We're Still Alive(Book1)BEING REWRITTEN

Five

Nocona, TX

          Paige mumbled and shifted around on the hay-covered floor. Cobalt nudged her again, grabbing some of her hair in his teeth and softly pulling at it.
          "Fine, I'm up." She pushed his head away and stood up. She had fallen asleep in the barn next to his stall the night before, and was now covered in hay and horse hair. She brushed off her clothes and looked around. It didn't take her long to remember what happened. She thought back to her parents, to Zoe, her aunt and uncle...
          Paige shook her head, trying to clear some of the thoughts, but she couldn't. She felt a sharp pain in her chest when she thought about her parents, how they were before. Her dad had promised to take her shooting that weekend, and her mom was going to take her shopping for her school dance. Then she remembered that morning, her father's eyes replaced with something else, something evil. She remembered the blood around his mouth and the body laying at his feet.
She was pulled away from her thoughts when Cobalt nudged her again, almost pushing her down.
          "What?" She asked, pushing his head back. He reached around her arm and nibbled at her hair. "Are you hungry? Is that it? Here, I'll get you some hay." She wandered to the other side of the barn and started pulling at one of the stacked hay bales. It was one of the larger bales, and she had pulled it only half-way to the stalls when she set it down with an exhausted sigh. "I think I'm out of shape boy. I don't think you really need to stay in there anyway," she opened the stall door to let him out, "I mean, as long as you're in the barn, you should be fine." Cobalt stepped out of the stall and trotted over to the hay bale. Paige smiled as he tore hungrily into the hay. At least someone was enjoying himself.
           She looked at the barn doors. What was going on outside? What was wrong with all those people? It was torture, not knowing, but she wasn't going to go open the doors. She wasn't that desperate. Then she looked up towards the loft of the barn. She remembered playing up there when she was younger. She would hang out the loft door, and sometimes even jump out onto a pile of hay bales that sometimes sat outside. Taking another quick look at Cobalt, she climbed up the ladder into the loft and over to the small door.
          Paige crouched on her hands and knees and crawled over to the edge. There wasn't much to see; mostly fields and a few other barns and houses. You wouldn't have thought that anything was wrong, except for the figures wandering through the fields. Paige laid down on her stomach and watched. What was she supposed to do? Was it like this everywhere?
          She was distracted by another noise just below her. She sat up and looked out over the edge of the window. There was a person just underneath her, a woman. Paige couldn't tell how old she was, though; probably in her thirties.
          She leaned farther out the door, trying to get a better look. Nothing. She leaned farther, so that she was almost right above the woman. That's when she felt the hay under her hands slip, and the next thing she knew, Paige was falling from the opening; lucky for her, it wasn't a big barn. They hadn't planned on having a lot of animals, so Paige's aunt and uncle didn't plan on having a big barn, either. And it was a good thing, because it made the fall a lot better than it could have been, even though there was no longer hay stacked at the bottom. Especially with the woman to break her fall.
Paige gasped as the wind was knocked out of her. Her first thought was that she'd fallen out of the loft door, putting her in a bad situation. Her second was that she'd landed on the woman below the
window, putting her in a worse situation. Paige struggled to her feet, trying to get as far away from the woman (who, as Paige had guessed, was not entirely human) as she could. The woman seemed to change after that. Before, she had been walking the same way as the other zombies: in a slow, kind of limping walk. Now she leaped at Paige, crouching down like an animal and then stretching her arms out. Without even thinking about it, Paige had taken out her pocket knife and unfolded it, holding it out in front of her. It didn't seem like it would do much, a small knife against the almost super-human woman. And yet it killed her. Paige gasped and fell onto her back as the woman landed on her and the knife found it's way into the zombie's forehead. It went in almost past the handle, and the woman immediately went limp. Paige relaxed, taking a few seconds to catch her breath. She realized that her left shoulder was throbbing, most likely from both the falls, and the stench of the blood filled her nose. At first, she just laid still, dread filling her at the thought of the other creatures noticing.
          After a minute or two, when nothing else happened, she tried to stand up, struggling with the woman's body. She was a lot heavier than Paige had expected. That was when she saw it. Apparently others had heard her struggle, because now there was another zombie at her feet, this one a man. She couldn't see him clearly over the dead body, but she noticed he moved slower than normal. He was looking her straight in the eye. Paige thought about running to the front barn door, but the man was blocking her way, and there was no way up to the window. There was a back door, but with the body weighing her down and the man next to her, Paige knew she couldn't make it.
          Suddenly she relaxed and closed her eyes. There was no way out. She could hear the man circling her, and when she looked she saw that he was crawling on all fours. She closed her eyes again as he came up to her head. Maybe if she played dead; would he fall for that? She could hear him sniffing the air, like a hunting dog. He sniffed at her face, which was now covered in blood, then up higher, probably smelling the woman.
          Then she heard it. Paige couldn't tell where the sound came from, but it made her whole body tense up. It was coming from farther in the city. It sounded like a howling, screeching kind of noise, not the sound any person or animal would be able to make. She opened her eyes to see the the man had stopped sniffing to listen. Then he answered with another call, this one more high-pitched and right next to Paige's ear. She wanted to cover her ears from the horrible noise, but she couldn't move between her fear and the body on top of her. Over the howling, she thought she heard others, but it was hard to tell. Finally it stopped. Paige watched as the man leaped up and took off at a dead sprint, faster than she'd seen anyone run in her life, toward the city. He was followed by the others who had been wandering the farm.
          After they were gone, Paige let out a sigh of relief and sat up, struggling to push the body off of her. When she did, she saw that her shirt was covered in blood. And it stank. It really stank.That didn't really surprise her, though. The dead woman looked like she had started rotting long ago. Of course, if these were really zombies, then they were technically dead, and moving their own dead bodies would make them rot faster. But how could something that was half-dead move like that? How could it call out to others like it and use its nose like a dog's? 
          And why hadn't the man attack? He had been smelling her, that was definitely weird. Paige hadn't seen zombies attack each other, just people. Living people. Despite everything, the zombies at least smelled dead. Paige was covered in zombie's blood. So she smelled dead. That's when she got the idea.