Not So Easy

Looming over, seemingly everything, the bright, brooding moon sat comfortably in the sky. The light grey clouds couldn’t block its oppressive glare on the long ago abandoned rural town... on the forgotten graveyard. A bone chilling silence consumed everything, eerily holding back any noise. Instead you could practically hear the panic, the tension so thick it could be cut with a knife, the deafening lack of any noise that could be registered by the human ear. The sun had long since left behind the town, abandoning it into a dim, starless existence. What could have elapsed into a pleasant setting was now a fearful place riddled with shadows and emptiness...

The withered graveyard, which had been reduced to a maze of mossy, crumbly headstones, took to the moon’s odd lighting almost immediately; it was eerie and dark in a matter of minutes. The silhouette of the stones lay where lives once were, a meaningless block to represent a lost sister, brother, parent, friend or even a beloved stranger.

Though dead, they were lucky.

Many people didn’t get the grace of a headstone when it came to the end.

The grass, long since past it’s friendly, soft stage, sprouted up in ragged bundles which dared to consume some stones completely. A stone wall squatted along the border, accompanying the disfigured statues that guarded the grounds as if they were soldiers at some palace, which was strange...

There was no one alive left to visit.

Well, almost no one.

Shivering (from the biting cold, or from strangling fear?) a diminutive teenager, spared from the infection, peeped out from behind a dying headstone. She had been safe there since the sun had chosen to sink under the silhouette of the trees, but she knew she should have known there was no chance of it lasting forever.

In the distance, so quiet that she could only barely hear it, there was the slow stumbling of clumsy feet over gravel and spiky grass, the owner’s barely if at all aware of their…. Of it’s movements, driven entirely by blind instinct.

She willed her breath to become slow and deep, her heart to beat ever quieter… but her body seemed to rebel against her as fear took over, causing the girl to let out a sharp, scared gasp at the revelation it was only one row of death away.

The sound might as well have been a scream in that silent night.

In the dim light of the moon, she could see the creature’s head snap to a jarringly unnatural angle as it jumped to face her, letting out a strange low moan as if to acknowledge she was there.

Ice flooded through her veins, spiking through her entire body, and the teen held her breath, praying that it might somehow forget or have missed her. She hoped there was some way she could be okay, she could simply sneak over the crumbling wall and never return, some way she could find another place that would provide some semblance of safety.

Of course, she had no such luck.

The creature lurched forward, unwashed lanky hair, inhumanly pale skin and lifeless eyes blurring in the darkness as it barrelled towards her, moaning loudly to draw in others, as if one zombie wasn’t already more than enough of a problem.

The teenager scrambled back, knocking her skull sharply on another nameless headstone, the scratching of her worn shoes echoing loudly over her beating heart, and the creature didn’t stop, growing closer and closer, not seeming to notice or care when it stumbled over weeds or stabs of stone.

She continued to stare at it's face, morbid fascination taking over.

Suddenly realising that this couldn’t just go away like she wanted it to, the girl shot up, swinging the bag with all of her worldly possessions off of her shoulders and towards the creature’s head as a makeshift weapon, knocking it right over and watching it fall like a tower of blocks.

It was a heavy bag, but nothing as heavy as, say, a bat. As a result, instead of dying, it twitched on the ground, disoriented and reaching for the girl as she panted heavily and loudly. It stared at her as if she had betrayed it. She stared back, paralysed.

What was she doing? Why was she locked in place like that? She had to run.

The girl sprinted in the opposite direction, the locket on her chest jumping up and down, thumping along to the too-fast beat of her heart. Quickly, she hitched herself up on the part of the wall that was both the lowest and least likely to fall at the slightest touch that she could see, pulling her scraped knees over the chunky gravel, ignoring the sharp pain that spiked them as she did so.

She ran and ran, not really caring where she was going and trying helplessly to ignore the familiar sensation of the necklace beating on her front. Usually it was a comfort for her.

Usually.

Now, all she could do was remember the blurry face locked inside.

A face she hadn’t seen for years.

Until that night.

Suddenly, she stopped dead, knuckles clenching around the metal heart and yanking with all of her strength, ignoring the tug at her neck until the chain snapped. Viciously she launched it into the inky nowhere that surrounded her, trying to choke back loud sobs that would only alert more zombies.

It was easy to forget they used to be real people when she saw them, lifeless and rotting as they wandered the streets searching for their next prey. It was easy to shove them, to hit them, to kill them if she just blocked out the truth that they were once humans with lives and families.

It wasn’t so easy anymore.