“No! I said don’t do that. What the hell!” 
Tommy stepped toward the woman as she attempted to sprint between two pair of outstretched arms. The eager arms trying to find lunch, which was the source of the screaming. Tommy winched as the zombie on the left grasp her ponytail. The woman’s face, joyful she had made it past them, would soon change to horror if Tommy couldn’t help her but he had his own problems. The woman’s screams had attracted a mob of zombies but worse, other prisoners had made the zombies ravenous.

The zombie we’re blind, their eyes covered in a cancerous white film but they felt everything. Tommy had developed a particular set of skills, allowing him to avoid the sun bleached, hungry grasped but he also avoided stupid moves like running between two zombies expected a miracle. 
“Miracles didn’t exist”, Tommy thought as he watched the woman fall backward landing on her ass first, then her back. 
“Miracles were part of that Christian revolution that disappeared once the world changed.” He continued the thought as he crouched low and walked forward, careful to avoid any noise. 

“Some of the Coyotes take a stabbing approach…,” he silently explained to himself, running through a speech he planned to give at the Rail Station downtown
later in the day. 
“… but I prefer the silent, stalking, carefully planned approach. Avoiding conflict, wasted energy and potential surprises. It’s a far smarter approach.” His thought concluded. 
He grabbed the woman by the ankles and pulled. The zombie holding her hair grasp tighter as he as his partner began to bend down. 
“Her screaming doesn’t help.” Tommy said to himself as hope of rescuing this group of prisoners disappeared along with the credits he would receive from the families.

“Five thousand credits per, multiplied by ten, now three… possibly two if I can’t rescue this dumb screaming woman. Hold it together Tommy. You can only do so much.”

Tommy lifted the woman by both ankles and violently pulled her toward him. She slammed her head on the concrete beneath her but the zombie holding her hair lost his hold. Tommy pulled again, careful to be as stealthy as he could. Other zombie stood waiting, listening groping for a clue. 
The woman lie under him. “Shut up!” He said looking into her terrified eyes. The look, familiar always haunting. “Your going to kill us both. Stop screaming.”

The woman stopped screaming, for the moment, and Tommy helped her to her feet. 
“We are 200 yards from Station 1,” Tommy said. “You can do this.” He encouraged her as he pulled a large gauze pad from his bag to stop the bleeding beneath her blond ponytail. He held it to her head for several moment as the two zombie approached from behind. 
The two other survivors, that had listened, stood like statues. Every bone and muscle in their body shook but they stood silently waiting. 
“Let’s go, quietly,” Tommy instructed. 
The four, two woman and two men walked slowly toward Station 1, a run-down restaurant with a large plate glass window in the front

Tommy placed the screaming woman’s hand on the gauze bandage and encouraged her to move forward quietly. She seemed to want to comply this time.

The two zombie behind them, encouraged by the interaction with the woman, approached. Their hunger insatiable. Tommy, was aware and searched for anything to lay in the pairs path. 
A shopping cart, covered in weeds, would work. Tommy suggested the group continue forward carefully and quietly as he veered off the the left to get the shopping cart. 
He freed the cart, in moments. Picked up the cart so it would not make noise and turned. 
All three survivors had began running toward the restaurant. 
Tommy cursed like he had never before. “The ignorance of these people,” he thought as he watched one of the men fall and get brutally beaten up, then eaten. The women ran erratically around the zombies that approached. Skillfully, avoiding the hungry lunges of the predators. 
“The zombie, though would overwhelm them,” Tommy thought. He knew it would happen, because it always did.

The numbers around the women grew till the commotion had drawn all the zombie from around where Tommy stood. He stood alone, behind a shopping cart, watching the entire scene. The tragedy of the inability to listen and check the fear for sake of survival. Tommy was void of fear anymore, reborn to this brutal new world of terror. He walked pass the growing mob of zombie and headed toward the back of Station 1. He approached the back door, withdrew a key and unlocked the door. He opened the door and disappeared.

Coyote Part 2