Demi and Jane
The walkers attention was drawn to her presence in the back of the truck, which meant soon enough her path -- if it could be called that -- to the cruiser would be non-existent. With her boots making a quiet ‘thud’ noise against the bed of the pickup, Demi inched her way towards the back, throwing one leg over the tailgate and then the other and dropping rather ungracefully down to the asphalt. With her own weapon now drawn she began to sprint towards the cruiser, dodging the spindly dead fingers of shufflers as they reached out for her. One lunged toward the woman and Jane nailed it in the torso and arm, slowing it down but not stopping the monster as it continued stalking its prey.
“Fuck,” Was the only word that slipped out of Demi’s mouth as she dodged the walker the police officer had clipped and found herself right in the path of another.
It happened in a split second, so quickly that at first Demi wasn’t certain what had happened. Then almost as if the moment had been unfroze, shooting pain radiated from her shoulder and Demi let out a blood curdling scream, the kind you hear reserved for horror movies.
The shuffler had bit her.
Jane had just put another bullet in the zombie she’d winged, finally downing it, when another one came from behind the woman and sank it’s teeth into her flesh. The raw, naked anguish in the woman’s howl drowned out the groans from the approaching shufflers but only for a moment.
“No!” Jane took four quick, purposeful steps toward the shuffler and put the muzzle of her gun in its ear and pulled the trigger. Bone, brain meat and viscera went in all directions, spattering Jane’s arm and the other woman’s side with dots of viscous fluid. Jane put her arm around the woman, unsure if she could still hold her firearm with her shoulder wound. Jane and the woman moved in a circular pattern to the cruiser, trying to keep sight in every direction. Jane shot another geek in their path and booted another in the kneecaps to keep it from following them. After what seemed like hours but only could have been seconds, Jane opened the driver’s side door and poured the woman into the passenger seat and shut the door behind her.
“Hold on.”
Jane gunned the engine and pushed the pedal to the floor. She plowed into one geek near her bumper, the impact jostling her passenger enough to warrant another cry of pain. Jane winced but did not stop, knowing she had to get the woman out of here, away from the horde, before she could look at her injury. They’d deal with that and anything else once they get away from the the mob of lurkers.
Later Demi would tell everyone it happened in such a blur, but in that moment as the zombie crumpled to the ground and the officer practically drug her towards their escape vehicle, Demi felt like everything was moving in slow motion and the only thing she could focus on was the throbbing in her shoulder. Well, and the deep gut wrenching sadness over the fact that the one thing she never wanted to put Isaac through was the very thing he would have to withstand for the next ten days...that was if she made it that long.
Even though Demi could only assume her rescuer was trying to be as gentle as possible, every bump and turn sent a new wave of pain through her shoulder as she clutched her hand over the wound. She wasn’t an expert in first aid, but she knew damn well she was doing very little to stop the bleeding. “I think I may bleed out in your car,” Demi stated as the woman took another sharp turn and she gasped and bit down on her lip to keep from crying out in pain.