Soul Survivor: A gripping tale of the living, the dead, and the struggle to survive in an apocalyptic world. (7 page)

    Dropping th
e pistol to the ground she pulled the shotgun, which had been slung over her shoulder, up for a shot. She fired a low un-aimed shot shattering the thing’s right knee. It stumbled and fell then struggled to regain its feet.

  
Amy advanced as it tried to get up. She fired again. This time a more carefully aimed shot that shattered the other leg. It fell to the ground again on its knees. Now un-able to stand.

  
Amy pumped again and fired into its body knocking it over backwards. Then again hitting the left shoulder and neck area. It collapsed to the ground.

   She determinedly walked
over to it and stopped a mere three feet away. Their eyes met, Amy no longer feeling afraid.

   It clenched its teeth
, growled and tried to rise up.

  
Amy pumped another shell into the chamber. “What the hell are you?” she spat.

   The
zombie snarled and hissed. Then it made one last attempt to lunge at her.

   
Amy stepped back and began to scream. This wasn’t a scream of fear but one of anger.

   “Fuck you!” she screamed.

   She fired once again into its body knocking it back to the ground, pumped the shotgun again and stepped closer. She fired at point blank range. The zombie’s head came apart in an explosion of blood, brains and bone. The fragments of which littered the ground behind it.

   She pumped to fire
again but the shotgun was empty. Smoke rose from the corpse. Amy’s scream still echoed off the walls of the surrounding buildings.

  
She looked up to see the slow zombie shuffling towards her. She reloaded the shotgun then headed off to put it down.

   When she was only a few yards away
it suddenly straightened, its eyes widened, and the look on its face changed.

   Amy stopped in her tracks. This was the same look she had just seen.

  The zombie screamed then lunged at her, seeming more like the other two than the slow zombie it had been only seconds before. She fired into its face and stepped to the side just as it stumbled by and fell to ground. Dead again.

   “What’s going on with these things?
” she said as she stared down at it.

   She stood still scanning the area for several minutes, watchin
g and listening. After a few minutes she was satisfied the immediate danger had passed.

  
Calmly she turned and walked back to Tommy.

   “We can’t
trust the slow ones to stay that way,” she said to Tommy. “Something weird is going on. They can change.”

   “How?”

   “I don’t know.”

  Amy
picked up the pistol at Tommy’s feet and dropped the clip. She reloaded it, put it back in place, chambered a round and handed it back to him.

   “Are you ok,” he asked
.

   “Yeah, just
still a little pissed off,” she said. “How about you? Are you ok.”

   “I’m good,” he answered.

   “Good,” she said smiling and patting him on the head. “Lets go get those pickles.”

  
They started across the street again and walked up to the front door of the deli. It was pretty much intact. There was no broken glass and it looked like it had just been closed for the night. The doors were closed but not locked.

  
“Alright, lets do it,” Amy said.

  
Amy stepped through the door first. There were a few things scattered on the floor but for the most part the place was still clean and orderly.

  
There was rancid meat and cheese in the glass case. Dried and molded bread sat on the counter.

 
Shotgun in hand Amy searched the Deli and the restrooms. Nothing. The place was empty.

   They
stacked cans of ham and turkey on the counter and filled several boxes with chips, soda and water. Tommy spotted a massive jar of pickles and set it with the rest of the food.

  
“Tommy I think we’ll skip the courthouse for now,” she said. “Lets load up everything we can find and go home. It’s too dangerous out here.”

   “No
argument from me,” Tommy said feeling relieved.

  
They were about to start loading things into the truck when Amy noticed the walk in cooler.

  
“Hey, maybe there are some goodies in there,” she said.

   She
clutched the handle and pulled. In an instant the door  flew open knocking her back.

  Two
dead burst from the cooler and were on Tommy before he could react. They knocked him down. One of them leaped on top of him as soon as he hit the floor.

  
Before Amy could act, the zombie began ripping at Tommy’s throat. It turned toward Amy and growled as if it were a wild  hyena protecting its kill. Blood ran down it’s chin. Flesh hung from its mouth. 

  
She leveled the shotgun and pulled the trigger. The zombie jerked from the blast then fell over to the side. Its head mostly gone.

   T
he other one turned to look at Amy as she pumped a shell into the chamber and fired again. It fell dead over Tommy’s body.

   She kicked it off of him
revealing the damage. His neck had been ripped apart. His jugulars laid open. A huge puddle of blood was spreading out on the white tile around his body.

 
His eyes were wide with terror and unblinking. He was gone. At least for the time being.

  
Amy knew what she had to do. She picked up the pistol, put the barrel to his forehead and pulled the trigger. A hole appeared between his eyes. The red puddle beneath him grew larger. He would not rise again.

  
Amy fell to her knees and began to weep. Something she had promised herself she wouldn’t do. After all they had been through Tommy was dead now. She was alone.

   Suddenly
there was something heavy on her back as she felt the pain and pressure of teeth sinking into her left shoulder.

   My God, there’s another
one,
she thought.

   The smell of its putrid, rotten breath entered her nostrils.  She gagged and threw up in her mouth.

