Bait (Short Story)

By all rights, I should be dead today. Just last night, I was way out ahead of the group when a zombie came running up on my left, at the very edge of my peripheral vision. That zombie isn't the reason I should be dead. I was half-expecting it. I put a battle-ax in his cerebellum.

I guess part of the problem is living in a world where I'm half-expecting to see a zombie at the edge of my peripheral vision. Four-year colleges don't really prepare a guy to live in a world where it's kind of normal to see a battle-ax. Or a cerebellum. But even that wasn't the immediate problem.

The immediate problem was the zombie that came limping up behind me. It was shaking like crazy, like they usually do. Usually you hear that shaking any time a zombie brushes up against something, but this time we were way out in the open, so that second one, the slow one, almost snuck up on me. I put my boot on the first one's chest, yanked my ax back out of his skull, flipped the handle around in my hand, and stabbed out blindly behind me. The top half of my ax blade sweeps back in a long, nasty point. It took me a lot of nights with a fire and hammer to get it just right. I went through a fair amount of scrap metal and a couple of ax heads, too, but it was worth it to be able to protect my own back.

I was once again rewarded for that hard work, rewarded with the sickly sound of rotten stomach splitting open. I felt it through the ax handle more than I heard it, really. That was enough to stop shaky, at least for a second. It was the pain that stopped him. I don't know anyone who wasn't surprised to learn that zombies feel pain. It always stops them. Personally, I figure they're shocked to feel something other than the hunger, something fresher, sharper.

We don't talk about it, and we try not to think about it. I think for most of us, the pain makes it harder, but this time, in this moment, it made things a whole lot easier, because just for a moment shaky stopped cold. Eventually the hunger won out, like it always does, and at that point, I heard more sickening sounds as shaky started pulling himself further up my ax's blade to get to me. Of course, while shaky had been stopped, I hadn't been. I had been looking over my shoulder and pulling my hatchet out of my belt with my right hand. As soon as shaky started pushing forward, I let go of the ax in my left hand, I spun around, and I brought the hatchet down as hard as I could onto the back of shaky's skull.

Because he was falling forward, and because of the awkward position shaky was in, with his two feet and two hands plus the butt of my ax handle on the ground, but his head hanging half-limp in the air, I didn't quite cut his head off with the narrow blade of the hatchet. That's what I was trying to do. I guess the easiest way to describe what I actually did is to say that I turned shaky into the single most gruesome Pez dispenser in recorded human history. Although it's a stretch to call this time recorded, or historic, or human.

I could also give a more clinical description of what happened, and use words like “fractured” and “lacerated,” but I find that the dark humor helps at least a little.

They do usually give themselves away by their shaking, which of course is where their nickname, “shakies,” comes from. For a while after they get sick, they're not really shaky as much as they are jerky. They move too fast, too urgently for the space they're in. At that stage, we call them “live shakies.” If you lock a live shaky in a closet, he'll sprint two steps to the far corner and then stop short. He won't hit his head hard during the stop, but he might bloody up his nose pretty good. Then he'll pick another corner and sprint toward that one, stopping short just a hair late again. Leave one in a closet long enough, and he'd come out with Michael Jackson's nose, but without a concussion. I think. To be honest, I don't know if even a live shaky has enough up there to concuss it, but I guess that's beside the point. Anyway, that stage lasts a couple weeks, or maybe a month at the longest. After that, they still try to move quickly, but they aren't strong enough anymore, so they shake instead. Then they're not live shakies anymore. They're just shakies.

Everyone, even those of us who are still alive, has had plenty of run-ins with shakies at this point. It's not like it happens to me because I'm reckless. Well, okay, I am reckless. I'm almost always way out in front of the group, for one thing. That hasn't been particularly good for my health, of course. I lost two fingers on my right hand and most of the structural integrity of my left knee, both to live shakies who grabbed an extremity and twisted. There was also the time I came around a corner and basically ran into three of them. I'd just killed one and had my hands full with the other two when another guy in our group came around the corner and shot one of them square in the face, taking off most of my ear in the process. Of course, if he hadn't done that, I might not be hearing anything at all now, so I don't complain about it.

