Flash Jab Challenge 11

Lost Connections

This month’s response comes to us from the talented Katt Dunsmore. It’s a bit of a haunting tale that zeroes in on the zombie trend. Thanks, Katt, for a disturbingly entertaining tale!

Zombie Walk

by Katt Dunsmore

We forced the four of them to walk to the old Peters place at top speed, which, being zombie speed, is pretty slow. When they fell, we stopped to give them a chance to get up. When they wouldn’t, we’d grab them and snatch them back to their feet or else drag them along. It’s not like we were exactly concerned for their comfort or anything.

“Gah!” one of the females gave an inarticulate cry as she fell again in the front yard of the Peters’ place.

“Get up,” Travis kicked her in the leg.

Marty stepped in between Travis and the female. “Travis…stop. Wait til we…get around back. Plenty of…play time…then,” he said breathlessly. It had been a long walk herding the prisoners, and we were all tired. We would have to take a break before the festivities began.

Marty leaned down and grabbed the female’s arm and pulled her to her feet.

“Leh me gah,” the female croaked. One of her eyes was swollen almost shut from the beating we had put on all of them to get them into the ropes.

“Let’s go.” Travis pushed the female forward.

It took us about ten minutes to walk around to the back of the Peters place – zombies are so slow – and walk the prisoners over to a platform built around an old, unconnected power pole. We had to drag them the last twenty feet or so once they saw what was waiting for them.

It was the type of power pole that looked like it had two sets of arms hanging out from it, the lower one with shorter arms. Four nooses hang down, one from the end of each arm. Travis, Marty, David, and I had set everything up to save time once we made it here tonight.

Travis dropped a noose over the head of the female that had fallen and tightened it. She started to struggle, trying to get away from the noose, and Travis grabbed her shoulders.

“Stand still….sweetheart,” his face was inches from hers. “You wouldn’t want…to fall again…not yet, anyway.”

We got the other three in place and the nooses on them, and then stepped off the platform. Marty looked at me and nodded. I put my hand on the lever and looked up at our prisoners, then over to Marty.

“Go for it,” he said, an odd grimace on his face.

I pulled the lever back, and the platform fell away. The prisoners fell several feet, an audible cracking noise coming from three of them. The other one, a male, didn’t die immediately, but instead hung there, struggling to breathe as the rope cut into his neck. It took him awhile to strangle. We waited until he stopped moving before we walked away.

At zombie speed. We would be long gone when the humans found their friends.

© Copyright 2012 Tonya D Dunsmore. All rights reserved.

BIO:

Tonya "Katt" Dunsmore is an American short story writer and illustrator. Her stories and essays have appeared in Crime and Suspense Magazine, Flashing in the Gutters, Flashshots, Mouth Full of Bullets, Associated Content, Microhorror, Silver Moon Magazine, Bewildering Stories, and Flash Jab Fiction, and in the anthologies, The EX-Factor: Justified Endings to Bad Exes (Koboca Publishing, 2006) Daily Bites of Flesh 2011 (Pill Hill Press, 2011), Daily Flash 2012 (Pill Hill Press, 2012), and Daily Frights 2012 (Pill Hill Press, 2012). Her illustrations and graphics have appeared in several publications and on the internet. Katt is married to her beloved husband, Dinny, and they have three children: Kitra, John, and Thomas. They make their home in northern South Carolina with their Rottweiler/German Shepherd mix, Briscoe, and their feline companion, Sixx.

Here are the protocols:
1) Use the photo on the site: http://flashjab.blogspot.com/
2) 750 words or less
3) Please don't plagiarize
4) Get it back to me within the next two weeks or sooner
5) With the authors' permission, stories get posted at Flash Jab Fiction
6) This is a writer's exercise done for fun; no fees, no pay. You get a byline and you keep the all rights. (Please notify me if you sell it so I can yank it from the blog.)
7) Embed the story in an email and shoot it to me at jacktheauthor@gmail.com

(Bloody Knuckles reserves the right to post or not to post a story.)

Flash Jab Fiction, Bloody Knuckles, and The Hard Nosed Sleuth reserve the right not to post submissions. This is an adult fiction site but there are limitations to what I can run. No bigotry, pornography, or anything featuring the exploitation of children will be considered.