Day 2

Zombies killed: 0

“And how the fuck are we supposed to do that?!”, Morgaine screamed. Well, I didn’t blame her: though it was mathematically possible, it obviously wasn’t an easy task.

“Well...”, sited on the ground and hugging my knees, looking the river’s water flowing red and black from the city to the blocked ocean, freezing under the night’s breeze with my clothes still drenched for fall into those waters while running to the Rock Hills, I saw no other possible answer than: “First we have to guarantee basic needs, right? Clean food and water, a warm shelter where we can sleep safely. A base where we can store our items and check our status!”, I got just a bit excited about the idea. Enough to make Morgaine throw me a weird look.

We had never been to close to one another. We were siblings and both lone weirdos, but this didn’t make us immediately friendly with each other. If anything, judging by the Morgaine’s appearance and attitude, always in black, always pessimistic, I thought she actually deserved it; I bet she sacrificed puppies to some kind of evil God in her room… And she probably thought as bad about me.

“And how will we do it? We can’t just go back to the city’s center and scavenge, there are tons of zombies there!”, Morgaine kicked a rock into the water, also hugging herself, chattering her teeth.

“I thought about loot cars: they will have, worst-case scenario, four zombies inside them, and they will have very limited movement, being easy to kill, and the vehicle can be used as a shelter too”, I suggested, getting up and turning to my twin sister.

“But cars means wide open streets, we would be very easy to spot.”

“Not if we walk crouched.”

“In that case, we wouldn’t be able to see them too, and there must be entire hordes of zombies walking the streets right now, attracted by all the people that tried to run away.”

She had a point.

“No cars then… Oh! I have an idea.”

Finally walking, then without (at least too much) fear, though attentive, once that the adrenaline, our clothes and hair started to dry out, I could analyze better our own situation:

Father had taken us from school in that morning, when the outbreak finally gained strength, so I and my twin sister were wearing our uniforms, though she had black leather boots whose shaft reached half of her shin, jacket opened and loose, and a choker, long black hair, nails painted the same color, skin of someone who spent too much time inside (not that I could say I was any different); she was kinda goth and did her best to personalize her looks even though school wasn’t very flexible with its rules (so, no black leather jacket). I, however, just had a neat and serious hairstyle and wore the plain white and brown uniform, all buttoned up and perfectly lined, and had both my ears pierced and displaying a pair of gray earrings, because I was just the coolest guy around and everyone definitely loved me even if I could talk about my favorite games nonstop for hours!

...Well, at least my father did love me.

Father...

“There it is”, Morgaine pointed.

It wasn’t time to mourn his death. We could do it later, then we had a job to do.

Zombies to kill.

“Let’s walk around it once, just to check if there are others nearby”, I whispered, crouching, holding tight the stick I had in hand; we obviously having armed ourselves previously, each one grabbing a thick piece of wood that ended up at the riverbank, carried by the waters.

We advanced side by side and very slowly...

Ahead of us: a small wood cabin with a single door, window, and with a sign saying “Fish’s Fishes”. A fishing equipment shop: I knew people used to fish in this river, so I thought (and hoped) that there would be one around there, a place away from urban centers that could provide us with everything that we needed, at least at that moment.

...And, then, we were again at the starting point, having to make already an entire loop.

“There’s no one else around...”, Morgaine pointed, gulping.

“Yeah… The path that leads to this cabin isn’t even wide enough to support a car, so I was expecting so”, my hands were sweating more than when I held hands with a girl for the first time, and my fingers seemed just so uncomfortable.

“Hey, hey, what are you fearing now? Aren’t we supposed to kill, like, 70 thousand zombies?” My twin sister pretended very badly to be the taught one; I don’t even need to say that I was the sibling who inherited all the good traits and was just on a whole another level, right? “We will never meet our daily quota like this, bro.”

“No, you see: today doesn’t count. Because, you know, when I said that it was already late and everything...”

“...You know that we will have to break in sooner or later, right? And that we will have to beat the thing inside it, that probably will be almost unstoppable.”

“Just give me a moment, fuck! This is hella scary!”

“And you think I’m not scared?! I’m 110% sure we will die by the first zombie we come across! But we can’t just sleep in the wild, it’s even more dangerous.”

