The Road in Red: Splinter Group

The lady with no jaw was coming for Noah.

She looked iridescent and ghostly in the limited light that struggled to break through the clouds.  Noah groped at his pockets.  The gun was in his right, the other item in his left.  He surveyed the ground beneath him.  Spotting a reasonably large tree limb, Noah picked it up and went to meet the woman. 

He found her, her arms outstretched, her tongue lapping at her teeth, her legs struggling to keep up with her urge to feed.  Noah's throat tightened.  His lower lids began to sting with the saline that was trying to crawl through.  His cheeks flushed.  His chest turned to lead.  Pity washed over Noah.  This woman so desperately wanted to eat him.  The one eye she had widened, glistening blue like the ocean, the depth of her hunger unfathomable.  Her tongue wagged at the sight of his skin.  If she had any lips, she might have been smiling. 

Noah had to do this.  This woman, this soccer mom or president of some club, this daughter or wife, this human being needed to be killed for her own peace.  Kill or be killed.  He hated killing them.  He just had to.  He thought about the old man.  He thought about the man before him, the two women, the child.  But with the exception of the old man, they were all sanitized by distance, dispatched by his gun.  He did not have the luxury of a bucketful of bullets anymore.  He had to get his hands dirty again. 

Please, God, forgive me.  Where was Gran?  Where were those cookies?  The woman got closer. 

No, I can't think of this now. 

Noah's mind tried to take him away from the happenings, an instant involuntary self-preservation mechanism.  He would go insane, snap if he had to deal with what he was going to have to do again.  His sanity was on the brink of breaking but he was also within teeth's reach of death.  Noah had to overcome his fear, his reservations, his own mind.  He breathed in the deep, death-filled air in a vain attempt to calm himself for the job at hand, to forget about the wonderful times that once brought him peace.  Those times were done.  Vanished forever in a fog of dead flesh.  Noah readied the tree limb.  He cleared out his mind and focused all thoughts on his swing.

But as the woman approached, Noah heard a shuffling from behind him.

His head immediately shot up, his gaze jerked behind him.  Another one.  A man.  Not alive.  Not there to help.  More crunching of limbs and leaves revealed the presence of a third person.  Noah realized his scream from when he fell earlier had grabbed the attention of the people that were close by.  Noah turned his attention back to the woman.  She was upon him now, her mouth open, her breath attacking his senses, stinging, blinding.  Noah had misjudged her speed and she was closer than he had anticipated.  Her sudden grip on his shirt startled Noah.  Instinctively, blindly, he plunged the tree limb into the woman’s face.  He missed her brain completely, managing instead to hit her nose and cheek.  Landing the skull wouldn’t have worked anyway because the tree limb merely crumbled in her face and did not penetrate her flesh by much.  The tree limb looked fine on the ground but beneath the good bark, it was black and frail, more rotted than the woman was.  The impact of the tree limb did not kill her.  Instead, she fell back onto the dirt.

Thin drizzles of rain struck his skin. 

The two other people, the two dead men, stumbled out of the trees and set their sights on Noah.  Moaning and groaning, lustful cries, hunger pains.  The woman scrambled to find Noah’s feet.  She grabbed his right ankle and tugged, causing a shooting pain in Noah’s bite wound.  It felt as if the pain were blooming inside him, burying its way through his skin and into his bone simultaneously.  All he could see was a searing hot white light stabbing his eyes.  Another scream escaped Noah’s lips, louder and longer this time, no doubt attracting more of those people.  Ringing a dinner bell.  The woman opened her mouth to take a bite out of Noah’s shoe.

“Not again!” he screamed as he kicked the woman in the face, sending her nose flying but not killing her.  Noah continued to kick as the two men drew closer.  Their groans reached him long before they did, the sounds sneaking up on his skin and seizing him by the neck, sending pinpricks of fear into his scalp, jerking his shoulders up in defense of his unprotected neck.  He jolted and stomped on the woman’s hands, fighting through the agony and breaking off fingers and snapping her wrists until she finally let go.  Her digits snapped like twigs and the bones in her wrists and arms cracked like the shot of a BB gun.  In the struggle, Noah wasn't sure if it was her bones or his that were breaking.  Adrenaline had taken the place of pain and Noah felt nothing but a surge that forced his veins to press against his skin and splinter off like the branches that lay before him.  The sight of these veins set off moans of lust and agony from the woman with the broken arms.  The sounds poured over her teeth and got caught in her black, wagging tongue.  Noah shifted his weight onto his bad leg and then raised the good one, sending his heavy boot down on the woman’s head.  Her skull cracked like a watermelon but he hadn’t managed to get to her brain. 

“Die, bitch!” he screamed as he desperately stomped and stomped until the pain in his leg was too intense to bear.

