Free Dry Rot: A Zombie Novel by H.E. Goodhue

front doors of the pharmacy in one rotted mass. I leapt over the counter and ran.

-21-
    The husks tripped over the ones that had fallen to the floor. The toppled security towers and broken doors provided a second set of obstacles, but there was no stopping the husks. They were single minded in their focus. All they could see and understand was that I was somewhere inside the pharmacy and that I could be eaten. I think it was the second part that drove them. The husks appeared to have no real motivation beyond eating. They showed no fear of fire or weapons. All they wanted was to feed.
    I sprinted towards the left side of the pharmacy. The storeroom had a rear exit that should open on the far side of the building. The noise and other husks should draw any of the ones outside to the inside and hopefully there wouldn’t be any waiting for me.
    The inside of the storeroom had no windows. Piles of boxes towered around me like long-forgotten obsidian obelisks. I tried not to imagine countless husks hiding behind each box, but my imagination had turned against me. In the shadows, I saw teeth gnashing and skeletal fingers ready to tear into my flesh.
    I could hear the husks toppling shelves and groaning as they made their way towards the storeroom. I pushed the bar to open the back door. A fire alarm began to wail. The small red box set above the handle beeped incessantly, calling out to any nearby husks. The power was off, but the alarm continued. It must have some sort of back-up battery. I thought about shooting the alarm. It was more out of anger than anything else. The husks would have already heard the sound and were no doubt stumbling towards it. A blast from my shotgun was only going to make more noise and leave me with one less shell.
    I ran out into an alley behind the pharmacy and slammed the door. I could still hear the alarm droning inside the pharmacy. The husks inside were going to be drawn to it and eventually they would push against the door and get it open. A wooden fence cut off the far end of the alley, so I turned and headed back towards the street.
    Husks stumbled through the streets in giant knots of leathery flesh. They were preserved, almost jerky-like. Any time I had engaged in the zombie apocalypse debate with friends, I would argue that all you had to do was wait for them to rot away. Weather, bugs and decay were all on our side. I was wrong. The husks were desiccated, completely dried out and persevered. They weren’t ever going to rot. I was sure they would wear down, maybe fall apart from walking endlessly, but they weren’t going to decay.
    More of the disgusting creatures fell through open doors and shattered storefronts. Most were following the sound of their dead comrades and the wail of the fire alarm to the front of the pharmacy. This was perhaps my best and only chance to escape.
    I moved out from the alley. The streetlights had flickered on, painting the ash-choked streets in orange and gray. I seemed incapable of escaping the two colors that I hated the most. I ducked behind a pickup truck that was parked near the curb.
    A husk lunged from behind a nearby mailbox. Its skeletal fingers raked across my NBC suit as it tried to pull me to the sidewalk. I stomped on its neck and felt the reverberation of vertebrae snapping. Its mouth continued to work and its dusty, gray eyes spun wildly in deep boney sockets as the husk still tried to bite me. My boot crushed the side of the husk’s skull, releasing a thick black gel that oozed across the sidewalk and dribbled into the street. The husk was dead, or at least dead again, but the lack of blood was still unsettling. I had seen plenty of blood in prison, some of it my own, and never enjoyed the sight of it. But the utter lack of it in the husks spoke to a lost degree of humanity that my mind wasn’t ready to deal with.
    More husks had turned towards me. They stumbled across the street. The sound of their clumsy, stilted steps and moans drew more