Shore Haven (Short Story): Leaving Liberty by Reynolds Jennifer

Author:Reynolds, Jennifer [Reynolds, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Zombies
Publisher: Jennifer Reynolds
Published: 2019-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

6

By dawn of that morning, I was at the warehouse. Chuck and one other man—I couldn’t remember his name—were gone, but the others were in the main lobby waiting for the sound of the lowering bridge before exiting. I thought we should be closer in case the sound lured the zombies to us, but the group had decided that waiting at the warehouse was safer on the off-chance Chuck didn’t bring down the bridge.

“Where’s Chuck?” I asked when no one acknowledged my presence.

“At the bridge,” Diana said. “He and Simon are going to lower it manually. I’m not sure how, but Chuck found a book on drawbridges made after the quakes, so he thinks he can use it to figure out how. The two men have been at the bridge all night. They told us to stay here until we heard the bridge start coming down. They said we’d know the sound when we heard it.”

I was both thankful I hadn’t been too late and peeved that they’d made no plans to wait for me.

Chuck was right. We knew the second the bridge started coming down. Two hours after I arrived, we heard a noise, almost like a mechanical humming. I expected something louder, not that the sound was quiet or anything, though, without the ding-ding of the sirens that usually went off with it to indicate further that the bridge was going up or down, it was quiet.

We left the building. The sound of the bridge lowering was drawing zombies, as I knew it would, and the group wanted to be able to get back to the warehouse quickly if something went wrong. Nothing did though. We got to the bridge before the turned could outnumber us, and those closest to us, we were able to dispatch easily enough.

The bridge was almost completely down when we reached its mouth and started to cross. We’d expected to see Dominic or some of his people on the other side, but all that was there was a large metal barrier of some kind blocking the exit.

“What’s that?” I asked, swinging my sword to decapitate a zombie that had stumbled onto the bridge behind me.

“It’s a blockade to keep zombies from leaving the island,” Chuck said. “Dominic warned us that they’d erected it to keep a swarm of zombies from crossing the bridge and attacking them.”

I looked behind me, and though I didn’t see a swarm of zombies, I saw enough to understand Dominic’s worry.

“Surely they can see that there are only us and a handful of the turned on the bridge,” Lucas said. “And those following us won’t be a problem.

“For now they won’t be, no, but their numbers can grow. You’re not looking at things from their point of view. We’re just as unknown to them as they are to us. They have no idea what’s on this island, just as we can’t know what’s on the other side of that wall. Both sides are going on faith that the other is telling the truth.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.