Clawing my way back.
Damned if I knew what kind of spell they were under, or drug, or maybe they were just special-sick. We never got a chance to ask, and I’m no scholar. They were people in a bad way, about halfway to being walking corpses, and that was what I knew.
Oh, and I didn’t dig myself out of my own grave knowing anything more about zombis and the like than I had known before I was thrown into my grave. People always seemed to think I had some special angle on undead things, just because I was one. Why? I don’t know. Just because, I guess.
So when the raiders came shambling in, I had to guess what they were, just like anytbody else. But I had a thought: “Marigold? Did any of these folks have bad breath? They talk at all? They stop and look at anything, like it was interesting?”
“Nothing like that,” Marigold told me as she finished stringing her bow. One reason she had run here was to get the chance to do a proper job readying it; if she was any good at archery, I might not even have to fire my gun. “They didn’t react when I stabbed their friends, neither. Hell, neither did the ones I stabbed, except to grab at me. They’ve got hard hands, too, even when they’re dying. If they’d grabbed me, I wouldn’t be here now.”
“Well, that’s something,” I muttered as I put my guns back in their holsters, and picked up the rifle that Louis had so kindly bequeathed me. I didn’t want to spend the few bullets I had, especially since I didn’t have money to get more. “Let’s see if their grip is better than mine.”