Walking Among Them

Walking Among Them
It started slowly. First the birds stopped singing. The quietness clung to me like rain would, coating my body and leaving me feeling sick after too long exposed. Rising with the sun in silence is something that I had never experienced before. We blamed the weather, told ourselves that the birds had traveled because of the warming temperatures. Someone mentioned that birds leave to avoid the cold, but we shrugged it off. We denied that anything bad was happening.

But soon it grew too obvious to ignore. Wildlife disappeared, too. Our pets grew anxious. Melos bristled as they walked down familiar paths and hurried to make sure to return home before dark. The Griffins kept close, circling above open meadows where we collected rainwater. Their cries carried across valleys. They were searching for anything that signaled that everything wasn't changing. Each trip drained the hope from them, until they settled in stalls in the barn and refused to fly at all.

The first zombie we saw was a stranger. Their skin sagged around their face. Their hair hung in greasy clumps where it wasn't missing entirely. A long gash ran along their face. I couldn't tell if they had once been a man or a woman; there were no curves to their body, just skin that clung to bones and sinew. The moan that fell from their lips was what caught our attention. As they walked closer, the smell of decay reached our noses. It smelled like spoiled food. They stumbled, like they couldn't lift their feet all the way. The moan was raspy, the dryness reminding me of someone who had gone too long without water. I got shoved along with a group who were running away from the walking corpse, and then I heard a gunshot. It was silent again.

The forest is growing used to our presence. The trees seem to lower their branches to shield us as needed, the leaves dangling just above the head of the tallest member of our group. When the wind picks up, we settle ourselves in thickets and patches of heavy briars. We crush leaves against our skin to mask our scents. Blackberries lure in animals for meat, but do nothing to attract the dead who have started overwhelming the area.

Ay is not fairing well with the new order of things. Trails are overgrown and nothing looks like it once did. Miniature Phoenix Trees have stopped growing, their roots stationary in the hard ground. No leaves are left on their branches by the start of fall and everything looks barren. Food is hard to come by. We've started eating things normally reserved for our pets, because these things are in abundance. We find canned goods in abandoned warehouses and our pets are suited to finding natural snacks wherever we are.

Today, I have eaten dragonberries for the first time. My lips are stained blue just like my fingertips, and everyone laughs when I smile. They are too sweet, something I would prefer to have as a dessert, or spread over pancakes for a breakfast, but beggars can't be choosers, so I wash it down with some water.

We are heading towards Ara. We suspect that things have remained the same there, that it is safe and welcoming. Every night I wonder if we're heading the right way, if we're better off staying where we are, where things are familiar. We've convinced ourselves that it will be better there.

Anything can be better than this. We are a depressing caravan. We weren't prepared for this sort of thing. My shoes aren't meant for hiking, and none of us had packs large enough to haul all the items we wanted to bring with us. We've fashioned backpacks to fit on the backs of our pets, who gladly take any load we give them. I make sure to take some out from the packs of the older pets; they grow tired more easily and slow us down, but I can't bear to imagine traveling without them. My pack is filled with bandages and first aid kits that we've found along the way. Gauze and antiseptic are light compared to other things: weapons, shields, guns.

The first time I held a gun was just over a month ago. I'd never seen any need. I preferred to avoid killing anything, and struggled to eat what was available. It was a group decision that we all carry weapons in preparation for a swarm of undead. I tried to choose something less powerful, like a small knife, but the handgun was thrust into my hand before I could say anything at all. It was heavy, the weight unfamiliar and comforting at the same time. I listened and mimicked the process of loading bullets and pulling the trigger. I was confident that I would never need to use it. Someone else had always stepped up when it was needed and I was more than comfortable stepping back and letting a more confident person kill the zombies for the second time.

The rattling of a zombie's breath makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It blends in with the sounds of a group walking along trails, until it is so close that you are sure they are standing with their chin resting on your shoulder. My nerves felt the zombie before I reacted to the sound of the labored breathing behind me, and by instinct I tried to yell to get someone's attention. All at once, the breathing grew louder as more zombies moved towards us. My yelp got lost in the sound of other people yelling out positions and orders. My hand reached into the holster that had held my gun the last few days, my fingers curling around the handle. There was one bullet in the chamber, left over from a practice earlier in the day. I lifted the gun, stepped with my strong leg, and pulled the trigger with the gun six inches from the zombies face.

Bones splitting, metal ripping... I'll spare you the details. Suffice to say that I heaved up my breakfast of popping berries into the nearest bush. I also dropped my gun and stood by and watched as everyone else systematically took out five or more zombies each. I checked myself for blood splatters, and then turned to the huddled group of pets. I told myself that it was my single shot that saved most of us that day. Every time after that, I shot more zombies, doing my part to keep us all safe.

The air is cooling now and winter is approaching. Our maps tell us we should have reached Ara miles ago, but we've continued walking, following trails that barely stand out from briars and fallen trees. I know when we're there, because everything is more color and more sound. Birds swoop around us and soon all we can hear is a symphony of finches and robins as we stumble into a small town of bewildered survivors who, like us, never thought they'd find a new home again.