Affliction Z: Abandoned Hope (Post Apocalyptic Thriller) by Ryan L.T

Author:Ryan, L.T. [Ryan, L.T.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Published: 2013-12-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

The ground felt damp and cold. The few remaining bugs crawled across Kathy’s exposed skin. She didn’t care. Not about the cold, the wet, or the bugs. She felt disassociated from herself. Her jumbled thoughts told her she should be dead. After all, she slept shirtless through a near-freezing night.

What had happened to her shirt?

She struggled to recall. Words were difficult to form in her mind, so she resorted to images. She’d taken off after something, an animal for food perhaps. The creature led her into the woods. A collision with low hanging branches resulted in her shirt being torn off her body.

Had that been yesterday, or the day before?

She couldn’t tell. The last few ran together.

She no longer felt sick. The coughing had stopped. The fever had gone away. New sensations replaced the old. She felt a hunger, a craving, for flesh. She needed to eat. It didn’t matter that there was a pantry full of food. That did nothing for her when she scarfed it down. The desire for warm, raw meat had taken over. She had also become acutely aware of everything around her over the past few days. It was in stark contrast to the way she felt about the shell she inhabited. She could brush her fingers across the bark of a tree and it might as well have been a silk sheet. It didn’t register. But when a rabbit moved fifty yards away, she honed in on it.

Few human thoughts remained with her. The ones that did were powerful. She thought of the man she called her husband, and the girl she called her daughter. Those words meant little to her anymore, but she still felt a strong connection with the memories of the two of them. Scenes of her life with them would fire off in her mind at odd intervals. She never noticed a scene that played twice, and she could no longer recall an event after she saw it. She knew they were there, somewhere, but she could not access them again, no matter how hard she tried.

The house that she hung around held some significance to her as well. She knew enough to go inside to find food, but aside from that, she wasn’t sure what it was for. Yet, she did not want to leave it. In the shadow of the house, she felt something. Normalcy, perhaps. That’s the word that came to her, at least.

Kathy licked her dirt-caked lips and lifted her head. She glanced up at the gray sky and wondered if it were about to rain.

Would she care? Would she even know what rain was by the time she felt it again?

This is how it played out in her mind. One minute more human than monster. The next, more monster than human.

She pushed herself off the ground, sliding her feet underneath her so she could remain crouched. The tall grasses in the field provided her with cover. She heard a rumbling in the distance. It reminded her of the truck driven by the man she knew was her husband.

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