The Passenger (Surviving the Dead) by James Cook, Joshua Guess Page A

up to my body tearing its victim apart, the fight was almost over. I was seeing it from the other side now, and even knowing I was one of the attackers, part of the overwhelming force and not a potential meal, I was scared.
    The sounds coming from the oth er dead people were what did it. Most of them stayed quiet, but a few began to huff, working their chests like bellows. It looked like a lot of work, and the handful that did it were fresh, only dead for maybe a few months. Then they hissed and moaned, a thin and reedy sound you never hear outside of a person dying.
    Hearing a death rattle in an emergency room is one thing. Being surrounded by it in the middle of the night is quite another. I didn't bother suppressing the urge to run; it would have just been a waste of energy anyway. I let the fear run its course, then took the mental equivalent of a deep breath and waited for bad things to happen.
    It wasn't a long delay. Shouts went up almost as soon as the dead people around me began making their shrill little noises. That strange sense of triangulated sound washed through me again, pointing exactly to where my eyes knew the source to be. I could see them there—a group, but small—flickering in and out of view between the press of corpses between us. I heard a woman scream for someone to get in a car and a faint whimper from what I assumed was a child.
    The woman's voice wasn't filled with panic, which put her above me. My own early experiences with the infected, back when I was still alive, were filled with shame.
    My family and I ran at every opportunity. I shouldn’t have felt bad about that—everyone else was running too—but I did. When measured against catastrophe, I came up short. There was no fight in me. I spent my life behind a desk, avoiding trouble. Nothing in it had prepared me for life-and-death struggles.
    The man in the group didn't have that problem. He and his wife must have been a damned good match, because as I heard her barking orders to the rest of the group and the accompanying sound of car doors slamming, the husband (I assumed) raised an animal howl of protest. There w as no trace of fear in his voice, not a shred of self-preservation. His war cry filled the night like a rock concert, shattering the silence, punctuated by a drumbeat of steel against flesh.
    I saw the husband rise up against the front of the swarm, and the sight of him left me agape. He was huge, towering over the ranks of undead. The long crowbar in his hands was tiny in comparison. His swings were fast enough that the stiffened muscles in my body's neck couldn't twitch fast enough to follow them.
    Fearless, the husband waded into the crowd. Strike after strike, merciless, and every one thumping into—and sometimes through—a skull. Head trauma. The only kn own killing blow for the thing I had become.
    The sheer ferocity of the husband's attack took the swarm by surprise. It's easy to get the wrong idea when you're running away from a horde of dead people, but they're really more complex than first impressions led me to believe. As I wa tched, I saw subtlety in them. Rather than behaving like mindless cannibals, many of them reacted to the obvious danger by stepping back, bodies tense and cautious. Not the reaction of purely instinct-driven automatons. Closer to a predatory animal, albeit a very stupid one.
    Still, the hunger burned inside me—rather, inside my bod y—and I was getting some of it, like a smoldering coal that could only be quenched in blood. My body didn't rush into the fray. It was clever enough to bide its time.
    But it didn't run away, either.
    The space between us opened for a moment, my view of the husband unobstructed. In that snapshot of time I saw his thick arms extended on the backside of a swing that took one of my cohorts off his feet, nearly decapitating him. That frozen instant showed a giant of a man with a face full of rage, teeth bared against the impossible odds. Bits of his enemy arced