Werewolves and Zombies and Witches, Oh My (Patreon)

Stella crouched on her platform tucked into the trees and watched as the zombie shuffled past, his footsteps stirring the bed of leaves and moss so that forest smell drifted on the sluggish breeze. Most zombies stuck close to town where the cracked and crumbling concrete offered easier passage for a creature that didn’t lift its feet. But sometimes they wandered into the forest because the thickness of the trees sheltered them from the sun.

Stella thought of them as reverse lizards. They tended to amble about, largely uninterested in their surroundings. But where lizards got sluggish when they were cold, expose a zombie to the full sunlight of a warm day and something in them just became placid. Sometimes she wondered if it was biological. Maybe a warm summer day made something in the formerly human brain stir, sating the hunger. Or maybe it was supernatural. Maybe whatever angry spirited created zombies was at war with the sun god.

Stella used to think that stories of the supernatural were ridiculous fairytales. Old folks who had grown senile would whisper about werewolves and witches when she would volunteer at the nursing home, but those people hadn't engaged with reality for far too long. She assumed they were no longer able to divide fantasy from reality. She thought stories of the deep woods that surrounded their small Oregon town were fables. She’d done a school paper on local fables in third or fourth grade. She’d drawn a wendigo with purple fangs and her mother had hung it on the refrigerator.

But now that she lived in rough treehouses strung together with rope ladders and ramps, stories of mythological monsters didn't sound so fantastical.

The zombie below stopped when a branch at chest level blocked his way. She knew from experience that if he stood there long enough, he could make a decision. He might duck down or detour around the obstacle. He might turn around and shuffle back towards town, his feet dragging through the debris on the forest floor. He might stand there for days. Faced with a new situation, zombies appeared almost childlike. Stella wanted to cut the creatures head off so that its body would rot back into the earth where it should be. However, she knew that there was one situation in which zombies were not slow lumbering creatures. When they sensed food, they would—lizardlike—dart after it in a flurry of limbs and snapping teeth.

And anything living was food.

She ran her hand over the holster gun at her side, a prize from rating a neighbor’s house. The neighbor had been as dead as her family, so he hadn't minded. In some ways, he had been lucky. The zombies had ripped him apart to the point that he couldn't rise as one of them. Instead, he been allowed to rest in peace. Or pieces.

Zombies were not fastidious eaters.

They would rip and tear until some instinct in their lizard brain told them that the prey had been dead too long. And then as one they would all shuffle away. The real horror was when the zombies were not given enough time to eat. If the body was intact or the brain were intact or some combination that she had no interest in scientifically testing were intact, then the dead would lay slowly blinking. Their fingers would reverently touch their own wounds before they would sit up and join the mindless shuffle. Her mother had earned one of those deaths. Her father, the other. Her brother? That was a pain greater than death and one that she chose to ignore.

But now she had a problem. Noises, especially louder persistent ones, would eventually cause zombies to turn their shuffling steps in that direction. Long after the government had declared a lockdown while they tried to clear out the monsters, the school bells had continued to ring. Sooner or later, no matter where a zombie had been in town, it would slowly turn it shuffling steps towards that noise.

Of course, back then parents had still hidden infected children in basements to save them from government extermination. Husbands had still tied wives to the bed in a desperate hope that scientists would find a cure before soldiers discovered their dirty little secret. And the quarantine and lockdown made it entirely too easy for family members to hide those sorts of secrets. Love had ended the world before hate had cleaned up the scraps.

So her gun was out of the question. That was for emergencies or hunting when she was far from her home territory. But her machete was wildly dangerous. If Stella died out here, there was no one to lop her head off, and one zombie could not eat a person fast enough to prevent the turning. So if she failed, there would be two new zombies shuffling through these woods, and even without the danger of turning, she would prefer to avoid death.

Barely, but she was hanging on to a will to live by a thin thread.

After all, Stella hadn’t finished the Outlander books. She found that starting a book series was the best way to avoid the suicidal thoughts that would creep in during the long rainstorms that plagued the Oregon forests. She thought surviving the zombie apocalypse would be a physical trial, one that hunting with her father and older brother had prepared her for. Loneliness was a far more insidious threat. Some days she wanted to claw her own skin off, and only the knowledge that she would turn into one of the shuffling monsters stopped her.

But, today was a good day. She mostly did not want to die. And she wanted to stop this monster before it reached her clearing. She did not want zombie ooze soaking into her vegetable beds. No one knew what had caused the first to zombies, but virus was on the list of things discussed on the news before civilization had collapsed. Eating carrots soaked in zombie virus seemed like tempting fate a little too much. Besides, even on her most suicidal days, that would just be ick.

Tightening her hold on the machete, she considered her angles. The monster would fly at her the second she made a noise, but zombies couldn't climb trees or ladders. Stairs, they did pretty good at. They had a weird lizardlike crawl-dash that a lot of soldiers underestimated. Which explained why a lot of soldiers were now zombies.

The zombie was still staring at the branch blocking his way, and his downturned head gave her a good angle on the back of his neck. The problem was that a blade could get stuck in the spinal column easier than she'd ever thought. It was far safer to swing at the front of the zombie’s head because the blood loss would make them slower and inability to breathe distressed some remnant of humanity they still possessed. But to get a clean sweep, she needed the zombie to raise its head before she leaned over her platform and revealed herself. Who knows how long that would take.

But, the apocalypse and taught her patience.

She settled in to wait and watch as the ponderous gears in the zombie’s head turn as he tried to make a decision. The sun was getting low in the sky before his head came up. Perhaps the fading light made him feel livelier, but for half a second he almost looked like he could be hunter setting out a trap for the first day of deer season. Or he could be one of the new teachers at the high school. They always had a wide-eyed panicked look on their face.

But that was illusion. And she didn't allow herself to live in a fantasy.

As soon as the zombie’s chin listed, she grabbed a rope to brace herself and leaned over the edge of the platform. She swung her machete with all her strength before the zombie could react. The knife sank through the soft layers of flesh and blood sluggishly poured from the wound.

Most of the time, and injured zombie with food nearby turned into a maddened monster, but like most zombies with a neck wound, this one reached up to grab his neck as though he could stop the flow of blood. He made a gurgling noise as he tried to breathe air that she wasn't sure he even needed. She had seen zombies walking around with similar wounds. But this zombie wouldn't have that chance. She swung again hitting the back of the zombie’s neck. The swing wasn't clean, and she had to jerk her knife back and swing twice more before the zombie’s head came off and the body sank to its knees and then collapsed.

The stench was nauseating.

She desperately hoped they had a rain soon because she did not want to have to smell that anywhere near her treehouses. However, if it was a choice between zombie stank or zombie, she’d live with the stank. Scraping her knife on the edge of the crudely built platform, she got the worst of the gore off before she grabbed a handful of leaves to try and take care of the rest.

The sun was going down in the zombies would be at their most active. It was time for her to head home and pull up the ramps. Maybe there was enough light for her to read another chapter of Outlander. Supernatural hijinks were so much more entertaining when a person didn't have to smell them.