Henry finally snapped out of his daze, turned around in a frenzy.
"What. The. Fuck!?" is all Henry could get out before he fell into the fence from turning around too fast.
He reached out behind him with both hands and was able to catch a few of the links to keep himself from falling to the ground. The baseball bat fell with a loud clang that shook inside of his head as it struck the cement footing for the chain link support. It rolled away from Henry and under the front of a pickup truck.
Coming around the far corner of the service centre closest to the road is a group of a dozen monsters that he has been trying to avoid encountering all day. After his last attack on the baseball field, Henry is not sure he's ready to deal with another.
The creatures that walked towards him did not look like anything that he had seen earlier in the day. They did not look like they were in a war like the others. Instead they looked like they were any other person, except a few who had dried blood on their chin.
Leading the pack was a woman dressed in a business suit, still carrying what looked like a briefcase. "I wonder if that lady was a banker or a real estate agent?" Henry wondered, "I guess it does not matter anymore."
Henry could not understand that this group was just as dangerous as the ones he had seen downtown. Grouped in with the banker were a half dozen teenagers, most of them still wearing their backpacks from school; there were a few men dressed in their finest business casual outfits and a couple of younger people dressed in their work uniforms for the fast food restaurants up the road.
Nothing was threatening in this group. Henry could not understand how he could feel so terrified right now.
As the group got halfway across the side of the building, Henry could begin to hear the groaning that they were making. The closer the group got the more noise they started to make and the more animated their movements became.
The banker lady raised one of her arms and almost pointed at Henry, she then took her other arm and gestured to her right. At this point the noise that she made was indescribable, Henry covered his ears and slammed his eyes shut as the frequency of the sound was at the breaking point of his sanity giving him a terrible headache.
The noise began to fade, and Henry opened his eyes and looked up towards his attackers. The group were now within 200 yards of him, and Henry started to get worried.
He started watching the group a little closer and noticed that part of the pack was breaking off and heading towards his left, in the direction that the banker pointed.
"What the fuck are they doing?" He said out loud. "I have to get out of here."
He looked around on the ground in front of him for the baseball bat and finally noticed it sticking out from underneath the front bumper of the red pickup truck in front of him.
Henry scrambled to the ground and clawed at it, trying to grab the handle of the bat. He looked around and could begin to see the feet of the group getting closer when he was looking through the wheels of the car.
He took a deep breath to calm himself down to think.
"I could crawl under the truck and over the next one, and then let them walk past me. While those things are distracted, I could..." Henry stopped talking as one of the members of the breakaway pack bent down to look under the truck. Once it spotted Henry looking at him, he dropped to the ground and began to crawl towards Henry, flashing his teeth and biting at the air.
"Well, that settles that then." Henry grabbed the handle of the baseball bat and stood up. "I've probably only got a minute to get ahead of them before they're here."
Henry started jogging towards his right, away from the breakaway pack and towards the corner of the service centre that he was going to try to avoid.
He glanced over his shoulder as he passed by the monsters and noticed that the second group changed its course and was now heading towards him again.
Henry slowed down his jog to a fast walk when he was behind the service centre; he did not want any more surprises coming out at him.
"The next lot has those few office buildings; they should be pretty safe for me to hide. If I can get far enough ahead of them, they won't know where I went."
Henry had a new plan; he was going to hide from this group of people until they had moved on and started to bother someone else.
The back of the service centre was a generic building that contained only a single entrance door with no door handle and a loading dock. "That's probably only an emergency exit, which might be a little bit safer if I had more time to break in."
While the building would have been perfect for finding some weapons to defend himself the front of the building was all glass for showcasing the latest models and would not be safe for very long once these monsters figured out he was in there.
Next to the door were a couple of garbage bins. These bins had the covers locked shut, to keep people from putting in their garbage late at night and costing the business more money. It is also a deterrent for homeless people to go looking for recyclables and sleeping.
"Oh shit!" Henry came to an abrupt stop.
Coming around the far corner of the building was Trevor, the mechanic from downtown with a few more of his friends.
"How did you get up here?" Henry looked frantically for an escape route.
He turned around in enough time to notice that the group he had been running from had come around that corner of the building and was stopped looking at him.
