“Chuck!” I shout.
“Ah, what? You scared me,” he says, readjusting the belt, and keeping me tighter to his back.
“Your hands. You picked up that stick from a pile of leaves. Do you feel any different?”
He hesitates. I feel his back tighten. He shakes his head no. His feet move us further down the road. The belt starts to loosen and he tightens it again.
“Don’t lie to me,” I say. “Stop. Please, let’s take a break and talk about this.”
“We need my hands,” he says. “The tingling. It’s probably nothing.”
“Chuck, it’ll spread,” I say. “Put me down.”
He keeps walking. He shakes his head. Clearing his throat, he says, “First, we make it to your camp,” he says.
“No, put me down!” I try to worm my way out of the belt but it is too tight.
“First,” he repeats, “we make it to your camp. Then, we’ll chop off my hands.”
“Chuck, I don’t even know if we’re going in the right direction. Please!”
I shake and rattle, forcing all my weight into my movements. My body hits hard enough to topple the teenager over. I continue to writhe and wiggle. He lays there, crying loud and shuddering.
“I need my hands! I’ll be useless without them. I won’t be able to lift anything, grab anything, touch anything, and-and- I don’t want to be like–”
Our arguing is loud enough to wake the dead. They seem to come from nowhere. They march out of the woodwork of rotted trees. They travel towards us with their dripping mouths and yellowed eyes. I count ten of them and stop squirming.
“Chuck, get up,” he is crying too hard to hear me. “Chuck! Get up. You’ve got to run. Run!”
He pulls us up with his rigor mortis hands. His eyes meet theirs. He runs as fast as he can with a woman tied to his back. The zombies follow us down the road. All my effort of loosening the belt finally pays off at the worst time.
I crash into a pothole and Chuck keeps running. I see him enter a tunnel under a bridge and exit down hill, disappearing. His name and my voice echo. The creatures’ eyes widen as their teeth chatter. Their feet stop stomping.
Arrows rain down from the bridge above us. The groans of the dead stop as their heads are stabbed by the projectiles. The rotted bodies fall all around me like the contagious leaves from the infected trees. Moments later, I see who shot the arrows. I try to crawl away.
The cloaked strangers surround me like the zombies they exterminated. Their mouths are covered by masks, and their eyes are forever focused. Gloved hands reach for me. For better or worse, I’m carried away.