A Small World

by R. S. Merritt

  Kyler and Mike walked towards the front porch. Kyler looked at the body of the girl and noticed the trail of ants running into her curly hair. She wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was just rotting meat laying across the stairs. If he lost it over every dead body they came across, he wasn’t going to make it. He’d either end up in the first stages of catatonia like Seth or need to join Mike at an American Airlines meeting. The girl was just rotting meat. Not somebody’s daughter or annoying little sister who’d run and played with dolls. Little girls who ran and played with dolls didn’t end up on the stairs in a pile of corpses with their faces blown off. Not here. Not where you could see them. That was something that happened in third world countries where leaders harbored genocidal tendencies. Not something that happened here in America.

  Kyler led the way towards the porch. The smell of rotting meat hit him when they got within a few feet of the bodies. He heard a high-pitched cackle coming from somewhere and started to look around. Mike slapped him on the back and spun him around.

  “You ok?” Mike whispered in Kyler’s face. Mike’s face was strained and worried. Kyler looked around trying to find the source of the cackling. Seeing the concerned expression on Mike’s face he realized the cackling had been himself. He took a deep breath and let it out. He could still smell the rot, but he pushed it out of his mind. He told himself it was just rotting hamburger. Just a dumpster outside a restaurant. He switched the deep breaths he’d been taking to calm himself to shallow breaths, so he wouldn’t get the smell in his head as much.

  Kyler nodded to signal he was ok. Turning back around he threaded his way carefully up the stairs trying not to step on anything. His brain was screaming that the little girl was going to grab his ankle. She was going to ask him why he was just leaving her laying there. Kyler shook his head hard and hurried up the front door. He began pacing along the porch looking through the windows to try and see inside the home. Mike walked along the porch in the other direction doing the same thing. They met back in the middle in front of the door.

  “How should we get in?” Kyler asked. He hadn’t been able to see a lot through the windows. The curtains were all pulled mostly closed. The few he’d been able to see through had shown the interior of a typical looking house. A dining room with a large table and some chairs. Another window had revealed a hallway leading to a large room with a brown couch that had an orange and brown quilt thrown over the back of it. Kyler watched as Mike checked the front door to see if they could get in the easy way. The front door was unlocked.

  Mike smiled at Kyler and pushed the door open. He had a machete in one hand while Kyler was carrying one of the hatchets they’d managed to hold onto. They really needed to find some guns somewhere. Neither of them relished the idea of getting close enough to a raging Zombie to use the weapons they had. Thinking of the little girl on the porch Kyler sincerely doubted he’d be able to bash in the brains of a diseased little kid even to save himself.

  Mike had the door all the way open. He moved into the foyer with the machete held out in front of him like a torch. Kyler followed a few steps behind. Both of them had forgotten their promise to Seth that they’d stay within sight of the SUV. The interior of the house was in fine order. White lace doilies covered the tops of the wood and glass tables set in the foyer and along the hallway. They moved into the kitchen to verify nothing that posed a danger was in there. Kyler opened the refrigerator and immediately closed it again. The smell that wafted out when he opened the door reminded him of the smell of the people rotting on the stairs. Falling to his knees he puked on the floor.

  Mike waited for him to finish puking and catch his breath then helped him back to his feet. He asked Kyler if he was ok. Once Kyler had recovered, he said he was fine, and they continued to clear the house. Finding nothing on the first floor they went up the creaky stairs to the second floor. The stairs ended at a long hallway with several doors along it. All of the doors were closed. Kyler and Mike went down the hallway. They took turns opening the doors and looking in each room. They didn’t find anything until the last door. When Kyler opened it, a familiar smell hit them both in the face.

  Forcing himself to ignore the bile rising in his mouth. Telling himself he needed to get used to this if he was going to survive. Manning up, Kyler looked into the room the smell came from. He had to take a few steps in to confirm that the big bed in the room held two bodies. A man and a woman were lying in the bed. The woman had been shot multiple times. She’d been positioned on the bed with a bible in her hands. Someone had taken the time to clean her up and position her primly and properly on the top of the bed covers. She had on a pretty yellow dress and her hair had been tied back with a ribbon. Kyler could imagine the man on the other side of the bed crying as he laid out his wife on the bed. He wondered if it was the man’s daughter on the stairs outside rotting in the hot sun.

  It’d been too much for the man. He was slumped over on his side of the bed with the shotgun still tilted against his chest. He’d sat in the bed beside his dead wife and shoved both barrels of the shotgun in his mouth. The wall behind him was splattered with bits of blood, brains, and hair. Bone fragments littered the top of the headboard behind him. They were held there by the goop that’d been blown out the back of his skull.

  Kyler walked around the bed to get to the man’s corpse. Mike had come into the room and was staring at the scene on the bed. Kyler reached over and started prying the shotgun away from the dead man. The covers moved as a large brown rat ran out and jumped off the bed right beside Mike. Both men let out startled shrieks. Mike reflexively swung his machete hard into the lap of the dead woman on his side of the bed trying to hit the rat. Her corpse tilted over and start to fall off the bed. Mike reached out to grab her and push her back on the bed. As soon as his hands touched her dead shoulder, his face reflecting the disgust he felt, he let her body tumble to the hard wood floor.