Plus there was that time with the motorcycle. At first, a lot of us had vehicles, but we ditched them. Engine noise is like a dinner bell to the shakies. I guess snarling, semi-conscious fiends don't have the skills it takes to keep a car running, so when someone else does, the shakies figure him (or her) for food. But one time I came across this old Indian Chief from back when World War II was still a current cultural reference. One of its owners during a more recent historical period had restored it, and souped it up for added power. The engine on that sucker made enough noise to draw pretty much every shaky in a one-mile radius. I used to be kind of a motorcycle guy before all this, so I decided to take it for a spin. I took it down this little logging road, caning it and carving my turns on the switchbacks, occasionally letting off a little to let the shakies think they might get me before twisting the throttle hard. A lot of them would jump off the switchbacks above me, sometimes two or three turns above me, trying to be first in line at the buffet. Of course, something that doesn't have enough brains to not run in a closet has no chance of grasping the concept of leading a target, so I was never in any danger from those guys. They just saved me the trouble of breaking their necks for them.

The ones that made more trouble were the ones who came up onto the road from below me, the ones coming from the opposite direction who had been drawn into my path by the noise. It got to where I couldn't let off the throttle at all for fear that the sheer volume of shakies reaching out to grab me would slow me to a stop. At that point, I knew I couldn't keep going much longer. Every foot or leg or torso that got under my wheels could throw me off balance bad enough to lose the bike. Finally, I came up on a turn that I didn't see until too late. I didn't even try to brake. Instead, I shifted up a gear, gunned the throttle, and got a solid footing on my pegs. I saw a tree branch overhanging the edge of the road and aimed for it. When I was about a pace and a half away from the tree, I jumped and grabbed for the branch. Unlike the shakies, I know just about everything there is to know about leading a target, and that day, just about everything was just enough. Not enough to keep me from turning my shoulders into a practical study in sports medicine, but that's the price I pay to play the game I play. Although I suppose it's a stretch to call this a game, or playing, or a price I could afford.

Anyway, I grabbed that branch, and then I climbed up a couple more branches, and then I swung my legs up over branch number three. The motorcycle kept going over the edge of the road, falling and then tumbling and then sliding down the hill. I could still hear it running when it came to a stop–they don't make 'em like that anymore. Meanwhile, the shakies started climbing up the tree, one by one. Hanging upside-down by my legs, I hacked at their heads or their hands or whatever else they gave me to hack at.

Interesting fact: the shakies can indeed bleed to death. It's not like in the movies. They'll bleed and bleed, and their hearts will keep going until they're pumping nothing but air. That final stage only lasts for about five or ten seconds, though. After that, they drop like a shot. In general, of course, it's a pretty bad idea to just wait around to see it happen, but when you're a good fifteen feet in the air, and the only ones left are missing their hands up to the elbow, there's no reason not to watch their last pathetic attempts to climb a tree.

I suppose you could look away, if you wanted, but I think the dark humor helps a little.

So yeah, I guess I'm reckless, but that's not my problem, it's just my job. And the job isn't the problem either. The problem is the reason I have the job.

I'm the only one of us left who can't outrun a zombie. When we started out, I had a little of my speed left from my days playing football, but mostly I had pathetic thirty-year-old-man arthritis from playing football. Now, with the knee thing and just the daily grind walking around all the time, what was left before is pretty much gone at this point. One of the decrepit shakies, sure, I'm faster than those, but if we get a live one, I have no choice but to turn around and fight it. If we get sixty of them, I'd still have to turn around. I'm the weak link. The flat tire. The anchor. And I don't mean the superstar stud runner who brings the baton to the finish line in the 4x100 relay. I mean the thing that holds you back. And our group has a rule: no weak links, no anchors.

