The Dead Frontier
The haze of acrid smoke hung low over smoldering hulks of cars jammed in the road. They were left scattered and crashed like they had been thrown carelessly by a malevolent giant. Trucks, cars, school buses and ambulances were jammed randomly together at odd angles, frozen in a catastrophic act of panicked flight.
It seemed to the survivor that it rained more now. He didn’t know why. Was it just one more petty malevolence of an unfeeling God? Or maybe it was the sudden introduction of so much death, burning and general holocaust into the Earth’s ecosystem that caused the weeping of these sooty tears?
He stood in the overhang of a portico. Some building of forgotten purpose. He watched the grey water from a dark drizzle drip into the wrecked landscape.
At least the rain helped with the smell. That awful smell. Like the smoldering offal of a million dirty slaughterhouses.
A burst of machine gun fire echoed from a few blocks over to the east. The staccato deadly typewriting of a Thompson he thought.
He checked methodically that his rifle had a full clip. There had been plenty of situations in the last weeks where his agility and endurance had not been enough. The grim, certain hammer of pure fire power had slowed the hoards enough to allow him to attain an outpost. A sanctuary.
A shuffling and a moan broke the silence and roused the survivor’s attention. He tensed.
One of them, what had been a man, shambled in full mindless awfulness around the corner of the building. It was horribly burned but somehow still managed forage. Still managed its cruel echo of life in its mangled form.
The survivor froze, waiting those few seconds where it would either smell him or not. It would either attack or stagger on.
The zombie froze too, as if sensing something and turned.
As he had done so many times before the survivor slowly backed away from the now excited undead and shouldered his rifle. This one wasn’t one of the bad ones or the mutated ones. No need to panic. ‘Just another day at the office’ he smiled inwardly with gallows humor.
The survivor backed a few paces into the grey drizzle of the street, tightened his aim and discharged a finger-sized slug of jacketed lead.
The zombie was stood up straight by the impact and stumbled backwards a few steps before regaining its balance.
Now it was mad.
With a great gurgling scream it attacked. It rushed the survivor with mad intent.
The survivor continued to carefully back away and chambered another round.
Another deafening rifle crack broke the unholy silence of Fairview City. With a great, wet smack of rendered meat and bone the thing that had been a man spun and crumpled twitching to the pavement.
The survivor hitched up his backpack of loot, chambered a fresh round and took off down the wet street at a jog. He knew that more would come. They would be drawn by the noise. They would come. There were always more.