About a Woman, a Zombie Chronicles Novel

by Mark Clodi

  About a Woman, a Zombie Chronicles Novel

  Mark Clodi

  Tiffani Speller

  Dora suddenly has more to worry about than getting to the doctor's office. Smashing her car, she finds herself stranded on a day when all hell is breaking loose in Kansas City. Going on is not an option, walking two miles, in this heat? This is not something she does, not ever. Where are those overpaid cops when you need a hand? They always seemed to be there when Dora was driving forty-five in a twenty mile an hour school zone, but now when the flesh eating undead are after her, they are nowhere to be found.

  Walking back to the last intersection she finds a fast food place still open for business as usual, going in she meets her new best friends; Paige and Mike. When the bullets start flying the three scuttle back to take cover in the manager's office, turning on an old television set they begin to realize how bad their situation actually is. They need to get out of the restaurant, but with the chaos starting all around them, where can they go?

  Mark Clodi & Tiffani Speller. About a Woman

  A Zombie Chronicles Novel

  Chapter 1

  "It's not like it's that big of deal." Roger said wearily.

  "Not a big deal? Not a big deal?!" she responded, her voice seething and shrill, "We'll see when I start swelling up like a balloon, when we have diapers to change, college to fucking pay for!"

  Sighing Roger protested, "We're married for Christ's sake! It's what 'married' people do, right? It isn't my fault the condom slipped off!"

  The way he said it betrayed something, in the darkness her eyes widened in shock and she knew it was indeed his fault the condom 'slipped' off. She started to reply, to escalate the fight, but her anger just deflated.

  'Fuck', she thought, 'I didn't even finish.' This was, of course, the normal way things were working for her these days. The sex, which had always been mediocre before marriage, had turned into robotic motions, with fewer sessions per month than she had ever dreamed of. Why didn't her husband want her more often? She was open to new ideas, had never turned him away and yet 'the horse had stopped drinking at the trough', so to speak. It had deteriorated so much that a few weeks ago the woman had not fulfilled her birth control prescription, which she had passed on to Roger. The ironic thing was that since she went off of her birth control Roger had shown her more interest than ever.

  'Three weeks and we've had sex, it was never lovemaking anymore, four times, damn but they were like a couple of wild teenagers!' Sarcasm never helped, it just often felt good. She had been married for four years, she was twenty nine years old and her friends, parents and now even her husband seemed to be on the baby war path. The dirty little non-secret was that she didn't want kids. She never had, her mom had 'pooh-poohed' her opinion away, telling her daughter she would change her mind when she got older.

  However nothing had changed and she was pretty sure nothing would. Roger now wanted a kid, a hundred and eighty degree turn around from the day he took his vows, he also made it clear two or three kids would be better.

  'Yeah, the condom slipped alright.' Part of her profanity was from the slippage, most was directed at the fact that she was still horny as hell. Why couldn't he finish what he started? She nuzzled closer to him, however a few moments of that let her know there would be no repeat performance, nor even cuddling. 'Where was a pool boy when you need one?' The very thought brought her a fresh wave of arousal.

  She moved her hand between her legs, listening for Roger to stir, he was lethargic, drifting towards sleep, yet not quite there, she had been 'caught' before, explaining that had been humiliating. She usually just slept after another one of what she thought of as "Roger's Rapids", especially if his foreplay was of his standard performance variety.

  'Let's see,' she thought, 'first the mandatory French kiss. Then, the one thing that decides if I cum or not; the neck nibble.' If Roger nibbled, it was a happy night of long sex, maybe even with some oral. A left side nuzzle was a horse of a different feather. Left side meant quick nipple fondling, some fast 'is the hole wet' exploration and almost immediate thrusting followed by equally speedy ejaculation. No, there was no need to get worked up about 'left nuzzle sex'. Again the thought of a pool-boy as a third partner crept into her mind. Just naughty enough to keep her arousal peeked, not too fantastic, not too mundane. Just ri-ight! The woman quickly slid out of bed and headed downstairs to the guest room, casting a quick glance behind her towards her now sleeping husband.

  Twenty minutes later she was still glowing with the after affects and turned on the television, a cable news channel came on with the latest news about the riots that seemed to be everywhere the last few days. On both of the coasts, Denver, Austin, who knew where or why, no reporters we on the scene, travel along certain corridors was prohibited, it was a total cluster-fuck, so far as the woman could tell no one had come out and used the 'T' word yet. She was leaning towards a domestic terrorist group herself, another group of nuts, like the Constitutionalists or something. This would be just another group put down by the government; the end result would be fewer rights for the remaining people with higher taxes to pay for it. And so it goes.

  The news was leading off with a story on several explosions in Colorado, rumored to be nuclear explosions. Someone had smuggled footage out of the 'Denver nuke', and it was all over the air now. The woman sat up, clutching the thin covers of the bed closer around her. 'Fuck! This is the world my family wants me to bring a kid into?'

  The woman resolved to head to the pharmacy when she got up the next day. The rest of her night was spent watching the news. In the morning her husband poked his head into the room then came in and shut off the television without really looking at it. Before leaving he rumpled her hair and kissed her brow goodbye.