I didn’t know how something could be more dangerous than a 110% chance of death, but, in her own twisted way, my twin sister was right: we couldn’t just wait there, crouched in the woods close to the river, forever.

“Okay. Let’s go!”

We rushed to the front of the building and took a peek from the single window: unfortunately, while we didn’t saw any zombies, the shelves were organized in the worst possible way, blocking our view of most of the shop. Anyway, I exchanged looks with Morgaine and, slowly, opened the door.

Of course, not only the damn thing squeaked like a fucking dying cat, it also ended up in a “pling!” when sounding a bell.

My twin sister and I stopped immediately and in complete silence, as if doing this would fix what had already happened.

It didn’t.

“Gaaargh”, the big, fat, and ugly undead came out off the back of the store. The son of a bitch was so bloated that I feared he had eaten an entire another person, and when we killed him, a second zombie would explode out of his belly… it wouldn’t, right?

At least it didn’t look too much like a human, and so I didn’t felt uncomfortable beating the shit out off it.

“Fuck, let’s attract him outside!”, I whispered angrily, pulling a real size person’s image in carved in wood to the door to keep it from shutting; my heart already beating fast and my skin covered in sweat even though the action hadn’t even started yet.

Morgaine and I get away from the entrance and looked around one more time, just to confirm that there wasn’t another horde of zombies come after us; and then waited. The creature, growling and snarling, eyes fixed on us, came forth step by step, walking just a little fast, hands reaching for us. When it got under the reach of my stick-weapon, I ended up re-thinking my original idea of just beat its head open and finish it, once that his infectious nails would, for sure, scratch me if I got at the distance I needed to do so. Therefore, I swung the wood with as much strength as I could against its hands: the zombie’s limbs were pushed away from me and there was a loud crack, and it wasn’t my stick. When the undead recomposed himself from the sudden impact, his fingers were all pointing in different directions… But they still were dangerous, and so I attacked them again while retreating only a bit.

And my twin sister seemed to think the same way, because her first strike found one of the zombie’s forearms, opening a big cut on his jelly-like flesh. Her second move, though, broke the limb.

When the too-fat creature turned its attention to my twin sister, I did as she had and attacked the forearm, three times in rapid succession, also breaking it.

We both retreated when the zombie, still advancing as if nothing had happened, concentrated at me again, and I looked Morgaine straight in her eyes. We were thinking the same, I was sure even without a single word spoken: It STILL was too dangerous to come for the head!

We ran around the creature faster than it could follow us and, at the same time, attacked its legs right on its ankles, bringing the zombie down. We didn’t lose time and started, immediately after, to strike the knees, shins, and feet of the undead, breaking its lower limbs in such a way that no surgery would ever fix it.

And then we returned or attention to its arms again: his forearms were broken, but he could still move his shoulders and crawl after us.

“Huf… Huf… Huf… The head now?”, Morgaine asked while we took a quick break from turning all of the bones inside four of the limbs of the too-fat zombie into powder.

“No, look its belly: don’t you think it’s abnormally large? I fear it can explode in acid, or something that attracts other zombies in the area, like in Left FOR Dead”, my original idea had developed a bit after half an hour of spanking a literal walking corpse. And the thing was still trying to hurt us, almost as if unstoppable.

“...But, then, beat it with sticks won’t be a good idea, right?”

“Yeah…” I tried to think what to do then, when my twin sister left her blood-soaked wood piece fall to the ground, and approached the river bank. Where she grabbed a pebble:

“There’s no sin, bro.”

It was a long stoning.

We stayed there for even an even longer time, throwing almost carelessly, rocks at the zombie on the floor than we beat it with our sticks. And in the end, the undead exploded under the weight of the stones that covered its body, revealing that his bloated belly was held just normal fat. In any case, the thing that remained there, buried under the pebbles, barely remembered a human corpse anymore.

Still, though…

“We… did it!”, Morgaine turned to me, closing her hands into tight fists and jumping in the same place.

“Oh, yeah, you better bet we fucking did it!”, I combed my hair backward, failing to contain my smile even though I preferred to look always calm and cool.

The sun was already rising, but it didn’t matter: we had a complete and overwhelming victory in our first movement! Seventy thousand minus one, baby! And that wasn’t even the biggest prize of the day:

“Now, let’s take a look what the treasure room hold for us”, I picked my stick once again and entered the shop a second time.