Lethal

She hoped they were safe and that her dying then undying didn't throw them off their game enough to let their guards down. Thoughts like this invaded her mind no matter how hard she was trying to push them out.

In just the past year they had been through so much. Several times they had been on the brink of starvation, making do with less than half the caloric intake they should have had per day. This drove them all to become rather adept hunters. Nothing compared to whatever she was now.

The plan had been to find nonperishable food they could take with them on the boat, but that was easier said than done. The only hope of that happening would have been if they ran into some fully stocked bunker they could have raided. Even on their best days, none of them were that lucky. Hell, with the luck they had lately they would find a bunker, and in it someone waiting to blow away the first person to come through the door.

The sound of crunching pine needles snapped her from her thoughts back into that predatory mind set from the night before. She immediately locked onto what was making the noise. One of the infected. Zombie or whatever. It stumbled along slowly through the dark forest, carelessly crunching through the underbrush, and completely unaware of the creature watching it approach.

Under normal circumstances she would have been in a defensive mode, ready to dispatch the thing quickly and quietly with a knife. However, as she laid there still on her back, eyeing the thing from afar, she wondered how it would react to her.

She certainly didn't feel threatened by this slow lumbering creature. What did she have to lose? After all, she was already dead.

She stood leisurely, taking time to brush off the pieces of leaves and other debris that had stuck to her clothes and hair. Still the creature shambled forward, closer now but still just as expressionless and uninterested as before. As if there were no one around it at all.

Had she been fully alive the thing certainly would have noticed her by now and started making its way to her.

So, she took a few careful steps toward it, now only 15 feet away or so. The faint amount of moonlight that filtered through the canopy above shown on the thing's face as it turned slightly toward her. Its jaw seemed to have been nearly ripped completely off and now dangled from his skull, only attached by the delicate skin that still clung there.

It groaned at her but made no further steps in her direction, instead choosing to readjust to the course it was on originally and go about its business.

"Well now that's just rude" she said hoping to elicit a response and receiving nothing.

Her eyes squinted as if she had just been snubbed by someone with a working brain. But the fact that this creature had a very diminished brain function did nothing to quell that feeling.

She walked towards the thing not measuring her steps and not caring for the snaps and crunches below her. It didn't matter anyway.

How did this thing see her? Obviously not as a threat and not as food. Did it see her as one of them? That wasn't true either.

Suddenly she found herself running as fast as she could through the forest. She was overcome with the need to find her boys. They were the only tie she had to any type of sane world. Nothing about who or what she was made sense and she knew if she could just talk to them, they could figure this out. Just seeing them would bring her peace. She needed to know they were alright.

The sun was making its first appearance of the day not yet having breached the mountains in the distance as she reached the clearing. The field just ahead was where just yesterday she had died, resurrected, and fled from to save her boys from the slaughter that she had inflicted on an innocent family.

They would just have to figure out how to deal with her new... living situation... Her mind was clear as she sprinted forward into the clearing. She could live without her boys, but she didn't want to. She needed to find them. Then everything would be okay.