More Emily

Just another nibble of Dead: Confrontation...enjoy.

Emily-zombie followed the small group into the woods. The warmth was just ahead, several sources. The sounds of screams and shouts only helped keep her and those around her headed in the right direction.

Something hit her in the stomach, but she no more felt that than she felt the Bowie knife jutting from her chest. Still, every so often, something in a very small part of her mind would spark. When a burst of gunfire erupted just to her left, Emily-zombie moved deeper into the pack.

When the first of the heat sources was stumbled upon, Emily-zombie waited for a few of the others to drag it down. Once it was on the ground, she no longer received any sparks that made her cautious. She fed until the warmth was gone and then rose up and continued after the others.

At one point, she eventually ended up alone. As she continued to push through the wall of white that often reached as high as her shoulders, she would sometimes come to a stop. It was not that she lacked the ability to move, it was simply that she felt no drive to continue moving.

When a sound came along, she would adjust and move accordingly in that direction. Every so often, that spark would fire and Emily-zombie would move away from the sounds. On more than one occasion, she would discover a source of heat that drew her near. Only once did she actually take the opportunity to feed. It was a single source, and when she discovered it, it was so faint that she would have missed it if she had not literally stepped on and fell over it.

Not much larger than her, this source made no sound and no effort to move when Emily-zombie tore into it. She did not notice the figure beside this poor unfortunate that had frozen solid. Nor did she notice that her “victim” was kept in place by the frozen appendages of that figure.

Once the warmth was gone, Emily-zombie continued on her way. She paid no heed to the figure that eventually fell in step beside her other than to hiss at it once when it tried to move past her as she headed away from a source of warmth that was making a terrible noise. She never noticed the bullet that tore through her temporary companion’s head and sent it toppling over the railing that had steered her back on course more than once as she continued along the lonely mountain road.

Late one night, a terrible wind came, followed by a blizzard that dumped over four feet of snow in thirty-six hours. That storm proved to be too much and Emily-zombie could no longer move in any direction. There was a silence that came, so she felt no actual need to move and simply stopped.

It would be weeks before the weather changed enough to allow Emily-zombie to move.