Runners, Final Post (for now)

Here you go, for Halloween, the final (and with extra gore) of this installment of Runners. This is an extra long post... hope you find some time today for a long scary story.


I fumbled for my knife, grabbing it at the hilt and holding it up like a talisman against the pile of undead now scattering up from the ground, lunging at Anna. Anna's face turned quickly from surprise to dread as she felt her arms being pulled down, her legs pulling out from under her. Her eyes searched with frenzy for me and when our eyes met she screamed, "find the red road! Look for the Pipe! Look for Dizzy!" Her hand was on her belt, unclipping her knife. She held it up as she looked at me one last time. "Run you fuck!" She stabbed the knife down through the side of the head of the zombie closest to her, but it did nothing to slow its lunge. It's teeth found her throat, biting and tearing in a slow motion. Her scream was cut dully from the air as her head slumped forward. The zombie continued to feed without swallowing, tearing and chewing from compulsion, but without pleasure, without reason.

I stared as the life faded from her eyes, as blood poured down over her face, out from her mouth, and onto the floor. I looked at the zombies pulling at her, biting chunks from her legs and torso, holding her half standing as they pulled at her from every direction. One looked up at me, it's gray face a mix of hungry and bored that all zombies have. It started to lurch towards me, tripping over those in it's path still concentrating on Anna. He moved slowly, but our little sleeping chamber was small, smaller now that it was filled with sounds of crunching and tearing as they fed.

I threw my knife at it, watched the handle bounce harmlessly off his chest. Suddenly, the last thirty or so seconds, maybe less, caught up with me all at once, racing across my eyes again and making me understand. I remembered where I was, remembered who I was. I knew that their eyes, all their eyes would turn away from Anna, still as hungry as before. I knew she would start to turn soon, but with her body so torn, would be unable to move from the floor. I pictured her trapped here, moaning, squirming, reaching constantly around her for something that would satiate her, something that would never come. I turned, finding the ladder that marked the back entrance. I climbed to the field my head swimming, spinning constantly, sure that there was a zombie directly behind me, but seeing only a few still milling around the front entrance of the shelter. They looked up at me, and I ran.
I ran as far from her as I could, feeling my ankle twist against a rock in the field, feeling the pain shoot up my leg with each foot fall. I ran without direction, without thought. I ran without looking, without hearing. I ran until my lungs felt torn, until my heart was thudding in my eyes, the earth shuddering as blood pumped through me. My heart was beating wildly from within my head, screaming its affirmation that I was still alive, still alive, still alive.
The trees around me, already shaking, began to blur, and I didn't realize I was crying until fat tears, dirty from their trip down my cheeks, began landing on the ground below me. I fell to my knees, then to my side. I stared at the single blade of grass that now consumed my view, so close to my eyes it must have been touching them. I cried until I couldn't. I shook until I stopped. I wrapped myself in myself, pressing my face against the ground under me. I waited for a darkness still hours away. I closed my eyes with all the energy I had left in me.
Anna had broken something in me, something I wasn't sure I ever wanted broken. I was sure now that I would die soon. I wasn't sure if I cared or not. I had spent every hour, every thought, every movement, for who knows how many months, trying to stay alive. There, on the ground, I asked myself why. I stared into the frantic lightening exploding on the backs of my eyelids. I had no answer.

The ground became soft around me, the dirt wrapping around me in the warmth of welcome. I was dying, I was pretty sure, and thankful for the mercy of it. Still, if I was dead, I knew it, which didn't seem right. If I was asleep, I was asleep consciously, which didn't fit either. With more effort than I should have needed, I forced open my eyes, and saw the ceiling of last night's shelter.

I tried to scream, but couldn't. My mouth felt three feet from my mind. The ceiling was above, definately right above me, but looked as if I was seeing it from across a long field. I tried to scream again, concentrating on throwing the message to lungs and to my tongue. A low moan dribbled from between my lips.

A hand shot in front of my eyes, and I tried to bring my hands up to protect myself. As I struggled to move my hands up, fruitlessly, the hand reached away from me. It was my hand. Rather, it was the hand attached to my body. It didn't look like my hand. The hand was too small, was covered in blood, mangled.

Tired from the effort it was costing me, I stopped trying to move my hand, stopped trying to do anything. The hand went on moving, reaching for something that wasn't there. I could feel my body like a blanket over me, could feel trapped inside of myself. I tried to scream again, but couldn't. I tried to move my eyes, to look away from my horrible hand, but couldn't. I tried to close my eyes, but couldn't do that either.

A zombie came into my field of view. I panicked, trying to pull myself away, thrashing, pushing at every inch of my body, trying to get it to move, to run. The zombie tripped over my legs, falling on top of me, its mouth, its horrid, rotting teeth, inches from my eyes. I screamed again, the force of it sharp against the inside of my skin, but no sound came. It pushed itself from me, looking at me without seeing, and rolled from my view. I understood then. The undead do not die, they just lose control.

I tried to concentrate on losing my mind. It didn't seem like it would be a hard thing to do, though I wasn't sure if it would make anything better.

One last time, I tried to shake myself to control. If I could just move enough to smash something into my skull. If I could just end this... I shook hard, like a dog drying after a swim, but I could feel that it was helpless, could feel the walls containing me in the back reaches of this brain growing more solid, more secure. I was trapped. Underground, unable to move, unable to die. I was trapped.

I came to on the ground, thrashing wildly and screaming. I seemed to be doing that a lot lately, waking up by announcing my presence loudly to anything in the area. Bad habit I have no idea how to get over. I stood, shakily. It took me a minute to gather my surroundings in. I looked hard at everything around me, trying to piece together what it was that was sprinting its way up from the back of my mind before it got there. I picked a direction and started walking, but not before it caught me.

Anna is on the ground. Anna was trapped, buried alive somewhere in a dead body, a dead brain.

Several realizations collided in my head then, all together. I knew that if Anna was somewhere alive, imprisoned, I would do nothing to help her. I knew that if Anna, that if anyone I had every known and loved, was somewhere right now being tortured, I knew that I would run in the opposite direction. I knew that I was going to Anna now. I knew that I would save her, would help her. I knew that I would find the heaviest thing I could carry, and I would smash her skull apart.

