Page 96 of Hollow Valley

As if answering him, she laid down and immediately started gnawing it herself.

“Oh, no, it’s just a snack for her,” he realized.

Vince had gotten used to Ripley and her appetites, but Buck watched her eating with absolute fascination and possibly abject horror.Although it was hard for me to tell exactly what horrified a mule.

As the morning light spilled over the mountains and onto the valley below, an unsettling noise drifted through the air.The dry guttural moaning was unmistakable.

Somewhere beyond the tree line, the zombies had awoken from the spring thaw, stirring with new hunger.Jordy and I exchanged wary glances before we went for our weapons of choice – the maul axe for me, and a machete for him.We readied to face whatever had clawed its way back to life with the melting ice.

58

Remy

Half-a-dozen of the decaying, infected bodies shambled out from between the trees.None of them were particularly fast, and they had survived enough seasons out here that most of their flesh had been rotten or frozen off.They were little more than skeletons with flakes of bluish-green skin and filthy scraps of old clothing.

A good chunk of them didn’t even have eyes anymore.Likely because so much of the tissue had been lost around the faces.Maybe the eyes froze and burst or were eaten by a particularly brave crow.

I half-expected them to erupt into a cloud of dust when I hit them with my axe, but that wasn’t what happened.Their bones had deteriorated to the typical zombie-gelatin, but the cold left them semi-frozen.A slushy mixture of green blood and yellowish bone splattered all over the ground and all over me.

By then, Ripley set aside her deer leg and went to work tackling the boney remnants of the zombies that clambered up the hillside toward us.The mules were braying and kicking out, but the ghoulish predators never made it anywhere near the tied down equines.

Ripley, Jordy, and I made quick work of the zombies, and then we were left with bones and flesh littering the ground around us.

“That’ll get your blood pumping in the morning.”Jordy grinned down at the carnage, and he wiped a spot a blood off his brow.

“These zombies look old as hell.I wonder how long they’ve been up here?”I asked.

He shrugged.“Maybe they’ve been wandering for a long time.They started out way down in the desert and slowly stumbled their way north for a decade.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Why do they do anything?”Jordy countered.“Zombies motivations have never made much sense to me.”

My hands were sticky with cold, drying zombie blood, and it would rust my axe blade if I didn’t take care of it properly.

“I’m going to get cleaned up,” I told Jordy, using my maul axe to point to a meltwater stream down the trail half-a-kilometer.

“I’ll be behind you in a few minutes.I want to check on Buck and take care of some things around the camp,” Jordy replied.

“Okay,” I said, even if I didn’t fully understand.I didn’t want to touch anything with hands covered in congealing zombie blood.It would get matted in the mules’ fur, contaminate our food and water, and stain our clothing.

But Jordy had his own way of doing things, so I left him to it.Ripley followed me down to the rapidly flowing stream, and she immediately stuck her face in the cold, clear water.

I rinsed off my weapon, and then I scrubbed at my hands until they were red and raw.Lyssavirus infection wasn’t a threat to me, but I hated how their blood felt on my skin.

Once I was done, I headed up the hill.As I returned to the campsite, I saw Jordy crouched over the zombie corpses.His back was to me, so I couldn’t tell what he was doing at first.

Then he stood up, and I saw the zombie brain in his hand.It was unmistakable.A fleshy mound of pale green marred by dozens of little holes, so it resembled a cross between Swiss cheese and pistachio pudding.

In his other hand, he held a strip of cheesecloth and wrapped the infected organ inside it.But I’d seen that before.At Jordy’s house, where bound pouches leaked green fluid into mason jars.

He had claimed that the cloth was filled with various herbs, giving the grinleaf its green hue.I had naively assumed that byherbs, he meant things like mushrooms, marijuana, or psychotropic flowers.

The rest of the process I understood, because he’d even walked me through it, and none of it had seemed strange or horrific.Of course that was before I understood that the very first “natural” ingredient was actually a freshly squeezed zombie brain.

“What the hell are you doing?”I shouted at Jordy, even though the situation was more than apparent to me.

When he saw me, his eyes widened, and he stammered out, “I-I… It’s not… This isn’t how it looks.”