The front glass pane was already broken in, just like every other store on the street. The butcher shop next door had a large, reddish smear on the front glass door and I shuddered, imagining what that had been. I already knew the aisles would be bare of many, if not all supplies and immediately went toward the storeroom door. I pressed my ear against the door and listened for several moments. Knowing I couldn’t waste any more time, I swung the door open quickly and pointed the flash light in. A chill ran down my spine. I hoped it was just nerves instead of instinct.
As far as I could see, the room was empty. I didn’t waste any time and ran down the first two aisles to find them completely empty. My heart thumped in my chest rapidly and tears began to fall. I silently begged the gods to please have something. I couldn’t go back to my daughter empty handed. Just as I was about to fully collapse into my own tears, I found a shelf stocked with canned goods. Somehow it had been missed.
I stuffed my backpack as quickly as I could and had dropped the last can in when I heard the crunching of glass. I froze. I even held my breath as I listened intently to the sounds around me. The room had become so dense with silence that I was beginning to wonder if I’d suddenly gone deaf.
I carefully began walking down the aisle, back toward the door. Of course, I was at the farthest end of the storeroom, as far away from the door as I could possibly be. It felt like miles. As I reached the end of the aisle a bald man stepped out quickly in front of me. He looked starved and mad.
“Hello, pretty.”
I took a reflexive step backward. He wasn’t infected – at least not with the Undead virus. But experience over the last few weeks had taught me that the Undead weren’t always the worst things out there.
I reached behind me and felt the hilt of my knife. He quirked his head to the side as he watched me curiously and smiled. I wrapped my fingers around the hilt comfortingly. He knew exactly what I was doing, but for some reason, he wasn’t trying to stop me. That’s when I realized why.
There was very little room to move in the aisle but I knew I needed to act quickly. I stepped to the side just as another man jumped right past me. He couldn’t stop his own momentum, causing himself to crash into the bald stranger.
I knew I wouldn’t have time to run around the aisle and took my chances running past them. I felt one of their fingertips brush my ankle but it wasn’t enough to stop me. That’s when things got worse.
I was only inches from the door when an Undead stepped over the threshold. I could tell at one point he’d been handsome. But his blood-filled eyes and marbleized skin left him looking evil instead. He smiled when he saw me, his teeth gleaming. He took a step toward me and one of them men behind me cursed. The Undead looked at the men and furrowed his brows and then looked back at me. He then stepped around me and the last thing I heard as I ran through the doorway was the screaming of the two men.
I ran full-speed back toward my apartment. Seeing my daughter playing on the living room floor overwhelmed me emotionally. I fell to the floor beside her and clutched her tightly, crying into her blonde curls.
“Emily,” I breathed out with relief. “Mommy?”
I could hear the fear in her voice. “It’s okay honey, I just missed you and was worried. We’re okay.”
She wrapped her tiny arms around my neck and I squeezed her tightly. The devastation around us had put things into perspective. Every living, breathing moment is ingrained in my memory. At night, I fall asleep only when I’ve lost the battle to stay awake, keeping my eyes on her every moment. I knew our time was limited and wanted every second I could steal.
The only regret I had was not doing this when things were okay. I regretted the moments I yelled at her for messing up my freshly folded laundry, or spilling her milk on the newly-mopped kitchen floor, or wanting to play with her Barbies when I really needed to do the dishes. I wish I had left the dishes and played with her more. Why did we need to come to this point for me to see this?
My daughter clutched her doll like she had been doing for weeks. If she wasn’t clutching her little doll, she was clutching onto me. I didn’t mind, I welcomed it. Our time was running out quickly.
My husband, Patrick, had left weeks ago. Left. Ha. What a joke. They took him. And not the Undead. The government took him because it was his duty. My only hope was that he would survive or at least help others survive.
The wind whistled through the cracks of the boards on the windows. It brought in the scent of the outside. I should say stench. You could smell the rotting flesh on the wind and the muskiness of desperation. The candle and the matches still sat on our bathroom sink.
We were running out of time when I came to accept that Patrick wouldn’t be back for us. I made the decision that I wouldn’t let them take us.
We were barricaded in our home after having lost power the night before. The end was coming for us. I could feel it breathing down our necks - except now the Grim Reaper was opening his arms to us, saving us from this life of horror. He was our saving angel.
We heard the scratching against the walls last night and I held my beautiful daughter until she cried herself to sleep. I held her even after she fell asleep. Her blond curls still bounced around her shoulders and her large blue eyes still looked at me in wonderment.
The scratching and banging on the walls didn’t stop until just before the sun rose. I thought for sure that was it for us; I was ready. But we were granted one more pathetic day. It wasn’t fair. It so wasn’t fair.
We were ready though. We wouldn’t let them take us. I would never let them turn my daughter into a monster. Death was the better alternative. I watched her and wondered if we had minutes or if we still had hours. I knew we wouldn’t make it through another night.
It’s nighttime now. I hear the first board creak ,and I know it’s our time. I grab my beautiful daughter and we rush to the bathroom. I know we have only minutes left and I want to make them count.
“Mommy, is it time?” “It is baby; it’s time.”
