The Lunar Shadow

Chapter 1 : The Lost Town

There stood the great town of stonegrandce, hiding into the darkness of what humanity had done to it. The city that was once clean and pure, it has a depressing aura seeping out. The Sun had gone behind the crumbling mountains, going to brighten another poor soul’s city. 

The town was filled with rotting smell of the dead bodies, Unfortunately, not only you can smell the dead but take the wrong turn and you'll be able to see them. As I continue through the streets it’s no longer silent. The dead were nearby. I immediately stopped walking, curved steel hooks protruding from either fist, I turned and leapt into the mass.

The infected lunged at me from all sides. 

I didn't think. 

I just fought. 

A flurry of steel and blood, the baling hooks like a part of my body. I sank a tip in one infected's throat, ripping it out even as I pivoted to cave in another's skulls at the temple. The first three fell away, knocking down te others.

But I wasn't done there. 

Rather than let the others come after me, I jumped down into their midst and waded in, both arms Swinging. Blood spatter arced overhead. I was screaming not in fear but in rage. A battle cry.

I hurled a hook up through the soft flesh beneath an infected woman's chin, the tip curving through her skull and shoving through her eye hole, popping the front membrane. I wrenched the hook free, and shee toppled, shuddering. 

Another infected grabbed me from behind, but I spun, raking both hooks, embedding the points in the side of his head. He dropped back stiffly, his body like a plank, his weight yanking his head free of the steel points. My arms ached at my sides. The Hosts lay sprawled around, twitching and gone. My face and shirt felt sticky with their blood, and my hooks were stained oil-black. 

For a moment the silence bathed me. 

Nine infected, dead at my hand. 

With each breath I seemed to inflate, my spine straightening one vertebra at a time, pulling me upright inch by inch. 

A familiar sound called my attention to the side of the highway. A few more infected trudged toward the barricade, their legs mired up to the ankles in the marshy reeds.

I drew the revolver, waited until they reached the edge of the asphalt about ten yards away. Then I shot them through their foreheads, one after another. 

I should probably introduce myself at this point. My name is Mark Curtis, and I'm fifteen. Fifteen in Stonegrandce isn't like fifteen in a lot other places. We work hard her and start young. I can till a field, work a bulldozer, break a mustang, and if you put me behind a hunting rifle, odds are I'll bring home dinner.

  

I'm also good at training dogs. 

That's what my aunt and uncle put me in charge of when they saw I was neither as strong nor as tough as my older cousin brother. 

No one was. 

I'm the place where you're from, Chris would be the star quarterback or the homecoming king. Here we don't have homecoming, but we do have the Harvest King, which Chris won by a landslide. And of course his girlfriend, Alexandra, won Harvest Queen.

Alex with her hair the color of wheat and her wide smile and eyes like sea glass. 

Chris is seventeen, so Alex is between us in age, though I am on the wrong end of that seesaw. Besides, to look at Chris you wouldn't think he was just two years older than me. Don't get me wrong - years of field work have built me up pretty good, but at six-two, Chris stands half a head taller than me and has grown man strength.

It hard to remember now before the virus spread, but things were normal once here Our town of three thousand had dances and graduations and weeding and funerals. When someone's house got blown away in tornado, people pitched in to help and rebuild it. There were disputes and affairs, and every few years someone got shot hunting and had to get to Stark Peak, the closest thing to a city around here, and hour and a half by car when the weather cooperated. Two years ago the three Braaten brothers took their mean streaks and a juiced up Camaro on a joyride, and only one crawled out of the wreckage alive. You can bet Ben Braaten and his broken skull got hauled to Stark Peak in a hurry

Our town was behind on a lot. The whole valley didn't get any cell coverage. There was rumor that AT&T was gonna come put in a tower, but what with our measly population they didn't seem in a big hurry. Our parents said that made it peaceful here. I thought that made it boring, especially when compared to all the stuff on TV. The hardest part was knowing there was a whole vast world out there, far from us. Some kids left and went off to New York or L.A. to pursue big dreams, and I was always a bit envious, but I shook their hands and wished them well and meant it.

When I was six, my parents went to Stark Peak for their anniversary. From what I learned later, there was steak and red wine and maybe a few martinis, too. On their way to the theater, dad ran an intersection and his trusty Chrysler got T-boned by a muni bus.

At the funeral the Caskets had to stay closed, and I could only imagine what Mom and Dad looked like beneath those shiny maple lids. When Stark Peak PD released their personals, I waited until late at night, snuck downstairs, and snooped through them. The face of Dad's beloved Timex was cracked. I ran my thumb across the picture on his driver's license. Mom's fancy black clutch purse reeked of lilac from her, but too strong, sickly sweet, and it hit on the memories buried in my chest. When I opened the purse, a stream of pebbled windshiels glass spilled out, some of it was red. 

Breathing the lilac air, I remember staring at those bloody bits scattered on the floorboards around my bare feet, all those pieces that could never be put back together. I blanket out after that, but I must have been crying, because the next thing I remember was Chris appearing from nowhere, my face pressed to his arms when he hugged me, and his voice quiet in my ear: 'I got it from here, little brother.'

TO BE CONTINUED...