Zombies Don't Jump... CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO

I was suddenly reeled back into consciousness when I felt someone pulling on my arms. Cassie was helping me up. I faced a dark hallway that led to our quarters but I whipped my head around to the door and caught a glimpse of a zombie before it slammed shut. And before I could even register what was happening, I heard a low-bellowed moan and saw Patrick on the floor clutching his right leg. It was badly damaged with a deep scratch wound that had blood gushing from it. Then I panicked.

“Patrick!” I screamed. “No!” I covered my mouth with my hands and hyperventilated. “Cassie, Patrick is bleeding!”

“Well he is human.” She sarcastically gruffed and rolled her eyes. Without saying anything else, she wrapped her arms around Patrick from the back and attempted to drag him down the hall. My eyes grew wide as thick cherry-colored blood oozed from Patrick’s thigh. I wondered if the zombie had hit an artery or if he was already a goner.

After struggling with him for a couple of minutes, she asked: “Aren’t you going to help me?” she said. More panic arose at the thought of dragging him back to our quarters while he was unconscious and zombie-scratched. I knew the amount of trouble we would be in if we got back. I gazed in horror at Patrick while thinking of this when Cassie cleared her throat. It amazed me how calm she could be in these kinds of situations.

I was about to abandon my fears and scream for help until a small girl with wild orange hair seemingly appeared out of nowhere. She crawled toward Patrick in an awkward fashion, as if she were a dog, and sniffed his wound. Then she crawled into a vent in the wall that I hadn’t noticed before and came back out with what looked like parts to old mattresses and clothes.

“Hey,” Cassie said defensively. “Who the hell are you?” Cassie demanded an answer, but the girl only glanced at her and continued to work on Patrick.

“Let her finish, then let’s ask questions.” I said, gaining my confidence back.

“Oh, I didn’t know ‘Ms. Melodramatic’ here was in the mood to be a leader.” She spited me, but I ignored her to watch the work being done on Patrick. The girl stuffed a bit of foam into the gash and then dressed up Patrick’s wound carefully and delicately. Cassie and I were astonished as the small girl performed a pseudo-surgical procedure on Patrick.

* **

It seemed like hours had passed when the girl had began to fix Patrick, and I was beginning to get worried about the blood loss Patrick was suffering from. There was about a pool of blood with a diameter of three feet surrounding the girl and Patrick. But she didn’t seem to notice it; for she was sitting in the same position she had been in when she first began performing on Patrick. Finally, Cassie exploded at the girl.

“Don’t you think that’s about enough?” she inquired pressingly. But the girl continued squeezing the tube of healing ointment on Patrick’s wound. Fortunately, he had stopped bleeding, but I wasn’t so hopeful because I knew that an infection could catch him at any time.

“Hey,” said Cassie. “Don’t you hear me? Excuse me?” I could feel the tension and annoyance in Cassie voice increasing, which indicated that she was getting more annoyed by the second. This was one fault of Cassie’s; although she was usually a cheerful person, she had an awful temper and sometimes it was incontrollable. But I decided to step in anyway and calm Cassie down because she was inching closer to the girl and looked like she was about to hit her.

“Cassie, let her do her job.” I said with slight assertiveness. I didn’t want to impede her right to ask questions but she needed to slow down. She whipped her head towards me and glared. I challenged her by giving her an equally pressing look and tilted my head a bit to the right. We glared at each other like this for several seconds. Then she blinked at me and I could tell that she was reevaluating her motives because she began stare blankly from the girl to Patrick. Then her tenseness calmed and she went back to being cool and collected, but I could see that she was disappointed. She backed away from the girl and returned to sitting against the wall and waited for the girl to be done.

While Cassie pondered in her own thought, I studied the orange-haired girl myself. I had never seen her before and I was sure of this because I knew everyone in our bunker. This was possible because we did not have a lot of people in our bunker. When the first invasion happened, most of the people in my city had been devoured by the flesh-eating mongrels. And those people were the ones that lived in the central city. The rest of us, however, were “saved” because we lived toward the rural yet poorer parts of the city, and it took a longer time for the zombies to reach us because we were less coagulated like the downtown area our city had. And I knew most of the people in the bunker because they were my neighbors, local citizens, or schoolmates and teachers.

But I had never seen that girl before in my life. I focused on her hair. I was starting to ponder her origins. I knew that she couldn’t have been the unseen child of any of my former neighbors; none of them had orange hair. Nor could she have been an adopted child. When we had our home and I, a functioning family, we were surrounded by neighbors were all traditionalists, though, that never had anything to do with adoption. Our city was simply too small for anyone to be bothered with adoption, though, I am sure it happened, but not in my neighborhood.

I heard banging on the metal door and I flinched. A cold chill descended down my spine. I stayed close beside Cassie as she and the orange-haired girl made their way toward our quarters through the darkness of the shelter with an eerie silence like the one we heard earlier today with the freshie I’d killed.