I looked again at the trees around me, aware now of what I had been looking for before I knew it: the way back to the shelter.

I remembered running and running, but all these trees looked the same. I started to turn in frantic circles, looking for some clues, for something. Knowing that I was only making things worse, I stopped. I had to calm myself down before I could think straight. I closed my eyes, breathed deep. The images attacked me as soon as my eyes were closed. I saw what she saw, heard through dead ears the sounds of feet shuffling around the small room. I tried to push the images away, opened my eyes and found myself as lost as I had been.

I closed my eyes again, again seeing through the eyes of what was left of Anna. I felt all the terror, all the panic of being trapped again, but I felt something else, something deeper, something in my stomach, like thread being pulled through my skin. I could feel the direction of the pulling. I opened my eyes again, turned slightly to my right, and started to walk.

I concentrated on that spot of my stomach, that grotesque pain that kept pulling at me. I tried not to blink, tried to keep away the split second flashes of Anna's sight. I had no idea how far I had run, but I knew now that I was getting closer. Something in me rebelled against the idea of walking towards a place that I knew was swarming with undead, but it was a polite rebellion, a stating of grievances that was quickly discarded and forgotten. That is not to say that I had anything that looked like a plan, any idea of what I would do when I got to the field where Anna was. Where she was, for all intents and purposes, buried.

As I walked, my ankle still reminding me with dull thuds that I had twisted it the day before, it sky grew purple above me. It would be dark before I got to the field. I thought about climbing, about sleeping, but grew nauseous at the idea of dreaming for hours what Anna was feeling now, and then started walking faster, near a jog, thinking that every moment I wasted was a moment that Anna was trapped.

I thought about all the zombies, all of them everywhere, the billions of them across the planet. I hoped to hell that it was only Anna who had been trapped, but I knew she wasn't. I thought of my brother, of the shovel full of his brains and skull. I felt relief that I knew, at least, that he was at whatever peace there was.

I kept walking, my eyes straining through the darkness to find a path. I couldn't tell how far or close I was to Anna, only that I was heading in the right direction. The moments I had to change course, to walk around a thick patch of trees or something, the tug got stronger on my stomach, surprisingly painful, until I got myself moving in the right direction again.

It got dark enough that I couldn't make out details of anything more than ten feet in front of me. I could see shapes of trees, bushes, the dips of the land around me. I watched through the lines of trees for anything out of place, anything moving. Nothing.

I was dark when I reached the clearing. The needlepoint pain in my stomach had defused, less sharp, but filled my torso and arms. The muscles of my shoulder flexed with the warmth, demanding to be used. The feeling was new to me. My muscles only ever begged for flight, surged me onwards, away from anywhere I had been long enough to count as rest. Flight is the work of legs, but my arms wanted action, wanted violence.

On a cloudless night, with eyes adjusted to dark over months of living hunted, I could see my goal clearly. Two doors swung down into real darkness, halfway across the field. I could hear the shuffling of feet, the moans of more than one mouth from within. The field was clear, whatever zombies that were still above ground when I ran had left. With no idea how many zombies were still underground, and no idea how to do what I planned to do, I took my first step forward into whatever sort of violent and short path I had chosen. I knew I had to rescue Anna. I said her name aloud, over and over, as I kept moving my legs.

As I approached the pit, the sounds from within got louder. They knew I was coming now, groaned with desire at the smell of me. I closed my eyes, concentrating on Anna. I saw nothing now, but felt again the panic of imprisonment, the helplessness and the horror of it. I wasn't sure if I was feeling my own panic or Anna's, but the feeling only resolved my goal. I had to save her.

My eyes scanned the ground around the entrance until I found what I didn't really know I was looking for. Half buried around the doors were pieces of the foundation of whatever frame used to mark their presence. I found one piece, coming to a rough point above ground, and dropped to my knees to start digging. In a few minutes, the groans below me turning to screams of anticipation, I unearthed the stone, rolling it out from the dirty that contained it.

I could lift it, and though it did not fit smoothly in my hands, I could grip it tightly. I carried the rock over to the edge of the doorway, stared into the swarming darkness stacked on top of Anna. I dropped again to my knees, and lifted the rock. It was about the size of a loaf of bread, but weighed enough that the burning of my arms turned to acid as I held it above my head.

I stared into the abyss below me, knowing Anna was down there somewhere, but knowing that there was work to be done before I could reach her.

5

The darkness below me swirled like oil with movement just past the point my sight penetrated. My arms grew tired, then sore. I gripped the rock harder, feeling the rough edges press through the skin of my palm. I knew all my pain and discomfort, but was detached from it. This moment would not be about me and my pain. My heart beat from my stomach, from that point that had pulled me here.

Minutes passed, maybe more, and I could hear them struggling below me, slipping over and on each other. I knew that soon they would find purchase on the metal rungs on the wall, leading to me. I waited, watching for something to materialize from the nothing.

First there were hands, which I was waiting for. They were grey, tinted green and pink. They were bloated, the knuckles and fingertips scraped away, revealing the pulpy meat we are all made of. The hands reached for me, but without the weight of a body behind them, they had no strength. Somehow in the old movies, zombies always moved slow, thought slow, but carried with them some unnatural strength. They could tear apart a person using bare hands alone, tear open a stomach and rip entrails from within. Really, they are weak, their muscles deteriorating from the moment they are turned. Their real power is in their numbers and their weight. Pushing 200 pounds from on top of you is difficult. Two zombies take a feat of incredible strength to push away, and three or more are impossible to overpower.

From above them, they could not use their weight against me. The hands could be easily shrugged off when they found purchase on my legs or arms if I wanted to. Really, it was only their bites that I had to fear. This ones fingernails, like all of them, continued to grow after death. A few had snapped off, perhaps while trying to feed, perhaps by the sheer clumsiness of the dead, and their pointed tips were sharp, but not sharp enough to cut through my jeans. It actually helped that it could dig into the fabric of my jeans, using them to claw its way further up, far enough that I could, finally, make out its head emerging from the cellar.

