Orbital Decay by A. G. Claymore

accumulation of blowing leaves.
    A car sat at an odd angle in the end of a driveway, its doors open and the headlights gleaming faintly. Ben looked inside and the keys were still there in the ‘on’ position. “Ran out of gas,” he said, standing back up to look at the house in front of him.
    “Gahhhh!” Abe’s exclamation was followed by a crunching sound.
    Ben spun around to see him backing away from a walking corpse in a charcoal grey suit with a fresh crease across it’s face. Abe brought his weapon up to his shoulder and fired a three round burst. In less than sixty milliseconds, the three rounds left the weapon and shattered what was left of the corpse’s brain, dropping him to the cold asphalt.
    “Son of a bitch!” Abe panted. “Where the hell did he come from? Must have been rooting through a garbage bin.”
    A loud thump came from an open garage down the street. Both men turned to search for the source.
    “They were drawn to us, back at the camp when you spoke,” Ben whispered. “I think they still have enough brain power to equate noise with food.”
    “Then we better get moving,” Abe finished for him.
    They set off at a jog, weaving around bins and abandoned cars. More lurching bodies started to show up, coming from open vehicles, doors or back yards.
    “This does not bode well for our return trip,” Abe panted as they picked up the pace by unspoken consent.
     When they were only a hundred yards from the house that backed onto Ben’s place, he realized that they had a problem. He looked back. Shit! “We can’t just run straight through or we’ll have at least thirty of the bastards trying to get in my house when I’m getting my family ready to bug out.” He pointed his rifle to the right. “We’ll cut through the church parking lot and go up the next street. Maybe we’ll lose some of them.”
    They raced across the lot, rounding the corner to find at least twenty more animated corpses milling around the middle of the street in their best clothes. Ben and Abe skidded to a halt. Their pursuers were thirty, maybe forty feet behind them.
    “Hey! Up here!”
    Both men looked up at the roof of the large brick structure that jutted out into the parking area. A man was waving down at them and pointing to a set of doors at ground level. He looked back over his shoulder. “Open up – we got two live ones!”
    The gymnasium floor was covered with blankets and sleeping bags. A serving counter on the far side held coffee urns and the smell of food hit Ben with a shock. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was. Aside from a packet of peanuts on the shuttle up to the hotel, his last meal had been sitting on the grill at Papa’s when the explosion destroyed his loft last night.
    “Ben?”
    He turned, his throat so tight he could hardly breathe. And there she was, standing at what must have been the entrance to the sanctuary. She had a look of utter amazement on her face. “Lise!” He ran to her and she met him in the middle of the large room, her hug so tight it hurt his neck.
    Funny how a little thing like a global pandemic can change your perspective, he thought wryly. He pulled back suddenly. “Brendan?”
    She smiled. “He’s playing with the other kids in a room down the hall.”
    “How did you end up here?” Ben looked back toward the kitchen again. “If we hadn’t been forced to detour, we would have missed you entirely.” He shuddered, thinking how he could have walked past this building and never found them.
    She gave him that sardonic look that he used to find so annoying a year ago. Now it made him smile. She looked at the G-19 hanging from his shoulder, then back up at her husband. “You mean you haven’t been to the house yet?”
    “No, we were trying to find a way there when someone on the roof called out to us.”
    She nodded. “You know, a couple of days ago, I would have said I had no use for churches, but this one really came through for us. Things changed so