  An hour and a half after Roger left a curfew was issued, citizens were ordered to stay in their homes. Twenty minutes after the curfew was issued a man approached the woman's front door. The man was about six feet tall had a bulging belly and wore a gray suit with black leather shoes. His knees and pant legs were muddy and there was a black stain along his right arm. His once designer haircut was mussed, leaving his gray-black hair a tangled birds nest. He was slow, he shuffled instead of walking, he did not knock at the woman's door, he did try to turn the door knob.

  The front door had not been used in months, not since Roger's parents had come over for dinner. The woman preferred to go out, not stay at home. The door was locked. The man at the front door tried to force it in, his attempt was lacking and he soon gave up and moved to the next house. The noise he had made stirred the woman in her sleep and she awoke minutes later.

  She yawned sleepily and scratched her ribs as she struggled into consciousness. Getting up was a chore, especially after staying up to watch the news so late. She hopped out of bed and viewed herself in the bedroom's full length mirror.

  'Not bad.' she thought, viewing herself with a critical eye. At five foot six she weighed hundred and thirty five pounds, not as fat, yet, as most of her friends and not a skinny bean pole without any meat either. Her brown hair accented her skin tone, she was sure there must have been an Hispanic or Italian somewhere in her past probably on her dads side. The woman's old grandma always hinted about her first husband, making him out to be some sort of family skeleton in the closet. She had seen pictures of her grandfather in his military uniform, he looked like a normal guy to her, unfortunately he had been killed in some war overseas long before she was born.

  Her old grandma had a wild past, that is one thing everyone agreed on, she still went against the grain living on her own, a few hundred miles away, at an age when mo
st people in their eighties considered retirement homes a welcome respite. The woman continued her nude assessment, legs; good. Arms; excellent. Buttocks; rather nice. Hips, good, breasts, never enough, but the men she had been with had not complained. Lower stomach, well, that is where the extra few pounds had settled.

  'More gym time. Today, after…..what?' She remembered, 'The pharmacy, the 'morning after' pill!'

  Now, it actually was 'the morning after'. 'Now it is time to keep any babies from coming into this world of terrorists who set off bombs in Denver.' The woman headed upstairs to her bedroom, pulled on a fluffy pink robe and called her Doctor.

  "Dr. Bayer's office. How may I help you?" asked the receptionist on the other end of the line.

  "Hi, this is Dora Sturges, I am one of Doctor Edmundson's patients. Could I speak to him please?" said Roger's wife.

  "What is this about Ma'am?"

  "I need him to call in a prescription for the morning after pill to my local pharmacy."

  "Oh. Well, that shouldn't be a problem. Is there a reason why?

  'Stupid bitch, none of your goddamned business!' Dora thought, but she found herself saying, "My husband and I had a little, uh…break with our normal form of birth control last night."

  "Okay, Dora. Give me a minute please." Dora found herself on hold for a couple of minutes before the nurse came back on and said, "Dora, are you still using the Medi-cap on Fourth Street?"

  "Yes, that would be fine." only after she answered did the woman realize what the receptionist had really been asking was, 'Do you want me to have the prescription sent somewhere they do not know you?'

  "Doctor Edmundson will call in the prescription now; it should be waiting for you at the pharmacy when you get there. He would like to see you and discuss an alternative form of birth control if you think this might be an ongoing problem."

  "What? Oh, no…well, maybe. I will think about my options and set something up later." Dora said, though she had no such intentions.

  Saying her goodbye, Dora moved downstairs and into the kitchen to start the coffee. She made a point of not turning on the news; she'd had enough of that miserable stuff last night. Puttering about she started some toast and took out a couple of brown organic eggs, which, according to the package, had been laid by happy free-range chickens.

  "I wonder how happy they are to have their eggs stolen?" she said aloud.

  The silence was getting to her, as it usually did, buckling in on her determination not to watch television she was reaching for the remote and ended up dropping an egg onto the tile floor.

  "Dammit!" She set the remote down and cleaned up one of the happy chicken's eggs before turning back to her breakfast. Any thoughts of turning on the television were erased in her haste to finish preparing her eggs, coffee and toast. After she cleaned up, she got dressed, grabbed her purse and headed into the garage, where her burnt orange Mazda 7 awaited.

  Sliding behind the seat she hit the garage door button, then turned the car over and started to back out of her driveway. When she hit the street she clicked the door shut and was momentarily startle by a loud buzzing siren. The tornado alarms when going off. The woman looked around suspiciously; nope, not a cloud in the sky. Dora figured they must be testing the system. Shrugging she headed for the pharmacy a few miles away, singing along to Lady Gaga's latest; that singer only got better as she got older, in Dora's opinion. As she drove out of her gated community, she did not notice the gray suited man crouched in the doorway of the first house inside the community's borders. The man, now walking with nary a shuffle to his steps, watched the woman drive away with a hungry look in his eyes.

  The first indication the woman had that something was seriously wrong was when she approached a traffic signal, it was blinking red in all directions and there was no traffic from any other direction, very unusual for this intersection at this time of day. Shrugging the woman drove on through to the next intersection, thinking it was going to be a long drive if she had to stop at every corner.

