Katie And The Reaper (A Post-Apocalyptic Romance)

Prologue - Katie age 14

Marie made some raspy noises as Katie unbuckled and untied the weight from her back. 

"There is help ahead Mom.  I heard an engine."  Katie lied.  She hadn't heard anything like that.

She thought her mom might be moving her lips trying to yell at her.

"I'm taking this off.  We can come back and get it.  Like we'll go back for the car.  But we must keep moving.  You know there might be more zombies behind us." 

Right on cue, she heard a warble of noise that sounded just like a zombie.  With hardly a flicker of life force to speak of, it was easy for the rotting things to hide on Katie's internal radar.  This wouldn't be the first time she walked blindly into a nest of them.  All the other creatures in this broken world, Katie could sense.  Close her eyes and she could see them. 

The zombies were her big weakness.   And terrain.

While not technically zombies, the mostly-dead, disease infected cannibals who roamed everywhere in dangerous packs like wolves, were the biggest threat to Katie and her mom, after complete dehydration and starvation.  With abilities that made her blood unique among humans, Mom was a special treat to their kind.  Katie thought they could smell her like popcorn in an apartment building.

Adrenaline helped Katie move faster, pulling and tugging at the overstuffed backpack, uncovering the already loaded shotgun.  She loosened the pockets on her pants for the metal spikes she had sharpened for quiet kills.  Bullets were last resort.  The noise would draw more predators.  And all Katie knew about guns was point, safety off, brace for recoil, shoot.  Plus, there was the 'her being a terrible shot' thing.  Bullets didn't like her.

Searching for someplace to put their backs, Katie found a sort of rock outcropping and the spear of a burned tree.  "Mom, we have to move a little.  Just over here.  Then you can rest for a minute.  But just a minute.  What if that engine drives away?"

"Not made for this," Her mother complained.  Katie had heard that a hundred times over the last week.  Back in the day, Mom had been a very well-paid stripper.  She bragged about it still.  She called herself Sugar and owned that gold pole in her pre-baby Katie days.  She was not a survivalist, she'd say.  Late afternoon coffee and workdays that started at 7:30 p.m. and feather boas were more her style.  But she'd managed to do a darn respectable job of keeping them both alive in a chaotic world where women were usually currency, not killers.

Scanning through the burned-out trees and over rocky ground, Katie sent out her senses.  Zombies had some kind of will that propelled them, a weak beastly thing that told them they were hungry, and food was ahead.  Why couldn't she sense them?  The terrain interrupted her sight line in five or six places.  Zombies could be in behind any one of them.

Katie watched Marie shove herself up and forward, using momentum to push her forward.  With the weight of the backpack gone and the weakness of near starvation, she was clumsy and awkward.  At the end of her limit.  Katie tried to help, but that brief spike of energy was gone. 

The first zombies came from the left.  Just suddenly there.  Warbles turned to growls.  The wind shifted and Katie could smell the blast of rot and disease.  A cross between a gut wound and gangrene, the distinctive smell radiated off them in a putrid cloud. 

Katies cry for help was a reflex.  It was a telepathic demand that shot out of her like a sonic bomb, calling friend and foe alike.  Currently, anything that answered that wasn't hungry, mangy zombie was better than the party they had going now.

Trying to keep her mom behind her, shoving the rifle in her general direction, Katie pulled her spikes.  Mummified brown skin, toothy, with bony claws, the things came at them. Katie could do a dance with two or three of them, even when they were fast and happy; she'd discovered something in herself that knew how to move when to strike.  Mom said she was a last day's kid, that the world had prepared to be broken by birthing children who could survive it.  Katie said she'd rather be in special kid class than in weird-killer home-school. 

There were more than three in this pack of biters.  Katie was tired and dehydrated and her Mom was on the ass-side of almost dead. 

The shotgun went off over Katie's head and she felt Mom kick with it.  Okay, so Marie was only on the boob-side of dead.  But the clock was ticking. Katie's brain focused.  She danced.  Fist pounding, spike to skull, dodge a bite, kick a knee, fist to upper jaw, twist to the side, fist to temple, twist an arm.  Body part to body part, every chance with the dance Katie improved.  But this wasn't prom and she had too many partners. 

Marie and been shooting and now she was screaming.  Katie's own rage joined hers.  Their bites weren't poisonous to Katie or Marie, but the things bit to eat, with no hesitation.  Once the zombies clamped down, they didn't release without a mouthful of meaty flesh.  One of things had decided to go low and had hold of Katie's calf while reaching around toward her mother.  She couldn't get it off, and there were too freakin' many. 

And then it stopped. 

A massive male appeared from nowhere, not- human, Katie's brain registered.  Not werewolf.  Not vampire.  Not mage.  But definitely full-on male.  Her inner mind felt him as blank space.  A giant, muscled, man-shaped black hole walking into the hungry cannibal crowd and started tapping shoulders and heads.  Everything he touched turned to sharp, splintered chunks. The zombies shattered like dry wood under massive pressure in a wierdo implosion. 

Not totally without survival instincts, the creatures realized something new had come to kill them and freaked out. Katie had never seen a frightened zombie.  It was kinda funny.

She'd laugh about it later. 

Currently, she was too busy bleeding out to bother.