The group peered out the window, careful to not be seen by the walkers. I just stood there. I couldn't move and I could hardly breathe at all. It all felt so unreal. Like it was just a bad dream. Like it hadn't happened at all and he would come walking through that door any minute.
But he didn't. And he's not going to. Because he's gone and he's not coming back. Not this time.
"It's the kid. Is he bit?" I heard one of the men say.
That one sentence snapped me out of my thoughts. Please, no! Someone else had been bitten? Denise briefly squeezed her eyes shut before letting out a shuddering breath.
"Nope." she mumbled before she started to walk to the other side of the room.
My eyebrows furrowed in confusion as she began to order the others to get bandages and medical supplies. What was going on here? They slid a gurney that stood in the corner over to the middle of the room just as Denise opened the front door. A tall man carrying a teenage boy in his arms rushed into the room followed by an African-American woman wielding a sword. I suppressed a gasp when they came closer. The boy's eye had been completely shot out and blood poured out of his empty eye-socket.
"This is a gunshot?" Denise asked them.
"Handgun. Close range," the woman supplied as the man laid the teen down onto the gurney.
Then it hit me. The gunshots we had heard earlier. It had been the boy. The man who I assumed to be his father looked dazed and wracked with worry.
"Please save him. Please." he said, his words so quiet and soft they were barely audible.
He stared at his son, unbelieving and my heart broke for him. Denise and the others worked hurriedly to treat the boy. The man wiped a hand tiredly over his face before gazing back down at his son's bloody unconscious body. He was in so much pain. Walking over to the window, he glanced out of the smudged glass to the horde of walkers outside. I saw something snap in his eyes then and he unsheathed an ax from his belt before wandering over to the front door. He wrenched it open before walking out into the night once more.
"Rick! Rick!" the woman called after him.
But he was already gone. And I knew exactly what he was going to do. He was going to kill. He was going to kill them all. I ran over to the window and yanked back the curtain. The man who I know knew whose name was Rick, swung his ax at walker after walker.
Blood sprayed out as he cleaved their heads in half. There were too many of them. He couldn't do it by himself. Besides, I wanted revenge too. Those rotting corpses had taken Owen away from me. They all deserved death. permanent death.
I scanned the room before my dark brown eyes landed on a knife that had been cast down on one of the various tables in the room. Quickly, I snatched it from the surface and ran outside. Those things would pay for what they did. Their deafening moans filled the air, making it hard to hear anything else. That didn't matter though. I didn't need to.
I only needed my knife so I could destroy them. Walkers came at me from all sides, their arms outstretched and jaws chomping at me. I raised my knife high and grabbing one of them, shoved it through its skull. I did the same over and over with countless others. And down they went one by one. Everything went by so fast that I barely noticed more people pouring out of the other houses, weapons in hand.
Soon, it wasn't just me and Rick fighting. It was the civilians too. I guess we all had a vendetta against these monsters. Blood covered me time and time again as I killed them. With every jab, every hit, I let out my anger. Anger over Owen's death, over my mom's, and over every other person I'd lost along the way to these beasts. Time slipped away from me then and all I was focused on was killing. The large group of us pushed the dwindling crowd of walkers further and further towards the gate.
"Move it! Back up!" Rick shouted to us over the din of snarling.
Suddenly, the giant body of water beside us caught fire, the flames just licking the grass. The walkers turned their heads, drawn towards the burning light of the fire. Slowly, they began to limp towards it. It lit up the town just like it was daytime, it was so bright. While the walkers were distracted momentarily, we began to kill more of them. I stabbed my knife into another one's head and it went down with a thud on the blood-covered pavement.
One by one they fell, whether by my hand or someone else's. They limped away in hordes, all of them headed towards the fiery lake. The flames engulfed them but they still kept going, not phased by it. On and on it went, for what must have been hours. I fought alongside people I'd never even met before but we worked as a team. And eventually, they were gone.
They were all gone. Those rotting corpses lay dead on the ground. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something bright fading into existence. I glanced over there and to my surprise, I saw the sun peeking out over the horizon. It was a brand new day.