Bitten

The Forest

Kiki ran hard and as fast as she could through the woods and kept her gun clenched in one hand while I followed behind with a gun in his hand as well. With my sight I  could see that the Revenants were coming in from both our sides.

This was seriously bad! It was like an entire town-sized outbreak was going to come in on us!

I didn’t want to scare Kiki, but she gasped and cried out, “Another one!”

There were a few coming in from the front now too. We were surrounded.

“No good… we have no other choice!” I pulled up my gun and let loose two head shots at the Revenants that were closest to them on their right. “Shoot them, Kiki! Make a path for us!”

In this moment, the military history of barking orders and the urgency to act was kicking back into my voice. I could hear how nervous Kiki was on the sound of her pounding heart, but she knew how to shoot a gun.

“God damn it, don’t yell at me like that!” She snapped back at me as she pointed her gun and shot the first zombie in front of her in the shoulder. That did nothing to help. It was the head that mattered in this situation, and she knew that. Kiki steadied her aim on the zombie again and fired her gun a second time. This time she struck the head and all of the undead brain matter splattered the immediate area. Kiki grimaced with a face of disgust, but Noah snapped at her, “Hey! If the path is clear, then keep running, Kiki!”

“I know that already, jeez!” She huffed and started to take off back to the dirt path again. She used her gun along the way as she went. The next two or three zombies that came out to grab and bite at her instead bit her lead bullets as they were shot at point blank into their ugly maws.

I kept my attention on our rear while we fled the forest. The majority of the zombies were approaching them from behind in a flood of groans and moans while stumbling quickly after them. We're we near a town that was deeply infected by the outbreak and these were all the people rushing after us.

A Revenant on my left got especially close to me – so close, in fact, that I was able to fit the barrel of the gun right into the creature’s disgusting mouth and fire off a shot that blew the cranium right off of the thing and splatter its brains all along the grass.

The Revenants were so aggressive in their pursuit and set on capturing us to feast on our  bodies that I turned around for a moment to focus on shooting off the ones that got ridiculously close to us in the moments of our escape.

These woods made running away difficult because of denseness of the trees and foliage. If we weren’t careful, one of us could trip, fall, and be overwhelmed by the mass of Revenants that was on our tail. The escape was slow because of all of this, but as long as we kept the Revenants at bay, I knew we still had a chance to escape.

I kept firing, reloaded my gun twice and going on three times at this point, and went right back to executing one zombie right after the other. After a few seconds of rapid firing and killing off the undead bastards, I turned back around to catch up to Kiki. I still had to make sure she was safe. I couldn’t let Kiki die out here. I picked up my speed a bit to catch back up to her.

She was carrying on.

Good.

She really is a strong kid. I thought to myself when I saw her safe and shooting off any Revenants that were in our way of escape.

As we hurried though, Kiki tripped over an uprooted tree root, but when she fell forward onto her hands and knees, she I saw something grab her ankle. The stinging in her cut up hands and knees were the least of her problems now as a hand on her ankle pull her back towards the bushes. I heard her  heart pounding out of her ears and I could smell the rush of adrenaline-induced terror coursed through her veins.