“Oh man,” Alex said, looking out the window, down the street. In the morning sun it was hard to tell if any lights were still on. “I guess I’m surprised it lasted this long…”
“Hey!” A voice yelled through the wall, “Hey, Alex! Did your power just go out?”
Alex recognized Mr. Peterson’s muffled yell and yelled back, “Yeah.”
“Fuck,” was all he heard from the other side.
“Without power do we still have water?” Morgan asked, walking into the kitchen.
“Oh no,” Alex said, the weight of her question dawning on him.
Morgan turned the faucet on and nothing happened. Her heart sank, immediately taking stock in her mind of how much soda Alex had in his refrigerator.
“Alex-”
“I know.” He cut her off. “This is bad.”
“What are we going to do?” she asked, not really expecting him to know.
“We need to at least look in the other apartments before it gets dark. See if we can search any of them or-” Alex paused, trying to let his brain focus. “But it’s going to be dangerous.”
Somehow, thinking of his father defending his childhood home inspired something inside of him. A sense of masculinity. Of power. If his father could do it, so could he. They would survive.
“We have no choice though.” Morgan asked, “Right?”
Alex shrugged.
Morgan put her arm around him, squeezing him closer. “Have I told you how glad I am I get to go through this with you?”
Alex chuckled uncomfortably. “I wouldn’t want to see the end of the world with anyone else.”
“I’m serious!” Morgan said.
“So am I.”
She sat back down calmly, smiling up at him. His mouth quivered into a crooked smile. There was an uncomfortable silence.
For Alex the silence lingered for too long.
He walked over to the bedroom doorway saying, “I think I’m going to open up the fire escape window.” He was obviously changing the subject. “We can see what’s in the apartments that we can reach from there.”
Morgan was both angry and thankful for his distraction. “Yeah, that sounds good. We can just search them one at a time. Take it slow.”
Alex picked up his sword and started to buckle it on his belt.
He dug in his closet and found an old backpack from the semester he spent in college. It turned out to be a wasted four months spent in computer classes, trying to learn how to code so he could design his own video games. He did well in the classes and the coding came easy to him, but the process bored him. He was also forced to see Morgan and Christopher every day, so dropping out was an easy choice.
A job at Wal-Mart greeted him when he left.
He emptied the bag and tossed it to Morgan, saying, “You can use that one.” Alex stood up and grabbed his laptop bag, pulling all the wires and adapters out of the pockets. He slung it over his shoulder and shrugged at Morgan.
“Do you want a sword?” Alex asked sincerely, motioning toward his wall of cheaply made replicas of medieval weaponry.
“I don’t think so.” Morgan said, and picked up a metal candleholder he had displayed on his TV. The holder was long and had a heavy base. Held upside down it made a solid metal club. “This will work fine,” she said, swinging the candleholder in the air.
They both moved the dresser they had set against the window and climbed out onto the fire escape. Morgan looked down at the alleyway below them and saw twenty of the infected people wandering through the back street. She couldn’t believe the number of them and how much it had grown in only a few days. She couldn’t imagine there were many people left in the city to infect.
As she scanned the group near the back wall, she saw a charred and blackened corpse lying next to a metal box attached to the building. The body’s head was blown open on the top, its eyeballs nothing more than exploded goo. Power lines came down from a pole in the alleyway and attached to the box. The box looked charred as well.
Morgan pointed at the box and the body saying, “Looks like we know why the power went out.”
Alex wondered how long it would take for the whole city to lose power.
They both climbed down the metal ladder to the next landing on the fire escape. Alex held his face up to the window and cupped his hands around his eyes, trying to peer through the glass into the apartment. All he could see was a bedroom with an unmade bed and dirty clothes lying on the floor.
He tried to lift the window, but it was locked tight. Morgan gently pushed him to the side and shattered the window with one good swing of her metal candleholder. She smiled when she saw the shocked look on Alex’s face.
The men on the ground started to moan and reach up into the air when they heard the window shatter and saw the fresh meat above them.
Alex reached through the broken window and unlocked it, allowing him to lift the frame. The loose glass fell away when he moved it. Climbing through first, he unsheathed his sword and crept toward the living room.
Morgan stepped through the window behind him. She could tell a single man lived in the house by the bedroom. A laundry basket filled with nothing more than T-shirts and boxer shorts lay next to the bed. A magazine with a random female celebrity in a bikini was set next to the bedside lamp. A part of her felt like a detective. The other part felt like a criminal.
Alex poked his head into the living room, glancing around the room. He motioned for Morgan to move up and she crept in close behind him.
“It looks clear,” he whispered, but they both immediately heard a moan come from the kitchen when he spoke.
Alex peeked out the doorway again, only to see a woman lurch out of the kitchen, dried blood all over her chin and chest. Her head lashed around as she searched for the source of the noise, but then she saw Alex standing in the bedroom doorway.
Her eyebrows arched into points and her mouth dropped open, releasing a horrific scream. She lunged at him with outstretched arms. He brought up his sword, reflexively defending himself. The point of the sword plunged into the woman’s stomach, piercing through her back. She fell to the base of the sword and latched onto Alex’s shoulders. Her mouth fell to his neck, only to get knocked away by Morgan’s swinging candleholder.
