They Call Me Daring

Chapter 2

    Being a zombie would suck so bad, you know? First you get kicked out, outcast, by your friends and family- Then, your skin turns pure white, your hair as well. And then your pupils become slits, and your irises blood red. Your finger and toenails darken to an oily black and eventually elongate to claws. Your incisors grow into poison fangs- Biting your tongue must feel great. All in all, you become an entirely separate race from the humans- One which shrivels up in the daylight, like an old lady taking a bath. And Randall's convenience store was chock full of them.
    The minute I stepped foot inside, they were right under me. Literally, my foot landed on one's face. It squealed, as did I, and I jumped a foot into the air. Its red eyes snapped open and it glared murderously at me for almost half a minute- During most of which I didn't breath- Then, slightly unceremoniously, it closed its eyes again. Close one. I'm thinking if I had my face smashed by someone's foot I wouldn't just lie down and angrily sleep- But I'm not a zombie.
    Then I just stood there, wondering what to do with myself. I took in my surroundings. As far as I knew, Randall's was a two story building- Either that, or the stairs led up off the roof for no reason, which was unlikely. The room was small, relatively speaking, but that didn't stop the creatures from filling it.
     They were everywhere. Curled up on the floor with others on top of them, drooling on the checkout counter, lying on the shelves like they were bunk beds. The snoring was deafening.
    I took a deep breath, then immediately coughed and wheezed from the horrible rotting stench. Just get it over with, Liam. Gotta shoot at some point, before they wake up on their own. I cocked the gun. Now or never.
    I sighted down the barrel, taking aim at a particularly large, ugly, and gooey one, lying on a small dining table. My hands were shaking, and my sighter dodged around, but it was a machine gun anyways, so it was bound to hit it. Now. Do it now. I could almost hear my father. Now!
    My finger hovered over the trigger. Just a twitch of my finger, and the room would be dead in under a minute. A zombie grunted loudly behind me, and I jumped. They were stirring, just beginning to awaken. Come on. Come on!
    I called myself a coward, weak, a wuss. But I couldn't bring myself pull the trigger. I bit my lip, rolled my shoulders, took a deep breath, and aimed again. But, again, nothing happened.
    Maybe if I got more in the middle of the horde it would be easier... I took another step inwards, being careful to avoid other hazardous passed out zombies. A few more painstaking steps, and I was in the center of the room. I pressed the gun to one zombie's head, hoping maybe then I would be able to shoot... But again, my finger wouldn't budge.
    I didn't want it to.
    I suspect it was my mother in me. Though my father had always tried to bury that piece of me under mounds of ignorance and pride, it prevailed that day.
    I looked down the barrel of Clark's rifle. Come on, Liam, you weakling, I could hear my father shouting in my mind. Liam, the failure, the story of my life.
    For almost a minute I stood with gun right on the zombie's head, my finger trembling on the trigger. Then I sighed, and lowered the gun. I couldn't do this. Even if they weren't human, they were at one point- Killing them was basically murder, and it wasn't even self-defense- I invaded their home, after all.
    Suddenly there was a creaking sound. My heart jumped in my throat, and I spun around, just as the front door was slammed shut. The room was plunged into complete darkness, except for the narrow beam of light from my headlamp. And, just because fate loves me, that began to flicker.
    Dang.
    Silence enveloped the room. It was punctuated by my rapid, terrified breathing, the grunting of awakening creatures in the darkness, as their claws scraped against the floor, and their footsteps fell almost silently.
    I held Clark's gun close to me. I should bolt to the door, I should, I should- where's the door? In the flickering, dimming light of my headlamp, I could only see zombies, rotting, slinking creatures. Red eyes caught the light and glinted malevolently, huge yellow fangs dripped greenish ooze onto the floor.
    After a few more seconds of spinning aimlessly in circles, hyperventilating, forgetting I was holding a gun, my headlamp wavered one final time, then died.
    The terror was very, very real. I couldn't breath, then, and the thump thump thump of my heart beating a tattoo against my chest was louder than the thunder of the machine gun when I lost my nerve.