I counted to three, letting it get closer, letting its hands cling to my jacket, pulling it up, close enough now that its open mouth was only inches from my thighs. One of his hands grabbed at my arms, ripping away skin as it tried to pull me near it. Blood ran from my triceps to my elbow, and dripped down into the abyss, met by the squeal and wheezing of hungry dead. I waited until I could see its eyes, unfocused, undirecting, unaware, and brought the stone down with a sickening crunch on top of its skull. This one had been dead a long time, had softened with decay. The force of the stone split its skull in half, driving nearly down to its neck. It fell down, leaving a layer of stale blood and brains coating the rock and my hands. I lifted the rock back above my head and waited for the next pair of hands to appear.

It was long work that lasted through most of the night. At first, it was a matter of minutes between zombies, each one dispatched with one or two blows to the head. The newer zombies I had to lure further out of the cellar, so I could use the ground on one side to add force to the blows, forcing the rock down through their skull until they stopped moving. My hands bled freely as the rock dug into them, fuzed with my skin as each blow drove fragments further and further into my hands.

I rested once, my the muscles in my arms and legs twitching for overuse as I sat back on the ground. Exhaustion threatened to overtake me as the gore of the night mixed with nightmares in my mind, as the night air around me became warm, wrapping around me and lulling me to sleep. My adrenaline had run out hours before, as had my grip on reality and my instinct for survival. Only the pain in my stomach kept me from passing out on the mouth to hell. The pain, and a hand gripping my ankle.

I sat up, startled by the contact, which in the fog of exhaustion felt almost comforting. It was just another dead hand, trying to drag me close to feed on me. I brought the rock up from my chest, where I was clutching it like a pillow, and let the weight of the stone do most of the work, letting it fall sloppily at first, crushing the face of the zombie pulling itself towards me, and then aiming better, smashing its head open on the hard dirt of the field. The kill made me realize that it had been at least an hour since I had killed the one before it. I listened at the entrance to the shelter and heard no feet shuffling, no weight being moved from one place to another. I even dangled my feet down the opening, like worm on a hook, but had no takers.

I knew then that Anna was alone down there, waiting for me. I looked up at the sky, seeing a the black above my head bleed to purple behind me, and to a color much like the one that coated my rock along the tree line. I had an hour or so before it would be light enough to go down into the shelter to get her. I decided that it was time for a talk.

I talked into the dead space below me, knowing that she was down there and hoping that she could hear me, could understand part of what I was saying. I tried to close my eyes again, to see things she could see, but that had worked less and less well the closer I got to her. Now that I was right here, right above her, that bond seemed to have broken. Maybe it never existed aside from my own guilt at escaping. Instead I talked. I told her about how I thought I had seen her in there, about how I knew she was still alive somewhere down there, and that I was coming to help her.

I tried my best not to think of the state she'd be in when I got there. So much of her had been eaten away before I left, there was no way she could walk or even crawl. She would be there, on the floor where she first fell, torn apart and incapable of real movement. I tried no to imagine that when I thought about saving her.

I told her that I remembered what she had said. That I should look for the Pipe. That I should look for Dizzy. I knew there was a road I had to get to, less than a day's walk from where I was. I knew the general direction we were walking in when we found the shelter. I told her all this, hoping it would make her feel better, more confident in my abilities. "It should be you out here," I said, tears floating at the back of my throat, "you're better at this, I know you are. But I'm going to make it, I promise." The air around me felt for a second like she might respond, and I listened so hard it hurt, but there was nothing. No sound at all. My rock still sat in my lap and I looked down at it. How many zombies had I killed tonight? Maybe a dozen, maybe more. It was hard to know how many had climbed back up after being hit once, hard to know which wounds I had inflicted, or had been there for months. I knew they were all dead now, for good.

When it finally got light enough that I could make out the pile of bodies below me, I got ready to lower myself into the shelter. I threw the rock down first, hearing it thud against the lifeless bodies sprawled over each other on the floor below me. Since it seemed easier and probably safer than spinning around to climb down, I threw myself after the rock, my feet landing squarely on the spine of the zombie on the top of the pile, the one that had grabbed my ankle. I noticed now that it had been a woman. Somehow, over the course of the night, I had looked only hard enough to find a target, only long enough to know that I had found my mark. I had not registered that each skull I had smashed had at one point belonged to a person, a person who almost certainly died in agony and fear. I looked down at the pile below my feet, unmoving, most without anything remaining that resembled a face. They looked so peaceful.

In the light, it was easy to find her against the ground, away from the pile by the doors. She was the only thing left that was moving, other than me. She had sensed me, smelled me maybe, if she could do that without a nose, or most of her face. She was reaching for me, lunging in my direction, without creating any real movement from her body. I could see, even in the dim light, that she was worse off than I had thought. Her legs were both eaten down to the bone in many places, her right leg broken straight sideways at one point during the struggle, or after her death. Large parts of her torso were torn away, as well as much of her neck and face. Still, there was enough connecting everything that it all twitched, all reached in its way towards me. "Don't worry," I said, as if to a crying child, "I'm coming."

I looked back towards the rock on the pile of bodies and thought against it. Not for Anna. Instead I straddled her, right over where her chest had once been. I pressed my knees against her shoulders, pinning her arms to the ground. "Don't worry," I said again, "I'm here to save you."

I brought my fist down hard against her left eye socket, which was empty. I heard a crack that might have been the structural bone of her face, or maybe the bones of my knuckles. My hands, already bleeding from the work of the night, splattered blood across her face. I brought my fist down again in the same place, feeling her face give in to the force of my blows. I kept punching her, pain shooting from my fist with every connection, as my target grew softer and softer. After some time, maybe five minutes, or maybe an hour, it was hard to tell. She stopped moving. I sat above her, panting, waiting to see if she would regain movement. She didn't. I stood, and just to make sure, stomped where her head used to be until I knew that every last piece of what remained of Anna was released. When I knew my job was done, I walked back over to the doors and swung them shut, latching them.