  She managed to get up to forty five miles per hour when she saw the police officer pull out behind her. As she saw his lights turn on she was distracted by what was going on in behind of her and she did not see the lady in rumpled clothing rushing off the slight incline with a tire rim. The woman did not see the rim thrown into the air and did not see it smash into her windshield. Turning her gaze back to the front of the car once she heard the impact Dora could not see out of her window. The windshield was bowed inwards, and she immediately swerved sideways and hit the steep curb at forty miles per hour. She didn't see the fence she blew through at thirty three and finally she also did not see the one hundred and twenty one year old oak tree that her car smashed into at twenty seven miles an hour, though she did hear it.

  The air bag deployed, her life was saved, yet she still impacted with enough force to convince the police men following her that she was beyond saving. The police car stopped, a male and a female officer sprang out of the side doors, drew their firearms and shot the bag lady four times, the male officer approached the bag lady's still twitching form and fired once into her head. Both officers, looking grim, started to approach the crashed Mazda. Before they got there, their radios went wild with calls, demanding them to come quickly, there were officers down. They simultaneously headed back to their patrol car, hardly casting a guilty glance towards the Mazda as they did so.

  Chapter 2

  The woman was not dead; far from it she was barely injured at all. Her nose had been bloodied by the deployment of the air bag, her neck had suffered bruised ligaments, tendons and muscles, more commonly known as whiplash and she had been stunned briefly into unconsciousness.

  When she came around Dora was groggy and scared, her nose had bled an awful lot and her neck hurt horribly. Looking out of her broken side window she saw the bag lady's body in the middle of the street. The woman mistakenly thought she had only been out a few seconds, she also thought she may have run the bag lady over before hitting the tree.

  Guilt overwhelmed her and she reached for her door handled to go and see if the other woman was okay. The door was stuck and would not open. She looked around for her cell phone and, finding it on the floor of the passenger side, barely within reach, she put a call into the police. It rang twelve times before a dispatcher answered. She told him she had an accident and she thought maybe she had run over a bag lady. The dispatcher told her to go home, get indoors and not to go out again.

  Dora was confused, "You don't understand, I ran someone over, I can't get out of my car and they are just lying in the street, you have to send someone to help, there is blood all over my car!"

  "Are you injured?"

  "I think so, I can move, I just can't get my door open. The window is broken out."

  "Can you start your car?"

  "What? Ugh, let me try." The engine would not turn over, "No it won't start."

  "You need to get to a safe place, your home if you can reach it, can you make it home?"

  "I don't understand! I had an accident. I might have killed a lady! And you are telling me to go home? Don't I have to wait for the police?"

  "Lady," a voice sighed on the other end of the line, "Look lady, you heard about the curfew right? You are not supposed to be out; you were supposed to stay in your house. I am telling you, no ordering you, to go home and barricade the doors. Leave the bag lady in the street or sidewalk, do not approach her. Do not wait for the police to arrive, do not stop until you get home and above all do not talk to anyone who looks odd on your way back home."

  The woman realized something more was wrong here than she had thought, "Curfew? No…I…" her voice lowered to a mere whisper, "Is it…is it the terrorists? Are they here in Kansas City too? Like Denver?"

  The exasperated man on the other end of the line said, "Yeah, yeah, it is lady, they are running around Kansas City now, okay? They have a drug that make people all crazy, like maniacs you've got to stay away from other people, get home and don't answe
r the door! Can you do that? Tell me who you are and where you live, if we can send an officer around to check on you later we will. Okay?"

  Dora gave her name and address to the dispatcher, who seemed please to get off the line with her. After hanging up she looked out the smashed window of her side door. It was covered in small pieces of broken glass. More blood dripped from her nose as she tried to force her door open. Her head felt like hell, she was getting frantic trying to force the door and no one was coming to help her!

  She looked across the width of the car to the other door, it seemed like it was an insurmountable distance away. Dora leaned over and tried to reach the inside door handle. A dull pain shot through her neck. She took her hand off of her face and used it to support her neck and continued to try and open her passenger side door. Eventually she just lay down over the seat, then looked up and pitifully clawed at the door with one hand. It opened.

  Dora was slowly able to move over the seat and out the door onto the lawn of someone's house. Getting up on her hands and knees she reached back into the car and got her keys out of the ignition, then groped around grabbing her purse and cell phone before using her hands to climb up the outside of the vehicle and get to her feet.

  The bag lady had not moved, and the woman didn't think she was going to either, she was sure the woman was dead.

  'There is something about killing a person that changes you.' she thought, feeling a strange sense of remorse and loss, even though she did not know the person she had run down and killed. Turning her head to the car she followed that up with 'Roger is going to kill me!'

  The car had impacted on the front bumper almost directly in front of the driver, the tire rim, which had been thrown free when she hit the tree, was nowhere in sight. This was the second car she had totaled in less than a year. Roger might follow through with his threat and buy her a 'previously owned' vehicle as he had said he would after the first accident. That would gall her to no end, cars were status and no one of status bought used goods. Unless they were antiques, there was an exception to every rule.