Living Dead- Eating Table Leg

  Her right leg sank through a hole he’d ripped through the floor, her heel planting on the dirt under the trailer, She cried out in shock and pain, dropping the duffel, José’s arms sprouted upward like tentacles. His hands, cockeyed bouquets of broken fingers, twined around her trapped thigh, Greer’s screech rattled the bathroom fixtures. It was the opposite of her earlier warrior shriek, the cry of a trapped rabbit.

  She twisted, straining to reach the duffel bag and Daddy’s machete. But the bag was behind her, and with her legs so widely scissored, her ability to turn was truncated. She felt her jeans tighten as José’s teeth clamped on a seam, One of her whipping arms struck a small decorative table with a semicircle top and Baroque legs, an unusually pretty accent piece, maybe the last item of beauty in her life.

  Fuck it—her mom probably stole it. Greer yanked a leg. The table crashed. She whacked it against the floor, and the leg snapped off in her hand. She lifted it high, then harpooned it downward. The splintered end drove straight into José’s open mouth and down his throat. Greer heard the wood rip through the back of his neck. His broken hands kept scratching, but he’d lost all leverage. Greer got her leg back and got herself back as well—juiced on apocalyptic frenzy, more awake than she’d ever felt at school, at parties, with Qasim.

- The Living Dead, chapter: Dream’s Over