It took us a long time to arrive at that rule. Months, maybe years. I lost count. In the beginning, we had kids with us, seven of them. Had, as in past tense. One of them, Liz, is still with us, although she was almost fourteen at the beginning and her mom almost made the Olympics in the 400 meter low hurdles. Liz was never a weak link. Now she's barely a kid.

The other six, we lost one by one.  After that, Emma (our official unofficial leader) made a rule that nobody's allowed to have more.  There was a huge argument when it happened, and it has been an ongoing source of tension ever since.  There were couples who were determined to repopulate.  I think Emma's right, though, that the apocalypse is not an appropriate place to bring your children.  For one thing, group morale goes in the toilet every time we lose a kid.  For another thing, we didn't just lose seven kids.  We lost them and a lot more good men and women determined to protect them.

I almost ended up on that list. This kid Chuck and his dad were off to the side of the group while the rest of us were setting up camp when a live one comes barreling out of the woods straight at them. It would have been the biggest human being I'd ever seen in my life, if it had still been human. I swear it was Shaquille O'Neal-sized. I was the first to react. I knocked it off a ten-foot escarpment with a running forearm shiver. It grabbed a handful of my shirt and pulled me over with it. I landed on its chest and just kept hitting it as hard as I could, until there was nothing showing on its face but cracked bone, and my good zombie-punching gloves were red all over. I came out with a couple of broken knuckles, plus half a dozen cracked ribs courtesy of undead fists the size of cantaloupes, but if it had landed on top of me...

By all rights, I should be dead today.

As I was climbing back up the little cliff, I heard footsteps coming toward me. “It's me!” I called out. I came over the lip of the embankment to the sight of three or four dozen people putting away bows and shotguns. Chuck ran up to hug my face and shoulders, which were the only things showing above the edge of the cliff. Chuck's dad was right behind him, trying to keep the little one away from the edge of the cliff. No sense knocking the frying pan down just to have the kid jump in the fire.

“That was amazing!” He told me.

“That was amazing!” Chuck echoed.

“Seriously, how can I repay you?” The father continued to gush. “There's no way I can repay you. If you hadn't been there...”

“Just doing my job,” I assured him.

“When you went over with the shaky, I thought you were dead for sure,” Emma said, in a tone that might have been curiosity. “That one was a monster.”

“Yeah,” I answered. “Well, so am I.”

A week later, Chuck wandered off into the woods while we were asleep. We never saw him again. Now there are no more kids, or senior citizens, or walking wounded–aside from me. There's no back of the pack. Now it's just me, and nobody's here to protect me. I protect the rest. I clear the path. Because there can be no weak links in my group, my role in the group is to not be part of it. If there's a trap, I spring the trap. If I live, that's less danger everyone else has to deal with. One of these days, when they kill me, my job is to die loud.

I guess it's a lousy job. It's definitely a dirty one. I don't think anybody wants it to be this way, but this is the way it is. When I did that thing with the motorcycle, I got back to camp about six and a half hours late. The driving took time, and then there was the fighting, and then I had to walk back slowly enough that my footsteps would be drowned out by the sounds of moaning, writhing, dying shakies. When I did get back, almost everyone was happy to see me. A few of them were really angry at first, and then even happier, so I guess they were either worried, or upset that I came back and then overacting to fit in with the mood of the rest of the group. Emma was the angriest. She yelled at me for a good fifteen or twenty minutes. I guess that's her job, being leader. That's how I know she doesn't want to see me dead. It's just that the same way she doesn't want me to die protecting someone who isn't gonna make it, she doesn't want any of the rest to die protecting me when they should be running to safety. I don't want that either. It isn't fair. None of us like it, so we just don't talk about it. Every day, I wake up knowing, and not needing to be told, that I won't be part of the group that day.

At night, though, I am part of the group again. I am still a part of all the really important parts of group life: sitting around, playing cards to pass the time, singing old songs (because they stopped recording music on account of the event, the only kind of music there is now is old music), and trying not to think about the fact that life suddenly turned into a B-movie that didn't end after two hours like it was supposed to. Trying not to think about how B-movies inevitably end for characters as slow and ugly as me.

