(22) The City

What had looked like a massive pile of bodies was actually a large force of animated corpses. They had been manipulated somewhere, programed to attack. I heard John's ray gun charge beside me so I readied mine too. John was here, I knew he would save me. I was not alone. He looked at me and kissed my forehead,

"I hadn't meant to charge in, guns blazing, but it looks like we have to. Can you shoot?" I nodded my head firmly, then to prove it, I shot the nearest body through the chest. It's guts splattered everywhere. I grimaced and prepared to shoot another one while I looked for a way out. When I spotted a dark side alley to my left I tugged at John's arm and pointed it out. He nodded and we fought our way through the horde. When we got into close range the ray guns took too long to charge to be of much use, so I started punching and kicking the corpses. John's strength enabled him to break off their limbs and necks. Eventually, covered in gore, we made it to the alley and ran inside. John fired at the walls as we passed through them and caused them to collapse, leaving us with no escape, but also ensuring we wouldn't be followed.

When we came to a fork in the alley, we checked the holographic schematic of the city. We were west of the capital building. So we took the right fork and continued on. It got darker, to keep us from getting separated, John held my hand and led me through the streets using a small pulsating green glow-light. As we neared a main street, John stowed his light safely, but didn't let go of my hand, instead he pulled his gun out and we pressed our backs to the wall at the edge of the building nearest the street. John looked down at me and nodded. Silently we ran across the street and ducked next to a large fountain that was now leaking and spraying water into the street. Large puddles rippled about the square. I knew this place. I had come here often to feed the amphibious birds that lived in and around this fountain. From the look of the red water, most of them were dead.

So much death surrounded this city. This city I loved. I had spent most of my childhood running through these streets. The library a few blocks from here had housed me nearly 29/8 one summer. I spent every available moment there pouring over books and reading all about adventures that people had on our planet of origin, earth.

Suddenly I was brought back to the present when John's gun charged. I saw the shadow move right in front of the street we needed to be on, it was no corpse, but a Beast. Ten feet tall with long deadly curved arms, it's large ears were pricked and alert for the slightest sound. It was a miracle we hadn't been spotted before. If John killed it, the others would surely hear about it. Hadn't our fight near the wall been noisy enough? Maybe it hadn't reached the rest of the city. Maybe the corpses were just acting on their own. There was a lot of debris in the square. John was looking at it too. He stowed his ray gun and motioned for me to follow him. We crawled across the smooth irridianite stone and found our way to a street north of our position. As we cautiously made our way down the street against the wall and in the shadows, I saw that the library was not destroyed. I motioned to John and we ducked inside the doorway, guns at the ready. I took John's hand and led him up the stairs and to a place where a part of the roof opened up to allow some sunlight in. We pulled ourselves up onto the slick, white surface of the roof. I saw the buildings line up all the way to the capital. We could jump our way across the city. The roofs were flat enough, as long as our feet didn't slip on the slick, cool surface. John wrapped his arms around me again, and we launched ourselves into the air.



{on a rather interesting side note, the corpses in the city were originally just going to be a pile of bodies, looking ominous. However, the comments on my last post were so funny and indicative of zombies that I couldn't resist. But, I dislike the "feed me brains" zombies that infect people, I just like the idea of animated and dangerous corpses used for war purposes. So, thank you for inspiring me to have John and Elaine enter the city with more of a bang! :) }