Once they were closed, I had trouble seeing where I was going, and tripped repeatedly over the limbs and bodies sprawled over the floor. Eventually I found Anna on the floor, curled up next to her, and slept.

Runners, Post 8

Anna crawled on top of me, kissing my chest and my neck, then lifting her mouth to mine again. Without sight, we found the soft spots of each other, her hand sliding down to the inside of my thigh, my hands covering her breasts, her nipples sliding between my fingers. Our eyes, closed when they were open, stopped reaching to see as we concentrated only on the feeling of each other. We felt each other soften under touch, harden under touch, change against each other. Anna, warm on top of me, especially her neck and between her legs, now pressing against my sides, began to trail her fingertips up and down my thighs, finding the hardness between my legs, wrapping her fingers around it.

My fingers followed the warmth up Anna's legs to its center, began pressing gently in slow circles. Her mouth moaned into mine sucking in on my bottom lip. My hand, palm up just below her stomach, my fingers curling just between her legs, pushed her body slowly down onto mine, joining us together in careful, slow movements. Anna's face, only an inch from mine, was impossible to see, but I could feel her breath moving slowly up and down between the bridge of my nose and the top of my lips as she moved her body forward and back.

She moved slowly, enough so that our mouths had time to find each other while she moved. We had all night, and took most of it. Our breathing matching each other for a few moments before her or I grew faster or slower as the sensations in our legs, our stomachs, or lips, and fingers, began to overtake us completely. In silence and in darkness, an orgasm feels like your body exploding.

We drifted in and out of sleep, never releasing each other. Sometimes, whatever we were thinking would float out between our lips. I heard something about Piper tomorrow, about the road to the hills. I heard about Dizzy, over and over again, enough that I knew the D was a capital. She heard about my brother, for a bit, from before. She heard about a place I found once where I stayed for three straight days, I called it the Landing, because it overlooked a gorgeous lake. One day, I saw the top of a head bob out from the water. It could have been have been a dead body. It could have been a log. It could have been one of them, walking up from the lake bottom. I ran out the back door. Kept running. I heard about her fighting in the nearly empty cities, roaming bands of survivors fighting back, feeling like they were doing something, winning some war they imagined. I hear about her seeing the first swarm, abandoning hope. We stopped talking completely, gave up to the darkness and to the feel of each other.

4

We woke up because we stopped sleeping. In the complete darkness, it was really hard to tell the difference. There was a moment of panic when I felt pressure on my mouth making it difficult to breath, then I realized Anna was kissing me. We kissed for a few minutes, or more, starting sleepy and slow, and building to playful and invigorating kissing of lips and cheeks and necks. She pulled her lips away from me just far enough to say, quietly, full of excitement, "Time to go sleepy. If we hurry today, we'll get to the Pipe."

"Pipe?"

"It's where I live. We just need to get to the road today. If we can run later, we'll make it, maybe even run into the movers, hitch a ride..." she wasn't talking to me anymore. She wasn't really even talking to herself anymore. She sounded more like she was on the phone, like she was promising someone who wasn't with us that she would be home soon.

As she was talking, she was gathering her things, tightening belts and shoes and straps, making sure she was ready for the distance we would travel that day. I could hear those things, and so followed suit. There didn't seem to be any water or any food, so I didn't bother asking or looking for it. Maybe we'd get lucky during our walk.

My mind still spun from the night, from the kissing and touching, from the talking, from the information that Anna had a home, a permanent place, a place where she lived. I was waking slower than normal, focusing on little things like the taste of the air, like the sounds of Anna dressing. I heard her walking across the room, slow, sure steps. I could hear the anxiety in her walk, the anticipation. "We'll take the front door this time," she said, and I could hear her hands finding the metal ladder and climbing the four rungs up to the large door, could hear her hands running against the door, looking for the handle. I could hear the scratching her hand made against the door, except, in two places at once, or three or four or...

"No! Shit!" I screamed my warning, but too late.

Her head turned towards me, and the door sprung open as soon as she pulled the handle down. Light flooded the small chamber, spilling over her face for a short second before it was swallowed by shawdow, followed by bodies. Five or six, shit, maybe more, laying on the ground under main entrance, their sound having been muffled by a thick door and distraction. They fell down on top of Anna, knocking her to the ground with them. She looked unhurt from the fall, but, for the very first time since I had met her, completely surprised.

Runners, Post 7

3

It felt a little like afternoon when we finally left the house, but I only knew for sure that it was daytime. Days and times had stopped really mattering a long time ago. It doesn't really matter what time it was when you have no idea where you are going. What with the head trauma and the brief flirtation with insanity, I had lost what little hold I had on how much time had passes since Anna and I had fucked on the couch of a home surrounded with things that wanted to eat us.

We walked mostly in silence, Anna's eyes darting back and forth over the horizon, constantly checking behind us, so our sides, steering us away from the blind corners sometimes created by a patch of trees or a small hill. I let my guard down because I could, but I had nothing else to focus on, so my eyes followed the same paths as hers. We didn't talk about the sex. We didn't talk about our names. We walked. Our watched our steps too. I took 10 for every 13 of hers. Over a stretch of a few hours of walking, our steps created a very drawn out rhythm, one that only repeated every fifteen minutes or so.

The sky dimmed slowly from an almost white blue to a light purple. We had maybe an hour worth of light to see by. You could walk in the dark, but once you had committed to it, you needed to walk all night. It was too hard to see something half a mile away in the dark, but it might find you when you were asleep.

I didn't see anything in the area that would work. Sparse trees, flat fields. A lot of nothing. We passed a group of trees that looked just like every other group of trees we had seen all day, except this group, on the tallest branch of the tallest tree, had a large piece of red cloth tied to it, flying like a bloody flag. Anna saw me looking up at it as I started to ask, "I wonder how tha-"

"I put it there. Shelter marker. Turn right."

