To Kill a Cactus - Dark Matter part 1

Chapter 4

Dark Matter

The "Mystery Killer Guy, who wasn't really a Killer Guy" carried me for a little while, I could see many curious eyes staring at us from behind the gate, but he didn't seem bothered by it. I was wondering where we were going, why weren't there any guards around. Perhaps he was a guard, he didn't look like one, but I also had been away for a little while, things changed so fast in the midst of a crisis, I felt like I changed with them.

Finally, we reached the main gate, where we could enter the city, I was looking around trying to figure out how we were supposed to get in. For a moment I thought that he was going to just use me as bait and throw me to the zombies to save himself, but once he opened the gate and walked out, everyone just moved out of our way and stared at us.

"These are the Surditas, they can not harm us, they are infected, but have the silent form of the disease, in fact, I'm not even sure if they're still alive. Every now and then one of them will collapse and the others just eat the fallen one, it's a gruesome sight, we better move fast," he said in a calm voice as if what he was saying was general knowledge.

"Why can't they harm us?" I asked him, although every word that came out from my mouth hurt.

"It's complicated, but we believe it has something to do with the brain activity difference between them and us, they see us as inedible, but those who have fallen among themselves as edible. All living creatures that have a lower brain activity than themselves is food, I don't know exactly what they view us as, but most studies we have attempted to carry out have given the same results," he answered with the same cool and collected manner as he had said everything else during our conversation.

"What about the ones who don't have the silent form?" I continued asking as we walked through the dead streets of the city.

"They're stronger, nearly impossible to kill, but fairly easy to capture. They are intelligent, capable of making decisions and plans, but ultimately their only goal is to gather as much food as possible, so they kill mercilessly,"  he said as we turned towards the main street, covered with trash, broken glass and odd slime that I could only assume was somehow left there by the infected people.

He added pace to his step, which made me feel slightly uneasy, I looked back and saw a group of people walking behind us, they seemed like the silent ones, they walked, eyes looking towards us, but they weren't aggressive.

Before I could ask him anything about it I heard a loud growling sound and the mass of people started running towards us, so he started running again. It definitely wasn't silent anymore, it sounded like wild hungry animals had been let loose and they looked like monsters, I saw thorns and spikes and needles poking out of their skin, some had horns, some were sticking out their tongue while screaming and I saw slime and blood running out from the cuts in their mouth and tongue.

We ran faster than them, which was a surprise to me since he was holding me and clearly couldn't use his full potential, however, I still saw the group of people behind us and they definitely weren't giving up. They almost looked happy, which was one of the scariest sights I had ever seen. 

Suddenly we stopped abruptly and the man said something beneath his breath that sounded like a bad word, so I shall not write it down to this story, but you can imagine a bad word of your choice. I looked in front of us and saw another group of infected people run towards us from the front. 

He threw me over his shoulder, which hurt a lot, but I didn't complain, just held on to his shirt as tightly as I could, that gave him a better freedom to use his hands to climb up a wall of the house that we were passing by from, I was extremely afraid, but at the same time impressed that he could pull himself and me up a broken down brick wall. To this day I don't realise how I didn't just fall down to my death there and then, but luckily he made it to an open window and pushed us both in from there. He adjusted me on his shoulder and kept running towards the other edge of the building. I couldn't really tell much about where we were since all I saw was a shaky vision of the floors that we were running on, within a few minutes we were on the other side and climbing back down again, he looked around, making sure it was safe and ran across the street to where the hospital was, compared to other buildings around us, the hospital was in pretty good condition, partly because it was guarded by a tall metal fence, which you needed the code to get in. To my delight, he knew the code and we were in, right as we heard the growling sounds get closer again. He put me on a bench and quickly secured the gates again, leaving the crazy zombie people on the other side, they were shaking the gates and reaching their hands through it trying to get to us.

He didn't let himself be bothered by them anymore, he just helped me to a wheelchair and we went inside. Funnily enough, as soon as we were out of sight, the zombie people went back to being silent and walked away as if nothing had happened. I guess they had things to do, people to kill or something.

We walked around the corridors of the hospital, it all looked almost too clean, too organised, like it was from another world. He wheeled me into a private room, where a lovely nurse examined me and got me settled in, he was gone before I could even say thanks. Whenever I tried to say anything, the nurse hushed me and said I needed to rest, so I put my head on the pillow and hoped that tomorrow would be a better day.

...

To be Continued