Free Life Among The Dead by Daniel Cotton

looks down at the relentless reanimated people. They are entangled with one another as they try to crawl out onto the porch in pursuit of their lunch. The hungry corpses look up at Dan and reach out to grab him. More and more exit the house onto the shoddy deck. The wooden structure creaks under their combined weight. Despite the obvious signs of danger more still join the others, crowding onto the tired old porch.
    The weathered deck inevitably releases its weak grip on the house and plummets to the yard below taking with it its decaying occupants. The mass of them strikes the earth and their bodies are scattered like broken dolls. The already deceased accident victims immediately start to rise to their feet, ignoring any broken bones sustained in the fall.
    The zombies in the bedroom continue to exit through the window even with no porch. They are greeted by gravity and join the others below. Dan has to laugh at their stupidity, he watches the dim-witted zombies fall to the lawn one after the other. None of them learning from the previous one’s mistake.
    He looks to the girl to see if she is watching the comic cavalcade unfold, the Keystone Korpses bungling below. She doesn’t see the humor in it. Her eyes are wide and stare at some far off spot. She just lost her entire family today and is scared. Dan crawls to her.
    The soldier takes one of her hands that are firmly planted to the shingles. He guides her to the house’s peak. At the summit he gets her to cling to a brick chimney. He removes his flak jacket and lays it down close to the masonry work.
    “ Here. Sit on this.” He offers. The girl lifts herself enough for him to slide the thick vest under her rear end. My flak should be more comfortable, he thinks. The asphalt shingles are rough with sharp edges, and despite the time of year their black color is making them very hot under the sun. The heat is visible, radiating in wavy lines around the edges of the roof.
    “ I’m Dan.” The soldier tells the frightened child extending his hand.
    “ Barbara.” She replies simply. She lets go of the chimney with one hand just long enough to shake his before quickly returning it to the stone.
    “ Hungry?” He asks while offering her a piece of beef jerky. She just shakes her head and stares into the distance.
    Dan sits down on the incline and lights a cigarette. He looks out onto the suburban street below. To the left he can see the park he had run through before coming to west 8th, and beyond that is the city of Waterloo. He had been trying to get home, but the dead kept popping up, forcing him to change his course as if corralling him here, and driving him further from his wife.
    He gazes right and sees the neighborhood comes to an end less than a dozen houses down in a circle of asphalt. A cul de sac? He thinks. I sought refuge on a dead end street? Shmuck. He shakes his head. Just beyond the final house he can see the levy and the Charles River. The river runs past miles of streets just like this one.
    So many houses, he thinks. How many people are alive out there? How many not so fortunate? Below the survivors Dan sees hundreds of unfortunates that clog the burb. Zombies surround the house they sit upon, stranded on an asphalt island in a sea of the dead.
     

 
    12
     
     
    Alone in the dark. Becka sits with her knees to her chest, shivering though the air continues to get uncomfortably hotter and hotter. She had wept while Stevie screamed for her to help him. His awful pleas went unanswered. She wept even harder when his screaming stopped and the ghouls below continued to feast on him. She could hear the wet sounds of it. They seemed to take more time with Stevie then they had with Derek.
    She is silent now as she listens to their feet pacing the creaky floorboards. Large drops of sweat leave the tip of her nose with the regularity of a leaking faucet. In her head she recites three words. I had to. I had to.
    Her only companion now is their moaning. She has