I lock the bathroom door and barricade it with the bureau I moved into the bathroom four days ago. I turn to look at my daughter for the last time.
“Come here Emily.”
“Uncle Marcus isn’t coming, is he Mama?”
“No baby, he won’t make it in time. But, he tried. I promise.”
“We’re going to go to Heaven together, Mama?”
“Yes, baby.” I try to swallow the lump in my throat but I can’t. I press my lips together, willing myself to hold it together. My daughter’s last moments will not include her mommy scared and crying. I hold her face between my hands as her blond curls cascade over my fingers. “Emily, do you know how much I love you?”
She nods with enthusiasm, her curls bouncing around her round face. “As much as the earth loves the moon.”
“Yes baby.” I hear the living room window shatter. Less than a minute now, I know. The floorboards creak under the weight of heavy footsteps. My heart drums in my ears. “Let’s sing your favorite song, baby.” Regardless of my attempts my voice still cracks, the lump in my throat becoming more painful to hold back. I feel my eyes well up with tears. Emily’s beautiful, sweet voice rings through my ears as I hold her tight, feeling her tiny heartbeat drum against mine. I can still smell baby lotion on her warm, soft skin as I place a final kiss against her temple, listening to the words of her favorite song. “My strong baby girl, my beautiful baby girl,” I whisper to her as she sings, the last words she will ever hear.
I pull the gun out of the back of my jeans, placing it against her other temple, just as I hear the door knob to the bathroom jiggle along with the sound of that sickening, grotesque, undead snarl. I just hope that the single bullet will take us both out together.
This old man, he played one
He played knick-knack on my thumb
With a knick knack paddywhack give a dog a bone This old man came rolling...
Eleven
Danny Ruiz
About
four-hundred miles off the
coast of Manzanillo, Mexico
October 1st, 2021
Some vacation. They didn’t tell us at first what was going on. But of course, we found out. With the way everyone virtually connects to each other nowadays, there was no way of hiding the inevitable from us. Here we were, floating dead in the water and the closest coast to us was hundreds of miles away.
My mom thought taking a cruise would be great for the family. I hated boats, but when my mom decided on something, well we did it. Everyone except my sister Katarina, who was now somewhere safe in the states. At least my mom had the peace of knowing that she would be okay. I knew she was beating herself up though, knowing she convinced her four other kids to take a trip together, to heal some bad blood, she’d said. Huh, ironic. So, here we were, all together on a cruise ship with our nightmares in sight.
I knew when we first became infected. We’d been at dinner a few nights ago in the cafeteria and when we all got our food; I realized we all had slabs of steaks on our plates and nothing else. Steaks so rare they were dripping blood. Sure, I liked my steaks rare, but my sister, Maria, didn’t. Maria was a vegetarian. Yet, there she was with a bloody steak on her plate. She didn’t even realize what she was doing until she saw us watching her wipe the blood off her plate with her finger and sucking off the blood as if it was the most pleasurable thing ever.
When I turned to my mom, I knew I would see a look of horror on her face, but that was the worst part. See, my mom wasn’t disgusted by her eldest daughter’s actions. She looked pleased. That’s when I realized we all shared the same expressions. I don’t know what it was, but sharing in this crude display was the most pleasurable moment of my life. I looked around the cafeteria and realized we were in good company when I saw all the tables around us experiencing the same delights.
We didn’t realize then exactly what the infection was. We just knew that certain parts of Europe were having weird challenges with some sort of debilitating infection. I was so lost in my thoughts I didn’t even notice I had finished the steak until I heard screaming from the kitchen. I looked down at my plate and noticed it had been licked clean. As a doctor, the screaming should’ve made me instinctively run to the kitchen to see what I could do to help. Instead, I just sat there and listened to the sound as if it was music.
Pleasure was four nights ago.
Today is torment. After we got our fill of steak blood, the reality sunk in and somehow we just knew. It wasn’t just an infection, we were all becoming an entirely new savage species. On the ship, we were already beginning the changes, except for a select few. The doctor in me was hidden under layers of raw desire and urges, and it screamed to be released. As I watched those that were immune, I became curious. A different curiosity from those around me who were giving in so easily to their hunger. My curiosity was more on the scientific level. Why were they immune?
Currently, the Uninfected had locked themselves inside their cabins, hiding. Of course, I didn’t blame them. It drove me mad. Three of them had escaped during dinner last night - took one of the lifeboats when no one was looking. Since then, some of the infected released all the lifeboats and prevented any further escape. Us versus them.
The problem with being a savage is that arguments turn ugly- as is evident of our currently dead captain and crew. Idiots. Now we just sat in the water and no one knew how to drive the damn boat.
“Mama, you have to stop crying. You’re losing blood,” my sister, Sarah, attempted to comfort our mother.
We cry blood, we sweat blood, and we drink blood for pleasure. This is our life now. Our heartbeats slow by the hour. When I last checked, mine drummed slowly at twenty- two beats per minute and my body temperature had dropped to seventy-six degrees, the same temperature as the ship. Yet, physically I felt relatively fine.
