Just Another Day in the Zombie Apocalypse (Episode 1)

by L. C. Mortimer

  There was a front door with a peephole and a deadbolt. Two large windows were side-by-side to the left of the door. They were covered with blinds and big blue curtains. They were probably chocked full of dust, Alice thought immediately. What would that mean for Kyle?

  She’d been in the kid’s apartment before. It was spotless. It had to be, he told her. When Kyle was exposed to dust, he’d almost instantly have an attack. His throat would start to constrict and he’d often start to panic, which only made the asthma attack worse.

  Kyle had been working through his anxiety and trying to utilize deep breathing techniques, but Alice knew they weren’t always effective.

  “Let’s move these,” Mark motioned toward a large flower-print couch. It was the ugliest thing Alice had ever seen.

  “In front of the door?” She asked, and Mark nodded. She looked around the room quickly and spotted a couple of end tables, a coffee table, and a small bookshelf. Most of the living room was not useful furniture, however. Most of the room consisted of piles and piles of junk.

  At least, it was what Alice would consider junk.

  The couch was covered in laundry and the coffee table had books and magazines piled on top. Each end table had an assortment of coffee mugs and dishes.

  “For people who scrubbed their kitchen before vacation, they sure didn’t mind leaving the living room a freaking mess,” Alice commented. She had taken a peek in the fridge earlier. It was spotless. It looked brand new. If it wasn’t for the faint scent of bleach, Alice would have assumed the family had purchased a fridge and simply never used it. There wasn’t a single thing in there.

  She moved quickly and helped Mark push the clothing off the couch. They lifted the sofa easily and carried it to the door, then pushed it in front.

  “I don’t know that it’ll keep out a horde of angry humans,” Mark said. “But it’ll work for now.”

  “I don’t think they’re human anymore,” Alice commented. “Not once, you know. Not once they’re infected.”

  “It doesn’t matter what they are as long as they don’t come inside.” Mark’s words hung in the air and Alice wondered, just for a second, what they would do if the creatures did come inside, if they did get in somehow. She didn’t want to think about it, didn’t like the idea that they could be taken over, killed, eaten.

  She looked back at the front door. Then Alice allowed her gaze to wander. There were no windows on the sides of the room. Instead, there was a door on either side. Alice was grateful, but wasn’t sure if she should be. There could be anything beyond those doors.

  As if reading her mind, Mark gently patted her shoulder.

  “I checked them earlier, remember? That one’s a bathroom. The other one is a laundry room. It leads to the garage, which is also locked.”

  “Sorry,” she said, embarrassed. Then she jerked her head toward the living room windows. “Should we board them up or something?”

  “No,” he shook his head. “We could break the end tables and use the wood to board the windows, but I’m a bit more worried about noise at this point. It would be awfully loud. I don’t know if these damn things have good hearing or not.” Then he paused, cocked his head. His eyes narrow. “Listen.”

  Alice did. She closed her eyes, focusing on what she could hear. She always found that when she closed her eyes, when she wasn’t busy looking, that she could focus better on the sounds around her.

  That’s when she heard it: the sound. The noise was slow, and almost soft, but distinct.

  “What is that?” But she knew.

  She knew.

  Alice opened her eyes and Mark pressed a finger to her lips. She pressed them closed, wanting to speak, but silently obeying his command not to. He removed his finger and motioned for her to follow him to the windows.

  She did. Her feet moved on their own, and Alice gently separated two of the blinds to peek outside, hoping anyone – or anything – outside wouldn’t see her.

  The house Alice, Mark, and Kyle were hiding in was on a quiet cul-de-sac. At least, it had been quiet when they first arrived. Now they could see action happening at the house three doors down. The cul-de-sac was curved enough that despite being at the very end of the circle, they had a clear view of what was happening at the house.

  And it was, in fact, quite loud.

  That was the sound Alice had heard: yelling. The garage door was open and someone was revving the car engine. Another person was running around in circles in the yard, screaming or crying. They were throwing suitcases into the car and random other items: a painting, a laptop, an outfit still on the hanger.

  “What the hell?” Alice mumbled, but Mark made a shushing sound, so she quieted. What was this family doing? If they were alive and well, shouldn’t they simply have stayed inside? Why were they going out now, at dusk, to try to escape?

  “They aren’t going to get far,” Mark murmured.

  That’s when Alice saw it: the figure in the doorway. She muffled a gasp and this time, Mark covered her mouth with his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “But you can’t be loud. You can’t cry out. Not now. We don’t know if these things are attracted to sound. We need to watch this, to learn as much as we can. It’s going to be hard to see, but you need to see it, Alice. You need to see what happens because if this thing is as bad as we think it is, it’s going to get a lot worse. You’re going to see a lot worse.”

  She nodded numbly, watching the scene unfold before her. Part of her thought she and Mark should run out and help the couple at the car. The man was behind the wheel, still revving the engine for some reason. Was he trying to scare the infected away? She wondered, but that didn’t make sense. If it was undead, like Kyle had said, why would it be scared of noise?

  Noise meant people.

  People meant food.

