Flashback.
By the time the last of the men died, she wasn't gaping at their remains anymore. She wasn't even looking. She heard a squeal from behind her, a noise of terror better befitting a pig, followed by snapping tendons and tearing flesh, and the guttural vocalizations of feasting runners. Wet red was splashed her from behind. He was still screaming and the screams chased her.
A runner threw itself at her with a croaking bellow, and she pushed it aside with a strength she didn't actually possess, and she probably strained her arm but felt nothing. She got in the door. She heaved it shut, and she threw down the barricade, and then a thousand infected slams fell up against the other side, howling, pounding, begging to be let inside. The door held. Still, somewhere beyond, a man was screaming.
Her memory refused to conjure his name. Refused to conjure anyone's names.
Her machete clattered from her hands. She slid to the ground and hugged her knees and she was the incarnation of tears and fears and holes into the world where people could fall to and disappear from existence.
This wasn't a role she was equipped for. If someone had just told her, she would have backed up and done things differently. She would have learned a sport. Joined the military. Fallen in with the wrong crowd and joined a gang. Anything. Anything to have any potential to earn her next breath.
The world spun apart, into a daze of distress. She crumpled to the ground, but then shook her head and valiantly propped herself up again. The wound in her side was bleeding, and she needed to fix that. Yeah. Yeah, that was something she could figure out how to do. Maybe. She doggedly grabbed at the handle of her machete, and crawled her way forward across the ground because she lacked the strength to do much else. Some medical supplies were stacked in the corner, and she took one case of them and opened it gingerly to inspect the contents.
She took off her jacket, and her shirt. She cleaned herself of grime and sweat, wincing and sniffling at each jab of pain. It was a bullet wound, but it wasn't bad. It hadn't gone in her, just skimmed her. She had to decide whether to let it breathe or stitch it shut. She decided to stitch it, because that was harder and scarier and maybe if she just forced herself through each stitch, then she'd deserve to heal.
When it was done, and she had dabbed herself in ointments and wrapped up the injury again, she felt spent. She let her head thud back against the wall, and she stared vacantly. All the energy was gone, and so was all the fear and all the tears, and she felt fuzzy like her head was stuffed with cotton.
Something moved.
At first, she assumed it was a rat. Then she realized it was much larger, and she turned to see a sinuous humanoid figure with his belly to the ground, slinking across the middle of the room with a deathly silence. His fingertips were splayed out and overgrown with black nails like grizzly talons. He wore a low hood, torn and bloody clothing, and sleeves battened down with a wrap of gymnast's tape.
She jumped into a straighter posture, and she grabbed frantically hold of the machete and lifted it up defensively. I'm dead.
The hunter's back went up in an arch, and he loosed the most unexpected, frightening, croaking noise she could have imagined. He sounded like the ghost from The Ring. He sounded like a crocodile, or something else without vocal cords, and the rattle of it all stretched on like a menacing, recurrent death threat. But as disturbing as the sound might have been, she did note that this was not the sound she'd expected to hear from him.
The croak trailed off slowly. The zombie seemed to be staring at her, and she was sure as hell staring at him.
After a long moment, he slowly eased forward one of his arched and splayed-fingered hands, and light finally fell across the lower portion of his face.
The lower jaw was missing on one side, along with all the flesh and muscle that had previously supported it. The majority of the upper lip was gone on that side, and the tissue of the cheek had been torn raggedly back about half an inch. The remaining half of the lower jaw was bruised and swollen to the point that there was no room inside the mouth for a tongue, which was limed in puss and dangled out the hole. Flaps of skin and tissue hung torn and full of holes. By the look of things, the hunter had been hit point blank in the face with a payload of birdshot-
-maggots! Maggots! His wounds were visibly writhing with maggots!
She kicked back away from him in a revulsion she wasn't clear-headed enough to contain, feeling bile rising up in her mouth.
The hunter's back lifted an inch again, and his croak grew louder. When she didn't move again, he quickly leaned forward, opened his broken mouth, and seized up her bloody jacket with his remaining teeth. Then he skurried backwards into the dark, dragging his 'prey' with him.
Gun. She needed a gun. She clambered to her feet and stalked determinately about the better lit half of the safe house. Were there weapons in there? Please. Yes! A rifle, one. She took it and loaded it in the way she'd so recently been taught. There. She brought the butt of the weapon to her shoulder, and slowly crept in the direction the hunter had disappeared in.
She found a wood crate had been divested of peanut butter and medical pills. Sitting in said crate with the lid balanced atop his head, and kneading her torn jacket between his swollen gums, was the hunter. He looked much too large for his incredibly square confines, but on seeing her approach he croaked and ducked down so that the crate lid shut on top of him. She took a deep breath and nosed the barrel of her gun forward, using it to lift up the edge of the crate. She aimed for his head. He batted at the barrel of her gun. She readjusted her aim. He forced a yowl out through what she imagined were sorely inflamed vocal cords, and batted repeatedly at her gun reproachfully like a cat might bat at an encroaching vacuum cleaner hose. When she kept trying to get a bead on his head, he leaped out of the crate, bounded away from her, slowed to a haughty strut, and dragged her jacket off towards a cupboard on the far side of the room.
She stared after him in dismay.
Lacking the heart required to chase down and murder the apocalypse's one and only disinterested(?) zombie, she stumbled back over to where she'd left her medical supplies, and sank back down into a puddle of herself. Well. Now what? She knew that a person could technically off themselves with a rifle, but they had to use their toe to pull the trigger. Was that a feasible option here? Shooting herself?
She reached for her purse and wondered why she was even still carrying the thing. She overturned it, and emptied it, and watched coins and check books and phones and all sorts of other useless things go rolling away. She knocked aside cigarettes and reached for her jar of insomnia pills, because supposedly that was one way to do it- to end it without losing the nerve to end it. Falling asleep sounded like one hell of a peaceful way to go, all things considered.
Her fingers brushed up against a cat of gourmet cat food, a treat she'd purchased for the neighborhood stray on her way home from work that evening.
She slumped back into puddlehood. This wasn't fair. This wasn't fair.
When she could move again, she found a pen and paper among the supplies in the safe house, and she wrote out a letter to her family. To her mother, and father, and brother. To that stray cat she'd never see again. To her coworkers. They were dead. And she wasn't, not yet. She took her old cigarette lighter, and lit up the letter. She watched it burn. She was exhausted, and her eyes were red and salty from tears, and she probably needed to sleep.
Her eyes found the can again. The cat food can. She reached out to it, and picked it up in her hands. More tears came; she was sure she'd been out of tears. She lifted up the tab on the top of the can, and pulled the lid off. Walking on legs that felt like lead, she stumbled over to the cupboard where the hunter had disappeared, and she set down the can.
She walked back to her things. She slumped. She looked at her wallet, and the pictures of her family. She contemplated the gun and took off one of her shoes and her sock, but then picked up the insomnia medication and took four times the recommended dose. Would that be enough? As she curled up to sleep, she hoped so.