Greg took a deep breath. He didn’t answer, but Nancy knew he’d do it.
“Weapons?” she asked. Her heart was pounding with anxiety, but somehow she also felt liberated. If they succeeded, it would be a great moment. If they died trying, at least they would have given Greg and Sarah a chance, and they would die together and not have to face the darkness alone. It sounded like the thought process of a crazy woman. Maybe it was.
“There are two handguns in the basement,” Ken suggested. “We should take those, because the bigger guns would just slow us down.”
Nancy agreed and ran to the lower level to grab them. As a second thought she also snagged the lightest of the rifles and brought it upstairs to Greg. He accepted it without looking at her. She stifled a pain-filled sigh and instead looked at Sarah. “Be good, baby girl,” she cooed. “Listen to your big brother and be strong, okay?” Her voice broke and the tears started flowing again. She realized, as Greg surely did, that she was saying “Good-bye”, just in case. She kissed the little girl on the head and received a giggly raspberry in response.
Ken placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently. “Let’s go,” he suggested. “Before we lose our nerve.”
The minutes that followed passed so quickly in front of Nancy’s eyes that she felt as though time had sped up and was slipping through her fingers. She looked behind her as Ken led her to the opposite side of the house and saw Greg looking back at her. The pain on his face was almost enough to make her reconsider. But then, suddenly, they were at the window. Ken undid the latch and slid the pane upward, and before the zombies could catch sight of them they’d jumped out together. They took off running. Nancy clutched the fake baby close to her chest and made a point to look up as they ran within sight of the barn. The demon girl glared down at them and then there was a terrifying din in the air as the hoard was alerted to their presence. They swarmed. What had before looked like a hundred or so zombies now seemed to be a thousand. They were everywhere. Nancy’s voice betrayed a squeak of terror as she ran for her life. Ken fired off three shots to clear the way to the forest. Nancy took four of her own, but she didn’t see whether any of the shots were good. It didn’t matter; there was a small gap in the crowd so they leaped over a fallen zombie and sprinted for the trees as hard as they could.
Nancy was suddenly jerked backward as a zombie almost snatched the fake baby right out of her arms. Two parts of her mind warred with each other.
Drop it and RUN!
yelled one part.
If the girl sees that the baby is fake, it’s all been a stupid waste!
screamed the other.
Before she could make the decision, Ken’s gun was pressed against the zombies head, and then the zombie was gone and Ken was pulling her through the snarling, decomposing crowd.
Nancy risked one last quick glance back at the demon girl as they broke through the tree-line. The girl’s crimson-red eyes were as visible as though they’d been standing directly in front of her.
The sun fell behind the trees, and the echo of hundreds of hungry, merciless moans followed them therein.
The fear was immeasurable. They ran faster than they ever imagined they could, never letting up for a second, until Nancy’s throat burned like hot coals and her heart was threatening to throw in the towel for good. When she began to slow, Ken tightened his grip on her wrist and dragged her. When she began to stumble and fall he hauled her up onto his back and kept moving. In a corner of her exhausted and frightened mind she couldn’t help but wonder where his energy was coming from.
Night fell as they wove through the trees. Ken hiked Nancy up every so often to make sure she didn’t fall. Eventually he slowed, his breath ragged, and without warning a large root seemed to leap from the Earth and wrapped around his foot. With a yelp, he was thrown to the ground. Nancy went flying off his back and into a large, sharp bush. They both groaned and cursed. Now that he’d been stopped, Ken couldn’t seem to find the will to get up and keep moving.
Nancy crawled from the bushes. The dozens of tiny cuts all over her meant nothing. She made her way on hands and knees to where Ken lay in the dirt and leaves.
“I’m...sorry...” he sputtered. He couldn’t seem to take in enough air to speak. “Can’t...go...on...”
“It’s okay,” she assured him. Her words did nothing to convince him, if the pain and misery etched on his face was to be believed. “We’ll wait here and rest for a little while.”
They didn’t have to voice what they were both thinking. The zombies would catch up eventually. They didn’t tire, they had no reason to stop, and their prey was on foot. Plus, now that they were out in the open, the demon child could find them much more easily and lead her hoard right to them. Regardless of how tired Nancy and Ken might be, they really couldn’t afford to rest.
Nancy helped Ken into a sitting position and backed him up against the trunk of a large tree. She snuggled down next to him. It was only early fall, but the evening winds were chilly and would only get colder throughout the night. Ken put his arm around Nancy and sighed out his aches and fatigue. Nancy sniffled to herself and prayed to whomever might listen that Greg had gotten away with the baby.
Eventually Ken drifted off, having expended every ounce of his energy. Nancy took his hand in hers and tried her very hardest to stay awake. She needed to watch over him, protect him like he had done for her. She held out longer than some people would have, but eventually the sweet allure of sleep seduced her and she found herself dozing off into a restless slumber.
She woke with a start, the tiny fragments of a dream flitting away as she remembered where she was and what was happening. She could hear them. It didn’t sound like there were many yet, but at least a few of them had caught up.
Nancy turned to Ken and shook him hard. He woke slowly. There was drowsiness etched around his eyes. He looked at her as though he’d never seen her before in his life. “Huh?” he asked. Nancy shook him harder, desperate to get him awake and moving. “Up!” she hissed. “Up now! They’re coming! We fell asleep! They could be on us any second!”
For a few torturous moments it didn’t seem that Ken was understanding the words coming out of her mouth, but then, suddenly, his eyes went wide and his body stiffened. His ears pricked up at the moaning and cracking of twigs and leaves beneath dead feet. He scrambled to get up and almost fell flat on his face. Nancy quickly grabbed his arm, threw it over her shoulders, and forced herself to move. It wasn’t an easy task; she was extremely tired herself, and Ken was much heavier than she was. Several times she found herself tipping precariously. She almost went head-over-heels over several roots that she couldn’t quite seem to lift her feet high enough to avoid. When she stumbled and rammed her shoulder into a tree Ken spoke again.