  The other person was a woman. She turned and Alice could see her face clearly. Seeing the figure in the doorway, though, Alice wondered why this couple was wasting time packing so many weird, useless items.

  A painting?

  Really?

  The figure was shaking. It almost looked like it was having a seizure, though Alice knew from her summers volunteering at the nursing home that this was nowhere near as bad as a seizure could get. There was a dark stain covering the person’s shirt. Blood. Alice wasn’t sure how she knew, but she knew it was blood. The figure moved again. She thought it was a man, maybe, or perhaps a teenage boy. The person was tall, but thin.

  He took a step out onto the porch, and the woman seemed to notice him in her frantic scrambling. The man in the car made no motion to move. Maybe he didn’t see the figure. Maybe he just didn’t care.

  The woman screamed and dropped the items in her hand, then ran toward the car, but by that point, it was too late.

  Alice felt her breath coming hard and hot against Mark’s hand. She hoped he didn’t mind, but if he noticed how heavy she was breathing, he made no motion to move. No, he simply seemed to want to hold her still, to keep her quiet as she watched what was happening.

  The figure in the doorway took another step.

  Then it leapt forward.

  It propelled itself from the porch onto the woman and tackled her before she reached the vehicle. Alice felt tears streaming down her cheeks as she watched the creature bite the woman, tearing into her flesh. Blood sprayed everywhere. The woman screamed. Her voice filled the air and the sound hit Alice’s ears like a foghorn.

  The creature pinned her down and bit her, chewing, tearing her apart until the woman’s screams stopped suddenly and her body stopped twitching.

  “Fuck it all to hell,” Mark murmured. “Kyle was right. Zombies. Fuck.”

  It didn’t seem right or real to her. It couldn’t. She couldn’t quite believe what was happening. She didn’t want to. Alice wanted to go home. She wanted to go back to her apartment and climb into bed and then wake up. She wanted it to all be a dream. She wanted it to be fake. She wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere el
se.

  She didn’t want this to be happening.

  The man in the car suddenly seemed to notice something was happening because he began to move the vehicle. He pulled out of the driveway and the infected man launched his body at the car.

  The car didn’t stop.

  It pulled into the cul-de-sac, then sped off down the road. The creature chased it. Moving slowly, more slowly than it had before feeding, the man moved down the road, following the direction of the car.

  “I guess that answers our questions about noise,” Mark murmured. Then, as if he’d forgotten he was covering Alice’s mouth, he released his hand. “Uh, sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if you were going to freak out or not.”

  “Sorry if I drooled on you,” Alice said quietly. Then she peeked back out the blinds. She had expected the woman in the grass to get back up, to rise from the dead, but she didn’t. Instead, she just lay there, unmoving.

  “Guess he really did a number on her,” Mark said. “She didn’t change into one of them. She’s just dead.”

  “How do you know? How do you know it doesn’t take awhile?”

  Mark shook his head, and Alice realized he didn’t know. He couldn’t. None of them did. They were all in this together, though. Mark, Alice, and Kyle were a team now. She didn’t know how to explain it, but something changed as they watched the woman being killed.

  Something deep inside of her shifted.

  Alice and Mark could have gone after the woman. They could have tried to save her, but what if the man had launched himself at them instead of the woman? Was it worth sacrificing themselves for a stranger? Was it worth giving up their lives for the life of someone else? Someone they didn’t even know?

  Alice used to go to church. During her youth group years, she would have sworn up and down that it was always the “right” thing to do: sacrificing yourself. She would have argued that you needed to sacrifice yourself, that you needed to save other people.

  Wasn’t that what being a good person was all about? Being willing to give up your life for others?

  Now, though, Alice wasn’t so sure.

  Now she wasn’t so certain of what she believed.

  She knew she and Mark couldn’t just give themselves up for the neighbor they didn’t know. They couldn’t because they had Kyle now and he needed them. What if his asthma got worse? What if he had another attack and needed their help to get it under control?

  No, they couldn’t go off dying for random people. They just couldn’t. They had responsibilities now, someone to care for. They had each other.

  And as Alice watched out the window at the woman’s body on the ground beginning to shake, she realized that their troubles really were just beginning.

  Chapter 6

  “She’s coming back to life,” Alice whispered. The fear in her voice shot straight to Mark’s cold, dead heart and he closed his eyes.

  “Come on,” he murmured, pulling her away from the window. Neither one of them was going to go outside and kill her. They were inside for the night, whether they liked it or not. He wanted to barricade the rest of the house, to do something about the windows, to stabilize the back door, but there was no time for any of that anymore.

  The infection had reached them and now it was time to hide until morning.

  “Go upstairs,” he whispered to Alice. “Go upstairs with Kyle and wait for me there.”

  Thankfully, the little sprite didn’t argue. She just went, scurrying up the stairs. Mark ran a hand through his short hair and down his face. His day-old stubble stung his hand, scratching him, and he wished he had shaved. He tried to distance himself from his military days in many ways, but shaving was one thing he couldn’t seem to stop. He needed it. He needed the routine, the predictability. He needed knowing that when he woke up, he brushed his teeth and shaved, and then he began his day.

