come back and then left again. Twice. But I waited nonetheless.
The screaming and pounding ceased, and after a few grunts, all became quiet. I then turned into the smoking hottie in the horror movies that you are always yelling at not to open that or go there. I slowly parted the threadbare curtains over the sink in the airstream.
The first thing that grabbed my attention was that it had snowed. Flurries were still falling, but there was at least three inches of the white stuff blanketing the world. The second thing I noticed was footprints in said precipitation. Or I should say boot prints.
Now being from Massachusetts, I have seen some fauna. Hawks, squirrels, sea gulls, weasels, deer. I even saw a fisher cat once. Mean S.O.B. too. Said animal did not have the intelligence to strap on a pair of Timberlands though, and I was fairly certain that even the animals up here in New Hampshire didn’t parade around in shoes either.
Options on the species boot-wearing critter were limited.
I waited for at least an hour. It had stopped snowing, but the footprints were mostly covered. I peeked out the curtains one last time before I cautiously opened the door and peeked out of that as well. Nothing.
I took a furtive step outside, panning the .38 around. More nothing. I took two steps out the door and into the snow and realized that all this nothing was scaring the piss that I no longer had right out of me, so I spun around and made for the trailer door. I dunno who was doing all that yelling, but I no longer needed to find out.
I should have looked up.
On top of the airstream, with his ass on his heels in a crouch and staring right at me was the culprit. His head was cocked to the side, but only momentarily as he threw it back and screamed the scream of the damned. Then he launched himself off the trailer like a leopard pouncing on a gazelle. Gazelle = me for the slow people.
Blood on the Snow
Now I know you’ve been wondering why I’ve brought up the Runners twice previously, but only in a sort of an aside. They have been surreptitiously absent from this gripping tale. That’s because Runners are different . Some people use the word “zombie” for the dead folks that have taken over, but that term is incorrect. Look up your Haitian voodoo.
I’m going to call them zombies from here on out too, even though the term is crap.
Runners are as different from those walking pus bags (zombies) as you are from a can of spam. There are commonalities mind you, but they are most definitely not the same. I was talking about commonalities in the types of infected, not between you and spam. Although, come to think of it, I don’t know you, so maybe you’re as dumb as spam, and you’re probably fashioned out of meat like spam. God is fickle.
Anyway, the point is that the thing hurtling at me velociraptor style, was most assuredly a Runner. It was my first Runner, so you should consider that a particularly terrifying moment for me. Previously, I mentioned I had deposited what most would reflect on as an extremely manly and hard-hitting piss. I did this while flexing my un-infected pecs and standing over a filthy toilet containing Heaven knows what. So this is twice I had no urine to spare, because damn, my bladder let go with a bunch of nothing.
As it leapt gracefully through the cold pre-December air, I couldn’t help but notice that the thing looked like a mountain man. Scraggly beard, dirty clothes with a green military jacket, obviously fabricated the same year as the Airstream for a tour in Vietnam. It had scratches on its cheeks, above the whiskers. The eyes are what I remember most though.
People use descriptive terms like ‘inhuman’ to designate the infected, but you can’t really understand what that means until you’ve seen a Runner, or, more to the point, until you see a Runner who sees you. When you look into their eyes, you can tell that they are no longer human. To me, being human isn’t defined