Decaying Humanity by James Barton Read Free Book Online Page A

jogged over to see the man’s legs convulsing in pain. There was a thin green package lying on the floor with spilled powder. The man’s wrist was bubbling. “What the hell is that?” I asked.
        “Speed Clot; I got it from the Army surplus store while you were at work.”
        “Is it legal?”
        “Everything is legal now. Plus, you’d be surprised what you could get when you say price is no issue. Except guns … apparently,” Harvey said.
        “What is it doing to him?”
        “Chemically searing his wounds shut. It keeps soldiers from bleeding out before they can make it to the surgeons. He isn’t going to bleed to death now, but without antibiotics or whatever they use, he might just die from an infection.”
        “Fuck you,” the man muttered still making a sneering expression from the pain.
        I looked over at the broken man, “We won’t need him that long.”
        So we planned it out, the immoral lessons we would extract from our unwilling teacher. There is only so much we can learn from the death of one person. These lessons also required zombies; which worried me.
        “What caused infection? How long once infected does it take before you turn? What kills them and how do they hunt us? Those were the most pressing questions we needed answered,” I said while writing in the notebook. Harvey nodded his head while tying the man up with phone cable.
        “They will come back for me,” the man muttered.
        Now I may have skipped some parts of the story. John, or whatever the hell his name was, had been talking non-stop since he recovered from his amateur surgery. Pleading at first, telling us that he only needed the food and that he had never shot anyone. When that didn’t seem to get him anywhere, he started threatening and making demands. His stories kept changing, but he kept coming back to the one where they had taken up residence in the Allmart. They had at least a hundred men and were going to take this attack personally. He painted a picture of a tough group of people that pretty much took what they wanted. People that tried to steal from them, even their own members that took too many rations were tortured and killed.
        I had struggled with a few shreds of remorse for what we were about to put him through, but thankfully he had cured me of that. Not only did he seem more evil than us, he just simply wouldn’t shut up.
        “When they get here, they aren’t going to kill you. Oh, no, they are going to chain you up to the back of the truck and drag you all the way home until bloody chains are all that is left of you,” he said before spitting on the floor. Harvey and I looked at each other one last time. Screw it; I don’t even feel bad about this anymore.
        There he was, beaten and bloody, tied to a folding chair. The sun was just peeking over the horizon and provided enough light to drag him into the dewy grass. One of the things we needed to learn was if the undead were attracted to noise, particularly voices or just any loud sound. We hadn’t figured out how to test smell, but to test sight we decided to throw a blanket over him. It sounded stupid, but what if a sheet made you invisible to their dull senses? We had seen so many movies that it was hard not to assume we already knew it all.
        So there he was, in the yard with a thin white sheet covering him, rocking back and forth cussing up a storm. I was surprised that the gunshots and commotion from last night didn’t attract any visitors, but we had only seen one zombie so far. We were also concerned that the neighbors might try to save him. No heroes showed up during last night’s shootout, so it seemed they were content to mind their own business.
        So we left him in the yard, swaying back and forth like a foul-mouthed ghost. A few minutes in, John managed to knock himself to the ground. We went out to him, not to sit him back up, he could