Blood on the Floor: An Undead Adventure Read Free Page B

street ahead and ambles off. He follows behind. Two of them now. Both nameless but driven by the same urge. That she is half-naked from the waist down holds no meaning to him. That she has shit down the back of her own legs is not relevant. She stinks. She hums so bad even the flies are concerned but that doesn’t register.
    The two move down the road. The half-naked shit covered woman slightly in the lead. She didn’t make it to the battle last night. She was busy shitting on her own legs and the face of a crawler that bit her ankle when she squatted in an alley to relieve the urgent pressing of her bowels. The crawler didn’t make it. She broke his neck when she fell on him.
    Another host waits further up the road. Inert yet watchful. Staring at the two coming. The woman gets there first. The child turns and the three walk on. The infection inside the woman knows the child is hers but it suppresses the neural pathways that would sizzle in recognition of one’s own kinfolk and family. Hormonal changes that would produce chemicals that give the mother the urge to protect and nurture, and the child the need for comfort are stopped. They are hosts bound to the infection within. Nothing more. Nothing less. Seek. Feast. Bite. There is only one objective and it is singular.
    Without scent or noise to follow they meander aimless but perpetual. A man joins them. Maggots writhe in the wound caused by the chunk of flesh in his right shoulder being bitten away. White maggots that eat into the flesh and grow succulent from the never ending supply of food. The man is fat. Obese. His stomach hangs down covering his groin and wobbles with each step taken. He was insulin dependent until three days ago from self-induced diabetes brought on by an inability to stop gorging. He was sloth-like and almost sinisterly greedy. He lied to the doctors about his food intake and promised everyone around him that he was trying. It must be glandular. It must be a medical condition because I hardly eat anything. They came through his window. He lived on the ground floor in a specially converted flat paid for by the local council. He was ripe. Nine days without carers coming to wipe his arse for him and the stench of his form wafted into the street that drew the things. He couldn’t fight back. He was too fat. He threw the remote control at one of them then wailed in abject fear as he was bitten in the shoulder.
    Now he doesn’t have diabetes and in the past three days he has lost over fifteen kilos of fat from his frame as the infection ramps his metabolism up to keep him moving.
    More join them. People from all walks of life. Men, women and children. Elderly who couldn’t previously walk unassisted now walk unaided. Arthritis gone. Heart conditions fixed. Eyesight and hearing made sharp again. There are no irritable bowels. No depression. No stress or anxiety. There are no medical conditions. The infection has fixed it and taken all those things away.
    They trickle feed into the small horde. Drawn by the smell and insular hive mind of the other hosts. The collective conscious of the infection doesn’t pay heed to them. They are too few to be of use. The battle here is done and finished. It doesn’t give specific instruction or task other than to fulfil the singular objective.
    The man who woke in the garden walks with them. Drool coats his beard, shiny and wet. He doesn’t know any difference between being on his own and being with others, only that he must go with them. They each must go with the others. It is ordained and impossible to do anything else.
    So they walk as one. A horde of undead all with red bloodshot eyes and mouths that hang open. From the periphery of the town towards the centre where the greater density of population will be. More humans lived in the centre. There is more chance of finding new hosts.
    The man looks ahead as they all do. Something flashes in his mind but is instantly suppressed. A sensation akin to Déjà vu