The fact is, they're too kind for their own good. I'm entitled to a share of any canned, freeze-dried, vacuum-sealed, or otherwise-preserved food we run across. Even after several years, that happens more than you'd think. The shakies are only interested in flesh, and almost all packaged food is edible way past its expiration date. Thank God for preservatives. But I turn it down, because they shouldn't be wasting food on a walking deadman like me. Since I'm out ahead, I come across a lot of mushrooms that haven't been stepped on and animals that haven't been scared back into the woods by the larger group. Sometimes there are berry bushes. I have plenty to eat from what I can pick and shoot. I took a beautiful old recurve bow out of a hunting cabin near the very beginning of this whole thing. These days, I get more and better fresh meat than I ever did in my old life. The extinction of humanity has been great for wildlife. I typically get about two deer a week, out of the dozens I see. I share with the group, because they're glad to have it, and because it would go bad before I could eat all of it anyway.

Occasionally we run out of the grocery-store stuff, and the whole group forages for food, the same as I do. They eat a lot of dandelion roots during those times. Trying to stay out ahead of the group on two bum legs and one knee that's flat-out injured, I don't really have any time for digging, but for their sake, I try not to step on dandelions. Someday, there probably won't be any more of the processed food left to find, and everyone will do a lot of foraging every day. Personally, I hope to live long enough to see those days, but for everyone else's sake, I hope they never come.

Sometimes, when someone else gets hurt too bad to outrun the live ones, they send him (or her) up ahead with me. That's the worst. I hate that. Emma has always told me I'm not allowed to protect anyone else who gets sent ahead with me, but, I mean, do you think I can help it? Most of these people are my friends, and even the ones I don't like, we've been through a lot together. A month or so back, I about damn near got my right arm torn off by a shaky I didn't see coming, because I was keeping another one off Chuck's dad. He didn't make it. Now I'm weak on the right side. I have to hide it from Emma, or she'd really let me have it. I do what I can, within reason, but sometimes there are just too many...

Like I said, now it's just me.

By all rights I should be dead today.

A few of the youngest guys in the group look up to me. I guess they see me as someone to be admired. Anyway, they call me “mini-Frankenstein,” and they're always telling stories about me, saying that I'll outlive all of us. If the population of Earth was seven billion shakies, they say, it would take seven billion and one to stop me. It can be fun to listen to, and I'd like to think it's true, but I know better. I've just been lucky so far.

I guess if we ever stopped to think about it, we'd realize how unlikely it is for any of us to be alive. For one thing, we ended up in the perfect location, up here in the mountains, with lots of good places to hide. If my boss hadn't sent me on a ski retreat, if instead he'd booked a luau somewhere in the tropics, where the populations are higher, I'd be shaking and eating people right now. Plus, disease doesn't spread so easily up at this altitude. We pretty much get a nightly freeze, which kills viruses and shakies. Now I'm imagining them out there freezing to death, shivering. I guess they wouldn't really look any different from regular shakies.

I told you the humor helps.

It would be bad back in that steamy excuse for a hellhole known as Florida, where my wife and I used to live. Where I tell myself my wife still lives. It wouldn't be quite as bad, though, because of the old people. I figure that when an old person turns, they never go through the jerky, frantic stage, and skip right to the stumbling and shaking. But I don't know for sure. I've never seen an old-person shaky.

So anyway, last night, a shaky snuck up on me way out in the open. We don't spend much time way out in the open, because even the regular shakies can surprise you there sometimes, but we were pretty sure we were hot on the trail of our best news all month. In the early afternoon, we came across a poster of sorts. It was very plain, no pictures or anything. It just said:

If you can read this, you are welcomed.

←

We followed the arrow, and before too long, we came upon a similar poster. This one had an arrow pointing right instead of left, and below the arrow, someone had handwritten, “If you know your ABC's, you will be welcome.” “ABC” and “welcome” had been underlined, apparently by the same hand.

