The Plague Unto The End by T. Gault Page A

without over-packing it.
     
    I heard a loud crunch from the other side of the house, and a solid thud following.
     
    “What the heck was that?” I said out loud.
     
    I threw my bag on and sighted the gun on the door.  Silence.  I quickly walked to the door and tried to prepare for what may have to happen.  I flung the door open and slowly rounded the corner to the hallway.  The TV was on again, but the weather was interfering with the signal.  The channel kept switching from the newscaster to a black screen.  I walked to the end of the hallway and paused once I entered the front room.  I glanced to my right to see around the front door.  Nothing.  I scanned the front room.  Nothing.
     
    I was about to walk into the hallway that led to the den when I heard something bump into the wall in the hallway to my left, next to the kitchen.  I froze and stared in the direction the noise came from.  I took a deep breath and slowly backed away from the entryway to the hall.  I aimed the gun toward the opening to the hallway and walked across the front room.
     
    There he was, standing still, staring into the den.  He swayed from side to side, almost as if he were drunk.  I leveled the weapon at the center of the man’s back and slid my finger onto the trigger.  “Hey!  Get out of my house or I’ll shoot!” I yelled.  The man slowly turned around, but when he saw me he was not scared of the gun.  He started to walk toward me, each step very stiff and labored.  “Get back!”  I screamed.  “I told you to get back!  Don’t take another step!”  I commanded.  He just kept coming at me and began to pick up speed.
     
    BANG!   The gun had gone off.  I hadn’t intentionally pulled the trigger.  The tension of the situation had caused my grip to tighten and I pulled the trigger.  After the shock of the noise and the confusion of how I had fired set in, I realized that the man was still coming.  I fired again.  There was no change.  Was I missing? I thought to myself.  I sighted the third shot on his chest and fired.  I saw him jerk from the impact but that was all.  I brought the weapon up again and aimed at his head this time.  BANG!   The round hit him on the right side of his nose and exited out the back of his head.  He fell to the carpet and laid still.  Small bits and pieces of his skull and tissue were scattered on the wall behind where he had stood.
     
    There was not as much blood as I expected there would be.  The blood that I did see, did not look like I thought it would.  It was dark and thick.  It wasn’t bright red, like I had expected.  I had seen people shot in movies before, and had an idea of what it would look like.  It was not too far off of what the skilled makeup artists could produce.  Still, I felt sick to my stomach.  The sight of the corpse, motionless, splattered and bleeding didn’t make me sick.  The thought that I had just ended someone’s life, sick or not, had me on the floor heaving.  I dropped the gun to the floor and threw up the only food I had eaten all day.  “Why didn’t you stop?” I yelled at the motionless body.
     
    As I drew my hand across my mouth to remove any vomit still there, I thought, He really doesn’t look any different than he did before I shot him .  His skin was still the pasty pale color it was before, and his eyes were still the same foggy gray.  I slowly stood back up and walked over to the body.  I had never been so close to a real dead body before, at least not like this.  As I looked closer, I could see that the man’s skin had begun to marble and in some places it appeared to sag, detached from the bones.
     
    CRACK!   Someone was pounding on the door to the den and the flimsy door was about to give.  I snatched the Glock from the floor where I had dropped it.  I tried to remember how many shots I had fired, but with the stress of the situation, I could only remember firing three rounds.  I pointed the