Mark Clodi - Ascension

A wicked wind kicked up dust limiting vision to less than a mile and making the wide open prairie feel like a confining box. Despite the dust in the air the sun was still heating up the land on the warm August afternoon as the man and the dog marched along the gravel road. 'Not that the dog seems to care.' Red thought to himself. Since walking away from a fight with the powerful zombie that had killed Nita and taken Hugh, Red had done a lot of walking. Walking and thinking. 'It isn't like me to complain about how unfair everything seems to have gotten. But here I am.'

"Here, Reilly, c'mon girl. Leave that alone." Red called to the dog. His words pulled it away from the corpse at the side of the road, a human body with a sizable head wound. Someone knew how to kill zombies around here. The dog still growled in Red's direction, but she left off gnawing on the old woman where she lay. "That's a girl. Good dog." It just didn't seem right to Red to have the dog eating human flesh. 'That's reserved for me.' Not that this flesh appealed to Red; it had been dead a long while and all the swirling energy that was contained in the body had long since fled.

The day he left the fight he had taken a motorcycle and driven up Highway 80 to southeastern Wyoming. Red ran out of gas half an hour after crossing the border, Red didn't bother looking for any more, walking would suit him just as well. He did prop the bike up next to one of the many accidents along the road. It was a good machine and might come in handy for someone else if they wanted to find gas for it. Red had nowhere to go, yet he still went on. The road signs giving the distance to Cheyenne told him he was less than eight miles out. After thinking about it briefly he decided to cut across country instead of heading through another city. Cities were full of zombies or people trying to kill zombies and he didn't want the drama.

At the edge of his dust limited vision he could see a large farm house. He set off for it because having a destination, even such a short term one, seemed better than wandering around aimlessly. Red wasn't worried that he would run into any gun-toting humans in the farmhouse; the place was empty of both the living and the dead. Having an extended 'zombie vision' was convenient; it made finding human meals easier, but also allowed him to steer clear of other zombies. After the last couple of days Red was sure he was going to avoid making any friends for a while, living or dead. 'Reilly is enough. Maybe I will find some other dogs to keep her company. She needs some socializing.' Trudging into the yard of the house Red felt there was something wrong almost immediately. He stood on the packed gravel drive and tried to put his finger on what was wrong. A cow mooed softly from the shade of the barn, a dozen chickens were gathered around a water filled bowl set in the shade of the same structure. From the fence a huge pink pig snorted at him and turned back to wallowing in the mud.

'It's the animals, they should be dead by now.' Red had passed several ranches and farms and come across dead livestock of all sorts. Farm animals didn't feed themselves and tended to die after a few days without water. These animals were fine, well cared for too, by the look of it. Red turned to get a better look at the pig as the shot rang out. He was thrown to the ground in a puff of dust by the shot, which had caught him in the left shoulder. Scrambling around he tried to get to the barn as more shots rang out, followed by cursing from the direction of the house.

Frantically, Red sought out his opponent, 'Nothing. The damned guy is invisible!' Reaching the lucrative safety of the barn Red turned and peered out of the doorway towards the house. Shifting his vision back to what he thought of as 'near human' to spy out his opponent. A weight hit him in the back and knocked him forward into the side of the door, pinning him there. Three long, slender tines were poking out of his chest and embedded in the wooden frame of the doorway. Red was not a natural fighter, the last few months of unlife had seen fit to give him a rudimentary education in brawling, but that was the best he could manage. Usually his strength was enough if he got into a tussle with someone else. The problem now was getting a grip on his opponent, the man moved around quickly and it took Red valuable seconds to pull away from where he was pinned with the pitchfork and twist around. Once he accomplished this Red stopped dead in his tracks.

"Why you're…you're just a boy!" He said with surprise.

"And you're dead mister." the boy sneered as another shot rang out and hit Red from behind, this time striking him just above his right elbow.

The shot was a disappointment to the boy who screamed, "Goddamn it, Jimbo! You can't shoot worth shit!"

Red stepped sideways to move out of sight from the shooter. The boy leaped up into the hayloft, making the jump of more than twenty feet in a single bound. Dumbfounded, Red realized the boy was a zombie, he had to be, or else Red was seeing things. Quickly he switched to his zombie sight to track the boy before he disappeared, the boy hardly registered in Red's vision. His aura was so faint that Red would never have considered him a zombie. Now that he had seen the boy moving he knew what he was dealing with. Reaching out mentally he grabbed for the boy with his mind, 'Time to be unfair, but for me this time.'

Like a slippery trout the boy's mind slid through Red's grasp. The effort was not without results though, the boy slowed down and Red was able to tell that he was facing a much weaker zombie than he was. Surprisingly the boy was from the same line as Re, which meant that somewhere along the line Red had infected the zombie that had infected the boy. This meant that Red should have more control over him, not less. 'Something is going on here and I need to find out what. I could use what they are doing.'

In a flash the boy was gone, jumping through an open door in the hayloft to land in the driveway in front of the barn. Red shrugged and turned again towards the open door, bumping the long handle of the pitchfork into the wall as he turned. Frowning Red tried to reach the handle of the tool, but couldn't do it. Looking around for something to help pull it out of him he saw Reilly cowering by the side of the wall, looking at him.

"Lotta help you've been. What happened to barking? You bark at every god damned butterfly or grasshopper for two hundred miles, but when I need it you curl up and go all cowardly on me?" The dog crouched down more and whimpered, "Aw, shit. Sorry, I know this ain't been easy on you either. Just lay low. Good girl."

"You talking to the dog?" called a voice from outside.

"Well I ain't talking to you, no." Red yelled. He grasped the middle tine of the pitchfork and pushed it down even with his chest. 'Right through the solar plexus, pretty good shot.'

"What do you want?"

Red stopped to think for a moment.

"You hear me? I want to know what you want."

"Yeah, you got a right nice way of asking for it mister. You behind the barrel of a gun, ambushing me in the driveway. Then stabbing me a pitchfork."

"Times are…difficult. We didn't want any trouble and people like you cause lots of it."

"People like me?"

"Yeah, don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. Early made zombies; the oldest ones. You're pretty old. If I had to guess, from your accent you aren't from the area, which means you were one of the first."

"Yes, that's right." Red said, growing concerned that the man could tell things about him. Red tried to read the guy, but he couldn't. Like the boy he slid away like a trout in a stream. Again Red was able to get a sense that the zombie he was talking to was much younger than he was which should have made this an uneven relationship in his favor.