The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse Read Online Free

things I thought I might need.”
    “Did she attack you?”
    “She tried,” Zane said softly. “But she stumbled. She clawed at me, her fingernails hooked into the sleeve of my shirt. I reached into the bag and felt the handle of the hammer. That’s what I hit her with.”
    I couldn’t help myself. “Jesus…” I breathed.
    Zane let out a breath he had been holding. It sounded like a tremulous sigh – the sound someone makes after they have cried themselves out. He nodded his head slowly. “She wouldn’t go down,” he said – and at last his eyes slammed into mine. I could see the haunted pain there. “I hit her again… and again,” he whispered. “Blood splattered over my shirt. I was screaming. The ghoul was shrieking. The fourth time I hit her I turned the hammer around and buried the clawed end of the tool into the broad of her forehead. The weight of the blow knocked her off her feet, but this time she didn’t get up.”
    “She was dead? I mean really dead?”
    “I don’t know,” Zane confessed. “She wasn’t moving. I don’t know if that ended her or not. I threw myself behind the wheel of my car and reversed over her. Then I just drove, man. I drove as fast as I could and I didn’t ever look back.”
    I stood back and shook my head slowly. Zane’s harrowing encounter with one of the ‘Afflicted’ was the kind of moment that could haunt a man for the rest of his life – especially a young man without a lifetime of experience to bulwark his emotions. I felt sorry for him. On the surface he was calm, composed. But the layers underneath were scared with the horrors that happened during the Apocalypse.
    We walked back towards where our vehicles were parked. Somehow, away from the storage shed, the air seemed fresher, the space around us less claustrophobic. Zane leaned against the side of his Jeep like he needed to. I wrote three pages of frantic notes and then looked up circumspectly.
    “Can we go to the University now?”
    Zane looked up like it was the first time he had seen me. “Why?” his voice became guarded.
    “So I can get a sense of the events that happened that day, Zane,” I said honestly. “I don’t want to just tell the world your story, I want to know where you were, what you lived through. To do that we need to go back to the campus.”
    He thought about it for a long moment, his eyes narrowed. The friendly affable face was hidden behind a mask. “Sure,” he said slowly. “That makes sense.”
    I followed Zane in my own car. It was a short drive. The lawns were overgrown and filled with weeds, the concrete paths that snaked their way through the maze of University buildings were cracked and crumbling.
    “This was the Janzow Campus Center,” Zane looked over his shoulder at me as we went in through the doors. The interior was a wrecked abandoned shambles. The chairs and tables were overturned, painted in a coat of grey dust and there were the droppings of vermin and birds on the floor. A couple of pigeons were roosting in the rafters where the ceiling had collapsed, looking down at us. There were framed dusty photos still hanging askew on the walls, an overturned pool table and a couple of sofas, each with the stuffing gnawed out of them by rats… or something larger.
    Zane looked around, reminiscing. “They were refurbishing and renovating this part of the university just before the Apocalypse broke out,” he said absently.
    I looked around. The windows were smashed and there was glass everywhere. It crunched loudly under my feet. One of the walls was spattered in dried blood. It looked like an abstract artist’s mural.
    I heard Zane sigh. His hands had bunched into fists, the flesh across his knuckles white with tension or tight restraint. He stared at me, maybe resentful now that I had brought him back here.
    “This is the place,” he said tonelessly and pointed. “I was sitting right over there. By a window.”
    “What were you doing?”
    “Preparing for a