Free Medora: A Zombie Novel by Wick Welker Page A

trying to recuperate the loss of the woman’s head. His dress shoes now dripped with the organic matter of the insides of a human head. He realized he only had the choice of ignoring the fact that he was literally disassembling body parts or he was going to be torn apart. With no more time to awe at the macabre of his situation, he leaped down to the next level and could see he was now on the seventh level of the building. His slacks were deeply stained with blood and the whiteness of his shirt was now totally absent.
    He continued jumping downward with nothing on his mind but the intense focus of making it to the ground level. He saw the morbid faces of fellow New Yorkers, staring vaguely, coughing loudly, groaning quietly and quickly losing their humanity. His body ached under the humidity of the crowded stairwell. It wasn't moisture from the weather but from the sheer body mass occupying the small space, creating its own microenvironment of heat and pressure. His forehead dripped sweat into his eyes as he leaped downward from one staircase to the next. He could feel tension aching into his arms and knees every time he landed on the people below him.
    He looked up and saw the sign for the fourth level . He was doing it. He was riding his way out of the building on the heads of the people that he had greeted just that morning on the streets, at the newsstands and lunch. Each level was as full of infected people as the level before. He couldn't think about what the street looked like, about how many must be out there, if there was this many in here. He couldn't think about how he was going to get out of the city. All he could think about was a big letter “L” for Lobby.
    Level two . He was gasping for air. His mind was constantly alluding to being at a rock concert and he briefly mused at the absurdity of it. He kept slipping in between them as he jumped down. Some of them he didn't knock down when he landed and he had to push them over each other, down the stairs. He hit a blonde woman in her already herniated left eye with his fist. She toppled backwards, clutching the arm of another sick person next to her, bringing him down.
    He finally jumped to the ground level , walking on the backs of the people he had knocked over. He knew the lobby would be a death trap, full of the horde. He looked behind him and saw a hallway empty of the sick, leading to a dead end underneath the stairs. Seeing the sick regaining their footing and taking notice of him, they began to crowd into him. Some from above noticed the action from below and began to stumble downwards. Keith put his foot on the belly of a man and kicked outward, pushing him into the impending crowd. He had no choice but to move toward the dead end hall watching them sluggishly step towards him in a chaotic yet concerted effort. 
    He had forgot about Dave who had disappeared, and could only think about how the choice he made in the last ten minutes was going to end his life in a way that would have been impossible for him to conceive. He punched and kicked as they approached, shuffling backwards under the staircase. He now dreamed of being imprisoned upstairs in an office with the other employees. At least, he could have a door between him and these people who had lost the essential characteristics that make them people. The awfulness of being mobbed and torn apart under the dark staircase was starting to consume all of his thoughts. He had no flashes of his life and no thoughts of his loved ones, only a hollow vacuum of anticipated horror. He was finally forced to lean up against the dead end wall and decidedly stare at the floor as the mass pushed towards him, just a few feet away. He thought of the cold cinder block wall behind him and pushed his hands backwards to feel it, to feel something to remind him of reality. Instead of feeling the gritty texture of cinder block, his fingers wrapped around a cold metal bar and sirens immediately blared in his ears.
    He had ope