Dying Days by Armand Rosamilia Page B

stop shaking. She closed the door and made sure it locked.
    The front entrance wouldn’t be so simple to secure. Darlene doubted she could close the doors enough or had the strength to push the heavy library furniture over to block it.
    Back in the main room, nothing had been disturbed and nothing had entered while she was checking the rest of the building. She was thankful for that. One of the few military men left in the group, his head missing, was draped over a table. She went to him and pulled his M9 pistol from his dead fingers and found three detachable 15-round staggered box magazines – all full – in his pockets. She wondered why he still had so much ammo, but didn’t complain. She’d been expecting to find two or three shells in the gun and nothing more.
    Darlene was about to do a thorough search of the room when she heard something slam against one of the vehicles outside. She knew it was time to find a safe haven.
    Upstairs, past gore and the stench of death, a utility closet with an intact door was her best bet. She tried her best to jam a broom handle against the door knob and put her back to the farthest wall. A small window told her she had a long wait until night fall, but she didn’t care. She needed sleep and she needed to gather her strength. Who knew what tomorrow would bring?
     
    *   *   *   *   *
     
    A residential area netted Darlene quiet a catch: two apple trees, an orange tree and a working well with an old-fashioned hand pump. Despite the impending cold the fruit was still edible. It was a bit of a distance, but she’d been lucky enough to not run into too many of the undead in the two months she’d been living in the library.
    The front doors had been sealed, the windows boarded up, and the back parking lot’s gate mended enough to keep the undead out but still allow her to slip in and out. From the roof of the building, she could see all around her, and from there plan her next moves.
    The highway she’d come in from was teeming with zombies, and in all directions she could see roaming packs of them. Fires and occasional explosions surrounded her, but she’d not seen another living person in weeks.
    Settling into her hard wooden chair on the roof, she snuggled with two wool blankets and bit into an apple. The sun was dropping, and it was already cold. Baltimore didn’t get as cold as Maine, but it was still going to be a bitter winter. Eventually she’d have to start a fire to keep warm and hope it wouldn’t attract the undead or the living.
    “Where am I going and what am I doing?” she whispered, tossing the apple in her hand. She didn’t want to stay here through the winter, but now realized she should have done something about it weeks ago. It was just easier to stay where she was, in the relative safety of her library-fortress, and hope the world would go back to normal.
    Darlene had been running for so long she was growing restless. She missed her home and she missed her father. At the thought of him, once again seeing him as he was before she pulled the trigger of the Desert Eagle, she started to cry. She knew Maine held nothing for her anymore, yet she longed to be there. By now her home had been ransacked and destroyed, her hometown of Dexter in ruins and aflame like here, but she didn’t care. She needed to be somewhere, anywhere, but here. She knew how silly it sounded, and unrealistic.
    The wind kicked up and she decided to go back inside.
     
    *   *   *   *   *
     
    The first flurries arrived a week later, while Darlene was raiding a diner, fighting the cockroaches for scraps of food. She’d found cans of tomato paste as well as two industrial cans of coffee.
    It was while she was leaving through the hole that she’d entered through that she saw the movement across the street. She ducked down and peeked over the jagged edge, expecting to see a dozen zombies shambling towards her. Instead she saw a living, breathing person disappear into the