the corner on the street she needed. Not to mention, on top of the building that housed the gun shop. The only problem with that thought was the size of each building and their distance apart. The next building over was just as close as the last one, but the space between that one and the one beyond that was nearly the width of a house and there was no way she could jump that.
She made the leap across, knowing that it would be the last one she’d be capable of for a while. She was almost done in physically. She might even have a cracked rib. It hurt to breathe. As it had looked from one building back, the distance between this one and the next was impossible to make without a bridge.
Her only choice was down the fire escape.
As she reached the edge of the roof, she realized the further problem with that option.
The parking lot below was full of the infected.
She thought of how Alex would have helped her through this and would probably have thought of better ways to do it all and a lump rose in her throat.
They had gone for supplies together. The time was somewhere around noon, when the sun was highest. The infected seemed far less alert in the hot afternoon sun. Perhaps whatever was burning through their systems, rotting their bodies and causing them to walk again at the same time was working that much faster in such heat. Neither Alex nor Vicky knew the reason, only that it afforded them a better chance at making a supply run.
And they had almost made it without incident. No infected in their path for the entire trip to the store. None in the store either, which was surprising since it would have been a cool retreat from the summer heat. They’d passed within yards of more than a few who just lay there in the streets or on the sidewalks, as though dead or sleeping, but none had noticed them.
And then less than a half block from home, one had.
A young dark skinned infected woman who’d been slumped against the building had smelled them, perhaps, or heard the scuff of shoe on concrete. Whatever had alerted her; she let out a defiant, hungry cry and staggered to her feet. She continued to cry out most of the way down the alley. Mere moments later, it was blocked from both ends.
They were swarmed with infected in seconds. It seemed impossible that so many could come out of nowhere so quickly, but there was no time to think of that. There was a ladder going up the side of one of the buildings and Alex had pointed her to it. They had taken down four of the creatures before she had been able to start climbing and Alex took two more out as she got to a height where he could start climbing beneath her.
As he fell in behind her, however, she heard a long hiss of air from Alex.
There was the squeak of rubber on metal, the whisk of cloth against cloth, and then a thud, followed quickly by a grunt.
Vicky looked down just in time to see his body come to a rest not far below.
His eyes were closed. He looked so peaceful.
Then they were screaming and reaching for her while others fell upon Alex’s dead or unconscious body. Whichever the case, he never made a sound as they tore him apart.
Vicky had caught one last look at all of the blood as she frantically climbed the side of the building and that look hung with her now. Not a day passed when she didn’t think of that moment and wonder if she might have been able to do something. But what could she have done? No matter how many times she tried to convince herself of that fact, she couldn’t help but think that there had to be something. But what did it matter? She didn’t have a time machine. And even if she did, there had to have been at least forty of the infected in that alley.
She looked up from the parking lot to the sky and sighed. It was a perfect day; bright blue with hardly a cloud in site. It was hot too. It was the type of day that she and Alex might have spent at the beach or camping or walking through the parks before all of this shit and she hated the world and God and the infected masses below and whatever else it was possible to hate at that moment. How dare it be sunny? As ridiculous as that thought was, it was relevant to the current situation. How ridiculous was it for the sun to be shining when the world was dead? When the dead ones literally walked in the streets eating whatever they found that still breathed and sometimes each other. It was hell on earth – her hell – and she wondered in that moment if she hadn’t already died. Was she in her own world of eternal torment? Were people living on right now somewhere else? Was this all for her? If she went on out of sheer stubbornness – and what else could it be for without Alex – would it just get harder and harder until it drove her insane?
She stepped toward the edge. A couple of seconds and it would be over. She thought of her previous fear of surviving the fall only to be eaten alive and become one of them. She knew it was possible. But wasn’t that inevitable anyway, unless she shot herself in the head? No matter what happened, it seemed as though that was the eventual outcome. So why not take the chance?
She stood for a moment with her feet half over the edge, bending them slightly and wavering forward and back momentarily.
A light breeze blew her hair around and reminded her how high up she was. Her fear of heights kicked in and she felt a brief panic. That made her laugh, and for a moment the fear died away. Here she was standing at the edge of an apartment building, trying to prepare herself to jump to her death, and she found herself afraid of falling. If that wasn’t irony, she didn’t know what was. She couldn’t kill herself. That was painfully obvious.
‘But they can,’ she thought. Sure, the fucking Zombies, or infected or undead or whatever the hell you wanted to call them, could. And she wouldn’t have the guilt of suicide. ‘And if this is hell,’ she thought, ‘I’ll know it if I somehow manage to survive.’
Three buildings down to the gun shop. If, that was, someone didn’t clean it out when this whole mess started. That was always a possibility.
The next building down was too far away to jump. She’d already seen that.
She turned and ran toward the front.
Half way across the roof, there was a sharp incline and nothing but painted tar or something similar to cling to. She scrambled up it and across the short section of roof that was left up there, to the edge.
Below in the streets, the masses were moving to the opposite side of the building. They were out of the streets for the most part. There would just be a few in her way. She looked up the street in the direction of the gun store and found that way to be equally empty. The fire in the building next door had the ones on this side, at least, partially mesmerized. They weren’t all that smart, at least the ones that she had seen.
On the other side of the building was a section with some windows, where a small apartment or something had been. She ran to it, but there didn’t seem to be a way in from up here.
Back to the parking lot side, she got onto the old fire escape and started down.
Several of the infected mass below saw her and began shambling her way.
Two floors down, however, she found what she was looking for.
The door to the fire escape for that level was locked, as was the last one, but there were windows, and she kicked one in.
Seconds later she was crawling into an apartment that seemed fairly clean. In her building, lots of people had panicked at the end, cleared out in a hurry, and left behind messes. Some had committed suicide. Some had been infected. This apartment, aside from a generous accrual of dust, looked as though someone had stepped out to work and never come back.
She carefully made her way around the corner into the main room of the place. There were the usual things. A television, various devices that went along with it, a couch, a chair, but what she found on the wall was more along the lines of what she had been wishing for.
Whoever had lived here had obviously been a collector of various kinds of knives and short swords. There were a few curved blades about the length of her forearm and they looked sharp.
Directly above the couch was a shotgun.
She went for it, disbelieving her luck. That she had picked this place seem
ed statistically impossible.
Her hands closed on the shotgun and the excitement went immediately out of her. It was plastic. Just for decoration.
The blades were real, however. Maybe they were made more for decoration than for fighting, but they appeared to be sharp and strong enough to kill a few slow moving infected.
She plucked two in particular off the wall and almost left her machete behind. There was another machete, however, and she decided that with the sheaths the previous inhabitant of this place had here, she could at least keep the two of them as backup.
She searched the place slowly, keeping one of the curved short swords in front of her. What she imagined must be the bedroom was locked. She tried the handle a couple of times, then more forcefully.
Without warning a thunderous boom rang out and a part of the door disappeared.
Shock turned to panic and she fell backwards on her ass, scrambling up and into the couch, ears ringing, heart racing, skin cold with fear.
A few seconds passed and nothing happened, not that she would have heard any but the most deliberate of sounds from within the room with her ears ringing like that. And then a shotgun – a real one this time – came through the hole in the door. Behind it was a face that looked as terrified as she was.
“Jesus!” he said.
He was barely past his teens, shaggy blond hair, scrawny. He didn’t look as though he’d