Noah turned around to see two pairs of hands in his face.  Rotting hands.  Visible cartilage, joints.  Blood-stained fingers and broken off nails.  The smell of rot right under his nose.  Noah gasped and gagged at the same time, choking on his own saliva.  He leaned back and tripped over the woman, falling on his tailbone and knocking the air out of his lungs.  He grabbed his chest as the two men shuffled toward Noah, stepping on and over the woman to get to him.

Overhead, the sun was shining through the cracks in the clouds, sending down bars of light onto the dirt.  One stream of light shone directly over Noah, blurring his vision of the men over him.

Breath finally managed to sink back into Noah’s lungs as he reached into his pocket for his gun.  He aimed it at the man on his right, the one who was closer.  He pulled the trigger and with an unsettling sound like thunder cracking, the man whipped back with a loud moan and then set his gaze back on Noah.  He had only managed to clip the man’s shoulder.  Wasted shot.  Four more bullets.  He aimed his gun at the second man.  This one smelled the worst, like rotting meat and feces.  He had probably defecated on himself when he was attacked and killed.  Noah pulled the trigger and with a thunderous boom, the second man was down.  Noah kicked the first man and managed to snap the man's ankle, sending him to the ground next to Noah.  This gave Noah enough of an opportunity to get to his feet and run.  Three of them on the ground and none of them were dead.  Noah quickly assessed his performance and was unhappy.  The woman had managed to survive Noah's barrage of stomping and kicking and the man that smelled the worst hadn’t been shot in the head, either.  He was too decomposed for Noah to tell where he had been hit.  He supposed it didn’t matter because the man was still moving, still coming for him.

The light closed up as Noah ran.  The clouds took over the sky and sent more and more droplets of rain.  Noah was surrounded by darkness, death and decay.  All three of them were on their feet now, following Noah, even the man with the snapped ankle.  He was obviously a lot slower now but the other two could still cause a problem if he hit a roadblock up ahead.  Noah ran but the pain in his leg never left, never let up.  It took him over.  The agony formed hands that held him in place.  He tried not to yell.  He swore instead.  A string of obscenities flew through his teeth, as many dirty words and phrases that his mind could conceive.  Noah wasn't one to swear as it wasn't a very polite or Christian thing to do.  He used to only do it when he was angry.  Somehow slipping dirty words past his lips made him feel better, as if the satisfaction of sneakily naughty behavior temporarily distracted him from his problems.  He tried that strategy this time but bad words would not alleviate the agony.

A dead finger hit his forehead.

Noah's heart rose up into his throat.  No, it was wet.  Blood?  No, just more rain.  He clenched his teeth and grabbed his thigh, squeezing it in hopes the pressure would take away the pain.  He felt something wet hit the inside of his pants, a jolt of pain that took his breath away.  Then, relief.  The pain subsided enough so that he could run again.  He had to run fast.  The man and woman were catching up.  Noah heard more rustling on either side of him, a commotion in the trees.  Around him and up ahead he could barely make out the faces of people in the limited light.  They were all around him, all coming out to see who’s for dinner.  Noah’s heart raced not from his running but from the fright of all of these people piling into the road.  They were surrounding him now, the trees opening up like a macabre curtain, the dead coming onto the stage and joining the man and woman following Noah's trail.  He didn’t dare look back, too scared to see just how many were behind him, just how many were all too willing to tear him limb from limb.

What was driving these people?  How were they able to walk, to stand, to live after being shot and beat and set on fire?  Noah had a hard time believing they were dead.  It was the rational part of him, the logical reasoning and thinking Noah that couldn't understand the happenings.  He knew better, that they were dead, that they were ghouls and monsters sent from hell to collect souls but he didn’t want to accept it.  He had seen with his own eyes the destruction inflicted upon these people and how they still sat right back up, still kept coming, enduring damage that no ordinary human would be able to survive.  He had even done terrible things to these people, all in an attempt to escape them, of course, witnessed it first hand by his own doing and still they rose.  Nothing stopped them except enough damage to the brain.  It was the only method Noah knew.  Although he hated killing these things that he still considered people, he knew they were already dead.  I'm not doing anything wrong, not truly killing anyone, he tried to convince himself.  Just trying to survive.  Still, despite everything, he felt like he was going to hell for taking a human life.  Those people, those creatures.  He tried to dehumanize them.  Those things.  He couldn't tell if it was working.  Nature was dead.  Human laws no longer applied.  Yet, something within him felt guilty.  But, something deeper within him wanted to live at any cost.  Could they hear him running, see his muscles swimming beneath his skin or just smell the fresh meat of him?  Whatever motivated them to come back from the dead, Noah had a motivation, too.  He had to get back to…

Noah stopped.

His face grew pale as the rain lightly sprinkled across his face, as if the water were rinsing the color from his skin.  In front of him, bleeding and groaning, were a line of those things stretching across the entirety of the road, all moving forward at the sight of him.  They all stared at him, their eyes plotting the point where they'd bite.  Noah realized there was no way to break through the dead.  Everywhere he turned, they were there, stumbling forward.  Encircling him.

Closing in.