It may have been an hour since either of us had spoken, but our silence and her brevity were symptoms of our survival. Anna stopped, scanning the horizon in all directions, looking for any silhouette that moved. Now that we had moved further from the fields and into an area with more trees, it was getting a little harder to see clearly. A swaying tree at the right distance was enough to draw your eye. We were both practiced though, knew what we were looking for. We were alone.

Anna began searching with her feet, kicking aside grass and weeds that had tangled themselves into an impenetrable mess. She found what she was looking for, a small thick piece of wood, and lifted it to reveal a small hole with a ladder going down. "It's an old storm cellar. This is the back entrance we made. I'll go first. Make sure you put the door back on." Before she had finished talking, she was already half down the hole, which looked just wide enough that I'd be able to squeeze myself down it. Fuck. I hate being trapped above ground.

Once I had gotten my head below the grass line, I realized why it was that Anna wanted to go first. The last person on the ladder had to put the wood back in place, which meant crawling down a ladder backwards in total darkness. Fuck. The dirt kept brushing me my back on the way down, pushing against me where it got thinner. When I tried to go faster I felt like I would fall. When I tried to go slower, I felt like there wasn't enough air to breath. Fuck.

When my feet hit the ground, I swung my hand around trying to find where to go next and smacked Anna somewhere hard, which could have been any of a hundred places on Anna.

"So it's like that, huh?" She punched me hard in the stomach. Her eyes had adjusted better than mine. I could tell she was smiling though. She sounded playful.

"This place sucks."

"Yes, it does, but it's the best we've got around here. The main room is better." She grabbed my hand then, and started pulling me in the direction opposite the ladder. I hit my head on what felt like either hard dirt or a soft rock and swore. "Oh. Watch your head." Anna gave my hand a little squeeze, playful again as she continued to pull me through.

"Are there lights?"

"There were. Ran out."

In the darkness of the main room, we found bunks that seemed clean enough. Anna found the second ladder, this one wide and metal, that led to the main doors. She pushed against them to make sure they were locked and solid.

"Food?"

"No. Beds and doors."

"This place sucks."

"Yes, it does."

It was dark. So dark. I felt the ground above me, pushing down, the ground around me, pushing in. I found myself with one hand against the cold wall, smooth and solid. Concrete maybe. Or packed dirt. Or I didn't know. Without any sight at al, I was finding it impossible to understand anything around me. I touched every surface too hard or too soft. Everything felt like an attack. I rubbed the wall, my hand pressed hard against it. I thought about digging.

"This is driving you crazy."

"Yes."

"Don't think about the walls. Think about the dark."

I did. I thought about the air, clean and cool now that we were in the main room. I realized the warmth I was feeling was my own, my own blood rushing furiously through my body to combat the threat of being trapped. I thought about the dark, which was more than an absence of light, and more like some benevolent force that had driven all the light away. There was nothing to see, nothing to be worried about. It didn't matter if my eyes were opened or closed. There was nothing to be seen. Nothing to be seen.

I felt something fall down onto my hand and realized that I was crying, weeping in the darkness of the shelter. It felt good. I could feel the darkness taking it in.

There was a hand on my shoulder then, Anna somehow finding me in the darkness by the sounds of my cries, knowing exactly where to put her hand to find me, without making any sounds.

"This place it..." My voice cracked, and I was pulled from my knees, I hadn't realized I had dropped to them

"Yeah," Anna pulled me to her, wrapped her arms across the back of my shoulders,

"It's not so bad."

"No. No it's not."

My hands searched for her, so close but so small in the darkness that it took a moment to find an elbow, a waist, a neck, a face. With my palm on her cheek, I felt that she had been crying too.

In the darkness, that consuming and consumed darkness, we felt each other, felt each other with our hands and faces and chests and legs. Our bodies pressed against each other as we stood, as my head angled down and hers up. Our lips found each other, fit perfectly with heads turned slightly opposite one another.

My hands found their way just below her ribcage, and hers rested on top of my hips as we kissed. In a world of extremes, cold and hot and pain and numb, fright and shock, there are very few things that are soft, that are warm. Our lips, cracked and raw and dirty, found a softness with each other, bled warmth into each other, became smooth and lovely with each other. Our bodies pressed together, but like blankets, with no force but some reassurance, some comfort. We kissed and cried like that for a long time.

We found our way to one of the bunks, solid and surgically soft. I laid down first, and guided Anna down next to me so her head was on my chest, her leg thrown over mine, her arm across my stomach. Laying down, we let our hands talk for us, telling each other about hard lives, finding scars and knotted muscles, lean limbs and powerful centers. Clothing was removed slowly to allow for paths to be completed, stories to be told in completion, until we were both naked, still wrapped in each other without speaking.

Runners, Post 6

Throughout the month of October, I will be posting my zombie book "Runners," written just for the hell of it over the last year, piece by piece. New sections will be added every Monday and Thursday. Look below if you're catching up.

Slowly, the pain began to sharpen, to become points, stars in the sky. The stars got brighter, burning themselves to the back of my head. My mind connected the lines between some of them, the blackness between faded to lightness, and shapes emerged. There was pain.

I was awake, suddenly, like a light switch. I was sitting on a floor, I was screaming in pain and surprise. I took a sharp breath and screamed more, now changing the sound of my scream. I did this a few times more, had probably been doing it for awhile before I was aware of it, before I realize I was screaming a word, one long syllable at a time. I was screaming “window.”

“Wiiiiiiiiiinnnnn...”

Breath.

“Doooooooooooooow...”

I was staring at a window.

I stopped screaming.

I heard someone running up the stairs. I was upstairs. I made myself crawl to a corner, cover my head with my hands. I waited for what was about to happen. “Dude,” the voice was harsh, hateful, angry, “What the fuck?” The voice was beautiful, familiar, terrifying. I opened my eyes. It was her.

“What the fuck are you yelling about?” She was at the window, looking out, “there’s nothing out there.”

“Allen.” My voice sounded empty, strained.

“What?”

“Allen. My name is Allen.”

“Goddammit. I knew I should have tied you up.”

