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AT THE OCEANS EDGE, a strong but slow tide — forced forward by the pull of the moon and the exertion of the sun, comes rolling through the shallow waters. As it crashes against a large rock formed by God's unforgiving hands, the cloud of mist disperses throughout the thick air, a promise of evil arising in the atmosphere.
Slowly, those evanescent tides take the form of something else. Something completely different. A vile creature, clawing its way up to the surface. It stands in the water, as if the waves were part of it. Like, it was formed from salt crystals and strands of filthy seaweed. It then lets out a horrible groan. It is in pain. Stuck in the calming seas. A body without a soul. A shell. Then, there came more. Two, fifteen, twenty. They began sloshing through the water, reaching out. We can smell the strong odor now. The salt, and the fish. The perished.
This ocean was no ocean at all, anymore; but only a thick metal wall which had come crashing down in the streets of Alexandria. The barrier between life and death was hereby corrupted. Gone. And the vile creatures unforgivingly came inside without wiping their feet — without knocking.
Nobody would ever be able to tell you why it happened that day. Some may have said all of us had sinned so badly that the heavens decided it was time for a final extinction event. Or simply, it could have been that those walls were too weak to withstand the pressure placed upon themselves. Forced prophecy or not, the dead ones were here. This barley had a chance to register in my own head before I watched one of our own go down. He was near this very street I stood, firing lazy shots into the walker's chest as he ran forward. For whatever reason, he had stopped, and at that single moment I connected eyes with him. Scared, weak, impeccably frightened. All that emotion suddenly drained in a flash of pain. They rolled backwards, so that I could only watch the twitching white corrode his vision as teeth sank into his neck.
Only when I saw that soft muscle pull from the side of him, had I begun running back down the stairs into the lowered garage. As soon as I had made it past the frame, Denise came forward with her lock. She gave it a good hard shake before pulling it back out, and closing the thick, hidden wooden door behind the metal gate.