  Mark went into the kitchen and carefully moved all the crap from the kitchen table to the counter. Then he lifted one end of the table and carefully dragged it across the floor to the back door and pushed it in place. When he was finished, he piled all the crap back on the table.

  It wouldn’t do much to keep anyone from breaking in, but it would be loud, and that was what mattered. Mark didn’t plan on sleeping much, but just in case he dozed off, he wanted to know if someone – or something – was trying to get into the house.

  They would be hidden away upstairs, carefully tucked into the room with the bunk beds. He doubted anyone who broke in would go upstairs at all. Why would they? If someone broke in, they’d be looking for food, supplies, or blood, he realized.

  He couldn’t think like that, though, couldn’t be so overwhelmingly negative. Besides, he had more pressing matters to worry about.

  Like what he was going to do if he had a nightmare. For the first time in ages, he didn’t have a drink or five to help him fall asleep. He had grabbed the bottle of sleeping pills from his cabinet, but did he really want to take those? What if something happened? What if the Infected broke in and Alice and Kyle needed him to keep them safe?

  He liked the two of them. He really did. They needed him, though. He knew that much. They were both quick, both smart, but neither one of them had seen the things he had. Neither one of them had been in war. And as much as Mark hated to be the one to break the news to poor Kyle, playing war simulation video games wasn’t the same thing as holding your brother-in-arms as he died.

  He took one more look around the kitchen. The sun had gone down more and it was almost completely dark, but he needed to look once more. Just once more. Maybe he had missed something. He checked the drawers again and almost grabbed a steak knife, but left it. A steak knife might kill a human who was trying to attack Alice, but he doubted it would do anything to hurt or even slow down the Infected who were wandering the world now.

  Mark felt along the drawers, then moved back to the counter. There was a toaster and a microwave, and although he hadn’t thought twice about it earlier, he moved toward the microwave. He hadn’t touched it earlier, but something was casting a weird shadow inside now, and he wanted to see what it was.

  He pressed the button to open the door and when it swung open, he smiled.

  Money.

  Cold, hard cash.

  Then he frowned.

  Who the hell hid money in a microwave? Wasn’t that just about the worst place you could hide something like that?

  The world was ending. It was dying all around him. Mark shouldn’t be happy about something as simple as cash. He was, though. He picked it up, held it in his hands. For something so powerful, for something that so many fought over, it was so light. Maybe he’d be able to use it in the future. Yeah, there might not be stores open this week or even next, but eventually, civilization had to come back online.

  It had to.

  He put the money in his pocket.

  Mark looked at the kitchen’s back door one last time, then squared his shoulders and headed back upstairs. His steps felt too heavy, too loud on the wooden stairs as he made his way to the top. He was glad when he reached the little hallway where the wood planks were covered with a thick carpet. He’d always thought the colorful runners people chose for their halls were ugly as hell, but tonight he was grateful. The carpet would soften his steps, at least a little.

  His stomach rumbled just as he reached the door to the bedroom where his friends were, and once again, he thought about eating. He should have something. He’d need his strength. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, he was the muscle of their little group and he couldn’t fight off bad guys if he didn’t have some sort of nourishment.

  Mark pushed open the door to find Kyle and Alice already asleep in their opposite bunks. Kyle was on the bottom of the bunk on the left and Alice was sleeping on the top of the one on the right. It was thoughtful of her to leave him the bottom bunk. He wasn’t a huge guy, but he was big enough where sleeping on the upper half of a child’s bunk bed didn’t exactly appeal to him.

  He im
agined it swaying under his weight. He hadn’t liked the damn things when he was a kid and he sure as hell hadn’t liked him in basic training. He didn’t like them now, either.

  Mark quietly closed the door to the room, careful not to wake up his companions. It was almost pitch black now with the blinds closed. His apartment keys were still in the pockets of his jeans and he pulled them out. He gripped the keys together so they wouldn’t make noise and flipped the miniature flashlight on that he kept in his keychain.

  It had been a gift from his foster mother and he was glad now he’d kept it. It was amazing how long the little thing had lasted. What had simply been a silly little toy given to a child was now something more. Mark tried not to think of the memories associated with his flashlight. He really should just get a new one at some point: one that didn’t make him feel so damn much.

  He carefully walked over to the bed and switched the flashlight back off. Mark got down and sat on the bottom bunk, then kicked off his shoes. He put his keys on the floor by the bed and sat with his elbows on his knees.

  This didn’t seem real.

  It couldn’t be real.

  It was stupid, really, but Mark kept going over the events of the day in his head. He wouldn’t be able to fall asleep until he’d finished processing everything. He wouldn’t be able to sleep until he convinced himself this wasn’t really a dream: that he wasn’t hallucinating somehow.

  Zombies.

  Who would have thought it was ever possible? Mark knew it couldn’t be real. Not really. This wasn’t going to be like some bad monster movie. It couldn’t be. He needed to sleep.

  Part of him thought he should stay up and keep watch, but that wasn’t going to work. He was exhausted. He’d pass out and then the nightmares would come because he would have waited to sleep.

  No, he should sleep now before he got too tired to wake up if the dreams came.

  He should sleep now before they were unbearable.