Flash Fic #13 – This One Has Zombies On It

I had no idea how they hadn’t seen me. Perhaps I was covered in so much blood they thought I was already dead, and the living ones were tastier. Not that they were still living. Steve had been reduced to a length of intestine, and I wasn’t even sure if it was Steve’s. In fact, I wasn’t even sure if the intestine wouldn’t come back to life, wrap itself around my throat and disgustingly try to choke me to death. Jeanne’s ribcage had been pried open and now looked like a meaty bowl, with her chewed-on organs floating on a pool of blood and zombie saliva. I was a bit creeped out by myself checking out her bare, blood-drenched tits anyway. I just had to, I kind of had a crush on Jeanne when her ribcage was still intact and her rack looked fine. Harry was the unluckiest one, because the zombies decided to start with his feet and went up, taking their time with every muscle. At two minutes, he should have been in shock, but his incessant screaming indicated otherwise, to the point of pissing off a zombie who ate half his throat before resuming the meal on his nether bits, so Harry just gurgled until death.

I was absolutely still throughout the whole thing. My face was the victim of Steve’s arterial spray and I fell on my arse, failing to get up or shoot my pistol. So I just went with it and pretended to be dead. I doubted I could have helped them with twenty zombies in the room and only eight bullets on my gun. When they were done eating, half an hour later, they left, one by one, not even glancing at me. I was probably very convincingly dead.

I raised my head and looked down — my shirt had been almost entirely covered in blood and what looked like a bit of stomach that had probably fallen from a zombie’s mouth. My pants were equally colored, and there was so much blood around that when I got up, my steps went “squish squish squish”. I hoped the guns left behind by the group were blood-proof. I picked up Steve’s AK-47, the one I had originally found but the fucker had sweet-talked for himself. I shook it a bit to get some of the blood off and, well, what else could I do with it? I put it under my arm and saw Jeanne’s pistol not far from her partially devoured hand. I picked it up and removed the magazine, which she hadn’t had the chance to use, and pocketed it. After a moment’s thought, the gun also went on the back of my pants, magazine reloaded into it, just in case.

And finally, there was Harry’s shotgun.

I picked it up, glancing quickly at Harry. His frozen, dead face looked like he was still screaming, but perhaps that was because his jaw had been ripped off. I almost slipped on it. I cocked the shotgun, for no particular reason besides looking cool, and shook some blood out of it. It had been fired twice, with four shells remaining. I examined the bloody mess that Harry had become, trying to see where his pockets were. I failed, or perhaps the idea of touching him just convinced me to fail before I even tried.

We were in an apartment complex. Enclosed space, so the shotgun would be a good bet. However, four shells wouldn’t do much good in the long run, so I settled for the half-a-magazine-loaded AK. And I wasn’t going to use it until absolutely necessary anyway, until then the pistol would have to do. So I slung the AK around my neck and thought whether I really, really couldn’t take the shotgun. Nope. So I left it, wondering if another survivor would come across it and have a moment of hope. Ha ha ha.

I left the room, nodding briefly to my fallen partners — yes, “fallen” has to be the biggest euphemism ever in this case — and looked down the sights of my pistol, pointing it straight ahead of me as I walked down the eerily silent corridor. Zombies weren’t into sneaking, so I figured the silence was a good sign. Only it made my steps sound relatively loud. And my breathing. And I got the impression even my heart was audible to anyone but myself.

Then there was a groan coming from the staircase, and I could make out a faint shadow. It was the only way down, the elevator was no longer working. So I went over to the staircase, sneaked to the edge of the wall and took a quick look — three or four zombies, all still and very silent, except for the groaning one that seemed to be struggling against indigestion. Four bullets. Three, if I took the first one out with the knife. Two, if I managed to take two out with the knife. One, if I oh come on who was I kidding. The staircase made an u-turn to another set of stairs and then another u-turn, more stairs, and it went down in this fashion — there could be more zombies than I had ammo. And any loud sound would attract them all.

Mmm.

Steve had a flashbang with him. He kept complaining it was useless against zombies but potentially useful when we were fighting “the evil government troops and their conspiracy” in addition to zombies. So he carried it along with him, instead of pain pills or something more immediately handy. I went back into the room and glanced quickly at Steve, The Stubborn Length Of Intestine, proceeding to survey the room for the flashbang. Didn’t take long to see it on a corner. On my way to pick it up, I realized something.

Where was Jeanne’s corpse?

I felt hands gripping my shoulders from behind. Due to some incredibly convenient strategically-sound reflex, instead of trying to escape, I threw myself backwards, headbutting my opponent somewhere. I fell on all the blood and tried getting up, failing twice due to slipping like a fucking retard. Jeanne was on her feet, her forehead cut and blood on her eyes, trying to find me while leaning on the wall for support — her stomach was almost sliding out of her gaping abdomen.

Her stupid zombie brain took a while to figure out she could simply wipe the blood off her eyes with her other hand. In the meantime, I realized the pistol was no longer in my grip and in the heat of the moment, I didn’t remember I had one in the back of my pants. I surveyed the bloody floor and my eyes stopped on the shotgun precisely when Jeannie brushed her hand against her eyes and found me.

I leapt across the room and landed on my stomach, not as gracefully as I had planned but painlessly because I fell on Steve’s intestine, and slid over to the shotgun, which I grabbed and turned its sights to Jeannie, who was already on top of me about to bite.

The shot hit her chest — I mean, her back, since the chest was already open — and sent her flying against the wall. She bounced off of it and hit the ground like a big meaty sack. In my panic, I shot her head, which pretty much disintegrated at that close range.

After the shots, blessed silence — and then shrieks and groans reminded me I was in a building full of hungry zombies that had just heard two very loud sounds on an otherwise silent building.

FUCK.

No way was I going to risk the hahaha-I’m-just-pretending-to-be-dead strategy again, and my firepower was laughable. Without thinking further on the subject, I ran out of the room and there already were zombies heading my way, running and shrieking something that must mean “dinner is served!” in zombie. There was a window next to me, and I instinctively leapt through it, feeling every cut caused by the broken glass.

And then I remembered that window lead to the outside of the building, and I was on the 28th floor.

Some times, death is just random that way.