  The woman’s body lay there indecently. The fall had caused her dress to go up around her hips. Her pale white legs were crisscrossed with veins. Her face had angry looking red welts across the forehead disappearing into her hairline. She was lying in a completely unnatural position. Once again, Kyler reminded himself that these weren’t people anymore. They were just hunks of rotting meat supported by skeletons. The primal fear of death hit him hard. How easily the life could be taken from him. He could easily be the one whose body was lying on the floor. The one who was going to be eaten by a large brown rat as soon as they left the bodies alone in the darkness.

  Holding down his rising gorge Kyler felt around on the bed for shotgun shells. He didn’t find any, so they started ransacking the room. They finally found a box full of shotgun shells in the bottom drawer of the night stand behind where the woman’s body had fallen to the floor. Neither of them wanted to reach over her to check the drawer. A box of shells in his pocket and shotgun loaded Mike led the way out of the room. They closed the door behind them. Both of them trying not to think of the rat hungrily slinking back towards the bodies.

  Chapter 16: Adapt or Die

  Randy opened the door to the pantry and had to throw his hand over his mouth when he started laughing. The large walk-in pantry was fully stocked with non-perishables. Cans of food were stacked high on each of the shelves. Bottled water was stacked by the case. Joe stuck his head in to see what Randy was so excited about.

  “Nice. If they have another closet full of medicine and then one full of guns, we’re pretty much set.”

  “Do people have closets full of guns? I mean in New England in the middle of a ritzy tourist trap like this?” Randy asked rhetorically. He was trying to figure out how much of the food they’d be able to cart out.

  “Let’s find out. We need at least a few guns to call this trip a success.” Joe said as he backed out of the pantry and headed for the stairs to explore the second floor of the large home. On the way to the stairs they passed by a door which led into the garage. Ignoring the stairs for the moment they headed into
the garage.

  The garage had a little sports car in the center section. The other two sections in the three-car garage were empty. Joe had his flashlight out and was shining it around looking for anything useful. He stopped when he saw a box full of clay pigeons. Randy whispered a quick prayer as Joe continued to shine the light around the boxes of clay pigeons. Mounted high on the wall directly above the boxes was a gun rack with four shotguns in it. There was a bar coming down that ended in a section that had a combination lock shoved through it. The bar kept the shotguns secured in the gun rack. To the side of the gun rack sitting on a work bench were boxes of shotgun shells neatly stacked about a foot high.

  They excitedly walked over and started messing around with the locked gun rack trying to figure out how to get the guns out. Shaking the rack and pulling on it didn’t turn out to be effective methods. Randy started looking around the garage for a crowbar or some bolt cutters or something they could use to pry off the lock. Joe started putting all the shotgun shells into a milk crate he’d found sitting by the garage door.

  They heard the loud screech again. This time it sounded like it was coming from the driveway. It was loud. It was echoed by several others that sounded close by as well. Randy found a hammer. Not seeing any other choices, he walked over to the gun rack and started wailing on the lock as hard as he could with the hammer. It was just a cheap lock like you’d buy your kid for them to use on their high school locker.

  They heard glass shatter inside the house. Something began banging hard on the garage doors. Joe ran across the garage to shut the door they’d entered through. Randy kept up the attack on the cheap combination lock. Swinging the hammer wildly at the stubborn hunk of cheap metal and plastic. A loud screech erupted from inside the house as Joe slammed the thick, wooden garage door shut. Randy cocked his arm back and took a last, desperate swing at the lock. The lock shattered causing the hammer to ricochet off the bar behind it and Randy to end up scraping the skin off the top of his hand on the rough metal bottom of the gun rack. Nursing his bleeding hand, Randy rushed to get the guns pulled out.

  He got all four of the guns down and laid out on the work bench. Him and Joe began fumbling through getting them loaded. It took them a minute to figure out how to get the shells loaded into the magazines and connected to the shotguns. Once they did though they worked feverishly to get the magazines they found filled with shells. Each magazine held eight shells. They shoved in whatever shells they had close at hand. They didn’t even realize some of the shells were different until they’d finished loading them all. The hammering on the exterior and interior garage doors was starting to make them feel like they were in a drum. Randy made sure he had the truck keys in his pocket then looked for a stool or a ladder to stand on and look out the garage windows.

  “We need to be getting back to the boat and we need to be dragging a ton of supplies with us.” Joe said as he finished shoving the boxes of shotgun shells into the milk crate.

  Randy didn’t reply. He’d found some more milk crates and stacked them up to help him look out the window. In the driveway he saw about ten disheveled looking people wandering around. Two of them were standing right in front of the large aluminum garage doors. They were the ones striking the doors as they paced back and forth looking for a way in. Randy looked closer and saw the total lack of humanity in their eyes. Large, oozing, angry welts covered their foreheads. He heard some noise in the garage behind him as Joe knocked over some rakes and shovels that’d been stacked by the door.