“No... no,” it was coming back to me now. Them. They were out there. Close or far, I didn’t know, but they were out there. My mind had held that reality from me, and my mind had been nearly blank without it. Without her showing up, without the one memory apart from them, I may have lost my mind. Now, they were flooding my head again. My hands and eyes were searching for exits, for my pack, for “my knife.”

“I have it here,” she held it up, “I’ll give it back when I’m sure I wont have to stab you with it.”

“I’m fine. I was... confused. I’m alright now.”

“Good.” She put my knife down on the window sill and turned to leave. I tried to stand up, to thank her or to stop her, or just because she had moved quickly enough that my body was reacting in defense, but the pain in my head knocked me back down to the floor. “Goddamn my head hurts. Ow. Fucking Ow.”

She sighed, stopped, and turned back to me, “sorry about that, really,” and for a second she was that unguarded woman from the night before. “I was gone when you came back,” she paused and looked harder at me, impressed, but furiously so, “you dipshit. I told you not...”

"I came back for my knife.”

“Like hell you did. You came back for...” and she stopped, unwilling to finish the thought. “Well you nearly got yourself killed. Again. I came back from Piper and you were crumpled on the floor, your lip cracked open. I convinced the movers to put you in the attic, at least.”

“The movers? Piper?”

“Just... Just forget it. Those people were people I work for or with or, or, whatever.” She had wrapped her left arm around her stomach, shifted slightly in her stance, “just fucking forget it. I stayed to make sure you woke up ok. You woke up. I’m leaving now, and I’m claiming this house. Don’t come back here.”

“What’s your name?” At the question, she grabbed my knife again, pulled it from its sheath, and threw it at me. I ducked, but just barely enough, and it hit the wall behind me, handle first, and fell harmlessly to the ground. I scanned her quickly to make sure she didn’t have her knife on her at the moment, and asked again, “what’s your name?”

“Fuck you.”

“I want to come with you.”

“No.”

“My name is Allen. Allen. I want to come with you.” I was pleading now, would maybe be crying if I had remembered how. Her muscles were tensing tighter as I got more and more pathetic. She was spitting her words at me like venom. She was coiling back to strike. She could, would, beat me to death. I wasn’t sure that I would even try to stop her.

“I don’t work well with people.”

“You work with the people that hit me.”

“I... fuck you... I...” She was so angry now, but only part of that anger was for me. I could see that now. See it seething from her.

“Please, I...” I moved to stand again, my head still throbbing. A sob escaped my lips.

“Anna.”

“wuh.. what?”

“Fuck. Anna. You asked, asshole, and I told you. There.”

“I asked, and you threw a fucking knife at me.”

“Yes. And now I’m telling you. Anna.”

I knew an Anna back... before. I knew an Anna, always upset that people would read her name the American way, instead of “Ah-Na,” like her name was pronounced. Her parents had named her after a Russian poet, though they weren’t Russian. All of this flashed through my head in a split second, along with the idea that there wasn’t a Russia anymore, or an America, or an anywhere else.

“Hi Anna.” I didn’t know what else to say. How does all this work now that there’s almost nothing left of what were were? She started crying, bawling, and fell back against the wall next to the window. She was wearing the same thing as when I first saw her, when she first looked so dangerous, so hardened. She looked wounded now, but all the more lethal because of it. Her sobs were not those of a weak person. Her sobs came from her strength. I went to her anyway, put my hand awkwardly on the top of her head, on her short blond hair, and she began to laugh.

“What is it?” I didn’t need her going crazy on me now.

“Nothing, it’s just this...” I knew she meant me, us, “this is going to be interesting.”

Runners, Post 5

Throughout the month of October, I will be posting my zombie book "Runners," written just for the hell of it over the last year, piece by piece. New sections will be added every Monday and Thursday. Look below if you're catching up.

2

I was vaguely aware of some pain, and then more sharply so. I blinked twice, slowly, on the second blink telling my feet to stop. I realized I was wet, and that it had been raining for some time. My right arm raised itself, and I saw that something had cut me. When I turned my whole body around, I saw the thick branch of an overgrown bush sticking, sharp, into the path I had been shuffling down. I went to the branch and tried to break it off. I failed. I reached for my knife, only remembering once I had patted twice the place that it should be, that I had lost it.

I had not slept. Hardly at all. I tried to tell myself that was why I had fallen asleep walking, or near enough asleep to be very dangerous. I told myself I was just tired, but I was used to being tired. I had slept far less before, and for many nights in a row, and not let myself be so vulnerable. To live is to be be alert. To live in the world, to live in the world as it had been for... for how long? There had been two winters, at least, but I had been south for so long, I could have missed the cold and snow once or twice, before the markers told me plainly that the south was lost.

Markers were messages we left each other, those who were surviving, at first anyway, when there was some sense of civility left. They started with messages, warnings, for need or convenience, "No Food or Fuel Here," "Two Z Inside," "Water Still Clean." The messages expanded as the outbreak did, became more detailed and more cryptic, expressing a wider range of information on a larger scale.

"Do NOT Use This Road," "Dallas is Lost," "Trees Are Not Safe," "Fire Works Too Slow, Find Something Heavy," "They Are Not Us. We Are Not Them," "HELP," "HELP?" "They Move Slower in the Cold," "What Are We Surviving For?" "They Don't Remember," "I Have Been Bitten. Goodbye."

Those who stopped to help each other died, or learned enough not to do it again. The markers were all we could do to trade information. Being too close to other survivors meant too many problems. To live was to move. It was our motto, and was written as often as anything else, in one way or another. Keep moving, keep moving, and whether or not your movement had purpose turned out to be inconsequential, since your pursuers lacked reason, logic, skill, strategy. Just move. Fight only when moving is not possible. Fight only to be able to move. No vengeance, no pride, no remorse. To live was to be barely human. To live was to live on reflex, reaction.

But I had let myself be cut. I would have to try to clean that out if I could find some decent water by tonight. I had lost my knife. I would need another. I had been nearly trapped. In the last 12 or so hours, I had been acting completely unlike I have for years now. I had let my guard down. I should be dead.

