La Lune Bleue Planete -- page 7

Jeff Crouch

The Walk by Eric S. Brown

The sun baked down, hot and dry, as the gentle breeze stirred small dancing clouds of dust along the road. Scott looked up at the sky and wondered how things had gone so wrong. Humanity had once reigned supreme over the world. The human race had carved their designs into mountains, captured the beauty of the oceans in words, even reached for the stars yet now its extinction was a certainty. Scott was sure in his heart there simply weren't enough people left alive to start over. Most likely he was the last. Scott twisted off the cap of his canteen and drank heavily. Sweat glistened on his bare, sun scorched chest and legs. The smell of rotting flesh was strong on the breeze. He turned and looked over his shoulder at the horde of shamblers following in his wake, watching their slow movement as they chased after him. He couldn't help but laugh. Even the dead would soon be gone and the Earth would be left alone. Time would catch up with them, too, and their rotting limbs would fall apart until there was nothing left but unmoving bones. He closed his canteen and placed it back on his belt beside his handgun. The constant traveling was catching up to him; he was only human after all. He'd been on the run ever since the last known city had fallen, and the dead had come pouring through its fortified walls into its streets. He'd never forget the screams of that night as people died and were born again. The dead's numbers were seemingly endless. It was how they'd won the war in the long run, a simple matter of attrition. Scott stared at the hundreds upon hundreds of the monsters behind him. "Damn you," he whispered, fighting down the urge to draw his handgun and drop a few of them just to make himself feel better. The gray-fleshed men and women of the horde merely stumbled on towards him at their inhumanly slow pace, their hollow eyes locked onto him with longing looks of hunger and desparation. Scott wished he could just run and leave them all behind him, but doing so was pointless. It would only leave him more exhausted, and there would just be more of the things waiting for him wherever he ran to. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and started to walk again. His pace was barely faster than that of the dead. Soon enough, no matter how he conserved his energy, they'd overtake him and if by some miracle the horde didn't consume him entirely, he would rise up again as one of them to join their ranks. He didn't suppose it mattered, but he hoped he'd live long enough to see the true end of it all, when there was nothing left but him and the Earth took him back into her womb once more. Painfully he kept his legs moving, ignoring the heat, and walked west onward into the setting sun.

Jeff Crouch