“Danny, stop taking notes on everyone. You’ve been doing that for days and no one cares why we are like this or how to change us back.” My mother who had never said a curse word in her life finished off the rest of her sentence with a string of profanities that even I had never heard.
“Sarah, what are you looking at?” She stared at me as if I was food and it made me nervous.
“You.”
“I see that, why are you looking at me like that?” “Danny, did you know that I’m a virgin?” she purred.
There was a part of my mind that tried to remind me how wrong this conversation was, but that raw hunger screamed loudly in my ears. Drowning out any ethical thoughts that could surface.
“Really? You know, I’ve never had a virgin before.” Again, something knocked in my head, begging to be let in, to remind me why this was wrong. I ignored it.
“You know cariño, you’ve been working on that paperwork for far too long. I’m sure Kat would be happy to see your studies, but maybe you and your sister should take a walk,” my mother said while she winked at me, eyeing me carefully as she always did.
Yet, something else reflected in her eyes and I couldn’t quite identify it. I watched her, distrusting her instantly. She was deceitful and evil and I felt it in my core. “Perhaps you’re right mama.”
I felt Sarah’s cool hands in mine and it warmed me. “Let’s take that walk sis, shall we?”
“As long as you bring that stethoscope with you, brother.” She trailed her fingertip up my thigh and rested her hand on my crotch. I decided I’d take her right then and there. To hell with privacy.
At first, the whistling sound was just faint, in the distance. I barely noticed it at first but it quickly became louder. The rumbling of the boat was brief before everything went dark.
Twelve
Lana
Texas
September 3rd, 2021
Like nails on a chalkboard.
Ethan spun around at the sound and I saw the color drain from his face. I didn’t dare look at first. I couldn’t. For weeks the news had said that a plague was spreading rapidly. But years and years of bad news makes a person numb to what they hear. Fear mongering had been such a part of our society that it had become the boy who cried wolf. We ignored it.
So we thought this “plague” would be like the swine flu, H1N1, or all the other threats the CDC threw at us. We really didn’t think it would happen. But, it did. I’m not sure how I knew in that moment that we had been hit. Maybe it was the paralyzing fear that gripped Ethan’s features. Maybe it was the sardonic sound of nails, not against a chalkboard, but against the glass front of our butcher shop. The sound drove itself into my bones and my heart nearly froze. The shrill scream from the street broke us both out of our reverie and I finally turned around.
I had seen pictures of the Undead on the news, their eyes blood-filled from broken vessels in the brain, or something. Their skin had a grayish look to it. They looked dead. Maybe that’s why the news called them zombies — or maybe it was their loss of conscience. It didn’t make sense, even in that moment as I looked at the young girl who had become lost to the infection. I don’t think she was more than twelve years old. Yet, she stared at Ethan and I like we were flies she wanted to slowly pluck the wings from.
She drove her fingers down the glass of the shop, sending that ear-piercing, scratching sound throughout the store. She looked down at the front door handles of our butcher shop and I knew we were dead. We wouldn’t be able to outrun her. We had been warned and we had ignored the warnings. “Stronger, faster, and just evil.”
The words of the newscaster echoed in my mind as a painful reminder of what I never paid attention to,what none of us had until it was too late.
But then she left us. Just like that. I don’t know why she spared us that morning and looking back I wish she hadn’t. Maybe she liked the idea of torturing us with the reality of what was happening around us. We were facing the apocalypse, the final end to our race as we knew it — the end of humanity.
As soon as she left, Ethan ran to the front of the store and locked the doors. What good it would do, I don’t know.
It was just glass. Then I realized what we were really doing. We were locking out our neighbors; humans who needed us. “Ethan,” I whispered. He turned to look at me and I stumbled back. Never had I seen fear grip my husband this
way.
“Lana, we have enough food to last us, we’ll just wait it out in the back.”
“What about the others? There are people out there!”
Right on cue, a body slammed against the front door and I screamed. Lisa, the daughter of the Asian couple that owned the clothing store just down the street had run full speed into our doors.
“What the hell?” Ethan remarked.
“She must have thought the doors would be open.” I quickly walked around to the front of the counter so I could open the doors and let her in.
“Don’t!!” he screamed, his eyes wide with
fear. “What if she’s infected?”
I looked over his shoulder at her. Her eyes and skin looked normal, but I didn’t know if that meant she hadn’t been infected yet. Her screams were very human as she pounded her fists against the glass and then resorted to pulling on the handles of the doors.
“Please! Let me in! They killed mom and dad!”
Ethan pushed me against the counter, away from the
doors. “No!”
I looked up at him, my husband suddenly became a stranger to me. Lisa screamed so loudly that I was sure her throat would be raw with pain soon.
“Please!” Tears streaked her face as she begged.
Numbly, I let Ethan guide me behind the counter and into our back room. Just as I stepped into the doorway, one of the Undead ran full speed into her, slamming her down to the ground. Her head hit the concrete so violently that I felt the vibration in the floor beneath us. Just like that, she was dead — gone.
What had we done?
My chest compressed as I desperately clutched to Ethan, bracing myself. I couldn’t breathe.
The Apocalypse Page 4