Free What We Left Behind by Peter Cawdron Page A

help you survive for a few days out here, but in a fight with Zee, you’re interested in surviving for seconds, minutes, not days. Drop anything that won’t help you for the next sixty seconds, and fight like hell.”
    I swallow the lump in my throat.
    “Remember. It’s all about speed. Zee doesn’t want to kill you, he wants to infect you. He needs help. If he can slow you down so others can join, he wins. You want to disable him as quickly as possible. You don’t need to kill him. Knock him over, kick him down a hill, anything to buy yourself some time.”
    “Kick, push, punch,” I say.
    “That’s the spirit,” David replies as we walk on.
    We come to a rise and I can see the outskirts of the city opening out before us.
    I don’t know the name of the city. I’m not a good judge of numbers, so I have no way of estimating how many people once lived here. I imagine it was hundreds of thousands, not millions. Small town, small number of zombies? I hope that assumption holds true. Although, thinking about it, even though it’s not New York or Atlanta, there’s nothing small about hundreds of thousands of zombies. Really, any number beyond zero is one zombie too many.
    The track takes us back into the forest and we lose sight of the city.
    With the sun high above us, it’s easy to relax and forget about Zee, just as we would in the commune.
    “If you could have one thing back, what would it be?” Jane asks. She’s not looking at anyone in particular, just throwing her question out there as we walk along. “What do you miss from all we left behind?”
    “Oh, that’s easy,” Steve replies. “Hamburgers and french fries.”
    I laugh, but I must admit, just the mention of junk food has me salivating.
    “And a Coke,” David says. “Frozen Coke.”
    “On a day like this?” Jane asks. Even with the warmth of the noonday sun on our faces, there’s a chill in the air. The season is changing.
    “Even on a day like this,” David replies.
    “What about you?” I ask Jane, thinking if she raised the question, there must be something burning in the back of her mind.
    “I dunno,” she says rather absentmindedly. “Everything, I guess.”
    We’re getting glimpses of suburbia through the trees. It’s easy to forget there’s ever been an apocalypse until we round a corner and see the corpse of a fallen zombie lying on the track. Not exactly what you’d expect to see on your average pre-apocalypse nature walk.
    The corpse is old, but still repulsive. I guess it reminds me that life is fleeting. There’s a bullet hole almost exactly in the center of the skull. Most of the skin is gone, leaving a collection of bones and the odd patch of leathery skin clinging to a few ribs.
    “Male?” Steve asks. “Female?”
    No one answers. Straggly hair clings to patches of the scalp, having thinned as the corpse has weathered over the years. Most of the clothes have rotted away. The corpse looks like it has been here from the beginning.
    “Death is such a bummer,” Jane notes. I love that about Jane. She has a way of wrapping up the complexities of life in the simplest of comments.
    “So sad,” I say.
    I spot a purse in the bushes. It’s not much bigger than a wallet, and has long spaghetti straps that have broken as they’ve rotted. I pick up the purse. It’s filthy, but I have to look inside. I’m curious to see if there’s a photo. “Poor girl. I bet she was nice when she was alive.”
    “She was a failure as a zombie,” Steve notes. “Got shot through the head on day one.”
    “That’s hardly her fault,” Jane says.
    “Are zombies even at fault for what they do?” I ask. “I mean, she wouldn’t have wanted to end up as a zombie, or to end up shot like this, rotting on the side of a trail. Makes me shudder at how life ruins our best intentions.”
    “I wonder where he shot her from,” David says, looking around at the terrain.
    I ask, “Who says it was a him that pulled the trigger?”
    David