End of the Line by Lara Frater Page A

fluke? Did a zombie get too close to her? Did it have anything to do with the cra zy woman?
                  Then I found my answer and gasped. I pulled away from the body so suddenly that Tanya jerked.
                  “What you find?” she asked and I showe d her my horrifying discovery.              
                  “We should tell the others,” she said, calmly.
                  I left the tent. People had assembled for the funeral. It was cold and the snow was light but annoying. I wore a hood but it still got into my eyes. Jim had brought up umbrellas but it didn’t help. The bodies lay on the ground slowly getting wet under white sheets. Eli, Mindy and the woman who brought the girl were underneath. Yesterday they were all alive.
                  I wanted to leave the woman’s body outside the doors as a warning to others. I wanted her alive so I could shoot her again. Maybe in the knee caps like Abe did with Tom.
                  “What’d you find, doc?” Jim asked. Then he took a step back when he saw the look on my face.
                  “I know how she got the virus—“ I paused. “It isn’t airborne, so don’t worry. She was deliberately infected.”
                  “What?” Annemarie asked.
                  “I found a puncture wound between two of her toes. Someone injected her with the zombie virus.” I looked at the woman’s corpse on the ground. I watched the population and my family die. I watched people die in zombie attacks, I saw the strong take advantage of the weak, yet nothing prepared me for the cruelty of what this woman did.
                  “Jesus,” Robert said and made the sign of the cross.
                  “You bitch,” Annemarie said and kicked the corpse. “You cocksucking bitch.”  She kicked her a few more times before Jake pulled her away, then she started crying. “You should rot in hell.”
                  Maddie made another sign of the cross. “Please God, forgive our trespasses.”
                  At this point I’d given up on any god. I looked at Jim. “You knew her, didn’t you?”
                  He looked at the body intensely.
                  “Jim, please.”
                  “We knew her,” Ashley said. “At first, I wasn’t sure ‘cause she’s thinner and filthy.”
                  “Where?”
                  “In the beginning, when the council was only Jim, Abe and me. We wouldn’t let her in. She was nuts. The interview started good, but she started getting weird. Started talking to herself. Jim asked her about her illness, asked what meds she had been taking and got them for her. She threw them in his face and stomped out.”
                  “Jim?” I said, looking at him.
                  “Yes,” he said. “It was a hard decision. I think she was schizophrenic. If she had taken the meds and come back normal, we might have taken her in. Of course we interviewed her because she claimed to be a doctor,” he paused. “Maybe she was and perfectly normal on her meds.”
                  I touched his shoulder. “You couldn’t have known she would do this.”
                  Dave hadn’t said a word about this which surprised me, but he was staring intently at the sheet over Eli, his best friend. Annemarie didn’t look happy but it wasn’t Jim or Ashley or even Abe’s fault. Who would have thought this woman in her delusion could be so heartless and callous? The zombie plague had bought a completely breakdown of society including no mental health services for people who needed it, and no prisons for the criminals. 
                  Harlan was on sentry duty. He watched us but mostly looked over the roof. Everyone was here except Rosa, who