I guess I'm not the only one who thinks humor helps.

Every few intersections, we came upon a new sign, indicating a new turn. One of them even had the same handwritten message as before. It was just getting dark when I found a sign that pointed up a dirt driveway that led back into the woods. I walked down the driveway. After a few steps, I could see the silhouette of a house. Not just any house, a big house. The kind of house that was the best out of a very rich person's several summer homes.

Then I saw another silhouette in the woods–a shaky, twitching and giving himself away. I could easily have plugged it with an arrow, but I decided that would be a bad idea. For starters, I didn't really want to risk losing the arrow. Sure, I break the points on them all the time when I shoot something and hit bone. Arrowheads I can replace. I make them out of old tin cans. They fly like crap and they break a lot easier than the nice ones I used to have, but at least they're lethal. The shafts, on the other hand, I can't really replace. I found a handful of really nice hunting arrows in the cabin with the recurve. The shafts on them were well-made–strong and durable and perfectly balanced. There were also some very nice arrowheads screwed onto those shafts, but the last of those broke apart on some shaky's skull a long, long time ago. I can put my shoddy-ass tin-can heads on the shafts and still hit whatever I'm shooting at, but I doubt I can make a shaft good enough to deliver the arrowheads I make accurately. So if shaky took a while to die with my arrow in him, I would be searching in the woods a good long time to get the arrow back. Plus, there was the off chance that I might hit shaky without killing him at all, and then later he could show up and surprise us in our sleep, and then I would have failed to do my job properly out of sheer laziness. That would be no good at all. I needed an up-close kill.

I took a couple steps into the woods, moving sideways, intending to get behind shaky for an easy kill, but then I lost shaky behind a tree. I could still hear it aimlessly brushing against leaves and branches, but I couldn't tell which direction it had moved, which direction he was moving. Risky as it was, I needed to get shaky to come to me. I looked down, spotted a twig, and stepped on it. The aimless, listless brushing sounds continued. No good. I took another step, this one onto a stick with a bunch of twigs sticking out of it. That was enough noise to get shaky's attention. The brushing became more focused, more urgent, more consistent. Now I could get a direction on it. I slipped behind a tree, reached up to the top of my backpack, and grabbed the handle of my aluminum baseball bat. I pulled it up and out as quietly as I could and got into a crouch. For a second, I thought about what my position in the group, living as human bait. That's what my life amounted to. What Emma had demanded of me, what she still demanded of me, it wasn't fair. I let my anger heat my grip on the bat from red-knuckle to white-knuckle. When shaky finally came around the tree, I let loose a long, looping swing. I heard a femur break. I felt a dull, hot, radiating pain in my right shoulder. I saw shaky do three-quarters of a flip over my bat and land face-up. It rolled over two times, then a third, coming toward me. Now face-down on the ground, it looked up at me, and I could see that it used to be a she. It pulled itself toward me with its hands. I stomped down on its head, as hard as I could. I heard a disgusting, crackling, crumpling sound. Shaky stopped crawling.

I made my way toward the house, taking the single shaky as a good omen. Even in safe places, a loner shows up every once in a while. A place so inhospitable that even shakies stay away is not a place I want to see. It didn't take me long to get to the front porch, but when I climbed up to the front door, the smell made me hesitate. The stench from inside was so strong that I could smell it a step away from the door. We had been sleeping more or less outside for the last month, so I thought that maybe I just wasn't used to the human smell of lived-in places. That idea stopped making sense pretty quickly when I stepped inside, looked around, and noticed some human skeletons stacked haphazardly in the corner. I couldn't tell exactly how many there were, but there was a pile.

I turned around to leave, but just when I got out of the door, I saw someone starting to climb the stairs onto the front porch. Someone not shaking. Human. Ana. Someone from our group. I stood in the doorway, blocking her.

“We're not going in there tonight,” I told her.

“The hell we're not,” she said. “It's late.”

