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

3.

"You shall be driven mad by the sight of what you see."

- Deuteronomy 28:34

At first it feels as though you're having an out-of-the-body experience, looking down from some God-like vantage point, watching the wave of dead nursing home patients shuffle toward you in that narrow corridor. You observe yourself backing away, your muscles and tendons and joints working almost involuntarily. You watch the muzzle of your .22 rise up and bark. You see the flash of the blasts in the gloom, and the heads of some of the closest creatures snapping back, erupting with black fluids.

          You note that only a few of them go down, the fallen ones trampled by the others in the endless wave of mummified, ragged monsters in medical gowns and threadbare terrycloth robes clamoring to get to you, anxious to sink their jagged, yellowed, decaying, snapping-turtle incisors into the tender flesh of your neck.

          The bad news is that you have stumbled into an interior corridor - no egress to the outside, only locked doors leading to residential rooms - so you spin and race down the hallway toward the old man behind the metal-walker. You have one bullet left in the magazine. One bullet for scores of decomposing monsters in elastic waistbands and fuzzy slippers. You draw the buck-knife with your left hand while clutching the Ruger with your right. The thing behind the walker-apparatus lets out one last snarling growl as you approach. You swing the tip of the knife up and plunge it into the old man's ear, sinking it through his auditory canal and into the left hemisphere of his moldering brain.

          Still feeling that odd, buoyant, out-of-the-body disconnection, you see yourself shove the limp form of Walker-Man to the floor, and then you watch yourself holster your gun and knife and grab the metal apparatus. You lift the rusty metal walker just in time to fend off the first wave of hungry dead seniors closing in on you. You slam the feet of the thing - metal posts tipped with the halves of old tennis balls - into the putrid faces of former grandmothers, retired salesmen, and kindly old uncles who now just want to feast on your throbbing jugular vein.

          For just an instant, you find yourself locked in a strange stalemate. The army of seniors pushes in toward you, the rancid stench of their collective breath in your face, making you choke and cough and bellow with rage and horror as you stab the feet of the metal-walker at them. The tennis ball covers slip off the feet of the thing. You keep jabbing and poking and jabbing, one of the metal posts plunging into the jelly of an old woman's eye, another one impaling the forehead of a former orderly. You cry out in terror and frustration.

          You feel yourself backing toward a dead-end wall - a security door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY - but you keep valiantly stabbing the feet of the metal-walker at the oncoming horde, piercing temples and skewering milky eyeballs and plunging into nasal passages in spattering displays of gore. By this point, you're covered in the blood and spoor of the dead, and you're beginning to lose your bearings. The out of the body experience has deteriorated into a queasy memory of that surreal, extreme-slow-motion fall back at that horrible fork in the road.

          You find yourself flashing back to that awful, ethereal moment when you felt as though you were literally suspended in midair - caught between life and death, fixed in the micro-second eternity of a sparking synapse - careening down the embankment of that forking pavement. You feel yourself letting go... falling... falling as if in a dream... giving up... free-falling. You see the ground looming, rising up to meet you, the lights of the carousel spinning around you, your mother's grasp slipping away.