The hardest part of sleeping nowadays is the nightmares, that is if you can get to sleep with the constant, never-ending moaning and growling outside.
Michael had just woken up from a nightmare for the second time today. It was always the same one every time. The one where everything seems normal, before all of this.
He goes to his parents house for a visit, only they aren't home, the entire house is empty apart from his little sister sitting in a bare living room on the floor with a blank expression. There is no sound apart from a mysterious unseen clock loudly ticking away. Supposedly unaware of the evidently bizarre aberration of the house Michael sits down beside her and begins staring into nothing alongside her as if in a trance.
Time passes, whether it was minutes, hours or days he doesn't know. Eventually his sister stands up and walks up stairs into her bedroom, closing the door. Michael doesn't appear to notice until he hears a deafening bang and a scream echoing from the very same room. He runs up those seemingly endless stairs, with a hatchet for some reason in his hand, and into her room, the floorboards creaking with every step. Opening the door he sees his sister lying on the floor, somehow already decayed and rotten, a single maggot crawling in and around her bloodshot eye. Crouching over her with their faces buried into her flesh were their parents. The entire room stunk of blood and rotten meat, he gagged and would have vomited if not for the fact he hadn't eaten in days. Michael froze as his undead parents turned their stiff and decomposed necks towards him. He doesn't resist when they grab him and plunge their teeth into his neck and shoulder. The last thing he always sees before he wakes up is his sister's fingers twitching.
Having decided that he had wasted enough daylight brooding over his nightmares Michael began checking whatever supplies he had in his bag. A bottle and three quarters worth of water and a single bag of trail mix. Evidently, he needed to scavenge more, which unfortunately means a trip into the city. Hopefully he wouldn't need to go in too far. Who knows how many walkers could be lurking around, waiting for an easy meal. Grabbing his hatchet and handgun, Michael set out carefully and quietly from his temporary makeshift residence on the western outskirts of Salt Lake City and headed inwards, vigilant in case an audacious walker tried to sneak up on him. As he went further in he noticed the disturbing scent of burning and rotten meat which reminded him of those nightmares. He wrinkled his nose in disgust and put the thoughts away from his mind.
The smell was virtually overpowering but he was almost there, a charming little grocery store by the name of Grossman's Groceries that he had regularly taken food and water from when he needed. Having arrived at the store's entrance, he pulled up the roller shutter and stepped inside, making sure it was closed again before moving on. He gripped the hatchet tighter just in case walkers or bandits somehow found their way inside. At this point in time most of the fruits, vegetables and milk had gone bad and spoilt without refrigerators to keep them fresh, so Michael usually ignored these aisles and skipped straight to the canned goods. "Shit." Michael whispered to himself when he saw that almost everything had been taken since last time he was here, apart from one can of sweetcorn and a can of tomato soup.
Suddenly he heard a thunderous bang on the shutter, immediately he grabbed the two cans and ran for the back entrance of the store. Even if it was a lone roamer just accidently bumping into the shutter, he couldn't take the chance if another saw the first walking into the shutter and mistake it as an attempt to get in. If that happened the second one will beat the shutter in order to get in, then the first walker will see this and join the other one in trying to make their way in, and it will go on and on until every walker in the area is all riled up and hungry. He'd seen it happen before.
Half Pint