The forest was alive with the sound of the dead.

The day grew darker as the sun sat lower in the sky. We could feel them following us. I could hear him breathing hard as he ran next to me. They were not far behind.

It was the smell that gave them away most of the time. Some made noise but there was no way to forget the smell of a lumbering, rotting, corpse.

“We need to get out of the woods,” he said.

Most of the time the forest was our friend. It gave us ample places to hide, from both the dead and the living. We needed to see them coming. We had to make a stand.

For another ten minutes, we ran as quiet as we could through the forest, watching every step, twice he stopped to tape different pieces of gear together. Sound attracted them.

As we were about to hit the forest’s edge, one of them stepped out from behind a tree. It was tall, taller than me, and almost as tall as Evan. He almost looked normal except for the greying pallor of his skin. It turned, and there were the unmistakable touches of red around his mouth.

He turned slowly. Its wide shoulders made it difficult for him to move through the underbrush, but he lumbered towards us. I raised my gun, leveled it, staring straight down the sights, ready to plug it right between the eyes, and he stopped me.

I turned and Evan pointed to his bow. I nodded. It was a better idea. We didn’t know how many were out there and had to save ammo. Evan nocked an arrow and let it fly. The thing was so close that its head exploded and the arrow went clean through the weakened skull and lodged itself in the tree behind it.

“Let’s move,” he said.

Evan pulled his arrow free from the tree and wiped the decaying grey matter with the edge of his shirt. He stepped over the fallen body and hesitated for a moment.

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s nothing” he said, “Now let’s go.”

I wasn’t sure if the body would draw more of them. Evan didn’t seem to mind.

It was getting darker. The last remnants of sunlight were beginning to disappear behind the trees, as we reached a clearing. The woods opened to a country road with a small collection of buildings, including an old gas station and two larger structures. Vines obscured the entire front of the largest building and the local flora had assaulted the asphalt surrounding the area where people once pumped their gas. If we had come to this place much later we might have missed it entirely.

I took a step towards the building but Evan put his arm on my shoulder. I immediately realized my mistake. Evan pulled a monocular from his pack and surveyed the surroundings, and while Evan canvassed the area, I took up my normal position and watched the woods behind us. Every time a branch twitched I waited for another one to come stumbling out.

Fifteen minutes later, after seeing no one enter or leave, Evan tapped me on the shoulder and we moved towards the group of buildings. We crossed the road and slipped into the forest on the other side.

We picked the gas station first. It was the closest and the smallest of the buildings. We moved in a practiced silence and Evan, wearing his dark grey jacket with the hood pulled up, was invisible among the trees. Evan kept his bow in front of him with an arrow nocked. It was his favorite way to dispatch them, silent, and at a distance because at this point we had both been covered in enough smashed rotten bodily fluids.

We arrived at the gas station’s side door and Evan rested his shoulder along the doorjamb and waited for me to open it. I flung the door open, making sure to keep it from closing on us, and Evan went in first, checking all of the corners in the small square space. While Evan checked the cube of bulletproof glass where a cashier once stood, I started going through the storage area in the back.

The door was cracked, the door handle broken, and what appeared to be a dark red stain along the ground. I paused outside the door and took a final breath, kicked in the door and found a completely empty room. I was sure the stain beneath my boots was blood, but it was dry. Whatever died here did so before we got here.

Just as I returned to the main room, I found Evan wiping blood off a knife blade. “There was one behind the counter” was all he said. He replaced the knife in a sheath and picked up his bow.

As he walked out the door, “Don’t you ever get tired of this?” I asked.

“Of living?” he said as he turned back to face me “no.”

It got even darker while we were in the store and needed to clear the other two buildings before nightfall. The next building was much larger than the gas station so Evan and I opted to move to the farthest, smallest building. We dipped into the trees, and worked around the perimeter of the building

We came at the building from behind, and tried the back door but it wouldn’t budge. The building appeared to have once been a small restaurant. Upon closer inspection, we found the door boarded from the inside. Instead, we slid through a burnt out, broken window to find an interior dark, dank, and every stage of horrible. We worked our way through the kitchen, trying to move silently over discarded pots and pans, and several distended, warped cans, about to explode at any moment. The restaurant was split into two sections; the one in which we currently stood, and from what we could see through the window in the kitchen, the main dining room.

