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Deadend, Tribeca, New York - Photo by Sean Ng |
The sun retreated without promise of a tomorrow as darkness
crept through the alleyways of the abandoned streets, devouring the remaining light without mercy. A putrid stench of death hung in the air like a
suffocating fog, clinging to everything that it came in contact
with.
Charlie couldn't smell it anymore. He hadn't in quite some time.
Buildings
rose near endlessly into the sky around him like giant skeletons striped bare of their flesh. Once the pillar of modern civilization,
now the streets of New York were nothing more than trackless miles of rusted steel frames and
concrete mausoleums for the dead and hunting grounds for the eaters.
Charlie’s chest heaved with exhaustion. Eleven dead bodies lay around him as he sat against the side of an old condominium on the corner of Jay and Staple Street. He hadn’t seen another living soul in several months, which was fine with him. Everyone he ever met eventually got killed or was turned.
Today had been a productive day; thirty-seven
kills in all. Not bad for a 15-year-old from Bigfoot, Texas. Charlie had been
visiting his aunt in New York when the zombie virus broke out. The pandemic initially
outright killed people in droves, but when it morphed into an airborne pathogen,
it changed everything. The new form didn't quite kill its host, but instead,
turned them into an efficient, man-eating, killing machine with heightened
senses and a veracious appetite for flesh.
Charlie
appeared immune; he had the scars from bite wounds to prove it.
A
scream pierced the silence. Charlie instinctively jumped to his feet and
resumed a combat grip on his blood stained bat. The scream came again, but it wasn't one of them. He fallowed the sound north on Staple Street until he came
to an alley. The screams morphed into terror. Four of them had a young girl
cornered at the end of the alley. She was clamoring up an old mattress stacked on
top of a pile of trash bags.
Charlie
hated using his gun, but if he didn't shut her up soon the whole city of eaters
would be on them. He charged. Pulling his pistol from his side, he unloaded a
flurry of shots that tore through both flesh and bone. As he closed the gap,
Charlie finished off the last one with a backhanded swing with his Slugger. Before Charlie could catch his breath, he heard the
thunder of footsteps behind him. He spun on his heals to find a horde of them
pouring down the alleyway.
Charlie
snatched the girl by the hand a drug her to the only fire escape within reach and lifted her
up to the ladder. She latched on and climbed. Charlie leapt up behind her. As he
began to pull himself up, the mass of flesh-eaters pounced and grabbed Charlie by
his feet. He kicked furiously and broke free, but so did the rusty bolts
holding the ladder. Charlie’s last image was seeing the girl clinging to the
terrace above with desperation as the eaters engulfed him.
Michael A. Walker
Defying Procrastination
The above is my entry into a flash challenge hosted by the awesome J Whitworth Hazzard, author of the spectacular Dead Sea Games Series.
Like my story? -Kickstart the zombie apocalypse by publishing Dead Sea Games
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