Misery County

Chapter 12 - Part 3

"No. Wrong way. Excuse me," Cassie said as she turned on her heel and shoved past the necromancer, who only looked at her hungrily but made no effort to restrain her.

Shouldering her way through a door without a handle and latch, she burst into a very large, open-plan room. A long windowed bar ran along the entirety of one wall, and tables and chairs littered the main floor. Cassie supposed that if she was going to die, a buffet restaurant would be the most fitting place for it to happen, abandoned or not.

Ungodly sounds were coming clearer and louder from behind her. It seemed that there were more of those monsters coming. What were they? Zombies? That's certainly a new one. She couldn't wait to tell Eric about this, she thought, but that would depend on whether she made it out of there alive, the chances of which seemed a bit lean considering she'd never fought or even heard about zombies outside of film and television. That said, perhaps that knowledge wasn't completely useless.

One of the unmentionables staggered into the restaurant through the useless door.

"Stay right there," Cassie called out playfully while pulling her pistol out of her handbag.

She took careful aim in the dark, getting the corpse's dead head right in her sights.

A squeeze of the trigger, a pop, the smell of gunpowder, and the dead man dropped like a sack of potatoes.

"Sweet!" Cassie exclaimed, but her joy was short-lived as an unending line of the dead began to stream into the room. Wasting expensive silver bullets was bad enough on its own, but she feared something worse – she just didn't have enough for all of them.

Running to the far end of the restaurant floor, she tried to force open a glass door, but if what little she could see through the dusty coating was any indication, the double doors were chained together from the outside. Desperation set in. She grabbed a nearby chair and flung it at the door with all her strength. It bounced off unceremoniously.

Acrylic. Of course it's fucking acrylic.

The zombies were slow to catch up, but they were nonetheless filling up the room like flowing quicksand, spreading out, surrounding her.

Eyes darting around, she scanned the room for a way out. A flapping door that presumably led to the kitchen was nestled away in a corner not yet enveloped by the dead.

Not missing a beat, Cassie launched herself toward it. The corpses moaned and groaned as they adjusted the direction of their slow but steady movement, but no degree of shambling could have them reach the door before she did.

The kitchen was almost pitch black. There was only one window, high up toward the ceiling, but the light it let in was negligible. For all the equipment on Cassie's utility vest, of the two things she needed – a flashlight and a few more magazines – she had neither. Good thing she brought salt, though, she thought. She could season a nice steak if they've still got any lying around in the fridges.

Colliding with the wall at the far end of the kitchen, she realized something harrowing – she'd reached a dead end. How could this be? How could the kitchen not have a rear door? Her question was answered when she saw a handle peeking out from behind a large freezer. Not dedicating any time to trying to figure out why it was pushed in the way of the door, she immediately began trying to push it back, but it wouldn't budge. It must have been full. She opened it to see, and as she did so, an overpowering stench worse than the hundred zombies outside assaulted her senses. The freezer was full of meat, and it had been sitting there for a long, long time. Cassie began grabbing the rancid packets and throwing them outside of the freezer, but as the first corpse made its way into the cramped kitchen, it became abundantly clear to her that she wouldn't have enough time to get one tenth of the meat out of the freezer before she was caught up with, let alone enough of it to move it out of the way.

New plan. Cassie pulled a table over to underneath the small window.

Two more dapper-looking dead men entered the kitchen.

She hopped onto the table.

Another one came in.

Her fingers trembled as she fought with the mechanisms holding the window closed.

Two more shambled in, and the foremost zombie had now reached the end of the table.

Finally getting the window open, Cassie pulled herself up through it. She'd always had a bit of a complex about being petite, but for once it was working in her favor as she effortlessly slid her entire body through the tiny window and flopped face-first into a dumpster on the outside.

Rarely one to welcome lying in a pile of food waste that hadn't been cleared in decades, Cassie let out a laugh as she thought of her close escape. In fact, things had worked out the best way they possibly could. She had run in through the building, effectively trapping all the dead inside, and now she was clear to make a run for it on the outside. If Eric was there, he could have told her that being so results-oriented is bad for her longevity, but he wasn't, and she could tweak this part of the story to make herself look better when she tells him.

Hoisting herself out of the garbage, she stuck her head out over the edge of the dumpster and took in the view. The grounds were dotted with the living dead. Her stomach felt like it fell through, and she only hoped she hadn't evacuated her bowels. The indignity of dying with brown streaks down the back of her jeans was just a bit too much. She quickly did a head count of her hosts. There wasn't enough ammo in her handbag to make it to the gap in the fence, let alone clear out this infestation, and the dead were already beginning to notice her comfy spot in the dumpster.