AllFreeNovel
Share Us
When I reached the top, I could hear the wolfdogs howling through the trees, and presumably, Nova was chasing right behind them. I was looking toward the sounds, paying more attention to their hunt than where I was going, and I stumbled over something, and fell into a pile of leaves.
Thankfully, I caught myself with my hands and didn’t hurt my leg any worse. I sat up and brushed back some of the leaves to see what I’d tripped on, and I barely held back a disgusted scream when I saw the rotting arm.
I scrambled up to my feet, and I used a stick to clear the leaves away. My stomach dropped in horror as I realized that I recognized the dead bodies I’d fallen over.
Riva and Calvin were lying hand-in-hand, and they’d already begun decomposing. Animals had eaten the tips of their noses and cheeks, but they were unmistakably them.
They looked like they had been dead for weeks, probably not that long after I had last seen them. It was hard to tell exactly how they’d died – hypothermia? internal injuries I couldn’t see? poison from eating the wrong berries?
There had been so many casualties from the zombie apocalypse that weren’t even directly related to the virus. Surviving on your own in the wilderness was an incredibly difficult task, even when someone was as determined and resourceful as Riva.
I didn’t have much time to mourn them, though, because I heard a familiar noise. As the distance between the wolfdogs and I grew, and the sounds of the hunt faded, I was able to hear something much closer – the rattling breath of a death groan. I turned around to see a zombie standing a few feet behind me.
She was tall, with ashen skin and tangled hair, but it was her mouth that truly gave away that she was infected. Her lips were torn and bloody, as if she’d gnawed them off, and her teeth were stained rust red.
She seemed young and healthy, so I wasn’t sure that I could outrun her, and her bloodshot eyes were locked right on me, so I knew that she had me in her sights. My only courses of action were fighting her and calling for help.
“Okay, let’s get this over with.” I snapped a branch off the tree beside me, and I pointed the sharp broken end at the zombie. Then, to hedge my bets, I called for Nova and the dogs: “Nova! Frost! Sable! There’s a zombie up here!”
The zombie ran right at me, and I swung the stick like a baseball bat. It cracked hard against her skull, and she went flying back on the dirt.
I ran over to her – pushing through the searing pain in my knee – and I raised the stick up high, preparing to drive it down right through her eye and finish her as she stared up at me.
But before I had the chance, Nova came running over, and she tackled me to the ground.
“What are you doing?” I shouted in dismay and anger.
“You can’t hurt her!” Nova yelled, and she had already turned her attention to the zombie lying in the dirt nearby. She took the zombie’s hand, tenderly holding it in her own.
“Nova! What are you doing?” I repeated, as my frustration and confusion turned to fear. “You can’t touch a zombie! You’ll get bitten!”
“She’s not a zombie!” Nova insisted desperately with tears in her dark eyes. “She’s my sister. This is Sage.”
20
Lazlo
There was some family resemblance that I didn’t immediately catch – their dark eyes, the sharpness of the cheekbone, even their long black hair. But it wasn’t obvious with the zombie’s sickly appearance, and the way that her lips were torn off made her facial features harder to recognize.
The zombie – Sage, Nova’s sister – was making guttural sounds, almost as if she was talking to her.
“It’s okay,” Nova murmured words of comfort to her. “It’s going to be okay.”
Sage snapped her teeth together to make a clacking sound, and I flinched, but Nova didn’t even react. Sage kept turning her head from side to side, her neck swiveling and jerking, but it didn’t seem like she was looking around so much as she couldn’t control her movements completely.
“Is it going to be okay?” I asked Nova breathlessly.
“Yes, it will,” Nova insisted. “She got out of her enclosure, and I have to put her back. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, she doesn’t hurt anyone. She just wanders around.”
“You know she’s a zombie, right?” I asked her slowly and seriously, because I didn’t know exactly how deep Nova’s delusions ran on this. Because keeping your zombie sibling in an outdoor enclosure was definitely a delusional thing to do.
“I know that she is not who she once was,” Nova answered carefully. “But she is my sister, and she’s infected with a really fucked up illness. That’s all.”
Nova helped Sage to her feet and added, “She usually doesn’t wander this far.”
“If she likes to eat humans, she might’ve been drawn to those corpses.” I pointed to the bodies of Riva and Calvin that I had exposed.
I didn’t mention that I knew them, because it didn’t seem like the time. Not when I was still processing the fact that Nova was able to hold hands with a zombie.
