Fork in the Road: A Walking Dead Tale in Four Parts

2.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

- H.P. Lovecraft

You get your hand around the beavertail-patterned grip of your fallen Ruger SR22 just in time. You don't realize how just-in-time it is until you make that forty-five degree angle pivot with your upper body while simultaneously raising the matte black muzzle of that single-action .22 caliber pistol at the blur of motion behind you. You find yourself staring face-to-face with a reanimated dead person who is - at this very same instant - making a lurching bid to chew your face off. It's almost as though the creature's gaping black hole of a mouth and the blunt-ended barrel of your weapon are on a collision course with each other, and all you can manage to do is simultaneously let out a bellowing shriek of rage and squeeze off two quick blasts.

          The back of the thing's head jettisons. This is followed by a gruesome flood of black fluids that cascades down the back of the corpse as it involuntarily whiplashes backward, its expression going curiously slack before the rest of it collapses in a heap.

          Now you find yourself rising up and whirling toward the open path, holstering your firearm, the pain threatening to take you down one last time. You still have fight in you... or at least flight.

          More biters are closing in quickly behind their fallen comrade. There are too many to delineate now, some in the ratty, bood-sodden cable-knit of former fishermen, some in the dungarees of farmers or harbor workers, many of them reaching for you with blind bloodlust, their eyes like the phosphorous-white orbs of unclassified deep sea denizens that never reach the light of day.

          The bullet - lodged in the concavity between your shoulders - pangs unmercifully as you flee, making you convulse and trip over your own feet. You stumble. You hit the ground, eating dirt and sprawling down the slope. Again, you slide on your belly for a few agonizing feet, seeing stars, gasping. You roll over onto to your back and now your fingers seem to work at last, as though they had a mind of their own as they find your buttons.

          Frantically, you unclasp the front of your fatigue jacket button by button. The oncoming swarm, less than thirty feet away now, shuffles down the banked road toward you. They don't care who you are, or what your credit rating is, or your race, or your creed, or whether you're good or evil, or whether you have a plan in place to elude this horrible fate. They make no distinction between you and any other poor soul that happens to get mortally shot in their midst.

          They only smell warm flesh, and like water seeking its own level, they can only feed on it.

          You finally shrug off your jacket. Underneath, the heavy, sweat-damp Kevlar vest cuts into your armpits. You were lucky enough to find the vest about a year ago, in a storage locker at a local National Guard station outside Alexandria, and you've worn it religiously ever since, but you had no idea how heavy the thing would become on a long journey. Now you practically giggle with giddy relief as you peel the vest off. You turn it over and see the plug of metal that struck you between the shoulders - the projectile mashed into a tiny flat clod by the impervious fabric of the flak vest.

          The pain subsides almost instantly as if a thorn has been removed from your spine. You can breathe again. You can see the oncoming horde out of the corner of one eye, their collective chorus of wet snarling noises filtering through the adjacent forest. Quickly, you draw your buck knife and dig the pellet of steel out of the vest.