Love and Decay, Volume Eight (Episodes 9-12, Season Three) by Rachel Higginson

could creep in unnoticed.
    Wrong.
    So wrong.
    Apparently the middle of the night was when
the city came alive.
    With gunfire, rabid Zombies and civil
war.
    We should have been more prepared, especially
with our history. Truthfully, we had actually tried to come
into this city with guns blazing and our heads on straight. We had
game-planned and strategized. We had picked up as many weapons as
we could along the way. It just wasn’t enough.
    There was no way to prepare for this amount
of carnage. Seriously. No way.
    Bodies lined the streets in piles, reeking of
death and disease. Their ripped open flesh told the story of a free
buffet for Feeders. Their insides had been baked in the sun and
heat of the day. White bones had been licked clean and rotten flesh
and organs littered the ground around them.
    I couldn’t understand why the remaining
living hadn’t burned the bodies. The dead would spread disease so
quickly and also attract Feeders. But it appeared that all the
living had time to do was push the bodies to the side of the road
before they jumped back into the constant war that buzzed through
the massive metropolis.
    And massive it was.
    Adela had said that something like nine
million people lived here before the infection. Nine million people
in one city.
    Nine million people upended by an Apocalypse
that destroyed their lives and their loved ones.
    The idea was unfathomable to me. I couldn’t
even begin to guess how many people had survived over the last
three years, but it had to be a drastically smaller number given
the amount of dead people we passed on the streets.
    Adela had become our guide over the last
three weeks. She led us through the northern region of Mexico and
through the mountains that led us to Mexico City. Several nights
along the way she had known of a safe place to stay. She had saved
our lives with her connections and huge extended family.
    Most of the people that gave us shelter had
either been some kind of cousin of hers or friends of her father or
Diego. They treated her with the respect of a queen when she told
them what had happened to the northern territories and that Diego
was now in control of everything. They never doubted her
information; they gave her their trust and their respect as soon as
she said Diego’s name.
    It was remarkable and miraculous considering
how our first few weeks in Mexico had gone.
    We’d managed to keep the van running and
fueled, despite not always having access to unlimited supplies. We
were down to our last stores of gas and had previously hoped Mexico
City would be a place where we could rest and restock.
    Our gun and ammo supply were also
dwindling.
    Not all Mexican Zombies were kept in
cages.
    The last three weeks had been trying. We had
encountered several close calls and at least two times I had been
sure we would be dead by morning.
    But we had survived. We had sustained
injuries, but we were alive.
    And we hadn’t heard anything from the Colony.
Not a single peep.
    Every once in a while Adela would inquire to
see if any of her friends or family had heard what had happened to
Matthias Allen or the infamous American colony that had invaded
their country and torn it to shreds. The people south of Diego’s
territory hated Matthias and his soulless army. They hated that he
thought he could walk over their countrymen and do as he
pleased.
    They respected Adela by reputation. They
respected the rest of us by deed. We were heroes in their minds for
murdering Matthias.
    We were heroes in my mind, too.
    Too bad Mexico City hadn’t heard our
accolades yet. Maybe they would have been more accepting.
    Maybe they would have held a parade in our
honor.
    Just kidding. They would have tried to kill
us no matter what. These people didn’t care about the rest of the
country. The civil war that consumed them was the only thing that
mattered.
    I realized that within seconds of reaching
the edges of the city.
    “How could anyone control this entire thing?”
Haley