“Nancy, thank you,” he said sadly. “But I think you should leave me. Run as fast as you can.”
Nancy’s head ached from the variety of emotions that stirred within her. With all the strength she could muster she slammed Ken’s body up against the tree she had run into, took half a step back, and grabbed him on either side of his face. His eyes were wide. Nancy stared into them with a hard, frustrated look on her face. She squeezed her fingers into his jawbone and clenched her teeth. “I am not leaving you behind.” She emphasized each word with a stubborn anger that couldn’t be argued with. “We are going together or we are not going at all. If you even think about trying to throw yourself to the wolves I swear I will plunk myself down next to you and we’ll be eaten together. Do you understand me?”
Ken gave a minuscule nod. That wasn’t good enough for Nancy, so she squeezed his face even harder. “Do. You. Understand. Me?”
This time Ken nodded enthusiastically, and when Nancy threw his arm over her shoulders again he put every ounce of willpower that was left in him into moving along beside her.
The groaning only seemed to be getting closer, no matter how fast they tried to move. Despite what she’d told Ken, Nancy was beginning to think that maybe laying down and dying was simply the only course of action left to them. Surely at this point it was inevitable? They couldn’t keep moving for long in this state.
“Look!” Ken whispered suddenly. There was excitement in his voice. In her depressed stupor Nancy was barely able to lift her head to see where he was pointing, but when she did her eyes lit up. It was an old cabin, probably someone’s hunting retreat, and it looked abandoned. It was almost entirely made of brick, except for the roof and a wooden enclosure off to one side that protected a pile of firewood from the rain. It wasn’t a stronghold by any means, but it had a nice, solid-looking door and thick, dark curtains on the windows. They hobbled up to it excitedly.
“We don’t want to smash the lock if we don’t have to,” Nancy was murmuring to herself.
“Here,” Ken told her with a grin. He waved a small, silver key that he’d pulled down from the shade of the light next to the door. Nancy grabbed it, shoved it in the lock, and held her breath as it turned. The door clicked open. The sound was like a choir of angels bursting into a glorious rendition of Hallelujah. They rushed inside, shut the door, and pushed the first thing they saw (an old, cushy armchair) in front of it before collapsing to the floor. They passed out with their arms around each other.
Nancy had terrible nightmares. They weren’t like the ones she’d been having for the past weeks. In those dreams she had been somehow calm, as though she was watching the world fall apart from somewhere afar and untouched. These new nightmares were terrifying. They came one after another, an anthology of death and destruction. In one of them she was running through the woods again, but she tripped and was overtaken by the zombies while Ken’s voice accused her of dooming them. In another she watched, mute and helpless, as a wall of zombies converged on Greg and Sarah. Greg screamed and protected the sobbing baby with his body, but the zombies tore him apart and carried Sarah off as though she was some kind of morbid trophy of their conquest. In the last nightmare Nancy watched from some strange, high vantage point while Ken stood in a circle of zombies, desperately trying to shoot them all off with a rifle. She tried to scream to him as the zombies moved ever closer, but he couldn’t hear her and she couldn’t get to him. She watched as he was torn limb from limb.
She woke from the third nightmare screaming, only to have a hand quickly clapped against her mouth. She opened her teary eyes and looked - with no lack of relief - at Ken. He had a finger to his lips, telling her to be quiet. She nodded. He released her face. She took a deep, calming breath of air.
She looked around the cabin. It was day again, she gathered from the tiny streaks of light sneaking in through the edges of the curtains. The cabin was mostly furnished with an older generation of living room furniture, an old, possibly homemade kitchen table, and what appeared to be a double-sized bed with a colorful quilt in the back room. There was a gun rack on the far wall that housed five older-style hunting rifles, one of which had been removed and was now laying on the kitchen table next to a large box of ammunition. Ken had been busy while Nancy was asleep.
“What’s going on?” she whispered.
Ken answered by pointing at the kitchen window, where a slow-moving but very foreboding shadow was wandering by. “They’ve been walking past the house,” he said very quietly. “I don’t know if they know we’re in here or not, but they haven’t tried to get in so I’m thinking not. They just keep wandering through the woods as though they think we’re nearby but can’t quite figure out where we went.”
Nancy nodded, calm under the circumstances, but she was shivering on the inside.
Ken tiptoed to the kitchen area, grabbed the rifle and a box of granola bars from the kitchen counter and motioned for Nancy to follow him. He lead her into the bathroom, where there was no window, and gently closed the door. He laid the rifle across the sink before tearing open a granola bar and handing it to Nancy. She devoured it without hesitation. With a spark of pain she wondered if Greg had gotten a chance to feed Sarah yet, or if... No. She shook her head in defiance to keep herself from thinking about it.
“When did you wake up?” she asked Ken.
He shook his head a little. “Barely an hour ago,” he replied. “I scouted around and found some ammo for the guns and that was about it. I was actually just about to move you to the bed when you woke.” His face changed a little then. “What were you dreaming about?” he asked.
Nancy’s eyes fell down to the dusty cushion floor. It had an absolutely hideous orange floral design. “Nightmare,” she said. Ken didn’t press the matter.
Between the two of them the entire box of granola bars was soon gone. Ken took his new rifle and made a quick trip to the kitchen for a couple of glasses, which he returned with and filled at the bathroom sink. The water wasn’t the freshest, but it was cool and helped them swallow the last of their makeshift meal. They sat in silence for a few minutes afterward.