Silence of the Cities ✔ [COMPLETED]

Chapter Three

'You gonna butter them to death with that?' He nodded to the small knife in my hand and I braved a smile, eyeing the hammer in his grip.

'Alright Bob the builder, simmer down. You ready?'

'Ready'.

He pushed the door open before we had a chance to change our minds as daylight flooded the small room only fleetingly before we pushed it closed behind us. We were met with a small alleyway and though I'd have liked to kid myself and pretend we were greeted with silence, somewhere in the distance echoed a faint, guttural scream. Neither of us said anything.
'Stay low and stay silent' David mouthed, nodding for us to make our way forward. We pushed through the alleyway and it felt like a video game somehow, the tense few moments before you head straight into the last place you want to be. I was sweating, my stomach was churning rapidly and I could taste copper in my quivering mouth. My footsteps were silent but my heart hammered with the intensity of a thousand drums and it only made me feel worse, blurring my vision and making my head swim. 

I held my eyes closed as we reached the end of the alleyway, we had to walk straight through a street before the following one, straight out in the open. David peeked the corner first and when he gestured for me to move, I did just that. The way we ran was so silent, so careful, that it crossed my mind we might be floating. It was eerily quiet; nobody seemed to be around and no bodies littered the street. When David grabbed my hand and led me through the alley to the next road which was equally empty, I wondered if perhaps things weren't quite as dire as they'd seemed. There wasn't even blood. I'd snapped my head to the right at the cracking of a twig, but a lone cat was just making its way across a fence, borderline mockingly.

'You good?' he asked me, holding my shoulders as we ducked sneakily into the next alleyway. I simply nodded, head darting side to side, terrified to relax.

'Everything seems too normal' I muttered, to which he nodded.

'It's never too busy round here in the day, anyway' he whispered, checking our angles, 'And everyone is probably holed up inside watching us through the windows'.

The thought sent a shudder through my body and I couldn't help but eye the curtains of the house nearest us, half expecting a decayed looking body to smash straight through it.

'Two streets done' I said out loud, 'we just need to get through this next one'.

We turned the corner closest to the school and it seemed as though a thrumming of noise was just a little too far away to make out what was being said. David and I looked at one another with a frown and began to jog towards the noise which was gradually becoming clearer the closer we got.

'Is that coming from the school?'

He couldn't answer me as we moved nearer, ducking low behind walls and scouting the area out before we headed anywhere. The building itself came into view as the noise simultaneously began to make sense, and my blood ran cold.

'God, no'.

It was a raw, animalistic cry, amplified by about a thousand. What sounded like hundreds of people making a borderline demonic noise, as though their throats and voices only existed to instil fear in everyone around them. It was hoarse and guttural and when David looked at me with pure fear in his eyes, I almost burst into tears. 

'Get away, now' he hissed and he'd seen it before me; hell on earth. Because noises have a source and when I finally braved a look, I saw masses of bodies filling the school grounds, falling over one another, shuffling metre by metre. I understood now why the infected would signal the end of days, because I'd never seen anything quite like them.