Zombie Apocalypse Survivor: The Crawlspace Of Daryl Ingram

by Jason Thornton

and windows, or to flee if the streets were clear. Instead, he continued to pace and I continued to listened to his footsteps.

  I fell asleep to the noise of those footsteps, step...pause...drag...step.

  I awoke to the noise of those footsteps, step...pause...drag...step. My shoulder and sides ached terribly from lying on the hard floor of the crawl space. My bladder was full and it was screaming for relief. I opened my eyes and was greeted by a faint and hazy light filtering into the crawlspace. It was entering through the air vents built into in the foundation and filtered through the thick bats of insulation stuffed between the floor joists. It was enough that I could just make out the edges of the outside walls and cement pylon that supported the floors in the center of the home.

  The pressure on my bladder continued to exert its presence. It was screaming for action. I unraveled myself from my blankets and belly crawled across the crawlspace to the opposite corner. There I lifted up the plastic sheet that lined the dirt floor along the edge of the house and carefully relieved the pressure from my bladder. I was cautious not to splatter myself, since I was propped up inches from the ground on my hands and knees. Finished, I laid the plastic down and crawled towards one of the outside vents that were located at the front of the house.

  At the vent I lay on my side and looked up. It was high up on the foundation, physically between the floor joists and blocked by the fiberglass insulation. I desperately wanted to look outside, but I needed to clear away the insulation first. Unfortunately I didn’t have and gloves for working with fiberglass so I had to figure some other way to clear it away. I noticed that the fiberglass bats were held up by thin metal rods. If I knocked the rods loose then the insulation would fall to the floor. Once on the floor, I could just push them out of the way.

  I crawled away from the vent and back to the trap door through which I initially fallen into the crawl space. I began patting the ground to figure out what items had fallen into the hole with me. Immediately a wide grin broke out across my face as I discovered what those items were. There was a pair of my pants, three pairs of heavy boots, my belt, one of my wife’s vests, a hanger, a leather bag, a small wire rack and a whole package of toilet paper. Wasting no time, I quickly got dressed and immediately appreciated having a layer of clothing between myself and the dirty plastic lining the floor and the insulation above. After dressing I dragged the rest of the gear over to the corner where my blankets piled in a bundle.

  Feeling more confident with clothing on, I grabbed the plastic hanger and returned to the vent I had looked at a few minutes before. Using the hanger I slid the thin metal rods that held up the insulation free from the floor joists. Both the rods and insulation dropped to the ground once the rods were slipped loose. Right away the amount of light and fresh air increased in the crawlspace. The shadowy abstract shapes that been the extent of my world only moments before gave way to the full textures and muted colors of gray, brown and black of the typical crawlspace.

  Carefully I dragged the lengths of insulation that had dropped down out of the way and crawled forward in the clear space between the floor joists to the very edge of the foundation. Being careful to avoid the thick nails protruding from the floor, I lifted my head between the joists and brought my face up to the vent to look out. What I saw looking through the narrow vent slats caused my newfound joy and confidence to desert me. Standing across the street were my neighbors Aaron and his wife Destiny. I had occasionally watched from my home, laughing at their efforts, as they barricaded their home a week ago. Aaron had secured a thick sheet of plywood to the with three inch deck screws to the outer frame of the door. Now their bloody corpses were quietly swaying on the sidewalk in front of their open front door. There weren't any signs of the plywood that had once barricaded their door.

  Melissa lived next door to Aaron and Destiny. She was also outside, in her garden. At least half of her was in the garden. She was wearing an oversized gray sweatshirt, which did nothing to conceal her missing pair of long legs. She was hanging by that sweatshirt in the thick dogwood bush growing right outside of her bedroom window. I had no idea how she ended up there or where her legs happened to be. Her hands were reaching out and clawing ineffectively through the dogwood’s branches. I didn’t know if she was trying to get free or just moving in the zombie way, but she was stuck fast and not going anywhere.

