zombie story (chapter 1: part 2 of 4)

I scanned the ground quickly and looked in the dumpster and found nothing that resembled a gun. ‘Why would I have ammo in my pocket?’ the thought echoed through my brain as I heard a scraping noise above my head. I tilted my head back to look up at the noise, and as I did the world spun just a little bit more. After a moment, my eyes rested on what was causing the noise; a window three floors up had been opened, and a woman who appeared to be in her early twenties was leaning out of it. “Quick, climb up here!” she whispered just harshly enough for me to hear over the ringing in my ears.

Ignoring her request I yelled up to her, “HEY! Do you think you can call an ambulance or something? I think I need to go to a hospital!”

My voice echoed through the alley way, and as it did I heard a very faint and distant sound. I wasn’t quite sure what it was… sounded like humming possibly. It seemed out of place. I looked back to the girl in the window whose complexion appeared to be a few shades lighter than before. Her eyes darted around the alley way and then back to mine. She raised her voice slightly and emphasized her words “Climb up the ladder!”

“Look, I just…” My voice trailed off as the distant humming turned into a roar of excitement. My eyes followed the source of the sound to the end of the alleyway with the chain linked fence just as dozens of people ran around the corner at full sprint. Their faces contorted into angry expressions while they screamed at the top of their lungs. Their battle cry paralyzed me in fear. As soon as they cleared the corner, even more were following them. I stood frozen while they piled in, dozens at a time. The first of them ran straight into the fence at full speed without even blinking, and just as fast as they ran into the fence, the ones behind trampled them. More and more of them kept coming, if I had to guess, I would say there had to be one hundred at the very least on the other side of the fence, screaming, trampling and clawing at each other to get to the other side… to get to me.

The girl in the window screamed at the top of her lungs, “CLIMB THE ****ING LADDER!” This shook me from my paralysis, and I turned to look up at her. She was now standing in the fire escape pointing a shotgun at me. She squeezed off a round with a deafening boom that rang in my ears like a church bell. I recoiled in fear and then realized that I had not been shot, I turned around to see someone on the ground behind me spurting blood out of a major chest wound. The body twitched and convulsed.

I shifted my attention to the right (the side of the alley way that faced the street) and saw nearly two dozen people running at me from that direction, and closing in fast. Their enraged screams rang through the alley louder than any human voice I’ve ever heard. My feet started to move before my mind could even process the thought. I began to climb the side of dumpster, one of the attackers in the lead closed in on me and reached out a hand. He was no more than an arms length away when I saw his feet slip up over his head as he fell hard onto his back. My mind processed this action while my body steadied its footing on the side of the dumpster in full on auto pilot mode. I looked down to his body sliding across the ground underneath me, face still contorted in rage, bleeding from the nose and several other wounds all over his body. I back tracked his trajectory with my eyes and saw that he had slipped on the banana peel that I had previously discarded from my pocket.

A single thought came to mind ‘divine intervention’. My body leaped from the edge of the dumpster straight up into the air with my arms stretched out over head. A few moments felt like a lifetime as I hung in the air. Suddenly I felt my hand make contact with the bottom rung of the fire escape ladder. As gravity pulled the rest of my weight back to the ground I felt my hand slip off the rung. For a brief second, I felt like an idiot. ‘This is history repeating itself’ I thought, but my mouth said “****!”

I began to fall back to the ground, I could see angry looking people gathering around the dumpster, they all frenzied below me as I descended. They jumped and waved furiously at me, clawing the air with inhuman ambition. I was falling to my death. It was a sobering state of reality.

Suddenly a hand from above grabbed me roughly by the collar. My shirt ripped slightly as my falling body came to an abrupt halt, the whole motion made my stomach retch and my head spin. I looked up to see the face of a man in his late twenties hanging upside down from a rope, clutching my collar single handedly. His attire was black nylon and looked like military issued web gear. He turned his head to the side and yelled to some unseen person above him, “I GOT EM, PULL US UP!” Immediately we began to quickly ascend in an unsteady motion. The world spun and went black.