He looked at Trevor and noticed that his group stopped as well.
Both groups of people had stopped and seemed to be having an unspoken war about who had found him first.
Henry lifted the baseball bat and placed it on his shoulder and assumed the proper baseball stance he had learned when he was a kid playing little league. He began to make a make a slow circle in the middle of both groups of people.
Henry looked out across the highway towards his destination that he was probably never going to make it to; he looked at Trevor and his group wondering why he had not started moving. Henry took a quick look at the loading dock wondering if he could make any last stand there, he made a note of the garbage bins as he could stand on them and try to get out of reach. His turn then took him back to the banker's group of people, and Henry could tell that this was going to end soon as many members of this group begun to sway back and forth as if they were waiting for permission to go.
A sudden idea popped into Henry's mind, and he quickly turned back towards the garbage bins.
"They have wheels!" Henry almost squealed with delights, "I hope they're empty."
Henry made a run for the garbage bins just as both groups started moving towards him.
He glanced to both sides as he moved seeing who was going to end up being the first threat. Both crowds seemed to be moving at the same incredibly slow pace. Henry figured he had about a minute to get this plan into action.
He reached the garbage bin at a flat out run and slammed into the front of it. He grabbed hold of the first one and tugged on it. It did not move more than a couple of centimetres. He moved on to the next one and grabbed hold of the side of it and pulled as hard as he could. Henry was thrown backwards when the garbage bin went sailing across the pavement and came to a rest a few feet away.
Henry smiled. "This will do."
He got behind the garbage bin and started running in a straight line. Henery did not care where he ended up; he just knew that he needed to get this bin to the fence.
After a few seconds of sprinting, the garbage bin slammed into the chain-link fence and bounced off of it, sending Henry sprawling onto his back. The trash bin rolled back and bumped him in the leg, taunting him.
He looked over his shoulders as he stood up, only to find that both groups of people were within a dozen or so feet. Henry manoeuvred that garbage bin closer to the fence and scrambled up the side of it, using the railings that the machine used to pick it up as a footrest to ease his progress.
Henry pulled his feet up and stood in the middle of t
he bin as both groups of people started slamming into it shifting the trash bin from side to side slightly. He put his arms out to his side to keep his balance.
"I guess I have to do this then." He said as he looked up at the fence and his next problem, the barbed wire.
Henry looked around at the large group of people who were surrounding the garbage bin, reaching for him and pushing each other out of the way for a better chance at getting him.
It was then that Henry noticed the mechanic standing about 10 feet away, holding the arm of the banker who lay dead at his feet with her head smashed in. The mechanic stood over his conquest resting his foot on the head of the banker as if he was showing his dominance to the others in her group.
Henry rocked on his heels as one of the group members was pushed by another into the side of the garbage bin causing it to roll away from the fence slightly. He saw the teenager wearing an orange hoodie and green baseball hat pulling himself back upright, in a fit of anger he swung the bat down and connected with the face of the teenager causing it to bounce off the edge of the garbage bin. The baseball bat slammed into the side of the garbage bin with a hollow gong, the vibrations from the impact sent a shiver through his entire body and the bat flew out of his hand and into the group. The teenager fell to the ground in a heap next to the bat. The rest of the group stepped on him as they occupied the space now.
He turned back to the fence and began to rock forward on his heels a little, trying to build the courage to throw himself at the barbed wire.
"One.... Two.... Two and a half.... Two and three... screw it." Henry said as he leapt in the air.
Henry jumped at the top of the fence just as a couple of people managed to get to the front of the bin between the fence and the bin itself. They managed to push the garbage bin out a couple of feet while Henry was in the process of jumping, this caused him almost to miss the fence and land on the ground.
As it was, Henry managed to make it a little more than halfway up the fence. He quickly tried to find some footing to use to pull himself further up it and hopefully out of the reach of everyone else. The running shoes that he was wearing this morning had a bit of a pointed toe on them which made it a little easier for Henry to get some purchase on the fence and start his climb.
