SurvivorZ

25

MIKE

Four souls cowered in John Kenney's sparsely decorated, one-bedroom apartment while the moans of the dead filled their ears. Mike raised a shaking finger to his lips. There hardly seemed to be much point. Everyone was too scared to take a breath, much less make a sound.

Kenney, an old marine colonel, didn't need much convincing to hunker down with the rest of them. Mike noticed from his photos and medals hanging on the wall that this wasn't his first experience in the thick of it. He expected the veteran probably never thought he'd live to see the day he'd be hiding out in his own apartment from a passing army of undead cannibals.

Mike was less confident in the hardiness of their other two companions. Roberta Stack and her boyfriend, Lawrence Bell, lived across the hall in 202. The couple held one another as the mournful cries grew louder outside. They looked like a pair of nervous mice ready to bolt at the first whiff of a cat.

John invited them over as soon as he learned from Mike about the approaching horde. His reasoning was obvious. Keeping the terrified couple handy made more sense than leaving them to fend for themselves. They seemed flighty enough to try something foolish and risk everyone's life.

Mike peeked out the window at the dreadful procession heading south on Washington Street. They were fortunate so far. One of the zombies he encountered outside the medical center up the street had followed them as far as the front steps. The dead man threatened to smash the glass door and alert the others to the survivors hiding out. It probably would have too, if John hadn't been so diligent in gathering intel from the radio all morning.

Following the colonel's direction, Mike remotely triggered his car alarm. The creature immediately forgot about the two men it had been following and retreated to the crashed vehicle on the street, where it milled around the hood with its companions until the noisy distraction switched itself off.

That was over a half hour ago. Since then, a relentless swarm of revenants crossed Beacon Street and continued their steady march south. The mutilated crowd swept up the handful outside, adding to the number of walking dead moving through the neighborhood. They passed by the front window of Kenney's apartment like a slow motion version of the Boston Marathon, provided the route included a trip through a slaughterhouse.

"Wh-what do we do?" Roberta stammered.

"Shhh," Mike shushed her with a raised hand.

Larry held his softly weeping girlfriend closer and shot Mike a dirty look. Mike ignored him. The stranger's sour expression hurt a whole lot less than the pain those things would inflict if they broke in here.

He returned to the window. The sheer number of the dead passing by outside meant there was no point in counting heads, so Mike kept track of time instead. He started from the first moment the herd appeared by his car. Ten minutes later, they were still coming.

"Larry," John whispered, "why don't you and Roberta have a seat on the sofa, yeah? I'm sure it won't be much longer."

Mike caught the unspoken question in the raised eyebrows the old man directed his way. Right?

Mike fleetingly shook his head and returned to watching the hellish parade through the window. If there was an end to the outpouring of corrupted bodies lurching down Washington Street, he still wasn't seeing it.

"How can this be happening?" Roberta moaned, hugging herself as she took a seat. "It can't be. There's no way."

Her boyfriend sat next to her and slipped an arm around her shoulder. "It's okay," he comforted her. "We'll get through this."