"The highway is jammed. This sucks." I moan. We have been in our car, stuck on the highway, for over 10 minutes. Completely unmoving. People had begun to exit their vehicles and started to leave a few minutes ago, but of course dad just insisted we wait.
"See?" Dad says, triumphant. "They coming back, like a horde."
They don't seem to be walking right. Kind of a slow, dreamy pace. A lot of them seem to be limping, I notice.
Suddenly, the group begins to converge on a group of cars ahead of us.
"What the hell are they doing?" Ryan demands, sitting next to me in the backseat.
"There's so many of them..." my mother says, amazed. "What could they possibly want?"
"I dunno." I say. "But they're really creeping me out, that looks illegal."
I hear bumps on the trunk behind me. I look over my shoulder to see the most horrifying human face, if you could even call it human, pressed up against the glass.
Ryan and I stare in complete shock at it. At some point, our parents notice and begin panicking, but all I can focus on are its features.
Firstly, this person appears to have been rotting for days. Their skin is caked in dirt and is peeling in some places. Their hair is falling out in clumps, their eyes are glazed over, a glossy white state of... death?. The mouth is pulled into a grotesque snarl as they claw at the window, more like it approach from behind it.
I snap out of my trance to hear my father yelling at Ryan and I to grab guns.
"THAT IS NOT A HUMAN!" he roars, as my mother sobs next to him.
"Maybe it won't hurt us!" she says, choking back horrified tears.
Ryan sits in shock next to me, staring at the creature. As I pull a gun from the bag my father brought, the glass behind me breaks. I feel shards hit my head and back.
And suddenly, Ryan is gone. Pulled out of the car by whatever this thing is and its friends.
My father, roaring in anger, throws open his door holding his pistol. I can hardly see what is going on. The things look up from Ryan, who is on the ground behind us, and slowly shuffle toward my father.
Quickly, he puts bullets into their chests, and swears as they recoil, but do not die. As they approach him, he puts a final bullet into the closest one's head.
It falls limply to the ground.
Recovering from the shock of having Ryan pulled from me, I get out of the car holding my pistol to try and retrieve my screaming mother.
"SHOOT THEM IN THE HEAD!" my father bellows. "IN THE HEAD!"
Another turns toward me, its smell overwhelming now that I am outside. Like dead animal. I put a bullet in it's head and move to the front door.
"Mom. Mom" I say, trying to calm her, to no avail. "We need to go! We need to get Ryan and go! These things will rip us apart!"
The gunshots next to me stop. My father has killed all of the creatures surrounding him. He looks limply at the ground. I take my mother's hand and lead her to my father, and immediately regret it.
On the ground, where Ryan should have been, is an unrecognizable hunk of meat, with what appears to be intestines strewn around the ground. I say hunk of meat literally, because there are no limbs attached to it. Ryan is very clearly dead.
"They... they killed him?" I ask, even though I know the answer.
My mother begins to sob again.
My father looks up at us. Tears stream down his face. He points behind us, down a hill. People, or whatever those other things are, are streaming down the hill and running into houses, seemingly for refuge.
"Paula. Liam. We need to go.
AN: The action and drama begins here. Hope you enjoy!