Morgan brought the metal base down again onto the woman’s arms, snapping one of her forearms in half. Jagged bone fell to the floor and Alex was released from her grip. As he pulled away, he gave a tug on his sword, breaking the handle off of the blade.
The woman lunged with the remaining good arm, grabbing onto Morgan's shirt. Morgan brought the candleholder up, smashing the wide base into the woman’s jaw, snapping the mouth shut as the head reeled back from the impact.
Alex reached out and grabbed the woman’s hair, yanking her head away from Morgan. The woman snapped her teeth and growled like a wild animal. Morgan kicked her feet out, pushing herself away from the woman. Once she was out of the woman’s reach, the woman spun around and grabbed onto Alex, tackling him to the floor.
Alex slammed one hand under her jaw, holding her face away from his. The woman’s drool started running down his hand as she foamed at the mouth, uncontrollably grabbing at his body.
He pushed as hard as he could and lifted her head up into the air. With a low crack, Morgan’s candleholder smashed into her head, sending the body flying across the room. The woman stood back up immediately, her head dented in on one side.
“I’ll hold her down!” Alex yelled, leaping at the woman. “You keep smashing!”
He jumped at her, bringing her to the floor and put all his weight on her shoulders. The woman kept lifting her head, only using her neck, trying to get herself within biting distance.
“Do it, Morgan! Do it now!”
“Oh my god!” Morgan turned her head away from what she knew she needed to do.
“Do it!”
Morgan brought the metal base down in a wide arc, crushing the woman’s skull under her swing. Her face shattered into the floor, spraying t
he gore of her brains all over Alex and the carpet. When she lifted the candleholder off the impact site, strings of goo dripped from its bottom.
“I’m going to be sick,” Morgan said, her face turning pale.
Alex looked down at the headless woman, his sword blade still sticking out from her stomach. Her face was in pieces, splattered into the carpet in globs of fractured shards of bone. Alex could still recognize the body as his neighbor’s girlfriend.
He looked down at himself and saw the woman’s blood and brains all over his shirt. He could feel the hunks of flesh hanging in his hair. His mind wrestled with his body. One wanted to assess the situation and be happy he survived the encounter. The other wanted to release his lunch, adding to the disgusting mess in front of him.
He eventually gained control of his arms and pushed himself away, stumbling into the living room. Morgan was closing the door to the apartment, locking the deadbolt. The wood of the door was splintered around the doorknob, showing Morgan exactly how the infected had gotten into the apartment. Moans came from down the hall as nearby zombies responded to the commotion in the apartment. The doorknob hadn’t been enough, but the deadbolt would keep them out. At least for a while.
Alex pulled off his shirt and used the back of it to wipe the gore from his head.
“None in my eyes,” he thought. “None in my mouth. I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.”
He considered searching the man’s room for a new shirt, but saw the body still lying on the floor and decided it was warm enough to remain shirtless for a little longer.
“Let’s just get some food and whatever else we can find, and get out of here.”
Alex watched Morgan try to move her shaking hands to open drawers and cupboards. He wanted to help her, but she looked like if he touched her she might shatter. She fumbled with canned vegetables and ravioli, filling her bag with the boxed food diet of the single male. Her arms felt weak, her head felt dizzy.
Alex stepped behind her and placed his hand on her shoulders. “Are you okay?”
“I’m just... that was...”
“I know.”
“It felt just like killing.”
“I know.” His voice trailed off. He knew that woman was dead before they ever came into her apartment, but the experience had felt so real. It felt like murder, and he knew he would never be the same.
Morgan slung the backpack over her shoulder saying, “Forget it. I’m fine. I just need to get out of here,” and walked back into the bedroom, exiting out the window.
Alex sat alone in the room, listening to Morgan’s footsteps on the fire escape as she climbed back upstairs, and the moans of the corpses who stood right outside the door. He continued rooting through the drawers of the kitchen and finally dragged a chair over to the refrigerator to check the cupboard above it.
As he opened the doors of the small cupboard, a smile drew across his face. There, displayed in front of his curious eyes, were seven different bottles of alcohol. Various flavored vodkas, whiskey, and rum.
He did not realize it until that point, but it was exactly what he had been looking for.
Day 11
8:20 pm
Alex sipped from the bottle of whiskey, rubbing his eyes as the liquid burned down his throat. He felt a bit selfish, drinking by himself on the rooftop, but he knew Morgan hated whiskey. His eyelids were growing heavy, but the sunset still looked beautiful, even with the destroyed city that formed the horizon. The glowing orange skyline was one of the few pleasures the world had left for him.
As the last of the day’s light filtered away through the still burning city, Alex’s eyes fell to the corpses roaming below him. He watched them wander into open doorways as more wandered out. Through the whiskey-induced haze, he felt a twinge of sympathy for the corpses. He felt their pointless, unending hunger. Their moans sounded more painful when he really listened.