Evan held up three fingers, signaling the countdown, when he finished Evan kicked the two-way door open, and this time I went through first, leveling the shotgun, and Evan close behind, having foregone the bow and arrow for a small caliber rifle. The smell hit us first. I tried to cover my face with a bandana I had around my neck. It was putrid, a horrible, throat clogging, eye watering odor, and I struggled to keep the gun level while Evan continued to sweep the room, almost unfazed.

When we finished checking the room Evan said, “Clear.” Evan always gave the clear call.

“Well, almost” I said looking towards the center of the room. All of the booths and tables and most of the paraphernalia that would mark this place as an eatery were gone from the room and in the center, was a larger, black mass, and it was from this site the smell originated. “Is that what I think it is?” I asked.

Evan nodded, “It’s a funeral pyre” he said and poked the mass with a burnt section of a table leg.

“Do you think it was a massacre?”

“I think it was an escape,” he said.

I was about to say something else when he cut me off, “We need to get moving.” I didn’t argue and we left through the same broken window to tackle the largest building. We moved faster than before, battling the waning light, and I could tell that Evan was itching to get into this last building. It was taller than the previous two buildings and markedly larger, and more robust made of old grey brick instead of the aluminum siding.

From the outside, I could see that the large sliding door was barricaded and a majority of the windows were boarded. Evan knelt outside one of the windows and I moved around the building looking for another entrance. I spotted a service entrance around back.

I reported my findings to Evan.

“I counted three.”

“I don’t know how many are in the service entrance?” I said.

“Only one way to find out.”

The door on the service entrance was locked but not blocked because it eased open after I picked the lock. It swung open up and caught me off guard. Evan sprang through the entrance, knife drawn, but the room was empty. The room was covered in a thin film of dust and more red stains, and that room connected to the larger building by one door. I went to try and pick it but found the door was open.

“You ready?” Evan asked. I nodded and grabbed the door handle. I had just opened the door when Evan rushed through it, bow drawn, raising it as he ran. There were three of them.

I knew better than to interrupt Evan when he was hunting, and three were nothing to him. The two closest never had a chance as Evan unleashed an arrow, hitting the nearest zombie in the head. Evan kept moving, a ghost among the shadows. He drew another arrow, barely taking time to aim before the second zombie fell, and the arrow cracking through its skull and falling to pieces like eggshells. The third one heard the commotion and was turning but Evan covered the ground in less than a second, dropping his bow and reaching to his back for a machete. The zombie reached for him but Evan cut its arm off at the elbow, erupting in a shower of black blood. But Evan didn’t pause and with one horizontal stroke cleaved its head in two.

I walked up behind Evan.

“We need to get these bodies out of here” was all he said.

We piled the bodies in the service entrance, locked and barricaded the door. I was in the process of covering the windows while Evan lit his homemade grease lamp. It gave a sickly yellow light, and one that we tried to cover as best we could with shelves and drapes. It was best not to advertise our presence to the outside world.

We began moving the shelves around the store. This building, much like the other ones we had encountered, was one larger box, but this one contained a partial second story for what seemed like an office. It overlooked the rest of the store but it was covered by a high ceiling, giving the place an eerie, empty feel. In front of the stairs leading to the office, there was a large counter made from painted cinder block.

I tapped the top of the counter, “It seems solid. What do you think of this for a defensive position?’ I asked.

Evan nodded, “We need to check that office. I want to see if we get access to the roof.”

We climbed the stairs, making the largest possible effort to remain silent, but the stairs were old and metal, and rickety. Bare hints of moonlight found its way into the store but it was still too dark to see anything in the office. Evan pushed himself along the wall adjacent to the door and used his machete to tap on the door’s window.

We waited.

One second.

Nothing happened.

Two seconds.

Nothing happened.

Three seconds.

Nothing but the shadows.

This continued for several more seconds, and just as Evan reached for the doorknob as we heard it. It was faint but there was a slight bump, then something large shuffled towards the door. Evan pushed the door open and the creature hobbled out of the office. We watched as it picked up speed but right before reaching Evan he stepped back, allowing the zombie to flip over the guardrail. I was still on the stairs while Evan peered over the side and watched as the creature flailed on the ground, helplessly, almost torn in half after landing on the counter below. Evan’s back was still turned when the second one ran out. It was too far for me to use a knife, or the hatchet.

