Death Role

The Beach

Exhausted, Colin stumbled and fell onto the sand. Behind him most of the city burned and what wasn’t on fire was dead anyway. He used the back of a hand to wipe sweat from his brow and as he did, the strong scent of gasoline wafted into his nose. Some of the fires that licked the cityscape were started by his own trembling hands. But he had to forget all of that. They only thing that mattered was what lay ahead. He crossed the wide strip of beach and knelt at the ocean’s edge. Using the coarse sand, he scrubbed the skin of his hands and arms with salt water until they smelled like the sea instead.

The undead were behind him too, somewhere within the burning city. He needed to find shelter to protect himself from them, yes, but also from the sun. It had refused to stop rising and now, midday, it beat on his skin relentlessly. He looked down the beach in both directions. Abandoned beach towels and children’s sandcastle buckets were scattered everywhere. A quarter mile South, Colin could see a lifeguard tower. It was a long shot, but going back into the city wasn’t an option and he couldn’t yet see any boats on the horizon.

He made his way to the elevated shack, picking up unopened water bottles and other drinks he found along the way and stashing them in a hot pink beach tote that he’d also acquired.

At the base of the stairs he looked up. The lifeguard tower didn’t seem inhabited, but the dead could be very quiet when they were dormant; when they didn’t know food was on the other side of a wall. Adding to his inability to access the situation was the fact that two large wooden covers had been pulled down over the windows. A weapon, he thought. But what? Everything around him was either fabric or child safe and therefore, harmless. He had passed one or two beach umbrellas stuck in the sand. A large pole from one of them would work well enough, certainly better than a towel.

Ten minutes later, his skin nearing first degree burn status, he stripped an umbrella from its pole and he hefted the hollow tube back to the shack. He walked slowly up the stairs, each one creaking generously under his weight. The umbrella pole stuck out in front of him and he held it underneath an armpit, tight against his body like a jousting lance.

He swung the door inward.

The smell hit him before the first of the two zombies hit the pole. The inside of the tower was covered in waste and rot. Food wrappers stuck out here and there from the shallow cesspool that was the floor. Zombie one and two had survived for a while, alive in this place. A plan similar to his.

“What happened to you?” Colin asked the first zombie, who had now, in her persistent forward pursuit of his flesh, succeeded in forcing the end of the umbrella pole through her rotting chest. The second, a man from what Colin could tell, hit the end of the pole so hard it pushed Colin backward down the stairs. The new angle of the pole sent the first zombie sliding toward him. A dark liquid ran from her chest and down the pole towards his hands.

He raised the pole up to stop her descent, dropped it and ran around the other side of the tower. The two zombies struggled to move after him as their paths were intertwined. They looked like a human shish-ka-bob and they would cook like one too if they stayed out in the sun.

A few circles around the shack, he lost his pursuers and made his way back into the guard tower. He wrapped a towel around his neck and face to help cut the stench. It wasn’t livable, but from there he could signal one of the boats he knew were out on the water.

Colin opened the windows of the shack, blocked the stairs with a stack of ice-turned-water-filled coolers, and waited.

West, the salty tide came in. East, a wave of zombies was approaching.