“You don't want to go in there,” I insisted. “Trust me, you don't want to go in there.” But Ana was taller than me. She just leaned over my shoulder and looked in for herself. Then she leaned back. Her face turned white. She shook her head, and I shook mine in answer. At that moment, Emma joined Anna on the porch. “You don't wanna go in there,” I told her. “None of us are going to want to go in there.”

“He's not in the group,” Emma said to Ana. “He doesn't make the decisions.” Ana, still white-faced, just looked Emma square in the eye and shook her head. Emma raised an eyebrow. Ana shook her head again. Emma tried to push past me to look, and tried to look around me, but I was taller than her and pretty much as wide as the doorway. I wasn't going anywhere.

Finally, Ana found her words. “It's dead people,” she said. “Dead people live here.”

“What do you mean?” Emma asked.

“There's a pile of skeletons in the corner,” Ana answered. “Nobody's going to want to stay here.”

“At this point, what the others might want is irrelevant,” Emma said. “It's already dark. Too late to turn around and go anywhere else.”

“Are you sure there's nowhere else?” I asked her. “It wouldn't have to be anything great to be better than that,” I said jerking a thumb back over my shoulder to indicate the macabre, haphazard décor.

“I wish,” Emma answered, shaking her head.

I cursed myself, cursed my vain insistence on outsmarting shaky, cursed my greed at sacrificing crucial minutes to save an arrow-shaft, cursed the anger that was satisfied little by all the cursing, and much better by killing shakies up close and personal. If I'd just put a broadhead in shaky's eye from fifty feet, something I practiced doing every day, I would have reached the house sooner. Then I could have run back to intercept Ana before we got here, told her the house had burned to the ground, and found somewhere else to stay. Sure, running meant I would have had to wake up an hour early just loosen up my legs enough to walk in the morning, but I doubt the group would think one of my arrows and an hour of my sleep are worth the anywhere near the price they were about to be charged for them.

“It's not your fault,” Emma said. “You did the smart thing. You made the right tactical choice, because you assumed we were going to be staying here. Unfortunately, you were right.”

“It sure feels like my fault,” I told her.

With that, I turned back into the house and reached into my pack for my thin bedroll. I used the blankets to cover the pile of skeletons. They couldn't quite do the job. I kicked the bones at the edge into a more compact pile, doing my best not to think morbid thoughts about it. I made a mental note to keep the side of the blankets facing down now on the outside when I slept in them, at least until I made some blankets out of deer hide to replace these ones. I made a second mental note to do that soon.

I barely finished my work and my mental notes before the bulk of the group arrived. A few young men charged in the door and made straight for the kitchen while Emma, Ana and I were still doing a sweep of the house. There wasn't any food in there, but they did find some alcohol. They invited me to drink with them, but I turned them down. When even the oldest people you know are five years younger than you, but they think they're ten years younger, they look fifteen years younger and they feel twenty years younger, it's probably time to stop partying.

The boys didn't let it stop them, of course, and I didn't blame them. We all live the kind of life that requires unwinding from. It can be kind of amusing to watch them at it. We all have our old phones and iPods with music on them from before the event, and we all guard them with our lives. Ana even made a pedal charger for them. She's good at that kind of thing. It's heavy enough that I have to carry it, but it works. So when the guys have a party, they're usually passing a bottle around, drinking from the same one, but they're all dancing to different music. To me, it's kind of funny to watch. The parties I remember worked the opposite way.

I'm not a big fan of the music those guys listen to when they party. They guard their players jealously, but they'll share half of their headphones with you for a while. Not that they have to share long. I get sick of that new (well, newer) stuff pretty fast. Of course, the people who played the music I grew up with are all in the AARP now. Or they would be, if they weren't zombies instead.