  Next door to my own home, the neighbor boy Dakota was pounding on the door of his grandfather’s brand new black Chevy pick-up truck. His grandfather Barry was in the driver’s seat, slumped forward on the steering wheel. A spray of dark blood on the back window and a ragged hole in the back of his head told me how he had died. Dakota’s grandmother was laying a few feet away from me in my own front yard. It looked like Barry shot her before killing himself.

  Further down the street I saw more shadowy forms moving about and heard an occasional deep moan. Above me, my own zombie invader continued to wander throughout my house.

  I carefully lowered myself back to the floor and crawled back to my blankets.

  “Stumpy.” Lying in the nondescript shadows of my corner of the crawlspace, the name came unbidden to my mind. “Stumpy.” That was the name for the man wandering above me. I don’t know whether the distinct noise of his walking was because he was missing a limb or if he was just dragging about a severely mangled foot. Regardless, the name fit. In truth, for all I knew, “Stumpy” was just missing a shoe on one foot.

  It tried to rest peacefully, but the need to do something, anything, overwhelmed me. It had only been a few moments since I had looked outside the vents and even fewer since I had given “Stumpy" a formal name. But my mind was starting to race. I thought to myself, “What? What can I possibly do? I’m trapped. Trapped by ‘Stumpy’ above, cement walls all around and the cold dirt below. I’m screwed.” I wrapped myself tighter in the blankets and tried to relax my mind as I stared into the shadows.

  Five minutes later I thrashed myself loose from the blankets and crawled across the house. There was another trapdoor in my son’s room and I was going to check it out. After a few minutes I finally located the trapdoor. The fiberglass insulation under it was stapled instead of held up with wires and cut to fit.

  I pushed against the bottom of the trapdoor. It hardly budged. Something heavy was resting on top of it. I brought my knees underneath myself and put my shoulder against it. Trying again, I shoved upward as hard as I could. I burst upwards suddenly in a loud clatter of crashing objects as my son’s toys were slammed against the closet walls and door. After the leaving the quiet of the crawlspace, the noise was deafening. I froze in shock as I realized the amount of noise that I had just caused.

  I stood there in silence for a split second. A moment later I heard the pounding of feet as Stumpy came rushing towards my location from across the house. He stopped at the bedroom door, which was just to the right of where I was standing in crawlspace entry. He began to pound on the bedroom door. Then he moaned. The blood drained from my body at the sound.

  I was standing waist deep in clutter, Stumpy was still pounding on the bedroom door and I was still frozen in shock. I heard a second zombie moan nearby. It was a hideous, dry, almost-female scream. The bedroom window shattered. The state of shock that had frozen my body disappeared as panic took control. I needed to get back in the hole if I was going to survive. I grabbed the trap door and immediately realized that I would never be able to close it with the amount of clutter that was piled chaotically against me and the crawlspace entrance.

  I began to push everything away from the entry to try so I could descend and pulled the trapdoor back into place, but it all quickly fell back like shifting sands. I changed tactics and began pulling everything into the hole instead. I had just begun when a zombie, probably the one that had just broken the window, began pounding on the closet doors. The doors shook and rattled so much I knew I would be dead in a matter of seconds. I doubled m
y speed and had a clear space to close the trapdoor when the closet door broke loose from its hanging rail and smacked into me. It threw me backwards into the wall.

  My space in the closet was suddenly condensed into narrow triangular void that was formed by the door resting against the wall directly over my head. I could see the shadows of the wildly thrashing zombie cast against the closet wall to my left. I forced my mind to ignore the shadows and to focus of the task of escaping. I grabbed the trapdoor and dropped down into the hole. I set it into place as I landed unceremoniously in the clutter of items that I had thrown into the hole just moments before.

  I crawled back to my blankets and curled into a ball. My mind and body rebelled against my foolish actions and began to shake uncontrollably. I listened as more zombies entered my home through the opened front window. I lost track of Stumpy as a horde of zombies pounded and thrashed at the walls of my home in their effort to find and eat me.

  I didn’t know when the zombies finally stopped tearing the house apart. I slept through some of it. The floors continually creaked and thumped with the increased numbers of