Free The Harvesting by Melanie Karsak

from a side room and lunged at me.
    “ Layla!” Ian called
out.
    Jumping onto a dining room chair, then
onto the table, I spun, the sword slicing through the air. I
severed Jenna’s skull in half. Her momentum caused her body to
fling forward. It hit the table and buckled. The severed head
spilled a mush of brains and blood onto the table.
    “ Gross,” Jensen
said.
    “ Dammit, she was fast,”
Dusty cursed.
    “ Who?” Ian remarked
sarcastically.
    We all paused and waited, listening.
My heart was pounding.
    “ Let’s check upstairs,”
Ian whispered.
    When we got back to the foyer, Gary
joined us.
    “ Better keep guard,” I
told him. “You might have gotten someone’s attention.”
    “ I’m on it,” he said and
took a post on the porch.
    When we got upstairs, Ian called out.
“Anyone alive up here?”
    We waited.
    A moment later we heard slow
foot-steps. Everyone raised a weapon. One of the bedroom doors
opened, and an elderly man stood clutching the door frame. It was
Mr. Franklin. Clearly, he was not in good health, and he looked
frightened out of his mind.
    “ My wife,” he whispered,
rasping.
    “ I’m sorry, Mr. Franklin,
she’s dead,” Dusty told him.
    He nodded sadly and took a puff on his
inhaler.
    “ Come sit down,” I said,
sheathing my sword. I guided the old man back into the room and to
a chair. The room smelled like body odor, urine, and moldy food. He
must have been locked in there for several days.
    “ Mr. Franklin, we need to
move you. You’re not safe all alone in the house. Let us take you
to stay with someone,” Dusty encouraged.
    “ Mrs. Finch is going to
move in with Fred Johnson. That might be a good place for him,” Ian
suggested.
    “ My medicines,” the old
man said, motioning toward the table.
    My stomach hurt. There was no way this
man would survive. Just like Frenchie’s children, he was so
vulnerable. The enormity of keeping such people safe overwhelmed
me.
    “ I got them,” I said and
rose. I unzipped a pillowcase and put all the medicines
inside.
    Dusty and Jensen led Mr. Franklin down
the stairs. Outside, Gary shot twice at an approaching undead man.
I could only see the shadow of their figures through the beveled
glass windows. Mr. Franklin stopped.
    “ What is happening?” he
asked.
    “ It’s the end of days,”
Dusty replied. “Come on, Mr. Franklin. The good Lord hasn’t called
you just yet.”
    The old man muttered in
reply.
    When I reached the bottom of the
stairs, I noticed Mr. Franklin’s and his wife’s wedding portrait
hanging on the wall. They looked so young and happy.
    Ian came up behind me. He stopped and
looked at the photo as well. “I want to talk about last night,” he
whispered, but I raised my hand to cut him short.
    “ Not now,” I said and went
outside. Who would have thought that the end of the world would
bring me the one thing I thought I wanted most. I did still want
him, didn’t I?

Chapter 11
     
    The sun had just peaked over the
mountains when we collected in the elementary school parking lot.
The sunrise was a mix of pink and orange. The air was cool. Mist
was rising off the lake and river. Half the streets were shrouded
in fog. It was amazingly quiet: no cars, no hum of electricity, no
nothing, just birds and the sound of the wind.
    About two dozen people had
assembled.
    I rubbed my gloved hands together. “We
need to get some barricades in place at both ends of Main Street.
Is Fred here?” I asked, looking around.
    “ Here, Layla,” he
called.
    “ You’re our man, Fred.
What have we got? What can we roll in?”
    “ I need about ten bodies
to help. We can drive in the old school buses and fill the gaps
with scrap, dumpsters, barrels and the like,” he
replied.
    “ I think I saw that in a
movie once,” Jeff muttered.
    “ The Williams folks just
had a ton of chain link fencing delivered to expand their kennels.
It’s still rolled up on their property. We could try to fence the
barricade as well,” Jensen