ZOMBIE BOOKS

capable of silent travel over any surface and deadly surprise attacks.  Not so, apparently.  Not so.  While scrambling to get under the car I kicked up a bit of rock and fell loudly against some metal rods that made a rather resounding gong noise.  The labored walking stopped.  I searched between wheels and under frames until I spied the legs.  They were just at the head of the car.  I planned to watch them carefully, and when they began to move, I would crawl out in the opposite direction and make a dash for it.
If it came down to it, I knew I could kill a zombie.  I had no weapon, but I would tear its head off if I needed to.  I knew I could.  I just knew it.
“Shit, Dave.  You found yer’self a squirrel.”  I spun to find the source of the voice and came eye-to-eye with a bearded man in a cowboy hat.  He had knelt right behind me.  I was so distracted by the legs that I had found, I never noticed the second pair.
In later years I would look back and remember that day as the one on which I was scheduled to die.  Hiding under the railcar?  What the hell was I thinking?  That it would be better to be dragged out from beneath my hiding spot and torn to pieces in the gravel than to die on my feet?  Idiot.  By all accounts, I should have died.
The cowboy laughed and swiped at my foot.  “Get’cher ass outta there boy, ‘fore one ah them things wanders over and tears you up.”  He stood, and his friend made his way around to car to us.
Sheepishly, I slunk out from my hiding spot.  Out of shame I wouldn’t look the cowboy in the eye, but that didn’t stop him from laughing and talking.
“Damn boy, I’ll say.  I have no idea how you ain’t dead yet you thinkin’ that was the right thing to do.”  The cowboy shook his head and grinned widely.  “Whatcha gunna do down there?  Huh?  Think they can’t reach?  Or crawl?  Huh?”
“I…”  Words were coming hard at the moment.  I was being schooled by some redneck, and my pride was taking some serious blows.  “I didn’t think that… I heard you guys coming and thought that you were zombies, and…”  And then tears.  Of all the moments in my life that I could have cried.  I had never been madder at myself than I was at that moment.  Standing before two grown men, being treated like a scared puppy, and then putting on the waterworks.  If suicide was an option at that moment I most likely would have taken it.
Truth was, I was scared, alone, and I had just got my first lesson in zombie survival.  Turns out I was no good on my own.  And so I began to cry.
Whack!
The cowboy cracked me across the head with a gloved hand.  I looked him in the eye and he was smiling again.  “Cut that shit out, huh?  Freaks Dave a little to see kids cry.”  His tone was steady but his face was the very image of insanity. I looked at Dave, who continued to be silent.  Even though, he looked at me like I was a bug that was due to be crushed and tossed out.  His eyes were deep and hollow.  I could remember thinking that he was half a zombie himself.  Without any pretense, Dave started his shuffle toward the mill again.  One of his legs moved free, while the other was clearly a prosthetic.
The cowboy laughed again and said, “Shoot kid, he ain’t a zombie.  Dave here lost his leg long before all this.”  He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder.  Oddly, my tears were drying up and the sensation of human contact felt good.  “I bet you could use some chow, huh?”
My stomach bubbled in anticipation and I nodded eagerly.
“Ha!  I thought so,” he replied animatedly.  “C’mon kid.”
As we walked side by side, the cowboy chatted happily but his eyes never stopped moving.  “Now don’t you worry about Dave rattin’ on your whimperin’ and cowerin’.  Boy hasn’t said a word since I met him.  Don’t even know if Dave is his real name, but we have to call him somethin’, right?  An’ Dave’s as good a name as any.”
“We?”  The wheels were turning slowly in my mind, but at least they were moving.  “How many of you are there?”
“Including you?” he asked.  “Seven.”
The cowboy, Dave, and four others.
And me.
“And you guys all live…” I ventured.
“In the mill.  Great place.  Lots of room and storage.  Lots of viewpoints.  And we’ve barricaded all the entrances we don’t use.”  He looked up to the looming structure and smiled like a proud parent.  “She’s just about perfect.”
“You and the others,” I asked.  “Are any of you family?”
“Shit, boy,” he chuckled at me.  “It’s the end of the world.  Zombies are eating the heads right off most of our loved ones and crazy-ass humans are shooting the rest.  There’s little to no food, no police, no fuel, an’ no more bullets once they’re gone.  We are going to live the rest of our lives and then die in this infested wasteland.  Kid, every human that is not infected or insane is now your family.”
“Uncle Cowboy,” I say.
“Damn right!” he pipes back.  “An’ don’t you be forgettin’ your uncle Dave there.”
Dave stopped just long enough to turn around and share with us an expression that told a very different tale than the one the cowboy just submitted.  Beneath his outer countenance of tired irritation, there was clearly the presence of hurt.  There was pain and despair, and from what I could see, he didn’t try very hard to hide it.  Wordlessly, he then turned back to the building and kept on.
“I think he likes you,” says the cowboy with a grin.
We approached the building from the rail yard on the east side.  There were sandbags and metal sheeting up in all of the