The handle of my blade wags obscenely out between his lips, like some kind of new designer metal tongue, and he keeps snapping his teeth at me, chomping down on the knife’s handle. I can only stare at him while I’m still trying to hold him off and catch my breath from the impact of landing.

The biggest problem with the infected so far, besides the fact that they exist, has been their numbers. We all learned early on that with this disease, it is either kill them, or they will eat you. Or they’ll infect you, and you will turn if you manage to escape after being bitten. Dealing with the infected has already been difficult for most, impossible for some. But a decent defense can be made against a slow moving group of the infected, even when dealing with hundreds or thousands if situated properly.

The slow infected are the only kind that we have encountered so far. They are the only type anyone has seen anywhere in the world. I mean, we haven’t spoken with everyone out there of course, and haven’t heard much at all these last two months, but no one has mentioned the infected running.

The problem we have now is that they are changing. Either the parasite has mutated or the infected are adapting. The tables had turned against us humans that day when the infection was first spread. And right now in front of me, sitting on my stomach, I am seeing the latest evolutionary step of the infected kind. The knife sticking out of this infected man’s mouth would not be noticed by any other infected that I have encountered. I have seen them stuck or have stabbed them in many places, and unless there is blunt force trauma to the head or severing the spine at the neck, they just don’t acknowledge any injury.

This infected man knows the knife is in its mouth and can’t bite with it there. Like other infected, it didn’t flinch or blink when I shoved the knife in, but this infected has stopped its grasping of my face and head, is sitting back up from leaning over me, and is now pulling the knife out of its mouth. It understands what is wrong and knows how to fix it.

This is not supposed to happen. These things have never moved quickly once infected, and they’re not supposed to regain their reasoning skills once they have the fever. We have tested people to see what happens when they get infected, and the parasite causes severe body tremors and a fever that usually runs in the 108 to 109 °F degree range. It burns just long enough to fry most normal cognitive function and fine motor skills. So, manipulating your wrist, hand, and fingers to grab onto a knife and pull it out and away from your mouth should be impossible.

A loud crack sounds out above me as Simone bounces her baseball bat off the head of this infected bastard, causing him to collapse on top of me. “Did you just see that!” we both yell to each other. Our second lines are not identical but are each equally disturbing. While I am yelling, “It just pulled the knife out of its mouth!” She is yelling, “That thing just ran!” We both just blindly stare at each other for a second, absorbing this new information.

Finally, I start to lift my back off the sidewalk so I can drag the rest of my body out from under my avid admirer. He apparently has decided that he just doesn’t want to see me go without a goodbye kiss. In this case, a goodbye bite. So he clamps down on my left forearm right below the elbow, through the shirt sleeve, and into the meat. It hurts like a motherfucker, and the blood that is around his lips and on my sleeve shows that he is piercing my skin.

Two more successive cracks from Simone’s bat cave in my attackers head, but the damage is already done and plain to see.