Henry had only made it up a little bit when he felt the first hand grab his ankle. The grip on his foot was weak as if the person who got him had a broken hand that never really healed. If the grip had of been any tighter than they would have pulled him off the fence when he kicked out at them and landed squarely on their face, their hand slide off of his foot, and he started climbing again.
Henry reached the level where the barbed wire began and put his hand up to move a piece of the wire when he was pulled down. The force of the pull made him reach out and grasp anything that he could to stay on the fence. His fingers wrapped around the barbed wire and a bladed barb dug into the meat of his hand.
Henry screamed in agony.
A great strain was being put on his upper body to hold on. Henry squeezed his hands harder to make sure he stayed on the fence. His leg was getting pulled down more and more like the man holding onto his foot was straining to put the shoe in his mouth and take a bite from it.
Blood started pouring from the wound on his hand and running down his arm. The blood started dripping from his arm and landing on the forehead of the person holding his foot, a droplet of blood fell and landed in its open mouth. As suddenly as the hand grabbed his leg, it had let go.
Henry glanced down toward the group huddled around the fence and noticed that they were tearing apart the man who just had a hold of his foot. The scent and presence of fresh blood on his body was enough for them to kill and start to eat him.
He used this distraction to pull himself the rest of the way up the fence and over the top.
Henry did not care how badly he injured himself getting to the top, anything that he might endure climbing would not be as bad as getting torn apart by these monsters.
Hoisting himself up and over top of the fence was probably the hardest workout that Henry has ever done in his life. He had to move quick enough not to give the people below another opportunity to pull him down; he also had to be on the look out for the razor wire. On more than one occasion Henry had stifled back a scream of pain as a piece of razor wire stuck out and ripped through his clothes and skin.
Henry reached the top just as most of the group lost interest in the downed man. Judging from the look of the group, "He did not taste that good did he?"
The sharp razor wire that ran over his leg and under his arm did a number to his body to this point. Henry had a large diagonal slash on his cheek, that if he had a mirror would have run from the apple of his cheek all the way to his ear. If he had been leaning slightly further to the right Henry would have lost his ear when that man grabbed his foot. The gashes on his legs and arms would likely heal with time; they were only a superficial wound compared to the deep cut on his hand from trying to keep hold of the fence earlier.
Henry grimaced in pain as he flexed his hand open and closed to see how deep the wound was. Every time he opened his hand to see the depth he would only have a fraction of a second to look before it became full of blood.
"Ahh. That's not going to heal right if I cannot get to the hospital and get it cleaned." He said as he looked back down towards the ground.
He squeezed his hand shut and held it out over the side of the fence and onto the people below him. The scent of blood got the group into a frenzy as they pushed and shoved each other trying to get at the source.
One by one each member of the group trying to kill him turned their eyes up and looked deep into Henry's eyes.
Henry shuddered. "This is getting creepy. They look like starving dogs, and I just opened the last can of food in the house."
He took a moment to survey the area around him, sure that the noise of his friends below would have undoubtedly attracted some attention.
"There cannot be this much damage and no one around. Can there?" Henry asked to himself. "Then again, the baseball field was empty. Why would someone hang around when there is no one to kill?"
From this new vantage point, Henry could see in all directions.
On the other side of the overturned tractor trailer was an abandoned station waggon with all of the doors left open. The car left in the middle of the highway and another two cars slammed into each other trying to avoid it. Cars, trucks and motorcycles were all on the freeway, in the ditch, closest to him lay the wreckage of a bike, the driver of the bike was still holding the handlebars, the roof of a pickup truck pinned his legs.
Henry grimaced at the thought of what that driver must have gone through.
He peered into all of the vehicles that he could see, looking for bodies that did not look quite right; bodies that, like the one Henry encountered in the dugout, were not quite as dead as he thought. All of the bodies that Henry could see around him were in various stages of destruction, either by fire or dismemberment.
After a half dozen vehicles Henry was on the verge of vomiting again and had to stop. He placed his hands on his thighs and leant forward a little, making sure he did not throw up on his clothes if he did feel the need.
Henry looked down at the ground below him. While he was never scared of heights, Henry was afraid of falling and injuring himself. More specifically Henry did not want to fall and hurt his ankle since it was his speed that has kept him alive this long.