While the guys were enjoying the kitchen, the rest of the group headed upstairs to get some rest. The smell wasn't as bad up there. There was still a smell, but it wasn't as bad where the group slept as it was right next to the pile of skeletons. In fact, the whole night turned out to be a lot better than I expected. Everyone was disappointed to find that all those signs just led to an empty house, but it wasn't from the same high to the same low that I feared. I had gone from the primal feeling of accomplishment that comes from killing a shaky all the way down to finding a mass grave without the grave. They went from exhausted and hopeful to exhausted and holding their noses. The guys in the kitchen went from exhausted and hopeful to drunk, and as far as they were concerned, that wasn't even a step down. It's fair to say I went to sleep feeling better about the evening than I'd felt about it while I was still awake.

-------

I awoke very suddenly this morning. It came so suddenly that it was not as much morning as it was still night. The sound of something pounding on a wood door woke me. It was coming from the basement. I was sleeping in the front room. That's part of my job. Wherever zombies are most likely to come into camp, I sleep closest to it. When camp is some CEO's summer house, that's the front door. I remembered that Ana had told me the night before that there was a basement, and that there wasn't a whole lot in the basement but a heavy wood door that was locked securely from the inside. I wasn't sure who or what was doing the pounding, and I couldn't think of a good reason why they would be pounding on that door, but I was pretty sure they didn't have a check from Publisher's Clearinghouse. It seemed like the kind of thing the rest of the group should know about.

“Wake up!” I shouted at the top of my lungs as I gathered my weapons. “Weird noises downstairs! Gonna check it out!”

To emphasize my message, I took the stairs to the basement in leaps, five at a time, stomping both feet as I landed. I heard loud popping, creaking and groaning sounds–but that was just from my knees. The creaking and moaning of the wooden stairs was drowned out by the hollow, bass-drum booming of my feet landing hard on the stairs. When I got to the bottom, I noticed two new sounds. The pounding on the door had changed. Now it was the sound of pounding on a door that wasn't going to hold up for long. I also heard, very faintly, the sounds of shaking feet on a dirt floor.

Having a good idea of what was about to knock that door down, I decided to speed up the inevitable. I kicked the door as hard as I could. It slammed into whatever was on the other side with a dull thud and then vibrated on its hinges, half-open. Now I could definitely hear uneven, unsteady, disorganized footsteps. I grabbed the door with my right hand and pulled it most of the way shut. My left hand went for my recurve bow. I nocked two arrows, one to either side of my bow, and fired. Then I fired two more, and another two more. I could still hear feet in the dirt, but the sound was more distant now. I opened the basement door all the way and stepped in.

The sight that greeted me was like none I had seen before. There wasn't actually a dirt floor in the room. It was a finished basement, with a floor mostly covered in dirt. The dirt was from a hole toward the back of the room. The hole was more or less round, probably deeper than the average man is tall (it was definitely deeper than my height) and almost twice that large in diameter. There was a big crowd of shakies in the hole. A big crowd.

“So that's what a million shakies looks like!” I shouted, relaying the situation to Emma and the rest, hoping they heard.

“Worst lottery ever,” I muttered under my breath.

At that moment, a live one crawled out of a big, broken pipe entering the back side of the hole. They must have crawled up that pipe and broken up through the floor somehow. They must have killed the people who had lived here before, the ones who had put up a sign. Somehow, one of those people must have escaped and come back to seal the basement before crawling away through the pipe, hoping to save anyone who stumbled across the house. It had almost worked. I wondered why that survivor hadn't then made his (or her) way through town to take the posters down. My wondering was cut short when live shaky climbed up out of the hole.

Enraged that I might die for my anonymous predecessor’s laziness, I put my bow down behind me and pull out my battle-ax. I let that anger build. I'm not Luke Skywalker. I'm allowed to release my anger. I release most of it into a feral swing of my ax. The long blade goes straight through shaky, sort of cutting him in half and sort of pulverizing him. Behind him, the hole is filling up even more. The shakies are packed so tight inside that they're starting to climb on top of one another. For the ones on top, the hole is only waist-deep. They're struggling to climb up out. Two more live ones pop out of the hole, and a pack of the regular ones stream out slowly behind them.

“Who wants a bite?” I ask them, blustering a battle cry at the top of my lungs. “I'm not going anywhere!”

By all rights, I should be dead today.