Blackbird's Fall (Savage World 3)

She crept toward the door, reached out with her hand not holding the bat, and pulled it open slowly.

“Stay,” she whispered to Sherman. He whimpered again but lay down, his face turned up toward her. “Good boy.”

She opened the door a bit wider, and the old wood creaked slightly. Maya winced at the sound and held her breath, her pulse skyrocketing. The house was dark, but the sound of a crash from the kitchen told her all she needed to know. Maya’s heart raced, her muscles tightened, and the flight-or-fight instinct ran high in her.

She looked at her dog again. “Stay, Sherman,” she said once more and stepped out into the hallway. Keeping her back to the wall, she tried to calm her breathing. She needed to be calm, to keep a level head. It wasn’t as though she was tough as nails or one of those women who could take a man down.

But Maya had grown up working on her grandfather’s farm and knew what it meant to stay strong in the face of a hectic, confused situation and had always prided herself on using her brain in these matters.

Rounding the corner, but still keeping her back to the wall, she thought maybe an infected had gotten in, or maybe it was a looter? But as she leaned around the wall and looked into the kitchen, her mouth parted at the scene before her.

It wasn’t a stranger in her house, or an infected who had somehow broken in. No, it was her father standing in the center of the kitchen, right over her mother, and dark liquid dripping from the front of him. It might be too dark to see exactly what that fluid was, but she wasn’t a fool. It was blood, her father’s and her mother’s blood.

And when her father leaned down, kicking glass that was on the ground across the room, and started to tear into her mother, eating her flesh, an involuntary gasp left Maya. The moonlight gave her a small glimpse of the carnage, and as much as she felt like losing it right now, just breaking down, she had to stay strong if she wanted to survive.

“Kill me if I turn. I don’t want to hurt you or your mother or anyone else. I don’t want to live as a corpse.”

Her father’s words played through her mind over and over again, tearing her up, making her wish she was living a different life.

Her father turned around swiftly, still huddled over Maya’s mother, and opened his mouth in a grizzly display of gore. He screamed out, a gurgling, distorted sound that had chunks and fluid spewing from his mouth and down his chin. They held each other’s stare for several seconds, the wheezing coming from her father a reminder of the pain he endured while alive and during his last moments on this planet.

She backed away slowly, survival taking over. She’d been prepared for this since her father came home with the bite, and although she dreaded this moment, she couldn’t back down. Maya had to do this for her father, to end his suffering.

Turning and running toward the bathroom when her dad rose and started shuffling toward her, Maya slammed and locked the door for good measure, went over to the closet, pulled open the door, and pushed the hanging clothes away. She dropped to her knees and instantly saw what she was going after.

Lying on the floor along with a box of shells beside it was her father’s shotgun. The rifle was in the living room, the center of the house. She had weapons stashed throughout the home for this particular situation or if anyone tried fucking with her and her family.

Maya grabbed the gun, checked the chamber to make sure it was full and ready to go, and closed her eyes, breathing out slowly. The sound of her dad coming closer, his feet dragging on the hardwood, had the tears coming fast and strong. Squeezing her eyes harder, telling herself she could do this, that she had to do this, she rose and turned to face the door just as the booming knocks came.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

She could picture her now dead father pounding a bloody fist on the door, smearing her mother’s blood over the wood, making it a grisly reminder of what the world had come to.

Maya moved closer to it, her hands shaking, her mouth dry, and her throat tight. The pounding continued, matching the beat of her heart. She was a foot from the door now, and taking a deep breath, she lifted the gun and held it steady with both hands. She had two shells in the shotgun, and she wouldn’t waste them, wouldn’t make her father suffer more than he might be already.

She didn’t know if the infected felt pain, if they even remembered anything of their former lives, but she did know one thing for sure—they didn’t get better. They decayed even more, their bodies rotting, slowly become nothing more than rancid, putrid flesh on bones.