Scavengers by Christopher Fulbright, Angeline Hawkes

wind. They trailed him and Scooter as they emerged from the wooded area on Belt Line Road, south of Pioneer Parkway. As they neared a retail area, more and more of the creatures gathered, catching their scents. Closing in.
    He realized he was either going to have to lock himself into yet another car, or find some place more substantial in which to hole-up.
    The tollbooth was his saving grace.
    Here, under the lights, he had a clear view of the comings and goings of the zombies. He had the monitors that constantly showed their whereabouts, and he had a backpack full of food and water his mother had packed. He should have grabbed one of the other backpacks as well, but he wasn’t thinking that coherently at the time. Urgency had forced him to run and run fast.
    But now, he was out of food and down to one bottle of water that some tollbooth attendant left behind. In one corner he’d been using the plastic wastepaper basket as a toilet. He shredded paper to cover Scooter’s crap. It smelled funky in here, but funky was better than dead. It had taken some major coaxing to get Scooter to whiz inside the booth, but the poor dog finally had no other option. After the dog whizzed on top of the spot Shaun had saturated before him, he put the paper on top to soak up — what? — the odor? Shaun didn’t know. It just seemed somehow the right thing to do.
    So, now what ? Shaun scratched Scooter’s neck and tried not to think about food. Every so often, Scooter would lift his head from his paws and whine. They couldn’t stay barricaded in the tollbooth forever. That was where his plan ended. He alternated between crying and praying, all the while trying to formulate a plan that didn’t stink as bad as the piss in the corner. He came up with some elaborate schemes that played out like some sort of old Rambo movie, or like — what was the name of that 80’s movie his dad liked? Red something. Red Dawn . Only formulating plans against Russians seemed a lot easier than coming up with escape routes from zombies intent not upon indoctrinating you and taking over your country, but ripping open your stomach and slurping down the contents of your abdomen. Or munching the top of your skull and scooping out the brains inside like you were one of those Jell-O molds in the shape of a brain that his mom once bought at a Halloween store. His Christian school education had left him sorely under-skilled in the outliving-the-zombies department. Not that public school would have done him any better in that respect.
    Scooter snored on the floor beside him. Moans of the infected were low and mournful outside.
    “Maybe you’ve got the right idea, boy.” Shaun lay on the floor beside the Scooter, and nestled his face into the dog’s warm fur. “Maybe we can think of a better plan once we get some sleep.” He glanced at his wristwatch. It was one o’clock on Saturday morning. He could almost hear his mother telling him to go to sleep, that he’d have a clearer head when daylight broke. Shaun smiled sadly.
    He slid his hand over the ear not buried in Scooter’s fur, and hoped his palm would be enough to block out the sounds of the shuffling dead drifting to him from outside of the tollbooth.

CHAPTER 12
     
    The sound of the gunshot echoed through the woods; its recoil reverberated in Dejah’s body.
    Her back braced against the cold trunk of a thick cypress tree. The coyote lay dead in front of her, its mangy hair falling out in clumps, its drying lips still curled, revealing teeth in an eternal snarl. Her bullet had ripped through its left eye. The scavenger’s brain matter hung in a gelatinous clump like a jellyfish that tried to escape through the hole in the back of its skull.
    Dejah trembled, muscles strung tight as boa constrictors, her senses on high-alert now that the gunshot had announced her presence. She studied the nearby foliage: conifers, mesquite, cypress and sere grasses, illuminated by the light of the moon, shot with webbed