Frostbite

(The following is a short story I wrote a few months ago. It may have some typo's left. Also, forgive me for the lame pun title. I'm a horrible writer who thinks stacking adjectives is awesome, but then again.. I'm a horrible musician and that never stopped me.)

As far as he remembered, the sun had never shined so brightly, nor had the snow ever blinded him so fiercely, reflecting the golden rays cast down upon the ground. It was truly a sight for sore eyes, an idyllic snapshot of natural beauty. The only thing that bothered him was the undead clawing at his limbs.

Over the past few weeks, he had grown used to their presence, but this did not mean he liked it. He suddenly seized his train of thought and decided he could not figure out if it had been weeks, or months since the plague had begun. All he knew was that there had been no snow at the start. The landscape had been all but white, but a dark, gloomy red with the blood of living and undead alike. How it started, he did not want to know. He just knew that it had seemed manageable the first days after the initial outbreak. Back then, he used to have friends. He used to have hope. He used to have… them. Those things had been taken away from him by gnawing teeth and scratching fingers. And it hadn’t been this damn cold.

He looked at his jacket and noticed stains of blood. Some of the older bits were his, certainly, but there was new, fresh blood. Not looking forward to smelling like a sewer – if one thing can be said about zombie blood, it’s that the stuff is not quite fresh – he glanced at the ground. Dead corpses littered the ground around him. Apparently he had slain them without even realizing it. The speed at which one could become used to the idea of killing still shook him, but it slowly became all too familiar a feeling. However, the corners of his mouth curved upwards. Dead corpses? The irony of making a clear distinction between corpses that laid still and lifeless on the ground and the ones that were up and about and lusting for flesh only struck him now. He decided he wasn’t too fond of corpses in general either way, and continued towards his makeshift fortress.

Calling his hideout a fortress was a slight overstatement. It had been a small maintenance building before the end of humanity. The fact that it was in a park, with a healthy supply of firewood nearby, certainly made it more convenient, but luxury was nowhere to be found. In better days, he had been a man of science, working in laboratories and spending his off time with his family. All that got left behind when… he dared not think about it. Now his life resembled that of a bum; a bum going about decapitating the living dead, sure, but still a bum.
After putting down the backpack he had filled with supplies for the coming winter days, he lit a fire. He wasn’t planning on dying of cold after seemingly being the only man to survive the apocalypse. Night was falling swiftly, so he made sure his early warning system worked. While it was dangerous outside, the zombies weren’t exactly bright and never saw the strings, cans and chimes he had strategically put around his hideout. He wasn’t exactly certain they could see at all, he pondered. He just knew they bit. And they bit hard. The obvious discomforts of being bitten by another human aside, a bite from a zombie was nearly as deadly as a bullet to the head. He had seen people die from bites after just a few short hours, only to rise up again and continue spreading the infection. He had been bitten himself, in the finger, by her, but knowing what he knew, and deciding he would not wander the earth as a mindless corpse, he had cut off his own left hand. This had seemed to work: while his conditions weren’t ideal, at least he hadn’t gotten a craving for human flesh just yet. And while he missed his left hand, he was glad he still lived.
After ensuring his undead surprise prevention system was in working order, he went back to his fire. Slowly warming up thanks to a healthy mix of burning wood and looted whiskey, he slowly dozed off.

“Honey?”

He opened his eyes and stared straight into hers, and couldn’t help but feel completely happy. Her fingers ran through his hair, and she softly kissed him on his forehead.
“You have to drive David to hockey practice. It’s your turn this week, remember?” she said, smiling. He looked towards the doorway and saw his eleven year old son looking at him expectantly. David sure loved hockey. He got up and headed downstairs. The smell of coffee welcomed him. It had been another late Friday night at the laboratory, working on his newest assignment, but coming home to all this certainly made it worthwhile. After his morning – or early noon, he reluctantly admitted – shower and cup of coffee, he took David to the car and off they went, to the hockey field. While standing still at a traffic light, he looked to his left, towards his son, and saw… rotting flesh. Dead eyes. Twitching hands. The shock almost phased out the background noise. Cans and chimes.

Cans and chimes. Still in shock from witnessing the horrid vision in his dream, he instinctively grabbed for his machete, letting out a low grunt of despair. Cans and chimes only meant one thing to him: death was near. For a split second, he wished the same thing he always wished when he grabbed his machete: he wished he still had ammunition for that gun he had stashed away. A machete worked just as well, but that didn’t mean getting personal with the undead was his preferred choice of dealing with them. He peeked outside. Thank God it’s only one, he thought, as the blurriness of sleep faded away. He sneaked outside, only to trip over a can he had carelessly left to linger. While he hissed and attempted to get up – an endeavor quite mundane to a man in possession of both hands, but all the more challenging for one laying on a patch of ice with only one hand occupied by a rusty machete – he slipped on the ice and fell flat on his back. Meanwhile, the ghoul shuffled slowly towards him, clearly aware of the presence of a warm body to feed on. In a less deadly situation, the crooked step and moaning of the zombie might have been considered humorous. Only comedians typically don’t want to eat your flesh.
Struggling to get up, he noticed the ghoul was mere feet away from his body. He hacked at the fiend’s legs, cutting deep at the ankle. The zombie, unaware of any pain, seemingly ignored the weapon, but fell down nonetheless. It fell down straight on top of him. The struggle was brief and bloody, and ended the same way it always did: a decapitated undead corpse. His moment of victory was short, however, as he noticed a stinging pain in his shoulder.

He had been bitten. This time, he realized, he wouldn’t get off the hook as easily as he did with his hand. In a way, he felt serene and calm, as if things had come full circle at last. He remembered something. While the gun in his backpack didn’t carry any ammunition he wanted to shoot at random undead, it did carry the one bullet he had been saving for emergencies. While the bullet might have saved his life from the wandering ghoul moments earlier, he knew that it would now serve an equally important purpose. It would save him from himself.
He grabbed the gun, paid no heed to the biting cold and wandered off. There was another reason he had made his hideout here. The firewood had served him well, but a short walk away from his improvised hearth they rested in a shallow grave: his wife, Candace, and his son, David. The last day he had seen them, both had been infected. They had maniacally clawed and bitten him, and he hadn’t had a choice but to defend himself.

This was his burden. He had killed them once, by accidentally mixing up the samples in the laboratory, unwittingly setting loose the infection upon the planet. After infection, he had been forced to kill them once again. This had cost him not only his hand, but also his spirit. From that point on he had become a mindless machine, purely killing for survival. Ironically, this made him not that different from the hordes he battled. He found peace in the decision he made as he arrived at the grave. He noticed shuffling feet surrounding him as he put the barrel in his mouth, and was happy.

He would not be one of them.