Free Dove: A Zombie Tale (Byron: A Zombie Tale Book 2) by Scott Wieczorek

caught the creature across the chest, but it spun away before any real damage could be done. Its claws crashed down hard on my right arm, piercing my flesh and sending shocks of pain up into my shoulder and neck. It opened the fingers it dug into my arm as it pulled back, tearing large sections of meat away.
    Pushing through the pain, I lunged with my left arm, driving it toward the creature’s heart, but it twisted out of my reach. A guttural cadence coughed out from its mouth. Rage bubbled up inside with the understanding that it laughed at me. It actually laughed at me.
    I narrowed my eyes and circled him as the flesh of my arm knit itself back together. In a few short moments, I gave my other sword a few test swings. A formidable opponent, without a doubt. I needed to find some kind of weakness. Everything has one. And most creatures have a nasty habit of telegraphing that weakness somehow. The only trick is learning how to spot it.
    “You think you’re clever,” I called to it. “Got a little hurt in on me, huh? I don’t go down that easy.”
    I feinted left, and jabbed to the right with both swords. One blade caught him in the throat, the other in the abdomen. The beast let out an ear-piercing roar and scurried back a few paces. I whipped the blood from both blades, letting it spatter across the Goner’s own face.
    “How ya like me now, sucka?”
    The wounds closed fast, but he jumped to the offensive even faster. It closed in with both arms swinging in wild arcs. I blocked the first two blows, deflected the third, but the fourth grazed me and the fifth caught me right across the abdomen, leaving a trail of bloody scars in its wake. I finally ducked low, stepped in toward the beast, and thrust upward with both swords. The blades entered through the armpits and exited to each side of its head, crossing somewhere in between. Bracing my foot on its chest, I kicked off and used the scissor-action of the crossed blades to sever the creature’s head from its body.
    Looking down, I could see that my wounds were worse than I originally thought. They should have been closing by now. But for some reason, they kept bleeding freely. As the beast’s body lay twitching and thrashing on the rooftop, I leapt back to John’s house. My feet crashed down on the other side and my knees buckled, sending me sprawling.
    The wounds burned like the fires of hell. Something had gone wrong. In a major way.
    “Help! I need help!” I struggled to force the words out before darkness swallowed me up.
    ~ ~ ~
    The sound of something crashing onto the roof startled me. But what chilled me were the words I heard come through the panel Byron had cut with his sword. “Help! I need help!”
    How could that be? Wasn’t he undead? Didn’t he have little organisms keeping his dead body alive? How could he need help? How could I help him?
    “Byron? Is that you?” I lifted the panel from its resting place, grunting from the effort. It moved, but not without great difficulty. “Are you there? Byron?”
    I shoved harder and it moved a little more. With one last burst of effort, I popped the panel up and out. Byron’s limp body slipped through the opening, dangling inside.
    “My God! Byron! Are you okay?” I flushed at my knee-jerk question. “Of course you’re not okay. You’re a walking dead guy who is passed out on a roof.”
    I dragged him inside, his torso and legs dropping onto the attic floor with a dull thud, and rolled him onto his back. He looked like hell. Four dark ribbons of blood stretched across his abdomen like he’d been swiped by one of those cartoon super-heroes, the one with the blades shooting from his hands.
    I tapped him on the face. No response. I shined my flashlight into his eyes. Nothing.
    “Dammit. Now what?”
    Maybe I could get some water to splash on him. There had to be a bathroom in this house. The sounds of crashing decorations reminded me why that would be a bad idea. I scooted toward the drop-down ladder