Suspense Short Story – Double Tap
Suspense Short Story – Double Tap
Photo credit: clarita from morguefile.com
She ran, and she did not stop for a full twenty minutes.
Large beads of sweat, the size of .44 bullets, now seemed to fall off her, scaring her into believing she was making a whole path to the place she was running to. In the 17 days that the city had turned into a zombie haven, she had lost her friends, her parents, her elder sister, and god knows how many more people.
She saw the reverend chewing on a baby’s brain like communion had been announced. Some parents that kid must have had, to leave it behind, and probably flee for their lives. Then again, raising a child in such circumstance would be far too contradictory to their own upbringings, which were probably too uptight anyway. Fair enough in that sense…
She saw Billy, the truck owner get ripped apart by eight,maybe ten larger people. Billy was a full six feet tall, 290-pounder, just the kind of bait that would have attracted even the brainless zomboids- at something so large, enough food for everybody.
20 minutes past, her plan finally seemed to be working- after all, running onto a street full of zombies would not seem the smartest idea. Especially since, even with the baseball bat, the cleaver and .357 in tow, taking on a town of more than 400 undead would not be easy. At all.
But she managed it, reaching staggeringly close to being caught more than seven times, but still somehow, she had managed to get away. Maybe it was just the paranoia of imagining herself feeding on grey matter that caused her to try so hard to live. But she knew sooner or later, unless she boarded a plane to another part of the world, she was anything but safe. Doing that, again, involved a world of pain, but she had to do it. And she did not have to think of it right now.
Having started to catch her breath, she realized that every step she took now was to be a calculated one. ‘Thinking on her feet’ is what she had to do. She found it strange how language had made an idiom for everything that could be thought or imagined. She wondered who came up with that particular phrase, and whether that person thought of it in a similar situation.
Then, she heard it.
The low deathly growl, much like that of a rabid animal. She stood, and tried to pry the direction from which the sound came. Not that it ever stopped, just that the captivation of the need for attention was quite overwhelming.
The sound came from ahead, right on the road that she had been running, and now walking on. Realizing she would have come bang-on into the creature if she had continued running, she breathed a long, deep one. She wondered which of her three weapons she was going to use on this one.
The conscience had died anyway- the one that came in the way of having to kill. That feeling comes by difficult when your existence has become a scene from, until then, ‘walker movies’. The cleaver would give her a nice clean shot into the zombie’s head or neck. In any case, once it started, it had to be quick. And precise.
Then the growling stopped, quite suddenly. She became aware of the silence even before the growling had stopped. Then, it started again. Only this time, it was coming towards her, and fast. Before she knew it, she was on her.
At least it was a she. And not a large one. The rotting hand tried to grasp onto her neck. Not a second to waste, she got the .357 from the holster and shot her straight in the neck. The body fell off in a limp.
Over, for now.
Almost.
There was just one thing more to do. She took the gun, and with one square shot, split the shit out of the undead’s leper-like head. Until the mush inside looked liked pie filling.
Her journey would now continue, into the night, and hopefully into the day.
For now, she was just happy. Especially with double tap.
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