Degeneration Read Free Page B

darkness I recognized that it was Pepe, the president of the cooperative association that ran the supermarket. But if you think that Pepe had stayed in Navarrés to protect the interests of his association, I assure you that you are mistaken. I'm convinced that he was bitten by a zombie while trying to steal the shop’s money. The decaying being came towards me at surprising speed, dragging his guts along the floor and pulling himself strongly with his forearms. It was tight inside the freezer and the lack of light made it hard for me to aim at his head. When I was about to react, the zombie was already just a few inches from me. With amazing ease, he pushed off with his arms and tried to throw himself onto me, but I responded to the attack in time and hit him in the face with the stock of the gun. He fell to the ground and tried to push himself up again. Then I hit him repeatedly in the skull until his head cracked in two and his brains fell out onto the floor of the freezer. Splashed with Pepe's brain matter, I went to the back of the freezer and found several bags of money covered in blood. "Son of a bitch," I said, “even as a zombie this bastard was still worried about money.” So as not to waste more time, I took the bags and ran out of the freezer.  I filled the trunk of my 4x4 with canned goods, took the last jugs of water that I found, and got out of there without looking back.
    The confrontation with that putrefied being had somehow excited me and, for some reason unknown to me, I felt the need to take a drive around the village. I drove carefully through the high roads. Everything seemed calm there. I passed by the Villaplana Café and got to the entrance of the church. There I found two zombies wandering around; they were lost and disoriented and tripped time and time again over the steps that led to the large, arched pillars of the church’s doorway.  They seemed to be two members of the clergy who were, by instinct, going to pray to their god, the same god who had abandoned them. I stopped the car just a few feet away from the decomposing beings who, in turn, didn't even notice my presence. I tried to recognize in their putrefied faces the people who, a long time ago, had occupied those bodies; but, I wasn't able to identify them. Maybe they weren't even aware of how they had gotten to where they were.
    Without wasting more time, I rolled down the window and stuck half of my body out. I then raised the shotgun and put those poor, unfortunate men out of their misery. In that moment, a loud scratching sound alerted me to something that had run up against the passenger window. Worried, I turned around and aimed the shotgun in that direction. One of the decomposing beings had pressed his face against the glass and was scratching at it with his moldy, bloody nails. The zombie moaned and showed his repulsive teeth –the mortifying means of infection for others– as he vomited mouthfuls of blood onto the glass. He smashed his head into the window over and over again. I had to finish him off, but I couldn't shoot him from inside the vehicle; I ran the risk of blowing my eardrums out with the Browning's roar, or of taking a piece of glass to the body when the window blew in all directions. I thought about taking a risk, rolling down the window and pulling the trigger... but if I made a mistake, I would be at the mercy of that monstrous thing. So, I slammed on the clutch and jammed my 4x4 into reverse, intending to run him over. I backed the vehicle onto the sidewalk and got a couple feet away from him. The decomposing monster was directly in front of me, wobbling as if he were drunk. From this distance, and now a little calmer, I saw that it was Rafael, a retired teacher who had taught my wife in grade school.  His appearance had hardly changed from when he was alive.
    "Piece of shit," I muttered as I put it in first. "You were a zombie before the epidemic and you're a zombie now."
    I then let the clutch out and