See Your Shadow: Amber Baker 1

Chapter One

One day, completely without warning, the world ended. No battles, no valiant attempts to save it, the world just ended. At the time, I was a gas station clerk in Marro Creek, Tennessee. Had I been somewhere more populated, maybe I would've known sooner, but I'd probably be dead. Well, depending on your definition of dead.

You know that weird kid you sat next to in 4th grade? Dead. The telecaster for your local news? Dead. Your friends, your parents, your fucking postman. All dead, but only for a little while. Imagine everyone you ever knew, bloody, torn to pieces, and chasing toward you with only one goal in mind, eating your guts. This was what many people woke up to on September 24th, 1991. I on the other hand, was on my last hour of a double shift.

The sun was just coming up when a green pickup truck pulled in to the parking lot. A 40 something year-old woman came in coughing and hacking into the most disgusting rag I'd ever seen. She staggered around the isles for a few minutes before coming to the counter with a bottle of cough medicine, a candy bar, and three packets of energy pills. I sighed, putting down my book. It was some compilation of love and revenge murders in the 1960s, a book I'd picked up on a lark three days earlier called "Mauve Dawn: The Heart is a Lie". That was the kind of free time I used to have; I could sit around at work reading harlequin novels and watching soap operas. What a fucking joke.

"Will that be all ma'am?" I asked her. She started to answer, but all that came out was another hoarse cough. Instead she nodded, putting a 20 dollar bill down before pulling out the rag again. That's $18.37, and a dollar sixty-three in change. Have a nice day ma'am." I smiled, focusing on thoughts of my shift ending, being able to go home and sleep. The woman shuffled out to her car, leaving me and Shaun Ovey, the leading sensual male, to get better acquainted. But just as I started getting back into the story, I heard a crash. I looked up with a start to see that she'd crashed into our sign.

"You can't be serious; I've barely got ten minutes!" I muttered under my breath as I ran out the door. I did a quick scan of the parking lot; we were the only ones there, and it looked like I'd be on my own. While the initial crash wasn't that bad, the sign had broken off the pole, and put a serious dent into the back of the cab. The entire back windshield had shattered along with the passenger's side windows. I looked through the driver's side, and seeing she was at least unconscious, tried to open the door. Nothing. "Come on! Open, damn it!" I gritted my teeth and pulled harder on the door, to no avail. I groaned and punched the window in frustration. When it cracked, I looked through again and realized I'd been pulling on a locked door. "Nice, Amber. Very mature!" I shouted.

By now, every movie I'd ever seen was telling me that the car would blow any second. I frantically searched for something to break the window. In the truck bed was a tire iron; I grabbed it and slammed it into the glass. Nothing, again. It took three tries, but I broke in and unlocked the door.

At that moment, I knew something had gone terribly wrong. The woman looked nothing like she had a few minutes ago; she looked like she'd been dead for days. Her face was slightly swollen, white, and streaked with purple veins. She'd hit her head on the steering wheel, and blood streamed down into her open mouth. I recoiled in horror; I was barely nineteen. I'd never seen a broken bone, much less a dead body.

As I stood motionless in shock, someone had driven up beside us. An old teacher of mine, Mr. Lewis, got out of the car. "Good lord Amber, what happened here?" He shouted as he ran past me. I tried to answer, but could only manage a few small squeaking noises. Mr. Lewis leaned into the truck, checking her pulse."I've got nothing, go inside and call an ambulance, now!" He shouted as he pulled her body out. I stumbled back slowly, then turned around and ran back into the station.

Once behind the counter, I tore through the drawers trying to find the phone. When I got it, I shook so bad that I could hardly press the buttons. "911, what's your emergency?" the operator answered. "Sam, it's Amber, I'm down at the gas station on Pine and Enterprise and this lady hit the sign, and I think she's dead, and Mr. Lewis from the high school is outside with her, and I don't –" Sam cut me off. "Amber, there's people on the way, when did this all happen?"

"I don't know, like two, three minutes ago? Just tell me what to do and get down here!" I'd known Sam Francis my whole life, which goes for just about everyone around here. Marro Creek was smack in the middle of nothing and nowhere, with only 500 people. Well, 499 by the looks of things. Anyway, me and Sam went way back; ran around in diapers, dated for a year in high school, our moms were best friends. The whole deal, but that's not the point here. The point is that before he could answer, I looked out the window and saw something I'd never, ever forget.

It was the noise that got me. The woman somehow woke up, and let out a primal, ravaged scream. She jumped onto Mr. Lewis, biting and tearing out a mouthful of his shoulder as he struggled to push her away. "Oh my god, Sam she just woke up, and she's attacking him, and, and…" I could only watch, terrified. If it weren't for Sam I might have stayed rooted to the spot until she came for me too. "Amber, just stay calm, lock the door, and wait for us. They'll be there any second, just don't go out there." I could see Mr. Lewis trying, failing, to get away; to try and do something, but she just kept biting. And I thought to myself, "If I don't get out there, right now, this'll be the next Kitty Genovese."

"I gotta go Sam, she's gonna kill him!" I shrieked into the phone. "Amber, this isn't one of your, 'Oh look, I'm gonna be a hero!' stupid adventures! As your best friend, as well as an officer of the law, stay the hell inside!" Sam replied. Of course, I'd already dropped the phone and ran, hearing none of this.

Mr. Lewis slammed the woman against the truck, but she didn't even react. He was losing strength fast, and she was relentless. I pulled her off, and it took just about all the force I could manage. I shoved her to the side and went to pick up the tire iron from where I'd dropped it before. Problem was, it wasn't there. The woman staggered back towards us slowly, almost like it hurt. Her eyes and skin were milky white, offsetting the blood splattered across her face and torso. But strangely enough, the thing that got me was her expression.

There was no emotion; she didn't even look like a person anymore. Time seemed to crawl as she lifted up her head. The woman, that damn thing looked at me and I swear to god she snarled. So I bashed her head in with a tire iron, found under the car, and that was my first time with an infected.