Episode 2.2

Joe stood with his hands on his hips facing a plastic statue of a milk carton. It had a cartoonish grin and dead eyes.

"You're mocking me," he mumbled with a sneer.

Joe's footsteps echoed off the walls of the hallway. He seemed to be in the administration building. The hall was lined with locked doors, each with a small window in them revealing nothing but darkened rooms. Joe walked toward the metal double doors at the end of the hall, hoping to find the actual factory part of the factory behind them.

The doors opened up into a large warehouse-like room, bristling with machinery. The floor was concrete, glazed, with some of the largest bloodstains Joe had ever seen. Narrow cages lined each wall, each one with tubing going in and out of it. Joe figured that must be where they milked the cows. At the end of the room was an enormous garage door. There were small rectangular windows where the walls met the roof, giving the place a dim, musty lighting.

Joe picked his way around the blood puddles as he walked across the room. He found that the garage door was too heavy to lift. He glanced around and found the pulley system; it was on a walkway that could only be accessed from a different room. He picked his way across the blood puddles again, because he was too stupid to realize that there was something weird about giant puddles of blood in the middle of a dairy farm.

Or maybe he just didn't care. He wasn't very well-adjusted.

Joe opened a door to another hallway, this one completely dark. There wasn't a single window, and only one other door at the end of the hall.

Joe was, for some reason, still completely unbothered. He happily strolled into the dark hallway, thinking about how delicious his cereal would be when he finally found a cow and a bucket in this place.

Joe opened the door at the end of the hall. Behind it was an enormous alligator, looking up at Joe with blood all over its maw as it stood over a mutilated cow.

They stared at each other for a moment.

The alligator hissed and charged. Joe let go of the door and darted backwards, but the gator stuck his head between the door and the wall, preventing it from closing. It snapped at Joe's feet and he stumbled backwards, almost falling over but righting himself at the last second. He bolted for the door back into the warehouse, and the gator slipped through the door and charged, hot on his heels.

Joe burst through the doors and skidded on the concrete as he took a sharp turn. The gator barrelled through the door afterward and careened across the slippery floor, claws scrabbling for control. The gator stood between Joe and the exit, blocking his way out the other door. Joe backed up, his back against the wall underneath the walkway. The gator regained its footing and crawled towards Joe until it was within feet of him, its enormous, bloodied mouth open to reveal its numerous yellow teeth.

"I'm going to die here," Joe thought. "And I'll never get to eat my breakfast cereal."

The gator opened its mouth wider, about to snap, when a crate dropped down onto its head, stunning it. Joe looked up to see Freckle standing on the walkway above him, readying another crate.

"Yes!" Joe yelled in joy as the crate landed with a thump to his right, then another. Freckle motioned towards them, and Joe climbed up on top of them. They weren't quite high enough to reach the walkway. Only the tips of his fingers could touch the metal.

The alligator shook off its dazedness and climbed halfway up the stack of crates, so that its hind legs were on the ground and its front legs were on the first crate. Its maw was dangerously close to Joe's sneakers. "Freckle! Pull me up!" Joe shouted, reaching above his head.

Freckle reached down, grabbed Joe's wrist, pulled off the bracelet with the car keys attached, and ran through the walkway's door.

For a few seconds, Joe didn't even process what had happened. Then he was so livid that every muscle in his body seemed to seize. Then he screamed louder than he'd ever screamed before. The sound caused birds a mile away to fly from their perches.

He couldn't believe he'd trusted him. He couldn't believe he'd trusted a man--a zombie-- who he'd barely met, who had no motive to help him, who had every motive to leave and never come back. He couldn't believe he'd trusted him for even a moment.

The gator snapped at Joe's feet. The boxes shifted as the gator put its full weight against them. It was only a matter of minutes, seconds maybe, before they all came tumbling down and Joe would be mercilessly devoured by a monstrous lizard. He pressed himself as close to the wall as possible and mentally prepared.

With a thunderous crash the truck broke through the garage door, barrelling across the warehouse floor, with Freckle at the wheel. The gator looked over at it and screeched, dropping down on all fours again, and with a sickening crunch and a spray of blood, one of the truck's tires collided with its head. The gator lay still. Freckle put the truck into reverse, running over it again. Then he put it into drive, and ran over it again.

"I...think that's enough, buddy," Joe said. Freckle hovered his hand over the gearshift for a second, then dropped it.

…

Joe drove them out of the dairy farm. He went a little bit faster on the highway than he had when they drove in.

"Hey," Joe said after a bit. "Were you going to leave me there?"

Freckle chewed his cheek, looked out the window, looked back. "Not really," he wrote.

Joe furrowed his brow. "That's...a vague answer, bud."

"I only considered it for a second. I was always planning on running the gator over with the truck, because I knew we couldn't outrun it. I also wasn't sure either of us had the arm strength for me to pull you up."

"Alright...alright. So zombies don't get super-strength or anything when they turn?"

Freckle frowned. "Only when we've got bloodlust."

"Wait, seriously?"

Freckle nodded. "When a zombie smells a human the fungus tends to take over."

"Oh. Wait, then why haven't you eaten me yet?"

"You don't smell like a human."

"Then what do I smell like?"

"Mountain Dew. Potato Chips. Sweat. Anxiety."

"Anxiety has a smell?"

"Oh def."

"What does it smell like?"

"Ammonia, mostly."

"Makes sense. Um--by the way, I'm really sorry you had to go in and rescue me, especially now that you got hurt."

Freckle looked down at his chest. Apparently lifting all those boxes had reopened the wound in his chest. The bandages had soaked through.

"Are you feeling alright?"

Freckle shook his head.

"We should get you new bandages. And clean up that passenger seat, actually. It's still got blood all over it."

Freckle nodded weakly. The feeling was strange--he didn't feel any pain, thanks to the fungus, but he still felt weak. His chest felt heavy where the fungus was holding him together.

He sighed, realizing that he'd have to stay with Joe for even longer.