Timothy Long - Beyond the Barriers

“I think so too. It’s a good idea to go soon, since we may have wiped out a lot of those ghouls from town. We can probably zip through that barricade, or what’s left of it, and then set out after the group.”

She leaned over and kissed me, but I caught a hint of sadness in the gesture. I looked away, because I was reminded of Pat’s sacrifice at the barrier.

We buried the remains of the deer a ways from our home. I went out with an old shovel while she straightened up the cabin. I put all the parts in an old, black plastic bag I had been using for various functions and dragged it away. The thing had a hole in it somewhere, so it leaked a trail of blood behind me. At first I tried to flip the bag over, but it was overloaded, and I was afraid it would break. I tried to cover it up by kicking leaves and pine needles over the stain, but I knew it was useless. A predator would smell the blood from a mile away.

I found a patch of ground and went at it with the shovel. It was hard, and there were a lot of roots in the way. I had to really work at it, but it felt good to stretch my muscles. At one point, I found a thick root and went back to the cabin for my axe. I tugged it from under the edge of a bench on the porch. When I looked in the window, I saw Katherine with her back to me. She was standing in the kitchen, staring out the window. I watched her for almost a minute, but she didn’t move. Then her hand went to her forehead, and I saw her shoulders move up and down as if she were sobbing.

I walked back to the hole and finished with some judicious use of the sharp blade. As I dug, I thought of my companion. She was close to me in years, but she had the weariness of someone much older. I found it very hard to put myself in her shoes, to imagine losing my entire family to those things. I knew that it made her a bit of a wildcard; I had seen the battle and the way she reacted to the things at the barricade. She had been almost gleeful while she fired into their ranks. As we drove away, she had swerved to hit some of them with my car. Just ran them down, even though they were trying to get out of the way. I had a feeling that when, and if, we did battle again, I would need to keep a close eye on her.

I looked up, because I had a strange feeling between my shoulder blades, like someone just ran a feather over my skin. I had that feeling before, a few times, when the action was hot in Iraq. Ducking had usually been the thing to do, reacting to the strange sixth sense that we humans had when being watched.

I spun in a circle as I studied the thick vegetation. It was probably Katherine coming to get me for help with something.

“That you, babe?” I called out with a smile, determined not to let her know I had seen her earlier.

Nothing.

I walked around the spot and looked toward the cabin. I sighed, dumped the bag in the hole, and pushed dirt over it. Covered in sweat, I slipped my shirt off, just as I heard movement in the distance. I snapped my gaze up, and could have sworn I saw a man walking away from the site, a good fifty feet away. Goosebumps burst out all over my body, and I reached to the back of my pants for the gun.

Only I had left the gun at the cabin.

I should have gone back and grabbed a weapon, gotten Katherine, made sure it wasn’t her I had seen. I should have done a lot of things, but instead I picked up the axe and walked toward the place where I had seen the shape. I moved as quietly as I could for a man in size 12 iron-toed boots, which wasn’t very quietly at all. Branches and twigs crunched under me, as did pinecones and green needles left to rot.

A pair of birds shot out of the woods ahead. I gasped when they took flight, but kept my cool. If I had my shotgun, I might have dropped them and had roast bird tonight. They weren’t quail, but they looked very tasty after the stuff I had fed on for the last few days. Deer was tasty but gamey, with a slight musk that reminded me of lamb. The little birds, though, with some salt and pepper on the open fire would be quite a fine meal, even if I had to spit out buckshot.

There was a small clearing ahead, and I stopped to look around, turning in a full circle. I listened when I didn’t see anything, just stood in place with my eyes closed, but nothing … wait. Was that a keening sound?

It reminded me of a dog or something, maybe caught in a trap. As much as I had traipsed over this area, it was still possible that I missed a snare left by a hunter. If it was a raccoon, I wasn’t sure what I would do. I’d probably have to kill it rather than face getting bitten trying to set it free.

I moved toward the sound, which came from the direction of the sinking sun. The bright light blinded me, so I shaded my eyes with one hand as I crept up on the location.

I came upon a man who seemed to be stuck on a tree. A branch had snagged his jacket, and he wasn’t able to get loose. He was dressed in rags, like he had lived in the woods for a long time. His hair was disheveled and full of twigs and pine needles. How long had he been out here? His jacket was green, which explained why it had been so hard to see him. It wasn’t camouflage, but the color was just the sort of green to make a person’s eyes slip past it in the woods.

“You okay?” I asked in a low tone that was meant to make him aware of my presence. I was carrying an axe, after all, and having someone creep up and scare the shit out of me was a good excuse to turn around and attack first, then ask questions while cleaning up the wounds. He did turn around, but I wasn’t expecting the vacant look on his face that proclaimed him to be dead.

I backed up as the zombie turned. He moved slowly and moaned at me. His face was a nightmare of wounds, I guessed from walking through the woods and getting his face scratched. I supposed when you didn’t feel pain, you didn’t really care about twigs whipping against your face and body.

I shuddered at the thought, then I got a look at his mouth, which was dry and covered in old blood. This contrasted against the blue lips and jagged, yellow teeth. He continued to turn and shuffle at the same time. He keened in that tone I had heard earlier, taking it for an animal. The analytical part of my brain pondered how the thing could make noise like that when he clearly wasn’t breathing. His jacket was open, and his shirt was in shreds. He even had a gaping wound in his gut, and out of that horror fell a mass of maggots and things that would haunt my sleep that night. He tried to stagger forward but remained caught. I backed up and wanted to run. I wanted to go back to the cabin and forget about what I had seen. I wanted to run screaming, then come back with one of the assault rifles and blow this horror away.

Instead, I unlimbered the axe, as if suddenly remembering it was there. I held it in two hands and regarded my opponent. Though it offered no real fight, I had to kill the thing on principle alone. When I was back in Vesper Lake, I had been fighting for my life. Now I was just doing preventive maintenance. It had to be done for our safety; I would put a rabid dog down the same way.

I lifted the axe high above my head. The back of it was flat, and I hoped it would splatter less if I hit him on the temple, and then crushed his skull while he was on the ground. I lowered the haft in a horizontal plane to the ground, watching him raise one arm toward me like an automaton. Then he tugged forward, and with a rip, the man’s jacket tore as he staggered toward me.

I swung too late and hit him in the shoulder, which pushed him to the side. He spun nearly around with the impact, but turned again to come at me. I backed up, stepped on a fallen branch, and stumbled backward. Reaching out with one hand, I found nothing to catch me, so I had to take a few steps to recover. He came at me, eyes livid and teeth bared. He moaned, and the remains of his jagged teeth and torn lips were the only things I managed to focus on.