Free Medora: A Zombie Novel by Wick Welker

panicking. I’ve got an idea.” Keith walked over to a large glass coffee table, grabbed two legs between his forearms and chest, and lifted it up. “We might need this to get them back.” Keith looked at Dave, his hair now free from the confines of hair gel, swinging loosely above his eyes giving him an adolescent appearance. “Are you ready? Let's just knock them down first and then haul our asses up the stairs.”
    “ Just don’t, I can’t move or something!” Dave fell to his knees and started gasping for air in a panic attack. “I can’t…”
    Keith turned to the door and kicked it open, which surprisingly shot outwards. It appeared that the sick weren't crowding the doorway but were beginning to snake their way up to the next set of stairs. As soon as they heard the door, they swiveled their heads over to Keith at the doorframe and accordingly turned their bodies toward him. He stood clutching the legs of the coffee table and looked up the stairs to the next level only feeling hopelessness as he saw the distorted faces moving towards him. It was then, looking forward at the rails that led to the stairs below, in the spiraling chaos of actual human beings inching towards him to bite his flesh and pummel his body that he knew what to do. He instantaneously realized that it is only in moments of panic that risk is rational and insanity is only relative.
    “Dave, we have to go down. I have an idea, so follow me.” This was an order.
    Keith braced himself with the coffee table and lunged himself at the crowd. They bobbed backwards, stumbling back down the stairs and piling at the platform below. Keith kicked outward and lunged again with the table. More of them fell backward, slamming their arms and heads on the rails, losing teeth and tearing sagging flesh as they rolled downward. The table started to crack with each lunge forward that he gave to the crowd.
    “No , no what're you doing?” Dave looked up from his kneeling position. “We’ve got to go up!”
    Once Keith created a few feet of space around the threshold of the door, he finally threw the table at the crowd, which mainly fell on top of one of their heads, shattering into large shards of glass. An audible thunk echoed up the stairwell. The man's head that it landed on was completely crushed under the blow of the table and Keith could see fragments of bright pink flesh and white skull beneath the glass. He never knew what a live brain looked like and before that moment, didn't think he would ever know. Without hesitation, Keith leaped on top of the fragments of glass slabs and bodies. It felt like he was trying to maneuver through piles of garbage at a junkyard. He stepped squarely on the back of a frail woman who was draped along the steps of the staircase and he kept his feet close together as if he was on a surfboard.
    “Come on; this is going to work. Come on!” He grabbed onto the side rails that ran in the middle of the staircase and jumped over them, falling down to the next set of stairs below. He was now on the staircase leading down to the floor below and had landed directly on someone's shoulders, knocking them to the floor. His blow created a domino effect of slamming infected bodies on top of each other, creating a cascade of people chaotically falling down flights of stairs. The sick were dazed and slowly reacting to Keith who was perched on top of them. Keith yelled to Dave from below, “Dave, come on!”
    Keith knew momentum was the only way he could make it down the rest of the stairs without the sick regaining their footing and crowding inward on him, suffocating him slowly wit h the multiplied mass of dozens of bodies. He quickly grabbed onto the rail again and vaulted over it, landing on top of the heads of the sick on the staircase below. It gave him the ridiculous sensation of crowd surfing at a concert. Looking down, he saw that his left shoe had caved in the skull of woman. Shocked, he slowly took his foot out, as if