He hasn’t mentioned it yet, but he’s growing more and more worried that he’ll be hit with a migraine he can’t shake off sooner rather than later. If that happens while he’s trapped out here without any drugs to take the edge off, he isn’t sure how he’ll cope. So far, he’s been able to grit his teeth through them, but he hasn’t experienced one full force yet. There is nothing that can help him then, unless slamming his head against the wall is an option.
They make a careful journey toward the police station first, stepping as if any wrong move might trigger the shit show they were warned about.
“Whatever was happening here seems over now,” he mutters as they pass a hardware store with a broken window, the glass crunching under his boots loudly enough to prompt stirring inside.
In a split second, an arm reaches out through the opening, scrambling to grab his jacket while crimson-stained teeth snap in his direction. His reaction times haven’t adjusted to the impending doom around every corner and he flails for a moment, struggling against the attacker, forgetting that thereality of the situation is that he’s fighting a dead person and the only way out is to give him a lobotomy.
It doesn’t take long to kickstart, though. The sight of Nora trying to dislodge the newly rotten limbs from their grip is more than enough. Theo twists the knife in his hand to the right angle, shoves the man back with a grunt, and lets the force of his return impale him on the blade through the eyeball with a sickening, squishing sound.
“The brain,” he growls in frustration, mostly at himself for briefly forgetting. “We need to get the brain.”
“I was about to use the rifle but you’re too close and… what’s that?” She pauses, her brows furrowing in concentration as she listens with rapt attention. “It’s footsteps.”
He hears it too, coming from the alley just ahead of them. It could be another human, which might be a good thing if they’re decent, or a bad thing if they’re anything like Dalton, who he suspects is far from decent. Or it could be the dead shuffling over for an early dinner.
He readies his knife, and she points the barrel of the gun toward the opening, both of them stepping backward slowly, trying to put distance between themselves and whatever is heading their way.
At first, he thinks it might be just one. How many could be here anyway? This town is tiny. It isn’t like they have a population large enough to overrun anything.
“Save the bullets.” He sheaths his knife and lifts the hunting bow off his back, aiming the arrow between the eyeballs of what looks like another fisherman in slick overalls. The moment the dead man sees them, or scents them, he isn’t sure which, it picks up speed from a slow walk to a full-out run.
It’s all Theo can do to let the arrow fly before he’s on top of them. The fisherman slides to a motionless heap at their feet.
“Shit, back up, back up. Use the bullets!” he yells as several more, stirred up by the commotion, awake from whatever hibernation they’d been entranced in and begin rounding the corner of the alley.
Nora drops one with the rifle, then another, but racking the bolt in between takes time, and they are only two people against what looks like what’s left of the entire fucking town. The dead just keep coming. They give up on defending themselves and quickly accept that they’re outnumbered.
So they run.
It’s a silent action made together in a cohesive choice that he would have thought impossible for them. He is faster than her, though, simply because his legs are longer, and so he grabs her by the hand and pulls, forcing her momentum to increase beyond her usual pace. The terror on her face likely mirrors his own when he turns his head to look over his shoulder, catching a glimpse of her before laying eyes on at least a dozen or more of the dead closing the distance between their prey.
They are going to die here, he thinks. Not in the plane crash, or frozen in the snow on a hike. Not when the bear attacked or when potential criminals crossed paths with them. Any one of those moments could have been the end of their journey and maybe he’d been lulled into a false sense of security in assuming they had baked-in teflon by now, because the fact that it’ll end here, in Barrow, Alaska, while being devoured by the townsfolk is enough to have him laughing in a manic episode if he weren’t so busy running for his life.
“Check the doors!” she yells out, and normally, it would be an awful plan, but they have nowhere to go. They cannot outrun their fate with speed alone. The only hope now is to find cover, and so they make the difficult choice of veering off to attempt to shoulder their way through a shop door, finding it locked.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. They’re seconds from the end, and he isn’t about to let it happen to her first.
“Get behind me. If you have a chance to run, then you take it!” He shoves her back, lifts his knife, and waits for the inevitable.
The street is filled with the scrape and drag of approaching feet. The smell hits next, putrid rot curling into the air. He can hear Nora’s breath quicken behind him, and the soft shuffle of her boots as she braces herself. His pulse slams in his ears, so loud it almost drowns out the sound of their pursuers closing in. Every instinct is screaming to run, but there’s nowhere left to go.
And then the air shifts into something heavy and tense.
A low, bone-deep rumble rolls toward them.
And then a fucking polar bear erupts from the alley to their right like a freight train, its massive body slamming into the closest rotter, sharp teeth snapping the skull in half with a cracking, wet pop. Blood sprays in an arc across the clean white snow.
For a split second, Theo’s brain refuses to process what’s happening. The roar that follows is deafening, rattling the air in his chest. The dead don’t think, they react. Neurons fire, muscles twitch, it’s only stimulus response and not much more. Suddenly, they all pivot toward the larger target, launching themselves at it in a clumsy wave.
They go for the weakest first only appears to be true if there’s a proper line of sight and the bear blocks them like the broadside of a country barn.
The animal is unfazed. This isn’t the same energy they faced before from the mother protecting her cub. This one is twice the size, and Theo suspects he’s very, very hungry. It’s a swirl of white fur, and tearing flesh, sharp claws swatting bodies aside like they’re made of snow, jaws crushing bone as easily as twigs.The sound is primal, and it fills the street like that incoming storm will soon enough.
They are frozen, shoved up against the locked door of the shop. Nora shakes behind him, where he still has his arm out to protect her, as if he could. The two of them watch with horror and something akin to morbid fascination as the bear does what they couldn’t even do with bullets, arrows, and two sharp hunting knives.
There is hardly a scratch on the animal, but he has a pile of the dead at his paws, some twitching to get up after having lost their arms and legs, but not suffering head damage, others are a shredded mess leaking into the snow.
And then the bear spots them quaking against the building, narrows his gaze, lowers his head, and roars through red teeth, blasting the sound straight into Theo’s soul and out the other side.
