Surviving Beyond the Zombie Apocalypse by Jeffrey Littorno Page A

be showing mercy by killing it. I realized that the concept of mercy did not enter into my decision. The truth was I felt sick at the idea of getting close enough to the thing to kill it. I simply turned away from it and continued along the side of the car as the shrieking stabbed my ears.
         My original idea upon leaving the car had been to clear a path for the van. Now as I continued around the cluster of cars, any notion of clearing a way got lost in the images of mangled lives. The sound of the thing that used to be a toddler thrust pictures into my mind.
         A twenty-something father behind the wheel turning to his wife and saying, “What do you say we take Brenda to the park this afternoon?”
         The young woman in the passenger seat twists around to look at the little girl in the backseat. “I don’t know. She seems kind of sluggish like she might be coming down with a cold or something.”     
         “Well, she’s not the only one,” the man replied. “How are you feeling?”
         The woman answered with a sneeze.
         The banging on the window from inside a white SUV on the other side of the mass of cars brought me back to the moment. I looked over to see a black man with his face pushed against the back window of the car. In the next moment, the face had been pulled back from the glass. It seemed to be focused on something behind me. My heart jumped as the shell slammed its head back into the window. Once again, the face pressed into the glass, but this time a smear of blood showed itself. The shell slid its face around the back window of the car until nearly all of the glass became coated with blood. I stood transfixed by the sight. The thing pulled its face back only to slam it back into the glass a moment later. It suddenly dawned on me that my presence might be agitating the shell, but this possibility did not motivate me to move away. On the contrary, I took a couple of steps closer, feeling nothing aside from a sadistic pleasure at the question of whether the shell would continue to slam its head against the glass until its skull cracked.
         I did not have to wonder for long. The black shell pressed its nose into the glass to the point that I thought I heard it crack. Regardless of whether or not the sound was real, the place where the shell’s nose had been had disintegrated into a flattened mass of flesh. This lack of a nose did not cause the shell to hesitate for a second. It drew its face back. The coating of blood meant the glass was no longer transparent. A moment later the shell’s head smacked the glass with a thud. After that, there was nothing more. I did not move for what seemed like fifteen minutes, although it might have been much less time. I waited for another attempt by the shell, but nothing happened. I wondered if the shell had died or merely knocked itself out. 
         Before I pondered the question for long, a groan came from behind me. I spun around to find three shells shuffling toward me from ten or fifteen yards away. The condition of the black shell in the car was no longer a concern. Instead, I found myself sprinting back to the campervan. Fortunately, the trio of shells did not include any fast movers. I got back to the van and inside before they had changed directions.
     
         Clearly, my forward progress had been blocked and getting back to the store called for an alternate route. I spun the van around and headed away from the nose less black shell and the small thing in the car seat. I would have liked to have had a better idea of the way back to the store, but for now I was satisfied with simply moving.
         I realized how strange it seemed that I had spent so much time in this area around the newspaper building, but it now appeared completely unfamiliar to me. Truthfully, I had never truly looked at it, never taken notice of the details. Such disregard for specifics certainly did not suit a journalist. I