To get to the branch, I had turned myself South again, back towards that house. I told myself that my knife was there, told myself that I should have my knife. I started walking. I was feeling more alert now. Feeling more awake.

In so many years running, surviving, I had never learned the sorts of things called “survival skills” back when the world was still right. I had no idea how long I had been walking, and the sun didn’t tell me anything except that it was still daytime. I have vague ideas on where the sun sets, where it rises, because that seems to be when I’m looking at it most. I don’t watch the moon cycles. I don’t know that I’ve looked up long enough to notice the moon more than twice since the outbreaks started.

I often go by feel. I felt like I had walked for a few hours this morning, but remembered very little of it. There are very few times when a zombie is any danger out in the open in the middle of the day, but this morning I could have walked right into one and not noticed until it was far too late. I had to get over this. I had been dumb. Just dumb. I just had to be my mind back together and keeping moving.

It felt like it was around noon or so by the time the house came back into view. When I first saw it, I could only make it out as a silhouette, the unnaturally straight lines that were recognizable as a building from a long way off.

I approached the house from the rear, my eye hanging briefly over the window I had escaped from earlier in the day, looking for movement or for, for something. I walked through the field, what must have once grown some sort of food, though it was impossible to tell through the weeds and overgrowth just what. I stepped into what used to be the back yard, discernible only through a slight change in the amount of visible dirt, and in a short, busted fence, the kind that suggests a boundary more than it creates one. The back windows were boarded up, and it took the memory of reinforcing those barricade to become alarmed at how alone I was.

This house had been swarmed, had been surrounded and overrun not twelve hours ago. There should be zombies all over this yard, zombies milling around inside. "They Don't Remember" said the marker, and they don't. Once they stopped hearing or smelling us, or whatever it was that had drawn them, they would have stopped trying to get in, but they would have had nowhere better to go either. The outbreak happened quickly because people ran in the time between when they had been bit and when they finally turned.

I hadn’t been followed, or I would have run into them on the way back. The girl, she couldn’t have been followed, wouldn’t have been followed. She was faster than me, smarter than me. Maybe one or two would have pursued, but once they lost sight of her, they wouldn’t have kept following. They have no memory, barely long enough to follow you around a corner if you take it fast enough. She would have lost them easily. So where the fuck were they? Had they learned to take naps? Read books? Would I be disturbing tea?

I smiled to myself as I walked in the front door, which must have looked silly to the large man standing in the kitchen, waiting for me. I opened my mouth to say something, heard the shuffle of a short step behind me, and knew nothing but the taste of blood in my mouth and the painful thud in my head of every slow heartbeat, lapsing occasionally into complete blackness, brought back again by the pain, in a cycle with no time.

Runners, Post 4

Throughout the month of October, I will be posting my zombie book "Runners," written just for the hell of it over the last year, piece by piece. New sections will be added every Monday and Thursday. Look below if you're catching up.


"FUCK!" She yelled. I pulled back, swinging my head around to see if something had broken in. "Don't fucking stop!" She elbowed me again, and pressed her pussy against me again. Her wettness was running down my cock, and I could feel it on my thigh and her ass. She wouldn't let me lead now, but pinned my back against the back of the couch and kept pushing her ass back hard, pushing me deep and hard inside of her. With each thrust, she would scream more and more wildly.

We are food. To zombies, we smell like the best fucking steak in the world. Human smells drive them crazy. The noise and the smell and the inherent humanity of fucking was driving them absolutely nuts outside. I heard wood begin to splinter against their fists, the bones of their fists splinter against the wood. The noise of their pounding wouldn't drown out her voice though as she screamed at me that if I came before she did she'd rip my fucking eyes out. Her hand was between her legs, and I could feel her fingertips bounce against my cock as they worked hard circles over her clit. Any noise I made was instantly retaliated against with violence. I could feel bruises forming on my ribs and arm, and one just under my eye. Between the rain of fists and elbows and the sounds of screamed excitement from her and the zombies together, I was more scared shitless than I was enjoying myself.

I heard a board break somewhere in the kitchen, and tried to throw her from me, but she wouldn't be moved. "Fuck it," she shot at me, "they won't get in yet. Don't fucking give out now." I was holding as hard as I could from cumming, willing my cock to hold out, as more and more boards shattered, I heard the sounds of fingers grabbing at the walls of the living room through arm-sized holes. "Come and fucking get me!" She screamed, but I wasn't sure if she was talking to me, or to them, or to someone else. Through the increasing breaks in our barriers, I could make out a sky, now lightening to morning, and could hear pounding from every inch of the house's exterior. She started to shake against me now, her fingers moving faster against her clit, her ass pushing back in jerky thrusts as she screamed, loud and sharp and uninterrupted, emptying her lungs of air as she orgasmed. I couldn't hold out any longer, and felt the noise of her screams and of shattering windows and straining doors dim from my awareness as I came inside her, the pleasure of orgasm briefly dimming everything in the world but the tip of my cock.

As soon as she came, she was up on her feet again, dressed quicker than I could raise my head, her hand reaching for her knife and jacket. By the time I was up and zipping my pants back up, she had pulled the ladder down from the attic, and was climbing without looking back. The shuffling steps from the back bedroom, the kitchen, the basement, were not hers or mine. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I grabbed my pack from the floor by my chair, scanned for my knife before realizing that I left it on the kitchen table. I took two steps towards the kitchen before my brain put together the dragging steps coming from that room and the image of my knife on the table and realized it was a bad fucking idea to try to get it. I turned and scrambled up the ladder to the attic. She was sitting in the window, laughing at me. Her eyes were full of light and innocence and happiness. She tossed her head back, playfully, beautifully, then peeked behind me at the ladder. Just like that, her eyes were set cold again. "Pull the ladder up, dickhead." She looked at me like she didn't know me, like she didn't care. I realized we had never even introduced ourselves, but now did not seem like the time.

She swung her legs out of the window and onto the roof below. "I'm going South. You go North." She said it without looking back at me, and was gone.