Its arm grabbed Evan by the shoulder, its teeth reaching for his throat, and he dropped the machete.

BOOM. The shotgun roared, the creature exploded into a cloud of bone and viscera, and covered Evan in a vile film. I sprinted the last few steps to the doorway, pumping the shotgun, and waited at the entrance. Behind me I heard the distinctive click of a lighter, and a soft yellow glow illuminated the office. I checked the room. I checked everything, under the desk, in the closet and every corner. Only after that did I lower the shotgun, and made my way back to Evan, who hadn’t moved since I fired the shotgun. On his face, now an almost unrecognizable mixture of light and shadow due to the flame, I saw something I had only seen once before. Fear.

We stood there in silence, the flame from the lighter flickering. Finally Evan released the button and we were back in the shadows.

The thing at the bottom of the stairs groaned again. “I’ll take care of it,” I said.

When I finished dispatching the unusually large body, I turned to find Evan at the bottom of the stairs trying, without success, to wipe the layer of mutilated body from his clothes and face. I looked back at the rest of the warehouse. It should serve as an adequate bunker.

We moved the shelves in a way that forced everything into one area, a kill channel. If something were to breach the door, I knew what we would do. Evan and I would remain behind the counter and use the little amount of ammunition we had left to keep them at a distance.

But we would run out. If there was one undeniable fact in the world it’s that everyone runs out of ammunition. Once the bullets ran out, Evan would pick his arrows. He had thirty arrows last time I counted. So maybe thirty more would go down. I would be useless until they got close. I never was much good with a bow, had training on crossbow once but the guns worked best for me, best for everyone, really.

But eventually they would come close and we would retreat to the stairs. It forced them into an area narrow enough for the two of us to defend. It was their biggest strength, the numbers, that’s what eventually got everyone, even the holdouts, New York, the Last Stand at Washington, Bloodriver, it was always the numbers. Evan and I would fight. We would fight with the ax, and the machete, right down to our knives.

Evan had given up trying to wipe himself off, “We need to see if there’s access to the roof,” he said.

“Let’s go,” I said.

The trip to the roof was a silent one. From what I could see, Evan had regained his composure, but he never said a thing all the way up to the roof. There was an access in the office, a small ladder, and led to a cement rooftop that covered the store. I knew what Evan was thinking. This would be the last resort, our last stand, if need be. Evan was standing on the edge of the store, towards the entrance, looking at the road.

“We could always jump,” I said as I walked up next to him.

“Could, I guess, make it a lot easier. Go ahead if you want, I won’t stop you.” He said.

I stepped up to the edge of the roof, two stories was that tall, “And end up like those people in Tall Oaks, no thanks” I said. We once passed through a neighborhood where the people had all killed themselves, the lucky one went quick with a gun, some probably took pills, but for some reason, a lot of them decided to jump out of their second story windows, and a lot didn’t die right away.

“I don’t want to think about Tall Oaks. You still got that thing around your belt?” He asked.

As he said it, I reached up to touch the hunk of metal under my shirt. It was an old derringer, a small one-shot pistol that held a .45 long colt round, “Yeah, never leave home without it.”

“You’ll be all right then,” he said.

“When do you think they will come?” I asked.

“Soon, we’d better get down.”

“Do you think they’ll find us?”

“Yeah, they’ll find us.”

We were sitting behind the counter, eating one our last cans of food. Evan’s grease lamp smoked and flickered but gave off a little light, but not enough that anyone would spot us through the windows.

I was trying to get the last of the beans out of the can when Evan stood up and took the lamp. I sat in the dark, puzzled. I could hear Evan rummaging around the store but I could not figure out what he was looking for. Everything of any use had already been picked over.

I saw his shadow as he approached the counter. He reappeared holding something, and set the lamp back down.

“Where the hell did you go?” I asked, “What could possibly be out there?”

He set his items down and pushed them into the light, revealing a stack of notebooks and a box of pens.

“You writing your last will and testament,” I said.

“No you’re going to write our story” Evan said.

“I’m gonna what?” I asked.

“You,” he said, “ are going to write our story. No matter what happens tonight someone will know we were here.”