Forest Of The Dead
“Come on… they’re coming! Keep moving!”
“I’m going as fast as I can!”
“Hurry up! They’ll be here any second!”
Gillian was tired. It felt like they had been in these woods forever. The mist made it impossible to see more then a few yards ahead of her outstretched hand, which added to the feeling of being displaced. She was tired, and nervy, and Jonathan was starting to irritate her.
“Can’t we just… sit down for a second? I can’t see where we’re going anyway…” She pleaded.
“But…” He began, but seeing the look on her face, said instead, “… Okay, five minutes. But you know what happens if we’re too slow.”
“Of course I know. Sheesh, Jon.” She was aware of a nasal edge to her voice that she hated… She hadn’t felt this way in years, this particular kind of helpless, and she didn’t like it.
Jonathan came to her, put his arm around her, rubbed her shoulder in an attempt at reassurance. She could see right through him. He wanted to be on the move again, and that distracted expression he wore called for some reassuring of her own.
She grimaced a smile.
“It’s okay. I’m okay. I’ll be ready to move again in just a second.”
He half-smiled at her words, and half-dropped his head – his way, she knew, of apologising for his behaviour. In the many years that they had been together, there weren’t many signals between them that went unnoticed or misunderstood. She moved to touch his cheek, but he raised a quick hand, a silencer, and cocked his head back towards where the corpses walked.
“Did you hear that?” He whispered. “That sound?”
“No, not…” She said, but was cut off by an explosion of leaves and bracken, off to their left, as fast shapes broke through the underbrush. “Oh, god, they’re here.”
Suddenly it felt like the moaning was all around them, echoing back off the hanging mist. The haunting, mumbling, grunting sound of stale air moving over lifeless vocal chords, as the zombie horde, slow but relentless, crashed through the forest towards them.
Gillian could see the shambling shapes, the recently dead in varied states of silhouette, and felt the anxiety rise. Jon wasn’t looking, though – his eyes followed the still warm, the panicking trio of survivors, hearts still beating, that had broken through the calm.
“Hey!” He shouted, “Hey, over here!”
But they didn’t hear him.
He could see them weaving and bewildered, not knowing what he had found out the hard way, that these woods, when the grey came down, could turn you around. If they were lucky, they’d fox themselves into running right back into the clutches of the rotten dead, and it’d be quick. Unless someone helped them find their way. He kept shouting, but they couldn’t hear him.
Gillian tugged on Jon’s shirt, pulled his attention back toward the ever closer monsters.
“Jon, we have to hurry… we have to do something.” She said, but it was already too late. The mass was upon them, sweeping over her lover, ignoring his frustrated, anguished cries, their skin mottled and fetid grey-green with decay, their teeth, where they still had them, snapping, hands twisted into claws, clutching and snatching at the mist.
They crowded past her, and she tried to cry at them to stop, tried to grab at their dissolving clothes, but she couldn’t get a grip, and then…
And then they were gone, shuffling off, inevitable, heading in a straight line after the survivors as they looped through the woods in increasingly erratic circles. Jon and Gillian yelled out after the zombies, trying to distract them, but nothing worked. Nothing ever worked.
Gillian slumped back against the harsh bark of a leaning tree, and shouted out into the mist, a cracking, anguished sound that echoed back at them, sharper and more resilient then the now retreating groans.
“Damn.” Jon said, quieter. “Nothing works.”
“We’re useless. Completely useless!” Gillian cried, and collapsed down into herself, her head in her hands.
“Now, come on.” Jon responded, “This can’t last forever… and then it’ll be back to normal around here, with family outings and hunters to play with…”
“DON’T!” She barked, loud enough that Jon flinched. “Don’t pull the ‘sunny McSunnerson’s happy-go-lucky’ daydream shit with me. This is how life is. This is it, now. Things were awful, and now those things…” She pointed in the direction where the chaos had gone, and not the screaming was coming from. “Those things have made it much, much worse.”
“Gillian…”
“I’m serious. Don’t… you weren’t the one who was raped and murdered and left out here in a shallow grave. I’ve seen how bad things can get. This is it, now. Just you, and me, and those horrible things, until even they’ve dried up and gone, and there’s nothing left.”
Gillian got up, and stumbled away through the trees – away from Jonathan, and away from the noises. He let her go. She got like this sometimes, and after a few years of trying to sort things out, he had come to realise that she would work things through in her own time. Her past, and a couple of hundred years out here alone with it, had made her strong, but it had hurt her badly in other ways, too.
His wife had always told him that he was one of life’s fixers – that he wasn’t happy unless he had a pet project. And it hadn’t been until years after the accident that he had realised that she had meant it as a bad thing. It took an ill advised jump, and a backup ‘chute that failed to open, to give him the time to realise that.
Alone among the trees, Jonathan looked after Gillian, then back over to the sounds of pain and horror. He knew from experience that a feed could take nearly an hour, with the victim only dying right near the end, sometimes. If they came back, it was only ever like the moaners, never like he and Gillian.
Sometimes, before they went, the victims could see and hear the ghosts, and sometimes, it was possible to give them some kind of comfort as their bodies went the way of all dying meat.
Jonathan headed off in the direction of the carnage, to bear witness. He might as well be of use to someone today.
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[...] of a character called Gillian from my story "Forest Of The Dead" at Elephant Words. It is by fellow writer Andrew Cheverton, and I love [...]