“Let me see her.” A muffled female voice said.

I opened my eyes to complete darkness. My head throbbed, and something warm and wet was crawling down the right side of my face. Blood, I thought. I went to wipe it away but realized my hands had been duct taped together behind the back of the chair I sat in.

Footsteps loudly approached, from where I couldn’t say. Maybe my right? I had to squint when the door flew open in front of me, its rusty hinges squealing while blinding light flooded in from whatever was on the other side of it.

“You don’t mind if i sit, do you?” A woman in a white tank top said, flipping on a table lamp and letting the door close behind her. I just stared back at her as my pupils tried to adjust.

“Wait, how silly of me,” she continued, “let me help you.” She bent over, took a corner of the duct tape covering my mouth and ripped it off as hard as she could. It hurt like hell but I kept silent. I wouldn’t let her hear me scream. I just closed my eyes and bit my lips. But, when I shifted in my seat, I felt the folded up pocket knife I kept in my back pocket still there.

I guess these people didn’t do a good job of searching me.

“I’ll take that strained look on your face as an invitation.” She said with a smile. Her black ponytail flipped over her shoulder as she turned to grab a chair from the corner and place it directly across from me at the table between us. “Where are your people?” She asked.

“I don’t have any people. Never have.” I said, my voice hoarse from disuse.

The strange woman kept the smile on her face. “You can’t mean to tell me a pretty little thing like you has been fending for herself since the world went to shit.”

“Believe me or don’t. It doesn’t make any difference.” I kept my voice as even as I could while trying to work my fingers into my back pocket. With the table between us, she shouldn’t be able to see what I was doing.

Her smile was gone. “It makes all the damn difference. You were practically in my backyard when we found you.”

“So?”

“So you’re people must be nearby.”

“I told you I don’t have any people.”

She stood up and slammed her fist on the table between us. “EVERYONE WHO’S LEFT HAS PEOPLE!” She closed her eyes to and took a deep breath to compose herself. She lowered her voice and leaned in close, her perfume filling my nostrils. “And everyone who’s left must have done things.”

“What things?” I asked. I finally managed to get my fingertips on the knife.

“The kind of thing the people who aren’t left couldn’t stomach.”

I didn’t know if that was true for everyone, but it was for me. I’d done things to live. Things I could hardly stomach, but needed to do. The group I was a part of had done them, too. But I suppose that’s what happens when the world goes to hell. “These other people sound dangerous, why would you want to find them?”

Still leaning across the table one one arm, she used patted the pistol on her side with the other. “To hit them before they hit us.”

I had managed to slide the knife into my palm. “What if you’re right and I do have people, but you can’t handle them?”

The woman’s smile came back. “They’ll never know what hit them.”

I returned the smile when I managed to get my forefinger on the blade release. “Let’s see.”

I shot to my fee and bones cracked as I drove top of my head into the woman’s nose where she leaned close to me over the table. I pressed the blade release and quickly cut through the tape around my wrists. The woman was on the ground, leaning against the door and holding her nose.

“YOU BITCH!” She shouted, blood pouring through her fingers and down her chin. I ran around the tables towards her as she groped for her sidearm. I kicked the gun away as soon as she unholstered it and stuck my knife in her throat. She clawed at the knife for a moment and then went still, blood cascading down her shoulder and chest.

Footsteps pounded on the floor outside, getting closer to the door. I lunged across the floor for the pistol I’d kicked away and got a hold of it just as a guard burst through the door. I fired two shots into his chest and he dropped to the floor between the door and the frame. I approached slowly, my gun pointed down at the guard in case he was still alive. Seeing the two entrance wounds on his chest and the puddle of blood forming on the concrete floor told me he wasn’t.

Suddenly, alarms were blaring and feet were pounding from down to hall to my right. I ran to my left, nearly slipping from the blood slicking the bottom of my boots. I came to set of double doors and burst through them at full speed and found myself looking out at what used to be a parking lot.

A hundred sets of dead yellow eyes stared back at me in the darkness. Grey hands raised in front of them while their dead feet shuffled toward me.