LEFT BEHIND FOR DEAD - Zombie Outbreak by Nathan Kingsley

 
     
     
                  They left me, just like that, for dead.
                  Sherill, Marcus, and Kevin.
                  They didn't know what else to do, I know, but I may not forgive them. If I ever find them, I'll go right up to them and say, “You see? They didn't kill me. They didn't infect me. And you left me like garbage, like I was nobody and nothing to you.”
                  It was five-fifteen in the evening and we'd just left the city. We'd scored supplies, enough to last us a week. I carried the water, two gallons stuffed into a huge cotton bag and hoisted over my shoulder. We'd have to get more water, but the others carried food. Tins of sardines, tuna, salmon. Cans of fruit and beans and soup.
                  The dead came out of the swamps outside of Houma, Louisiana and swarmed over us like ants on sugar. Sherill dropped everything at once and ran. We had told her to do that. She was much too little to fight off a hungry zombie. Marcus and Kevin and I stood to fight. We slashed our way through a dozen of the cadavers and I was gagging uncontrollably, the scent something I could never get used to no matter how many of these dead came out into the open. When the dozen were done for and lying about like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the wild pigs came out of the swampy woods to snuffle and eat.
                  I threw up, right there. Kevin said, “Hang on, Craig. Grab the water, we have to get going.”
                  Then the real gang showed up. At least thirty of them, walking crooked and awkward, mouths hanging open on bloody gums and teeth, eyes as white and unseeing as summer clouds. They could hear, they could smell, and they wanted to eat. Their instincts were finely honed to hunt warm meat no matter who it belonged to, man or animal.
                  We fought into the dark, screaming in frustration and fear. I thought I heard Kevin command us to run, but I wasn't sure and besides, one of the dead had gotten the drop on me and had me down on the ground fighting for my life.
                  Once I had him off and had beaten his skull into splinters, I saw the dead were truly dead, or they'd faded back into the murky swamps to reconnoiter. It seemed to us the dead were gaining in thought processes and growing cunning. The very idea was terrifying. It was hard enough to fight off a horde of idiots. If they could actually learn to think ...
                  I was alone with broken and seeping bodies, a graveyard of the infected dead, and I didn't see Kevin or Marcus anywhere.
                  I called for them. I screamed. The night was steadfast on me and my imagination ran wild. I felt the pieces of the real dead lying on the ground leaking gore, but moving, moving stealthily, pulling themselves together, reaching for lost heads, for feet and hands.
                  The images wouldn't end. I knew I was imagining it, but I couldn't shake the idea they were moving. I sprinted out of the bodies, leaping over them like a frightened dog, and ran as hard and as fast down the road as I could go. All the while I looked for my friends. The friends who had left me on my own, left me behind for dead.
                  No, I couldn't forgive them for that.
                  Take that time in New Orleans when the dead got to us on the roof and we needed to go down the fire escape. Who held the fire door against them until the others descended? Who took the chance of getting caught? It was me, that's who.
                  Well, I was through being the hero.
                  I wouldn't risk myself for anyone again. If even your best friends, your friends from grade school, were willing to leave you behind, then you couldn't trust anyone.
                  That's why I was so surly with Naddy. She popped up from a trash