    I punched the trigger.
    Flashes of light lit the room with the rapid ratta-tat-rat-tatta of the bullets. They zinged and pinged off of metal racks and thudded into wooden shelves and plaster crumbled in the walls. Over the blood pounding in my ears, I heard the dull thuds of bodies hitting bodies, the squishing and cracking of snapping bones and blood splashing on the ground.
    It was the most confusing thing that had ever happened to me. Blinding light flared randomly as the shots were fired. Bang bang bang. Zombies screeched in my ears and my nose was filled with the stench of burning flesh long past its expiration date. I spun around. I could have been yelling. Everything whirled around me in such confusion I couldn't even think straight. Imagine standing in one of those strobe-light rooms, surrounded by a bunch of screaming people who were jumping up and down and you were being spun around in circles, then multiply that by ten. It was like falling down a huge funnel, deeper and deeper and the darkness was surrounding me and digging into my eyes and overcoming all my senses.
    That was all brought an abrupt start by the sudden sting in my right forearm.
    "Ouch!" I whirled and there was a smack as the barrel of my gun hit something across the head. I kept firing randomly into the darkness, but now my mind was fixated on my wrist.
    An overactive imagination is both a blessing and a curse. Except if you're me, then it's only ever a curse. Like right then.
    My mind went into overdrive. Random images and thoughts flickering through my brain, dispelling and dismissing them as quick as they came. But deep down, I knew what the throbbing was, the constant, stinging pain in my wrist.
    I fired endlessly and aimlessly, until the thud of bodies was that of corpses collapsing on other corpses, and even then my finger remained locked on the trigger. The noise must have woken the zombies upstairs, because after a while I felt that the number of zombies I must have shot was much too high for that little downstairs room.
    The pity I felt earlier kind of vanished along with my self-assurance. It's hard to feel bad for a bunch of reeking creatures which are currently trying to kill you. And now it was self-defense.
    I tried to focus. I didn't have to do much but keep my finger clamped over the trigger, but the pain in my wrist was growing every second, until my knees were shaking. I fired round after round after round, until the screaming of the zombies fell silent, and there was only the sound of shots hitting the walls, and then, click.
    Panting, I lowered Clark's now empty gun, and tried to breath deeply. My heart only beat faster and faster and faster, though, until I wondered if it might just explode and I would die right then and there. The sound of my breathing filled the now silent room. Then-
    "'At's my boy!" The loud, raucous voice made me jump after the silence, and a beam of light split the room in half. Crrreeeeaaak.... The door was opened further, and my Dad's huge buff figure stood outlined in the sagging doorway.
    He stepped in carelessly, walking over the bodies of countless zombies I couldn't believe I had shot, and clapped me heartily on the back. I barely managed to keep myself from tumbling over onto my head.
    "Cleared the room, you did!" He grinned proudly out over the wreckage and ruin. Then his nose wrinkled. "Ehh.... Let's get you home for a shower... You kinda smell, no offense."
    "None taken." I said emptily, shoving my right arm up my shirt for lack of better hiding places. I don't even want to know what the mark on my wrist is from- He definitely doesn't need to. Somehow he didn't notice, though.
    The lack of pride in his eyes hurt more than the pain in my wrist. When he walked into the room and saw me standing in the center of the dead hive, there was no proudness there- Only surprise, that I hadn't died.
    "Dude," Clark peeked inside as we were coming out. "That's a lot of dead zombies!" He summed up.
    I could only nod. My head was throbbing, and I cradled my wrist, hoping no one would notice, but I needed to sit down. My vision was shaking, vibrating slightly, so the ground was constantly not where it should be. I staggered slightly, and I realized my knees were shaking... That can't be good...
    There was a roaring in my ears, distant, chap chap chop chop phap pap chop... Like the sounds of a chopper flying through the air. Clark came over and stood next to me, eyeing me concernedly.
    "Man, you're not looking so good...." Was the last thing I heard, and then I collapsed and everything was sucked away from my consciousness.