Free Running with the Horde by Joseph K. Richard Page A

ridiculous cowboy hat sitting in the crow’s seat aiming the big gun at the zombies trailing a hundred yards behind them. Through my binoculars I could see three men in the cab all holding rifles of some kind. Two more men were in the back of the truck standing over bundles scattered around the bed. I couldn’t tell what the bundles were until they turned right onto 57 th and came to a stop.
                  One of the men grabbed a bundle and pulled it upright. He pulled a large knife from a sheath on his leg and I thought I could hear cries of outrage and screaming above the sound of the zombies. I started to get that puckered feeling a person gets when they are about to witness something awful. It turned out the bundles were people, trussed up like pigs before a roast. The bundle the man had so roughly picked up was an old man.
                  He quickly hacked through the bonds while the old man stood meekly at an awkward angle. He didn’t resist but the guard punched him in the gut anyway. The man went to his knees and vomited on the guard’s feet which earned him a rough kick to the face. He dropped like dead weight, his face awash in his own blood.
                  Meanwhile, a few hundred zombies closed the distance behind them completely ignoring me in my quiet parking lot.
                  My inner dialogue was screaming at me to do something as I watched this melodrama play out. I told my good angel to shut the hell up, I was too far away with a sea of undead between me and the truck.
                  I could drive over there but I would most likely be signing my own death warrant. I was stuck watching. I knew it and my conscience knew it but neither of us liked it. It was too much like the day of death back on my street but with one major difference. This wasn’t just the undead versus the living. This was the living doing awful things to other living people. The zombies were just the sharks circling in the water waiting for chum.
                  This was evil on a whole different level.
                  The guy pulled the old man roughly back to his feet and began cutting his arms with the knife. The other guard in the truck bed had brandished a pistol and was cursing and threatening the people squirming at his feet.
                  The sliced up old man, now bleeding freely, sagged to his knees with his head on his chest. His captor turned and nodded at the gunner who smiled and opened up with the machine gun.
                  The gunfire split the night with a deafening staccato as bullets eviscerated bodies at the front of the crowd of zombies. They had closed to within fifteen feet of the truck but the gunfire dropped enough of them to create a temporary wall of corpses. The remaining zombies were struggling to get around their fallen comrades to reach the fresh meat.
                  I heard the gunner yell “GO! GO! GO!” and stomp the roof of the cab with his foot.
                  The truck surged forward almost causing the cutter and the old man at his feet to tumble out. It drove forward another thirty yards and stopped. The dickhead gave the bloody old man a brutal two-handed shove. He landed rather ungracefully on his face in the street. As soon as he was out, the truck sped off up the street, the asshole laughing and firing his gun into the zombies who had broken through the pile of bodies.
                  The cold logic of their strategy was evident as the old man rose on shaky feet and turned to meet his fate. I thought the cutting and the blood was overkill because the zombies would have chased him anyway. It would have also been smarter to select a younger person with healthier legs. The objective was clearly to distract the zombies with a meal, allowing the truck an easy escape that wouldn’t lead the horde back to wherever they were living. Cruelty was