Time to Survive

We Suck At Being Assassins (1)

Chris POV

"Shh," I hissed over my shoulder, crouching low to the ground as I watched the newly turned deaders stagger down the paved road, their clothes torn and drifting behind them in the wind like something out of a movie.

We were crouching in some scratchy bushes, trying to stay out of sight of the band of deaders as they struggled down the road, the sky a bright blue and cloudless, and the heat was really starting to get to me.

Sometimes L.A. was not the place to be during a zombie apocalypse --- the smell of burning, decaying flesh made my nose burn this early in the morning, and my stomach did a few serious curls while the deaders went by. I had to press my hand against my mouth before I spilled my breakfast of hard granola bar all in these irritating bushes.

We'd left the Grants cabin this morning, deciding to just camp there where we knew we would be relatively safe before continuing our walk all the way to a paved road, leaving the gravel behind about a mile ago. I could see the mill Kelsey had talked about in the distance, a yellow field and some ambling deaders the only thing separating us. The trees all around it had been cleared out, but I couldn't see a road leading to it anywhere close to us.

The deaders going through were new, which lead me to believe they'd probably been part of that gang. I could tell where they'd been bitten, chunks of flesh missing from their throats or their guts trailing out like some grotesque Halloween costume.

Once again, today was not my morning to see shit like that; it was all I could do not to gag.

No one ever seems to think about the smells during an apocalypse, what happens to the human body when it died. How the skin sagged on the bodies, making the bone joints stick out grotesquely, making the deaders look like all they were were jagged points here and there and open, flapping jaws where the muscles didn't hold it shut anymore. How as soon as your body died, you released everything in your bowels, and if you turned, you got to walk around smelling like rot and shit for the rest of your time.

Deaders didn't go through rigor mortis, at least I wouldn't think so considering they could still move around, albeit a lot were stiff-legged and sort of hunched.

I considered it a blessing that I wouldnt' turn into one of those when I died.

I kept my hand pressed against my nose, the smell overly harsh today for some reason, even making my mouth burn with how horrible it was. Neither of the other guys seemed to be affected, which lead me to believe I'd probably caught a bug or something that was making me extremely sensitive to smells.

Great.

Ryan and Kuza knelt behind me, though Ryan kept shuffling and making noise; if he wasn’t careful, he would draw his fucking cousins right to us, and this wasn’t the time for a family reunion. I sent him a nasty look over my shoulder, and he merely returned an apologetic one.

He was hungry, I understood that, and he'd already had his meat for the day.

Which was kind of concerning; it should have filled him up like it usually did.

Had consuming human flesh changed it up?

Fuck, now wasn’t the time to worry about It.

I tightened my hold on the pipe I held in my hand, then slowly rose from the bushes, the deaders now a good distance down the paved road that they wouldn’t be an issue, though their smell lingered in the air like a warning.

I grimaced, then motioned at the guys behind me, and they stood as well.

"Is this a good idea?" Ryan asked softly, looking pale and tired, the black circles under his eyes darker today. "I mean, there's probably a shit ton more of those guys around here. Those were new."