Whatever It Takes (29 page)

The two remaining gallows were empty. A sign and symbol that had been left for he and Sarah.

Percival broke. He dropped to his knees before the hanging bodies of his friends and former teachers. His idealist companions in the foregone zombie apocalypse. His hammer fell from his fingers as he stared up at the corpses as they twisted in the wind.

Despair and grief crashed through him as his compartmentalized guilt and depression knocked down the walls in his mind and crashed to the forefront. Everything he’d done he’d done to better things here. Everyone he’d lost, he’d continued on to better things here.

And here was gone. His head dropped down to his chest and he sobbed. Hot tears spilled from between his eyes and pattered down before him. He felt the first drops of the storm that had threatened to break over him for half a day.

And among the cacophony of the late autumn storm that shed the tears of the sky onto him, he heard a soft feminine voice.

“Get the fuck up,” she said.

He lifted his head from his chest, whimpering. He still cried and his lip quivered as he drew his eyes up. In white, untouched by the torrent of rain around him, stood Sarah.

“You’re… dead,” he whispered. “I watched you die… I held you as you stopped breathing.”

He stared at her. She lifted a hand and he staggered as he climbed to his feet to go to her. He couldn’t believe it was her as he moved willingly to her embrace.

He didn’t feel the teeth as they sank through his leather jacket and into his shoulder.

The End

About the Author

Mike Staton lives with his special lady friend and three cats. He’s an avid practitioner of martial arts and enjoys contemplating how he’d best the tackle the zombie apocalypse. If you’ve enjoyed this piece of fiction he can be reached at:
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