  The creatures outside turned as one at the loud clatter of the falling tools. They all stared at the garage door momentarily before rushing it like a group of infantrymen coming out of the trenches to charge a machine gun nest. The monsters began beating on the door hard enough to shake it on its hinges. That horrifying, piercing shriek erupting from the throats of several of them. Joe and Randy froze in place, but the damage had already been done. The interior garage door started cracking as the Zombies in the house hurled themselves bodily into it. The screaming intensified from every direction. Randy ran over and picked up one of the shotguns. He slung another two of them around his shoulders by the straps and handed Joe the last shotgun and a box of shells.

  “We’ve got to go.” Randy said and headed for the interior garage door. The door cracked down the middle and came off a hinge. A naked arm and torso started pushing though the gap with fingers clawing blindly in the air. Joe had put away his flashlight so now they were working off the limited light provided by the windows spaced out along the top of the garage doors. Randy aimed the shotgun at the arm.

  “Stop! I’ll shoot!” He yelled at the figure in the door. The sound of his voice just served to triple the Zombies efforts to get through the door. It slammed into the door again. This time hard enough to fling it open on the one remaining hinge. The Zombie came through fast. Randy pulled the trigger. The Zombies face exploded. The shell had been a slug from the twelve-gauge shotgun. He’d fired it at a distance of about two feet and even though he’d had his eyes partially closed Randy had managed a perfect shot. He watched as the body sagged down to the floor. Randy mindlessly worked the rack on the shotgun to get the next shell into the chamber. He’d gone into a state of shock at having blown a person’s head off. He didn’t even notice the other Zombie clambering through the door frame to get at them until it screeched.

  A deafening roar right next to his ear and that Zombie spun in a circle. Another roar and the Zombie fell to the ground. The Zombies slamming into the garage outside sounded like huge hail stones striking a tin roof. The windows in the garage door were cracking. Randy stepped over the dead Zombie and moved towards the interior garage door. Joe followed behind him after picking the box of shells back up. He’d dropped it when he stuck the barrel of the shotgun past Randy’s head to shoot the second Zombie coming into the room. He’d correctly assumed Randy had frozen up after taking a life and stepped in to take out the second attacker.

  Randy led the way down the hall away from the garage. They made it into the living room. Not seeing any immediate danger in that space, they stopped to quickly hash out a plan. Up ahead in the foyer they could see the front door was standing wide open. If noise attracted these things, then the shotgun blasts in the garage would be pulling in a bunch of them from the surrounding area. Not to mention all the screeching and noise the group of Zombies were making outside banging away on the garage door.

  “We’ve got to go now. Once they lose interest in that garage door they’ll spread out and we won’t be able to get out of here.” Joe whispered. He was taking the time to reload his magazine to make sure he was topped off and ready to rock.

  “Agreed. Let’s roll. Out the front door and into the truck and get the hell out of here. If you can throw the box of shells in the back, I’ll be blasting away and getting the truck started.” Randy looked to Joe for confirmation.

  “Ok. Just take a deep breath and don’t freeze up. Pretend it’s a video game or paintball or something. You freeze up then we’re going to die.”

  Randy nodded. He made sure he had a shell in the chamber. They started walking towards the door. More Zombies were streaming up the driveway. Randy saw one beating its way towards them through the dense shrubs surrounding the property. Their truck was only about twenty feet from the front door, but it seemed about a mile away. Randy took a deep breath and started walking briskly towards the truck. He was hoping it’d take long enough for the Zombies to notice him that he may be able to get in and start the truck without being attacked.

  Two steps out the door a Zombie screeched and sprinted for him. He shot it in the chest then racked another shell from the magazine into the chamber. The spent shell ejected into the air. Randy sped up his pace as every Zombie in the over-sized driveway turned to stare at them. He must not have been moving fast enough. Joe went barreling past him and flung the box of shells into the bed of the truck then turned and took up a defensive position by the passenger side of the truck. Randy ran
through the storm of lead Joe was busy putting in the air. He skidded to a stop by the driver’s side and turned to take some shots at the Zombies swarming them.

  Only direct hits to the center of mass or head put them down. Randy knew his aim was true a few times and the Zombie just kept coming. He figured those must have been the bird shot or some other shell they’d randomly shoved in the guns. He took aim at one last Zombie as he caught Joe getting in the passenger seat out of his peripheral vision. The Zombie was only about three feet away from him when he pulled the trigger. The Zombies face disintegrated as the bird shot ripped all the skin off the front of its skull. The Zombie’s momentum caused it to flip over backwards. Sightless now since its eyes had been blown out of the sockets it writhed on the ground still trying to get up and get at him.

  Randy flung open his door and threw himself into the truck. Joe was changing out the magazine in his shotgun and yelling at him to get them moving. Randy had a moment of complete panic when he couldn’t find the keys in his pocket. The he realized he already had them in his hand. He flung the shotgun down on the seat and slammed his door. He somehow managed to do all that while simultaneously jamming the key into the ignition and cranking up the truck.