Fester

(hey, this isn't canon, just saying, so do what you will with that)

Bits of blood and skull smattered the wall in some twisted form of art.

Esther, with a passing, thought that it was beautiful, before some part of her brain told her that that wasn't right. Abstract art.

A scene of surrealism splayed out before her. She brought her weapon, the leg of a desk, down on another skull. She was so pumped full of adrenaline she felt sick. She was liking the killing a bit too much. She rationalized the feeling.

They were monsters now.

Yet, this only felt like a justification to her. She felt like an artist who'd found the perfect medium. That was the wrong way to feel, her mind told her so.

A groan came from behind her and she lifted her bat from the previous victim, bits of something dripping onto the dead. She twisted her body and shoved the jagged wooden edge into the next undead. She realized after a moment that would prove useless and lifted her foot and pushed the zombie off.

She dug a knife from the pocket in her skirt and pushed it into the thing's skull, it slid in with a satisfying wetness.

Esther was fearing for her sanity.

She loved this.

"Esther." She looked to the voice. Diana. They'd been best friends since sixth grade and this situation had proven to stress the frayed string that was their friendship. Esther did still trust her more than everyone else she had met in the last twenty hours.

Diana held a broken hockey stick in her hand; her normally bright blonde hair was wild and tinted with red. Her uniform was disheveled, and ripped in some places.

"We need to go now. There's a lot less of them out there. I think it'd be good if we go now before they come back." She made a gesture to the door with her thumb.

Esther nodded. "But where are we gonna go when we leave? There's nowhere else." Diana shook her head to that.

"There's no more living people here. We need more people. It'll be safer. So, I was thinking we could go to East Bris, maybe it didn't hit them as hard as it did us." There was a moment of silence before she continued.

"We need to move fast. I was watching them out there. They aren't slow fuckers like the movies. It's World War Z kinda stuff. They're incredibly fast, Es." Esther nodded again, glad that Diana was there. She brought things to the table that Esther could only dream of. What she had continuously brought Esther back from the bad times. That quality was essential to her, especially now.

"So," She waved her hand in the direction of the door and let Esther walk ahead of her. She lowered her voice. "Let's roll out."

Esther gave her the side-eye.

~x~

A door stood between them and likely death, and they faced it only because they were searching for more people.

Esther often questioned Diana's intellect. Had she not seen multiple people eaten alive on the very land they were about to walk on? Why did she think this was a good idea? Esther decided that her doubts were due to cold feet just before the dive. Or it was a moment of clarity. She decided to put her hope in Diana, who had her hand gripped tight on the handle of the door.

"So, Es, you ready?" Esther nodded slowly.

Diana breathed in deeply through her nose. "K, bud. And we go."

She threw the door open and the two burst through it.

Esther ran as fast as her feet could possibly take her, and she was glad that she was in track for most of her highschool life, as she doubted that she would have made it otherwise. She heard a grunt ahead of her and screeched to a halt, feeling somewhat dizzy at the change of pace.

Her grip tightened on the leg and she held it high before slamming it down with a squish into the things rotted head. Diana. Esther twisted to look at her best friend.

Feet upon feet behind her, Diana was on the ground, batting away the thing in front of her. Shit.

Why couldn't she just deal with things on her own? Esther pushed away the unnecessarily harsh thoughts and went back to the task at hand.

Sometimes, she didn't quite realize what she was doing. She'd zone out and when she zoned back in, she was already beating a zombie back to death.

It made her afraid, not being in control of her body. Not being in control of her mind, for that matter.

It was too much, too much, too much. Esther saw the way Diana saw her, bloody and not-quite-right, and she was afraid of what Diana might do if she went to far.

Run away? She hoped not.

~x~

It had been 71 hours ago, exactly. Esther was running, practicing for track on turf. She knew her limits, exactly where her Wall was, and when to stop pushing. She was at the Wall when she heard it.

A scream, slicing through the silent night like an knife.

Esther had paused. It was loud and high, then cutoff, quieted with a gurgling sound. She knew something was wrong. She couldn't run very far. She was way passed tired, but someone was hurt, possibly dying.

She ran faster, if only a little more than before. The gurgling noise got louder as she got closer.

Her footfalls were louder than the noise, and she stopped. Silence. Her last step crushed a dried leaf, filling the moment and somehow making the silence just after heavy and physical.

The person ahead of her hacked in the darkness and another noise arose.

Wet, smacking, and it reminded Esther of when she took too big of a bite of a too greasy burger. Smack, smack. When she couldn't shut her mouth because it was so full of food. Rip. Smack, smack. When the burger was so greasy, spittle flew from her mouth, watery oils dripped off her chin.

Then the smell hit her, metallic and revolting. She'd smelled blood before but never this much of it, and the less-pungent smell she found disgusting before was nothing close to this.

She almost wished she could see better but didn't really think that she was close to ready to seeing what was going on in front of her. Horror stalled the rest of her senses and she hadn't realized that the thing had gotten closer, much closer, until she felt it's musty, warm breath hit her face.

Her nose curled and bile bubbled at the bottom of her throat. She gagged on air and her feet plopped backward. Smack, smack. This time the sound was her feet on muddy ground.

"He-hello?" As the word fell from her mouth, the gargle started back up again, furious and guttural, only a foot from her face, it seemed. The growl got louder before it was interrupted by it's own hacking. Spittle flew onto Esther's face.

She reeled and ran back in the direction she once came.

She watched too many horror movies, read to many zombie-themed books, played too many zombie games. Too much for this shit.

All the scenarios and stories ran through her head and one thing was the most clear. She wasn't going to let this be the thing that killed her. She was going to be the main character. She wasn't going to die first.

Thoughts of Diana joined the zombies, and Esther wondered how she was coping, if it had even gotten that far. Had it?

A pain zinged up her leg and into her hip. Her muscles were tired. She was tired, but she wasn't so sure about stopping.

It would be dumb of her to think that there was only one, not including the person being eaten. Rational thoughts, rational thoughts.

Home. She needed to get home. She bit down the pain and she ran.