He took another sip of whiskey. He had never drank so much for so many days straight. He didn’t like drinking, but when he attempted to fool everyone into thinking he was “normal” he would have a few beers with them. He had stayed functionally drunk on hard liquor for the fast few days and his body was screaming at him for it. He woke every morning with a headache, but was grabbing the bottle by midday.
The liquor had made it easier for him to accept that the people he killed were not the people he knew. That it was him or them. He was protecting Morgan. It was this justification that worked in his mind because no matter how many times he told himself that these people were dead, when he watched them from the roof, he saw a glimmer of life.
They moved. He took another sip.
The world outside felt much farther away when he was drunk and the world inside appeared so much safer. Safe enough to cry. Safe enough to be scared.
“What are you doing?” Morgan asked from behind, startling him.
Alex turned around in one of the two kitchen chairs he had dragged up to the roof and saw her climbing up the fire escape ladder.
He wiped the tear forming by his eye and said, “Nothing. Just watching the sun go down. I like watching the automatic streetlights turn on. I wonder how much longer they'll last? Even the back-up generators have to run out sometime…”
She sat down next to him, propping her feet up on the edge of the building. She held a can of beer in her hand and took a loud sip. Alex reached down and grabbed his bottle, taking his own sip.
After an endlessly long moment of silence, Morgan finally said, “I feel really stupid.”
Alex was surprised at the random comment and asked, “What? Why?”
Morgan let out a sigh, still unsure if she should be talking about what was on her mind. The subject felt so foolish now that she was outside and faced with the world that surrounded them.
“Before I called you, before all of this, before Christopher had left for California… we got into this, like, huge fight. I mean big. We were screaming at each other, which we rarely did. He left the house and I told him I hated him, and I really wasn’t sure he was going to come back.” She took a sip of her beer and shook her head, revealing she understood what she felt was nonsense. “I seriously felt like my life was over. We had dated for so long, you know? He was all I knew. Or thought I knew. And I watched him walk out the door and I felt like that was it. That was all I had. My life just walked out the door.” She was immediately embarrassed by her vulnerability. She wished she could suck her words back into her mouth and go on pretending she was strong.
“I’m sure he knew you didn’t mean it.” Alex tried to be her friend, keeping his responses unbiased. “Everyone fights. Especially couples.”
“Yeah, but Alex. That’s not the point. I mean look around. I was worried about a boy not being around me. I called you just because, I mean, I know this is going to sound selfish or whatever, but I just wanted to know that someone was still going to be in my life. I wanted to know if he left me that at least you would still be there.” She shook her head in frustration. “Now the dead are walking the earth and I can’t go outside, or they might eat me!”
Alex couldn’t help but laugh a bit as he said, “Okay, I see what you’re saying.”
“I just feel so dumb for all the things I took for granted and all the things I gave too much importance. I mean, I’m not saying Christopher wasn’t… isn’t important. I just… compared to what might have happened to him I would give anything to have us just broken up. At least I would know he was still in the world. Still happy. I just can’t believe… I mean, the way I used to think. It seems so foreign to me. It feels wrong in this world. Just a couple weeks and everything is so different.”
“No, I’ve been thinking about that, too. But like, we can’t beat ourselves up over having a different life before. It was a different world. Just because in hindsight things don’t appear the same, it doesn’t make our old views any less valid.”
Morgan shook her head, hesitant to share what came next. “I’m just can’t stop thinking about Christophe
r. I just wish I knew what happened. One way or another.” She let her head fall into her hands, covering her face. “I feel horrible. I feel like it would be better to know he was dead than to not know.” She closed her eyes tight, summoning the power to hold back her tears.
Alex became uncomfortable, trying to call upon every ounce of maturity and sobriety in order to help her. “I feel like that about a lot of people.”
“I wonder if he got on the plane before… or, like, if he’s wandering around as… as one of those things.”
Alex’s head swished back and forth as he lifted the bottle of whiskey. He wished he wasn’t so drunk. He wanted to give Morgan advice that would set her mind at ease, but could think of nothing. His thoughts swirled from one thought to the next. He set the bottle down without drinking.
As he stared out across the city he focused his mind and said, “Ya know, I sit up here on the roof, and I sit here right, and I think. I try to think about how to save us. What to do so we can be okay. Where to go to be safe, and I…” His voice trailed off, like he lost his breath. Alex readjusted how he was sitting and rested his head in his hands, bracing his elbows on his legs. “I don’t know what to do Morgan,” he finally said, his voice mixed with a whimper. “I don’t know what to do.”
“It’s okay, Alex.” She smiled softly, resting her hand on his back. “We have enough food to last quite a while. We have time to figure it out. We can figure this out together.”
He looked into her eyes, hoping what she said was true.
“Alex, you don’t have to save me.”
He leaned over and he hugged her. He hugged her like he only did when she was leaving a party. When everyone else was hugging her goodbye and it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary. He stood in line until it was his turn to wish her goodbye and tried to quietly inhale her perfume, so that he could memorize the smell.
“We should start a fire,” Morgan said as she pulled away. They had constructed a makeshift grill on the roof so they could heat up their cans of food.
“Sounds good, we could have some of that soup we found,” Alex said, his stomach growling at the thought.
After Life Page 6