PAUSE: FAKE ZOMBIES. PLAY: REAL ZOMBIES.

Last night was the Zombie

Pub Crawl in Minneapolis' West Bank neighborhood. In its fifth year, the night

of fake blood and shuffling has turned into a major event. Unseasonably cold weather (dipping below 30

degrees) kept the numbers from hitting the projected 5,000 zombies, but it must have been close. This year's crawl was a bit more of a swarm, as there were enough people to fill each of the 10 or so bars beyond capacity, leading to long lines of groaning, cold zombies, waiting to get in (for the record... the "sexy nurse" costume is always kinda dumb, but VERYdumb when you're the sexy zombie nurse in below freezing temperatures).

This is the exact sort of event I always stay away from: Large crowds, crummy bars, dancing, people too drunk for their own good, not to mention people taking something I hold dear (zombies) and doing their best to ruin it

(zombies do not have

wounds that bleed. Zombies are dead, and don't bleed. Zombies do not groan "braaiiiiins" unless they're in a zombie movie that sucks).

I wasn't really going to go. I was going to talk about going, because it's fun to talk about going to a zombie pub crawl. This is what I had done for the last four years, getting worked up about how people SHOULD dress and SHOULD act, and then not going because I didn't feel like getting all dressed up and getting aggravated at people having too much fun around me.

Silly me, right? I take

things too seriously sometimes.

Well, this year I was doing

the same thing as before... talking about going, but not really planning for it, when

Kaylee said she wanted to go. I cannot turn down a night with Kaylee. I would,

in fact, go to extremes to

get to spend a whole night with Kaylee. Zombies it is.

Holy god did we have a good time.

The crowds were

ridiculous, with most bars being nearly impossible to walk around. People were drunk by the time we got there (around 7) and shoving, walking in front of cars, being stupid. It was cold out and there was too much waiting outside to get into bars. People were dressed as zombies that

didn't make any sense, and people didn't get my zombie outfit nearly enough (I dressed as a Zomcon domesticated zombie from the movie "Fido").

But... holy god did we have a good time.

I stopped being so serious, I stopped caring if I was

waiting to get into a bar, or waiting to get a drink in a bar, or was walking in the cold. I was at the Zombie Pub Crawl, and every bar I was in was absolutely packed with people dressed as zombies, and everyone was talking to one another because, why not? We were all dressed as zombies! The chant of the night (What do we want? BRAINS! When do we want them? BRAAAIINS!) should have bugged me, but I loved it. I

even made Kaylee start it at the Triple Rock and she got everyone in the bar screaming. Fun.

I knew it was going to be a good night when Kaylee

and I were waiting at a bus stop in downtown for a transfer to the west bank, and another group of zombies walked up to our side. We looked at each other, all painted up and surrounded by people looking at us weird, and one of the guys in the other group (a guy with a fork sticking out of his head) said to us, deadpan, "you look stupid."

I knew it was going to be a good night when, trying to wind our way through the first big crowd we hit (outside of Sgt. Prestons. Hate that bar.) Kaylee took

my hand so we wouldn't be

separated. Touching Kaylee always feels nice, nice, and nice. Holding hands all night through crowds always brought dumb little undead smiles to my face.

I knew it was going to be a good night when six straight city blocks were streaming with undead, when firemen drove past taking pictures, when I was

talking to a friend before going whose friends weren't going because it had "gotten too big," and "wasn't authentic" anymore. I may be a douche bag hipster, but I'm not THAT big of a douche bag hipster.

It started a little rough

early on. We went to the five corners area, spend about a half hour trying to get one drink, waited in line for another twenty minutes at the Town Hall Brewery before giving up, and walked all the way down to the other end of the crawl. Things got good when we got to the Triple Rock. We had to wait in line to get in, but we got to watch a guy stand on the corner looking into cars while chewing a fake bloody arm, so it was pretty much a wash.

When we got in, we got drinks within a few minutes,spent

some time talking to people who came as plants (there's a game, Plants Vs. Zombies), and started getting legitimately drunk.

Kaylee and I both have a part of us that prefers to sit quiet in the corner when there's lots of people around. We also both have a part of us that can switch on, and all the sudden we feel like talking to everyone and starting shit with people just to start shit.

We were both in the mood to start shit. Within the hour of being in the Triple Rock, we spoke directly to twenty or more people, sometimes little conversations about zombie looks, and sometimes longer conversations about how we couldn't imagine anyone in the world wanting to have sex with a guy with a curly mustache (impressive and worthy of

admiration, maybe, but fuckable? The consensus was no).

From the Triple Rock, we shuffled (mainly because we were zombies, but also

because we were a bit, umm, shuffly) down to the Cabooze for the big party at the end of the night. Then we REALLY started having fun.

The Cabooze was instantly the most fun atmosphere of the night. It was full, but not ridiculously packed. EVERYONE was a zombie, and lots were dancing. The music was mostly terrible (we walked in to the Thong Song, we walked out to the utterly uninteresting thrumming of house music) but we danced like crazy when the music was good. And Kaylee? Kaylee can dance. And Kaylee, when we were packed in and dancing close and touching touching touching? Kaylee danced crazy good and I smiled for an hour or so straight. Such a good time.

This is why Kaylee is and remains one of my favorite people in the entire world. We see each other so infrequently (and this last time, it seemed long enough that I wasn't sure if she wanted to hang out with me anymore), and I'm never sure where I stand exactly with her (and she just tortured me all night by saying things like, "giving a blowjob is not a punishment," "I don't want a relationship, but I'd love some sex," and, good god, "I just want some dick." And I just wanted to scream back, "I can be a dick!" ... but I feel like by saying that, I'd actually BE a dick. Ugh), but when we're together I know this: We have a blast, and I love her like crazy, and I always go home just feeling so good about getting to be around her. She's a great girl.

Tomorrow I'll post Part Four of Runners, when the sex gets really dirty, and the story's going to start to get pretty violent and grotesque, but for now I'm feeling good about feeling good about feeling good, surrounded by undead drunkards on a cold October night.