Apocalyptica (Book 3): Ran by Joshua Guess

yard.
    The corpse smashed into a zombie looking up at the odd display with vacant, hungry eyes.
    It was one of those moments in life where something so tragically awful happens that you just can’t help but laugh. Robert and I both burst into uncontrollable gales of laughter.
    “You guys are fucked up,” Maria said, glancing over at us.
    “I know,” I replied, still rattling off bursts of laughter as I spoke. “But you should’ve seen it. Like a deer in headlights.”
    The next zombie was easier for everyone as we worked out the kinks in the system. The one after that? Even smoother. By zombie number four my arms were starting to get tired, and I thought back to that initial urge to go a-swingin’ against the whole swarm by myself.
    Yeah. Not my best moment.
    Zombies five and six I killed with my knife. I’d have been a little concerned since Shane was still unable to consistently trap their arms, but without leverage they weren’t much of a threat. Besides, I stomped their wrists to make grabbing me almost impossible.
    It was boring. It took forever. And most important, it worked. If I had to explain what survival boiled down to in three sentences, it would be those.
     
     
     
     
    We didn’t kill all the zombies that way. If we had tried to, it would have taken all day and night. Beside which, not all the damn things came close enough to be lassoed. Zombies might be significantly more dumb than your average human, but they had at least the capacity to learn of an animal, and even animals know not to walk over to where one of their pack disappeared. Not when it happens fifteen times.
    Fortunately, our team wasn’t working alone. Maria and Gregory turned out to be pretty good shots, helped somewhat by the competition between the two spurred by several rounds of friendly shit-talking. Jem and Tony were likewise active, picking off zombies at the edges. Overall it was a surprisingly effective show of teamwork.
    I handed the bat off to Robert when we stepped onto the front porch. Most of the zombies were dead, but the few stragglers needed to be cleared up. I didn’t feel another fit coming on, and was lucky to have had one just before all this shit went down, but it had been a few hours. I worried the stress would have some kind of effect on the Nero in my system and give me another one.
    Carla put a hand on my shoulder as we stood on the porch and watched the last few zombies put up a fight when the boys chased them down.
    “You did great,” she said.
    “I didn’t have a bad reaction from the stress,” I said. “I’m pretty happy about that.”
    She glanced at me sideways. “Not what I mean, Ran.”
    I raised an eyebrow at her. “You lost me.”
    Carla chuckled. “I meant with the others. You did a good job with them. You acted like a leader.”
    I squirmed a little at that. “We all wanted to not die. In that situation, I don’t think I had to try very hard.”
    “Or,” Carla said, stretching out the word, “you could see it from another perspective. Which is that you got a group of people you just finished delivering bad news to, almost threatening them in the process, to work with you in a potentially dangerous situation.”
    I stared out at the land in front of us and shook my head. “You know, I’d feel like a better leader if I wasn’t so monumentally stupid. We fucked up, but early enough that it probably won’t kill us.”
    “How so?”
    “We relied on things staying the way they were,” I said, jerking a thumb over my shoulder toward the house. “Two weeks of electricity and we got comfortable. How are we going to cook? Battery power will drain in no time if we use it for that. Instead of putting all our effort into Tony’s plans, we should have been focusing on survival without things like electricity and running water.”
    Carla chewed her lip. “Well, we assumed…”
    “Exactly,” I said. “We assumed we had more time. We don’t. After we clear up these bodies, we have to