Corned
Chapter 8
"What about Chase and the others? What happened to them?" Cinna asked.
"I don't know. I got scared and ran back here as fast as I could."
"So you abandoned them?" Doria said, disgusted. "And you call yourself a man. What a joke."
He had nothing to say. He had run — and he hadn't even warned the rest of the group before he did it.
He felt sick over his own cowardice. But he was alive. What he'd seen out there had been pure terror — what was so wrong about running from that? What could he possibly have done if he'd stayed, besides become a liability? he told himself.
"You guys don't know what I saw. You have no idea how it felt, seeing those things up close. Your opinions won't mean anything once you run into one yourselves. We'll see if you still think the way you do now." He laughed, a little unhinged.
Meanwhile, Chase and three others found themselves trapped by the horde.
These weren't the typical undead — the kind that only reacted to sound. These were something else. Despite reanimating a full fourteen days after death, they came back faster, stronger, and smarter. Running into one of these was terror made flesh; they could tell when something was out of place, which made them brutally hard to kill.
"Keep quiet," Troy told the others, trying to keep the panic contained. They'd dealt with one of these before. This many would be fatal.
"What do we do?" Tyler asked. He and Troy had been close since junior high, all the way through college.
"I don't know. Let's see how many there are," Chase whispered, easing a glance out the window, careful not to be seen.
There were a lot of them out in the parking lot. They were holed up in an abandoned house about ten minutes' drive from the hotel — a simple scouting run that had turned into a fight for their lives, dodging ordinary zombies while trying not to draw the attention of the freaks.
They debated using noise as a distraction to slip out the back, but the freaks were too great a risk for that kind of gamble.
Crack. The front door swung open, letting a handful of zombies inside.
The boys moved fast, taking them down quietly — no screaming, no wasted noise. Pure adrenaline, stabbing and gouging their way through. Within five minutes it was over, all of them soaked in blood, breathing hard. Careful not to draw more attention, they started circling the house — until one of them noticed a freak staring dead straight at them.
It started limping toward them. They froze. It kept closing the distance until it was well within range, but nobody dared risk the noise of a shot. They kept circling instead, hoping it would just wander off.
Instead it let out a loud snarl. Their hearts nearly stopped. Every sense snapped into survival mode.
The freak wandered into the house, sniffing at the air for reasons nobody understood, until it found the pile of corpses in the kitchen and started devouring them right there. The room was so silent they could pick apart every individual sound — the bite, the tearing, blood dripping onto the carpet. They sat with that for ten full minutes before Chase carefully whispered for someone to lock the door. Troy, closest to it, hesitated a beat before easing it shut without a sound, sealing the freak inside with the rest of the dead.
Backing carefully away from the door, they noticed something worse — the freaks that had been outside were gone. That scared them more than anything. They couldn't have just wandered off, could they? Nobody said it out loud, but it was clearly on everyone's mind.
Their car was still parked outside. If they had any hope of getting out alive, that was the play.
The only question left was how to get from the house to the car without alerting whatever was still out there.
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