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Fires were a necessity now, so she learned quickly how to make one with only things she could find in the wilderness. It had been a lot of trial and error, but she hadn’t given up, despite that she wanted to.
She stayed in the tree line and stared at the small town. The sign right before entering the limits of the city said it had once been called Havens Peak. The little calligraphy beneath it said it was the most beautiful place in Colorado. Now, it just looked like a sad and depressing visual of what life once looked like.
Rebecca might have stayed there, hidden amongst the thick foliage of the Rocky Mountains, waiting to make sure everything was as safe as it could be in this situation, but her stomach cramped, her head ached, and she felt as though she was coming down with something.
It was the most inopportune time for her to catch a cold or get the flu, but she did hope she could find some over-the-counter medicine to stem off the symptoms.
If she closed her eyes and imagined this town, she could visualize it as a quaint little place a couple might go to retire. It had sidewalks that were intimate and small, and the shops that lined the tiny street looked like something she might have seen in Pleasantville.
But now it was just deserted, with trash blowing along the ground, windows broken out of the little shops, and the vehicles parked on the curb had their doors hanging open. Grass and weeds grew through the cracks in the sidewalks and streets, and the stench of desolation filled the air.
She moved away from the woods and into the street. The knife she held was more of a shiv she created herself after nearly being raped by a group of men. The only thing that saved her that day was the horde of walking corpses that had come out of nowhere.
The men diverted their attention from her to the infected, and she made herself scarce. Rebecca ran so hard and fast that when she reached the warehouse and climbed her loft, she hadn’t come down for days. Not even the sound of zombies outside the warehouse had taken her mind off the fact that she had nearly been the disgusting plaything for a group of vile fucking men.
But then she had gotten out of her blankets she barricaded herself in and found a long piece of metal on the warehouse floor. In fact, she had gotten several pieces of metal and shaped them into long, nasty-looking shanks. The smallest of the four she kept tucked in her sock by her ankle, the second she kept in her bag, the third at the small of her back, and the fourth she held at all times.
She was ready to slice an asshole up if they looked at her the wrong way. Rebecca wasn’t going to be a victim anymore, or at least she wasn’t about to lie down and let this world swallow her up. She’d fight back until there was nothing left of her.
Rebecca stayed close to the buildings as she moved silently and slowly. She kept her focus on anything and everything, and when she stopped by a truck that was half on the curb, she stared inside. There was a horribly decomposed body sitting in the driver seat.
He, or she, because she couldn’t tell what gender the corpse was, was not one of the living dead. The clothing was just a T-shirt and pair of jeans and the shoes a pair of sneakers. This person had been someone ordinary, who did average things, and was now just a rotting pile of bones and flesh. It had its arm on the steering wheel and its forehead resting back against the seat.
Its mouth was open, its tongue hanging out, and there was a bullet hole in the side of its head. She had long since gotten rid of her need to gag at the vile aromas and sights that now covered the earth.
Moving forward, she focused on the street, on the buildings on either side of her, and felt her pulse beat wildly in her ears. She moved her gaze back and forth along the deserted, eerily silent town. The wind picked up and had a few shutters on the mom-and-pop stores banging against the cement walls.
She stopped, focused on each noise, and then moved forward when no corpses made themselves known because of the noise. She moved past a hardware store, a creamery, and even a small clinic. Even though the town was now dead, it wasn’t that hard to see how it might have been before the contamination hit the world.
A small pharmacy was on the corner of the street, and she crossed the cobblestone road and pressed her back to the wall as soon as she made it across. Keeping the knife held to eye level, she tapped it on the glass of the building and waited to see if anything came shuffling out. She repeated the action after a few moments of silence. She waited again and then slipped inside.
