What woke me was the sensation of having a hot iron pressed against my face.
Even with my mind fogged up with pain, I instantly knew what this was.
The morning sun.
My kundalini noir shrank and corkscrewed in terror.
I slapped my hands over my face and curled into a ball. Hot rays prickled my skin. I squinted through my fingers.
The gray light of a rainy dawn broke to the east. A semicircle of yellow light hovered over the horizon, marking the place where the sun would rise.
The morning sun, the great devourer of vampires, was an instant away from roasting me into ash.
I lay in a rocky puddle at the bottom of a shallow ravine. I was surrounded by trash, weeds, and trees. My wet clothes were matted with mud and garbage.
My head swam in pain, but unless I moved…NOW…the next sensation would be cooking alive.
I drew the collar of my coat over my head. I sat up and crawled to the nearest well of shadow.
Sunlight lashed at me. The air burned with microwave intensity.
I splashed through the syrupy mud like a wounded, desperate dog and dove headfirst through the bramble.
I burrowed into a layer of wet dirty leaves. I scooped them over me until I was covered in a paste of leaves and mud. I lay still in the protective coolness while the ravaging sunlight stalked the open ground.
Worms and beetles crawled out from the fetid mud and kept me company by climbing over my face. I cinched my fingers over my nose and kept my eyes clenched tight to keep the visitors out.
A headache banged against the inside of my skull.
I stole a look at my wristwatch. My vision was blurry and I had to study the watch face to read the time. Almost eight. The morning after. The blow to my head had knocked me out all night.
Rain plopped through the leaves overhead. Then more rain. The downpour smothered the sunlight. The worms and beetles vanished as if they’d melted into the mud.
Rain channeled through the tree and came out in a spout from a fork in the trunk. I knelt under the spout to wash away the filth. I relished the cleansing and the reprieve from death. The water poured over me like a baptism.
Why hadn’t the zombies finished me off?
Couldn’t they find me?
I peered into the ravine. Flattened grass and dislodged rocks marked my path down the slope. Soggy cardboard and paper trash littered the rocky puddle I’d fallen into. No, I had been lying in plain sight.
Maybe the zombies thought they had killed me.
Or maybe they had a more pressing task.
As the rain beat down, I picked my way out of the ravine. I looked for my pistol, which I found in a patch of dandelions. A quick check of the magazine showed I had three rounds left. The muzzle bore was clear but gritty mud remained in the recesses of the pistol. Letting a gun get this dirty-for any reason-was as bad as stealing from your mother.
I scrambled up the ravine and kneeled at the edge. I parted the brush with the barrel of my.45.
No zombies.
Spent cartridge casings glittered in the mud under the oak. Some fight I had put up. I went down making a lot of noise but that was it.
Carefully, I made my way back to my Toyota.
The doors were open and my belongings were scattered over mud torn up by footprints.
If my kundalini noir had a mouth, it would’ve groaned.
My clothes lay in soaked lumps. The cooler sat empty with the lid open and gaping at the rain. The bags of blood looked like silver hamsters where they rested in the mud.
Had the zombies taken anything?
They had.
Now I understood why the zombies had left me alone.
They had found a prize too valuable to waste time killing me.
The psychotronic diviner.