Even then, we knew what a bite meant. There was no time for worry or fear. I spent most of my adult life as a man who never had a chance to make a stand or be brave, but I did at that moment. My family looked at me as I clutched that wounded limb, the soldiers around us staring as they finished the cleanup.
I knew the options. I'd heard them enough times to feel the words indelibly burned into my mind. I could go easy and quick, or I could wait it out. Suffer, burn, die anyway. Then come back.
I didn't think about it for long. I rushed forward to kiss them goodbye, whispered a request to the soldier closest to me, and then ran back through the barricade as fast as my feet would take me. The bites could kill quickly, very quickly. I didn't want to be a danger to my family, or other people lucky enough to escape the swarm unharmed.
There weren't many undead left outside the barricade, and every one of them was moving in the opposite direction. Knowing I was already dead gave me a recklessness I wouldn't have risked otherwise. The few infected that came close enough to almost touch me were kicked or shoved in my desperate attempt to get far enough away that my family wouldn't see me fall.
I was maybe a hundred feet from the barricade when the shot rang out. It took me high in the shoulder, proving that not all marksmen are created equal. The push of the bullet threw me off balance, and I hit the ground at the edge of a small hill. Tail over teakettle, I rolled and thrashed through brush and debris. I heard my clothes tear against a hundred small obstructions; felt the damaged muscle and sinew in my upper back scream at the brutal earth every time I slammed against it.
The trip down the side of the hill seemed to last forever, but finally, it ended. My last memory as a living man was lying half-submerged in a babbling stream. It was cold. I was cold. I listened to the crack of gunshots slow down and eventually fade away. I looked up at the sky and wondered how I'd missed the beauty of the stars for all those years.
Funny, I thought. Only at the twilight of humankind, when all the lights have gone out, do I finally see the lovely vastness that’s always been there. Just beyond the border of my cluttered little life.
And then I died.
*****
My body woke up before I did.
I don't know if it works that way for the other shambling corpses that make up my current peer group, but my first memory of my new life was coming to sudden and unfortunate consciousness as my body shredded the throat of a screaming man. My instinct was to pull away in horror, but I couldn't. In fact, I couldn't even look away.
I was a passenger. Read-only reality.
I railed and struggled to stop what my body was doing, to no avail. My hands—look there, that's my wedding ring, done in white gold inlays on tungsten carbide—pulled gobbets of flesh from what became a corpse during my struggles.
The full spectrum of sensory data was there, but I had no control over any of it. You can't imagine what it's like. It's not the same as watching some horrific television show you can't turn off. You're actually a part of the program. I felt the hot blood of the dead man running down my fingers. I smelled the sour perspiration on his skin. I heard his bowels cut loose, could taste the warm, salty meat of him as my estranged fingers jammed pieces into my mouth.
After an hour or so of eating and doing the mental equivalent of vomiting inside my own head, I heard something that filled me with hope: gunfire. The area we were in was unfamiliar, so I couldn't be sure if the shooters were soldiers or unsuspecting survivors. Briefly, I wondered how far my errant body had traveled under its new management, but gave up that curiosity when I realized it didn't matter. Wherever I had roamed, I hoped it was far enough away that my family wouldn't chance upon me. I didn't want them to see me this way.
Whoever was firing that gun had a chance to end this for me. My body was already moving toward the sound of the shots.
My God, the shots.
The sound.
The best way I can describe it is like hearing in 3-D. Something about the sonic waves ricocheting from the sharp crack of the rifle was akin to depth perception, but far more powerful. I just knew the direction it came from, the distance. Like knowing how to grab a ball from the air as it's thrown to you. Whatever the plague destroying humanity was, whatever it had done to me, it seemed to make my body a better predator.
I just hoped whoever I was heading toward was better still.
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The Fall (Book 2): Dead Will Rise Page 28
