Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #11 February 2015 | Page 16

Population dwindled, industry stopped. People boarded themselves up in their houses. Stockpiling food,
weapons they made to burn the infected and because
they still didn’t know the water was contaminated, they
boarded themselves up with their own death. Eventually everyone was infected. Everyone but me. I seemed
to be immune. I’ve drunk the water, been around the
dying, even been touched by the infected. And yet I
still lived.
***
Now I wander with no destination in mind, a flame
thrower on my back, cleaning up the mess the Taque
created.
I wonder, if I’m immune could others be as well? Am I
really the only one left? As I ponder, movement catches
my eye.

Large lizard in the Sun - Laurie Smith
PAGE 16

More zombies, come around a burnt out building,
hardly recognizable as a family residence. They move
slowly, uncoordinated, as the collective try to control
the rotting bodies. Faces expressionless, eyes sightless,
clothes dirty and torn, it was easy to see they were no
longer human. There were three, a man, a woman and
a small child. Had they been a family? I’ll never know.
As they shamble forward I unleash the flame thrower
on them, trying not to think of them as human anymore, especially the child. It always gets to me, the
children, makes me rage at the Taque for their cowardly means of eradicating us. I’d like to eradicate them,
but what could one man do against an entire race? I
wasn’t a geneticist that could repay them in kind or a
warrior for that matter. I was a college student studying
to be a teacher. Now there’s no one to teach. My grip
on sanity slips a little more as I watch what might have
once been a family, burn.