The runner looked at him, its jaws worked. He severed the spine, so it was harmless, but they didn’t die unless you destroyed the brain. He could see the hunger in its eyes, and it tried to bite him. It was disgusting, and he was disgusting.
He finished it off by smashing it’s skull with his heel. No point except that he was pissed off that the thing had tried to bite off his dick. He was wearing a cup, but it was the principle of the thing. He wiped his feet on what was left of the rug.
The room he was in had a hole cut in the wall. He looked up at the corners of the room. Cameras were tracking him. He gave one the finger. He stepped into the next room, keeping an eye out for any traps. At this point, he need to get to the damn gate, and he wasn’t keen on going through the building to do it. On the other hand, he needed to get past the runners. If the girl didn’t lead them down to the gate, they’d keep trying to get at him through the end of the building or they’d head down to the tanker. Either one was good.
He was halfway there when he hit another trap, of sorts. It wasn’t much of one, as they went. There was a door. It was the first honest to god door he come across since this happened. He opened it quickly.
Smith couldn’t tell immediately how many shamblers were there. They all looked old. Runners didn’t stay runners for very long. The virus kept their muscles and bodies working in ways that they really shouldn’t, but they didn’t heal, not really, unless they consumed a lot of human flesh.
After the first twenty four hour or so, the cumulative damage started to show, and they began to rot. They kept going, kept walking, but they got dumb and they got slow. They weren’t much of a threat, individually, but enough of them could overwhelm a puncher, and a lot of first timers ended up dead because they didn’t realize how easy it was to get surrounded.
Smith was not a first timer. He stayed in the door way, which meant that he only had them coming from direction. He planted his feet and fired off a series of punches to the first shambler. The last caused its fragile skull to pop and he stepped aside as it fell.
He grabbed the next two and slammed their heads together hard, then again and then shoved them against the other shamblers. He felt the blood sing in his arms and shoulders and he smiled. This job wasn’t all bad.
There were eight of them. More than enough to cause a problem, but these were at least a couple of months old. He beat one of them to death, or whatever passed for death for these things, with its own arm. He was on the last one when the girl stepped through the other door.
“You’re going in the wrong direction,” he said.
“You’ve got my key.”
“Is that tanker still alive?”
“The big guy? Yeah. It looks like a bomb went off by the gates. There are stacks of dead runners and shamblers. I’m beginning to respect the strategy.”
Smith looked at the torn leather on his chest.
“Yeah, me too.”
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