   She had let her guard down and it had cost both of their lives.

   Ther
e was another sharp pain and a tug as she felt a huge chunk of skin, tendon and muscle being ripped away from her shoulder.

   She
elbowed the zombie hard in the ribs then whirled around and raised the pistol to meet her attacker.

   He lunged at her again just as she
fired. The bullet entered its left eye. The back of its head flew apart. Blood and brains spilled out the gaping hole in the back of its head and dropped to the floor with a sickeningly wet thud.

   His mo
mentum sent him crashing into Amy’s legs causing her to slip on the bloody floor.

 
She stuck her elbow out to try to catch herself on the counter. As her arm hit, it bent back toward her body. The impact causing her to accidentally pull the trigger.

   The force of the blast caused her to lose her grip on the
gun and it fell to the floor with a metallic clatter. She knew instantly what had happened.

The bullet entered her stomach, ripped through her liver then blew up through the right lung severing the pulmonary artery before exited her back.

  
Her head came down hard on the counter top. She saw flashes of light then everything started to fade. She felt herself losing consciousness and knew she was dying as she hit the floor.  The last sensation she felt was the cold tile against her cheek.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  
Minutes passed. Then consciousness began to flash in and out like an old neon sign. Amy’s vision began to clear. She saw Tommy’s body and the bodies of the two dead that had attacked them. Then she saw her own body, lying in a pool of blood, below her.

   She felt confused but soon re
alized that she must be dead. She was amazed at how calmly she took it.

  
So this is what it’s like to die
, she thought.

   She hovered
there for several minutes trying to make sense of what was happening. Trying to come to grips with what she saw laid out below her. Trying to understand. Trying desperately to understand.

   Then the arms and legs of her body began to move
.

   She was
witnessing the process of a lifeless body becoming one of the living dead. And this zombie was her own.

   She was t
hankful she was no longer in there.

   Then the eyes opened wide as
her zombie moaned. Then it struggled to its hands and knees, raised its head and began to scream.

  
Amy had risen from the dead.

   At that instant she
began to spin around the room as if in a whirlpool. She tried to scream but nothing came out. She tried to grab something but had no physical body with which to do so.

  
She was spiraling lower and lower and faster and faster. Suddenly the scream ceased and was replaced with the sound of rushing air. Then she was sucked into her body and there was a stunned silence. She was back. Trapped. That wonderful peaceful feeling gone.

  
She felt a sudden sense of anguish, sadness and anger. She had not wanted to return.

   She
could see clearly through her zombie’s eyes. The sound was muffled but she could also hear. She had no control over her zombie’s movements whatsoever and had no sense of touch. There was no connection with the rest of the body. She had to observe whatever the zombie was observing. She could not look where she wanted to.

  Her zombie struggled to it
s feet, stepped over the bodies and walked around to the front of the counter.

  
She was grateful that the hunger for fresh meat hadn’t set in yet. She wouldn’t have been able to take it if her zombie had stopped to dine on Tommy.

 
They stood by the front door all afternoon. Unmoving.

  
This gave Amy time to ponder her own existence. She soon came to realize that most of the dead that she had dispatched in the past few weeks were actually vessels for the person they once had been. Like herself they were stowaways on a ghost ship. Unable to affect the outcome in anyway. Just along for the ride. It was a sobering thought.

   How terrifying would it be to be part of a roving pack of the dead. Chasing down and devouring prey. Being an unwilling participant to mass murder.

   She wondered what it was like at the moment of final death. What is it like when the dead die?
How terrifying is it to meet your fate for a second time?

  
How can I be dead and alive at the same time?
She thought.

  
What was the next level of existence? If any. Would she continue on or just blink out like a light. Or, as she hoped, would her
soul survive
and be free to emerge from its cocoon to continue its journey.

      A Richard Ba
ch quote kept repeating in her mind. “What a caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.” 

   She came to the conclusion that she was her consciousness. Her soul. Existing separately from the physical brain that had been hijacked by the zombie.

   Amy’s zombie began to get restless late in the afternoon. Then, just before sunset, it stepped out of the deli and onto the street.

  
Amy was calm even though she had no control. The sense of detachment was strange. She tried to will this thing to move and act as she wanted but it was no use.       Her zombie obviously wasn’t even aware that she was there.

   She
wondered again about the dead from earlier that morning. And the old lady, the mailman and the zombie in the front yard. She thought someway, somehow, the consciousness or souls of these people were somehow influencing the actions of their dead. Why was she different?

   She
wished she had become one of them. But she wasn’t. She could tell by the way her zombie walked and acted. Sadly she was just a garden variety zombie.

  
At least I’m not one of the demon dead,
she thought. 
At least not yet.

  At last they set out heading North. Amy’s zombie scanned the streets from side to side occasionally but mostly kept its gaze straight ahead as they plodded along. They headed down the Street and continued until they reached US-180. Then marched steadily on through night and early morning.

  
They stopped for the day around 11:00 a.m. Amy wasn’t quite sure why, but the zombie sought shade and stood almost as if asleep for five hours. Then they resumed their pointless quest when the sun was no longer high in the sky.