The Turning: A Tale of the Living Dead by Kelly M. Hudson

few
minutes.  I’ll holler when it’s good,” he said.
    He ran back towards the kitchen as
Jenny went back to work on causing a racket.
    Jeff walked into the large
refrigerator, which could accommodate him and Jenny, if need be.  It was still
cold, despite the loss of electricity, and would stay that way for a while
longer, as long as the doors were kept closed.
    His plan was simple:  stay in here
and let his body temperature drop.  He stood in the middle of the room,
shivering, as the cold set into his bones.  His teeth chattered and he had to
fight the impulse to rub his arms and jog in place.  He held steady and firm,
his shivers turning to spasms, until he could take it no more.  He opened the
door and stepped out into the kitchen, shaking so hard he could barely put one
foot in front of the other.
    By the time he reached the back
doors, though, he was warming up pretty well and he wondered if he should have
even bothered.  He didn’t have time to think about it, though.  He checked out
the windows, didn’t see any zombies, and flung the doors open. 
    The van was two feet away.  He
leaned out, put his hand up against one of the doors, and put the key in the
lock.  He opened the doors and spun, grabbing as many boxes as he could.  He
moved as quickly, stacking the boxes of cans to one side and the other
items—matches and utensils and a whole mess of tablecloths that Jenny wanted
included for some reason—on the other.  He was about to turn and go back inside
when  a pair of hands grabbed his leg and a mouth clamped around his ankle.
    He looked down and froze, not
believing what his eyes were seeing
    A zombie, a skeletal old woman,
naked from the waist up, with chunks of flesh bitten out of her arms and by her
rib cage, with wild, wispy gray hair and dead black eyes, gnawed on his ankle.
    Jeff screamed, exploding from his
stupor, and twisted in a panic, the teeth of the zombie scraping on his socks
and then coming out.
    Coming out?
    He looked down at a pair of
dentures, snagged in his sock, dripping with saliva and hanging from his leg
like a suicide jumper who’d changed their mind at the last second.  The zombie
didn't seem to notice.  She returned to his ankle, gumming away at it.
    Jeff kicked her face with his
other leg and jumped back into the loading dock as another zombie, this one a
suburbanite man with half his face missing, white cheekbone gleaming in the
light, reached for him.  Jeff grabbed the doors to haul himself inside just as
another zombie joined the fray. 
    It was a police officer, uniform
stained brown with old, dried blood.  He grabbed Jeff’s leg and tripped him. 
Jeff tumbled forward and fell back into the open van as the zombies, four of
them now, moved in for their feast. 
    He kicked and screamed and tried
to keep them off of him but it was no use.  They were climbing in after him,
their fingers clawing divots in his legs.  Jeff screeched and fought back,
thrashing and rolling around, afraid he was going to die right there in the
back of the van.
    A shotgun blast roared and the Cop
was cut in two, his lower body falling to the  ground as his upper body,
undaunted, gripped Jeff’s pants leg and hauled his torso up into the van.  Jeff
kicked to his right and shook the Cop off, its upper body tumbling from the
van.  As it fell, he could see the entire back of its head was stripped clean
of flesh, all the way to the bone, the zombie’s spine poking through the gnawed
skin like porcupine quills.
    Another blast echoed inside the
van and the Old Woman zombie went down.  Another blast took out the Suburbanite
zombie. 
    But there were too many of them
now, pouring around the corner, a surging mass of hungry creatures, swarming
for a hot meal.  Jeff saw a dozen of them flood the space between the van and
the loading dock, clogging any escape.  They clutched at Jenny's feet and
clawed their way into the back of the van, unrelenting. 
    “Shut the doors!” Jeff