"How am I going to get down from here?"
As if hearing his problem, a few of the people at the bottom of the fence grabbed hold of the links in the fence and began to shake it violently.
Henry threw his arms out to regain his balance and managed almost to grab hold of another piece of razor wire. He saw where his hand was going before he made a fist around it and quickly moved his hand to the left to miss it.
Henry's body was rocking from side-to-side as the shaking fence become more and more
violent. The people below were getting more and more animated as Henry started leaning further and further to the sides.
"Ah, shit," Henry said as his body started listing more to the side.
The only thing keeping Henry from falling over the side was his grip on the barbed wire.
"I gotta jump." Henry thought to himself.
He spotted a large patch of grass at the bottom of the fence that was going back up the embankment towards the road.
As he rocked towards the road, Henry released his grip on the wire and pushed off the fence with the foot that was on that side of it.
Henry smiled a little as he sailed through the air; he knew he was going to make it. Then his pant leg got caught up in a piece of razor wire, and his forward momentum stopped, and Henry fell to the ground at the bottom of the fence.
Henry did a small turn in the air, to try and put some of the force of the landing on his shoulder and hip as he knew he could take more punishment on those parts of his body than his ankles or back. He misjudged the grade of the hill and over rotated; he landed on the hill firmly on his chest.
A puff of air escaped his chest, and Henry struggled to breathe.
Gasping for air, Henry began to wheeze and suck air into his lungs. Panic began to fill his head as he did not want to die, not like this.
He rolled over onto his back and looked up at the sky, still trying to regain his composure. Tears started rolling down his cheeks as Henry began to accept the inevitable and he wanted to look at something happy for his last thought.
His breathing started to return to normal, and he was no longer sucking so hard to fill his lungs. Henry sighed with relief and let out a little laugh.
He closed his eyes and went to wipe the tears from his cheeks when he felt something like a blade of grass brush against the top of his head. He wiped away at it absentmindedly and tried to return to his peaceful spot.
The blade of grass brushed against his head again, as he reached up to wipe it away, he thought "I do not remember it being windy today."
Just then a hand wrapped around his arm and started pulling it towards the fence. Henry felt the grip of another hand on his arm as his body started moving up the hill.
He could hear ragged and excited breathing coming from the other side of the fence. In his mild panic after falling, he did not bother to check how far away from the fence he landed, he was only two feet away from it and several of the smaller teenagers had managed to get their entire arms through it and were pulling him towards their eager mouths.
Three teenagers had their arms through the fence and the faces of a half dozen others pressed against the chain moving their mouths open and shut waiting for his arm to get close enough to enjoy.
Henry pulled back against them using what strength he had in his arms after being deprived of oxygen and exerting all of his energy this morning; he could not muster enough strength against them. He rolled over onto his left side and using any power he could manage he was able to bring his feet up and put them on the fence a couple of feet away.
He wrapped his free arm around his other hand and brought it close to his chest then straightened his legs out using the fence for leverage. As he tensed his body, his chest moved up and away from the fence putting a lot of strain on the arms of people on the other side of it. He moved his feet up the fence and closer to his body and straightened again. He closed his eyes tight and mustered all of the strength he could.
Suddenly Henry's body was thrown back and away from the fence; he started to roll down the hill.
"They must have let go." He thought to himself as he opened his eyes.
Henry looked back towards the fence and could see several of the teenagers were missing the lower portions of their arms. He looked down as his arm and could see two hands and forearms still gripped around his wrist. He threw his arms around in the air to detach the grasp of the limbs.
The arms fell to the ground with a dull thud.
He looked back to the fence and the teenagers. Neither of the teenagers showed any sign of pain at the detachment of their limbs. The bloody stumps he expected to be spraying and dripping blood at the severing of a semi-major artery were dry.
"What that hell are those things?"
Henry turned and scrambled up the hill and onto the highway.
Without glancing back towards the fence, Henry crossed the road, walked down into the median and on the other side. Henry focused on making it to the Wholesale store that was at the other end of the mall.
If he had taken a moment to look behind him, he would have noticed several members of the group trying to mimic what he had done earlier by climbing the fence to get at him.
Chapter Thirteen