The Beauty and the Redneck

Stuck

Two days have passed since the CDC went up in flames like an oversized campfire. During this time we got stuck in the hellhole where this whole twisted story started, Atlanta. Since the CDC turned out to be a dead end, we were moving on to Shane's plan and were packing for the long journey to Fort Benning. We had secured a random building and stayed there for most of the time while some of us tried to scout the area for supplies. The scouting parties were not very successful unfortunately and that because of the massive horde of zombies that kept roaming the streets. Our movement was limited and the stores we did reach had nothing useful left in them anymore.

When we were finally ready to leave, we decided to abandon some vehicles so that we can keep the fuel consumption as low as possible. For a few hours after we set out, everything was quiet. I was lying down on one of the beds in Dale's trailer, staring into thin air when a sudden metallic creak caught my attention. Confused I got up and followed the others outside the vehicle. Dale's trailer broke down.

Luckily around us were hundreds of cars so we had no problem finding spare parts. The only bad news was that even if we managed to squeeze our way through half of the car barricade, the other half had the rest of the highway completely blocked. The only way for us to keep going was to move some of the cars out of the way.

"There's a whole bunch of stuff ya' can find here." Daryl said and for once I could agree with him. This place was a gold mine.

"Yeah, maybe we can find some food or water. Maybe stack up on fuel from all this cars." Without even waiting for a replay to his remark, T-Dog took an empty gas canister and made his way to the nearest car.

"This place is a graveyard. I don't know how I feel about this." Lori kept looking around scanning the place. I could understand her concerns. Lots of abandoned cars mean that once lots of people tried to go through here and if some of this people were infected, we could have been looking at an area full of walkers. Still, we were low in supplies and everything was worth the gamble.

"Loosen up Lori. You don't have to be a doctor to know that dead people don't eat and don't drink. Besides I could use some meds. We're running low and without medication there's nothing much I can do in case one of you gets sick or injured."

"Until a few months ago the dead weren't walking either." Lori's low grumble, which I chose to ignore, could be heard. Not even bothering looking back at her I started making my way through the abandoned rows of cars, looking inside the ones I could pry open. Everybody followed my lead and started searching for whatever they could find too.

There was nothing useful lying around; lots of clothes, shoes, bathroom stuff but no food, water or medication. I kept looking and looking until I found a corpse which was crouched in an unusual position right next to what seemed to have been his car.

"You poor soul; I wonder what happened to you." I spoke out loud as I keeled next to the corpse to examine it closer. The dead person was half-eaten but that was not the cause of his death. His skull was crushed, as were several other bones in his body. He still had several boot marks on his putrid fresh which led to the conclusion he was stomped to death. I rose to my feet and looked around again. Actually the whole scene before me looked as if everybody was in a big hurry to get away.

'I don't even want to know what they were running from. Was it that scary they weren't even aware they were stepping on a living human being?' Thinking this I looked at the dead body once again. A tiny bit of something pearl black that looked like leather could be seen from underneath the decaying arm of the dead man. Intrigued by it I lowered myself to the ground again and a bit hesitant moved the decaying flesh away from the leather bag. It was bigger than I initially expected. I tried to open the bag but the zipper was a bit rusty and it got stuck.