A car. A road. Brakes.

The brakes screeched as the car came to a slow stop. The door opened and out stepped a shiny pair of cow-boy boots. In the cow-boy boots was a man. He was dressed in a pair of brand new jeans, a clean tank top and a huge brown cowboy hat.

“Howdy”, he said at no one in particular. He had stopped his car outside a quiet shopping centre. There were no people on the street. It was completely empty. With a smug smile on his face he closed the car door and headed for the entrance.

The inside was quiet. The cowboy stepped in slowly, his brand new boots echoing as they hit the marble floor. They were the only thing that fractured the painful silence.

The shops were shut, the food areas were deserted and litter from the bins was on the floor. He took two more steps. Two escalators in front of him were stationary. The glass under the banister of one was smashed through, shards all over the floor.

His gaze moved over to a corridor that ran down to toilets, a perfect place for them to hide. He stared for a bit longer. He stared. Silence. No blinking. Silence. The corridor. Silence. Them. Silence. A shadow. A man! He was running straight for the cowboy. His face was covered in blood, as though he had been working in a butcher’s shop. With torn clothes, greasy hair and mad look in his eye, he continued to charge.

The cowboy knew exactly what the man was and what to do with him. He reached down to his thigh where two guns were held in holsters. He grabbed them and raised them to the bloody man’s face, then fired. Two bullets flew straight into the monster’s diseased brain. Blood splatted onto the floor. He fell.

Red filled the space around the body as the cowboy smiled. With a smirk across his face, he blew smoke from the end of his gun.

Silence filled the air again but only for a moment. Then a sudden cry of pain came rushing from corridors. It splintered the air; it hurt to listen to. But the cowboy loved it. Suddenly, he was not alone. Hundreds of men and women and children and babies and shop workers and policemen came running into the centre from corridors and shops; heading straight for him. All of them dead. But not quite enough.

The cowboy put his guns back where they had come from then ran for the escalators. The once empty white marble floor was now littered with bloody-thirsty monsters, running and clawing at anything, just to get to the fresh meat they desired. They followed their prey up the stationary escalators, stomping over each other just to get any advantage.

The cowboy ran. When he reached the next floor he continued in the same direction. This story was the same as the last. It had closed shops on either side of the walk-way and the floor was a mess.

He was well in front of the beasts but turned around. He reached for his pistols again and fired. Band. Bang. He walked backwards whilst shooting. They continued to charge, their teeth ready for flesh. Concentrating on one at a time he managed to take out numerous undead. They all dropped to the floor in a splatter of blood.

Soon he came to a dead end; shops on three sides and a sea of monsters on the other. He had nowhere to run. With his back pushed hard against a shutter he continued to fire at his enemies with his two pistols. One trigger was stuck. The gun was out of ammunition and he didn’t have more. He threw the gun at a blood-thirsty woman, who didn’t even flinch. Then he reached over his shoulder and took hold of a small thick sword that was strapped to his back. He drew it and pointed it at his hunters. They weren’t the only ones with madness in their eyes now.

The cowboy charged, gun in one hand, a machete in the other. He shot the first one in his line of sight in the forehead. It opened a space in the crowd. Filling it he swung his arm round, and tore into several necks with his blade. He leap-frogged over another, heading in the direction he had come from. He smacked a cheek with the heel of his boot, the body attached swung around and fell into a group of his fellow heads, knocking them over. He trod on a foot as he kept running.

A pair of arms wrapped around his neck. Then a bullet went straight threw the owners head and the cowboy continued to run through the sea of arms; all trying to grab him. They moaned as he knocked one out of the way, then shot another in the head, then punched one in the face, then kneed one in the stomach. His body was exhausted but he knew he had to gone.

When he reached the end of the crowd he was still on the second floor and he had passed the escalators. For a moment he thought he had nowhere to run. Then he saw it, a hole in one of the shop’s shutters. He headed straight for it.

It was a DVD shop, a huge rectangle that consisted of only a few, all filled with stock. The undead poured in after him, like water down a hill. He ran to the end of the room, nowhere else to run. Before he could react the cowboy was bitten. Pain shot up his arm, right to his head; a blinding pain. A pain he couldn’t stand.

A fist made contact with a face and the biting was over. The biter fell to the floor, with a bloody mess of a face. The cowboy dropped to the floor clutching his arm. He yelled. He had never felt agony like this. It made his insides saw and his veins throb, like something was killing him from the inside; an evil force that wouldn’t yield.

The undead continued to advance, slower this time, almost as if they knew the cowboy was defeated. He put his hand deep into his pocket and gripped a chunky metal cylinder – a grenade. Pulling it out he looked at his hungry assassins. Then he pulled a pin from the contraption. It fell to the floor.

This was it. The cowboy was done for. He gave the zombies one last wicked smile, satisfied with a job well done. “Burn in hell”, he said.