Dying Days by Armand Rosamilia

and he was trying to rip them off of her.
    They slammed against the window, jarring the glass. Her jeans had come undone and Barry dragged them down her thighs.
    Darlene punched frantically at him but her blows were ineffective. Her vision blurred as she remembered the attack from the militia and how brutal they had been to her. At some point she’d started crying.
    “I knew you had thongs on,” Barry was whispering in her ear now, drool sliding from his lips and coating her cheek. “I am gonna tear that little ass of yours up.”
    He slid a finger under her undies and tried to bury the digit inside her.
    Barry was still smiling as Darlene jammed the Desert Eagle into his stomach and pulled the trigger. His eyes grew wide in shock but he didn’t let go. “I loved you,” he whispered before falling backwards.
    Darlene kicked his body in the ribs before shooting him in the face four times.
    She heard the pounding from below again and knew there was no escape. Resigned to that fact, she put her jeans back up as best she could and stared at the blocked door, the Desert Eagle ready to fire.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Eleven
     
     
    Undead of Winter
     
     
    A weak ray of light woke her from a restless sleep. She immediately gripped the gun and scanned the room with it. Empty.
    “What the fuck happened?” Darlene whispered. The furniture was still pushed up against the door, although a chair had toppled at some point. Barry was still on the floor, blood and guts coagulating and reeking. A hundred flies had settled on the crimson mess of his remains.
    Slowly, she walked across the room and removed a chair. She placed an ear to the door but heard nothing. “Don’t open the door,” she muttered. In every horror movie she’d ever watched, the stupid bitch female had opens the door and gets decapitated with a machete or has her throat slit.
    Instead, she went to the window and looked to the street below. It was empty of living and dead. There was blood on everything, though, and she knew while she’d slept another war had been waged. She didn’t know who won.
    Darlene suddenly remembered the large group she’d been traveling with: two hundred strong, moving from Connecticut to here, near Baltimore. Yesterday – or earlier today? – they’d holed up in a library, but Darlene was assigned Death Squad duty to kill a sickly member of the group. In addition, she’d managed to kill Jonathan and, later, Barry. Barry deserved it, having tried to rape her while they hid. Jonathan had been a good kid. A young kid just trying to survive like everyone else.
    “Fuck it,” she whispered. For some reason, since the world had gone to Hell, she’d whispered her thoughts. Ironically, there was no one living to hear her words. Like now.
    Going back to the door, she slowly pulled the piled-up furniture away from in front of it and gripped the handle. She held the gun at the ready and turned the knob. Before pulling the door open, she got into a shooting stance, wiped sweat from her face with a dirty sleeve and tried in vain to relax her body. Far from ideal conditions to kill anything on the other side of the door, she really didn’t have a choice.
    Darlene tugged the door open and came within a fraction of a second of pulling the trigger at an empty hallway. “Fuck.” Instead of a pile of body parts or a horde of zombies waiting patiently to kill her, there was nothing. Gouges in the doorframe shocked her. She was amazed the door had held.
    She went to the end of the hallway, glancing into open doors and ignoring the closed ones – no sense in opening one and having it squeak and alert the undead – and went down the steps one at a time, as gingerly as possible.
    Out on the street, she sniffed the cool morning air. When the dead were close you could usually smell them coming for blocks. Now she smelled smoke and nothing