The Gorging

by Kirk Thompson

  Nikki jumped at the sound of a light tapping noise on the window in the living room. She tensed up as she looked over to the window and saw shadowed outlines of two people. Her first thought was that it is Mr. and Mrs. Thomas wanting to drop in for a late morning snack. She watched as one of the shadowy figures raised a hand and tapped on the window, this time a little harder. Any harder and the glass would surely shatter.

  Nikki felt the cool linoleum on the bottom of her feet as she stepped into the kitchen. She grabbed the biggest knife she could find. She held it by its walnut handle with the 12-inch steel blade sticking out in front of her.

  The tapping on the window grew louder, this time with both shadowy figures tapping on it as if they were attempting to drive her insane. She could have sworn she heard hideous laughing coming from outside, but reassured herself that it’s just in her mind and it’s not real. She wished she could say the same about everything else that is going on. Nikki’s hands shook and she could barely hold the knife steady as she walked out of the kitchen and back toward the window. She wrapped her left hand around the right, holding the knife as tight as she could. The tapping continued in a steady rhythm.

  “Go away,” she shouted. “I’ll call the police.” She knew this was a bold-faced lie. “I have a gun.” Another lie. “If you don’t go away, I’ll shoot you dead.” Stop lying Nikki. You’re not very good at lying.

  The tapping stopped. Nikki stopped. She took a deep breath and watched the shadowy figures disappear from her window. She let out a sigh of relief and dropped to her knees, letting the knife fall to her side when she did. She was surprised they believed her and left. She held the tears back and brought herself to her feet and sat in the chair in front of the closet. She leaned back, letting her head touch the door softly. The tears began to fall again.

  “Eddie,” she said softly to the closet door, hoping that he would hear her through it. “I love you, honey. Everything is going to be okay. We can get through this together baby. Just please hang on sweetheart.” She was only assuring herself everything would be okay. She knew it was wrong to feel selfish, but she is the one dealing with having been bitten and now having to worry about psycho people lingering outside of the house. She ran her finger along the closet door softly and stared at it, wishing that she could just hold Eddie without having to worry about him trying to eat away at her once again.

  The sound of smashing glass made her jump up from the chair and look toward the master bedroom. She heard the sound of another smash. She jumped out of the chair and grabbed the knife she left on the floor. She stepped around the corner into the kitchen away from the hallway. She listened to the sound of shoes stepping on the shards of glass on the bedroom floor as they cracked into smaller pieces.

  Oh my God. They’re in the house. Oh, no. This isn’t happening.

  Her breathing picked up to a heavy pace and her chest started pounding. She broke out into a sweat, which was already dripping from her forehead. She clinched the knife tight in her palms. She had no plans of dying today, not with her son shoved in the hall closet and her husband 2,000 miles away. She wanted to scream, but refrained from doing so because that would give away her position. She learned about that kind of stuff from Bobby. He always talked to her about his service and the deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. “I may have been a combat photographer,” Bobby would say, “but I was right there in the middle of it so I had to know all about the grunt stuff. We learned how to cut a man’s throat out with one stab to the neck and then a pull to rip out the esophagus.”

  Nikki would rather Bobby be holding the knife instead of her. The grunt stuff and the stories were interesting to hear, but living them out inside her own house was not on her agenda.

  She listened as she slid down the kitchen wall into a squatting position. She heard shoes squeaking with each step across the hardwood floor of the bedroom. She peeked her head into the hallway just in time to see the bedroom door open. She froze stiff, looking at the door as it creaked open. She couldn’t move. Through the door stepped her neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas. The front of Mr. Thomas’s shirt is covered in blood. The blood around his mouth had began to dry. Mrs. Thomas’s flower dress is also soaked in blood. The elderly couple shuffled their way through the bedroom door and down the hallway. It was as though they could smell Nikki’s fear and knew exactly which direction to go.

  Nikki shook vigorously as she tried to keep quite. She managed to take control of her body and pull herself back into the kitchen out of the Thomas’s sight. She let go of the knife with her left hand and covered her mouth. She was terrified she was going to let out a scream and they would know exactly where she was hiding out. They already knew. It wasn’t the fear they smelled. It was the smell of fresh meat. It was the smell of Nikki. They wanted her more than anything. Whatever was happening to the people who turned hostile had an overwhelming desire for human flesh. It tasted better than anything. No hamburger, steak, or any kind of meat tasted as good as the human skin and muscle. The blood made everything extra juicy, nothing like a greasy cheeseburger.

  Nikki watched as the shadows of her neighbors in her house crept up the hallway and slid up the wall near the kitchen. She could hear the foot steps as they got closer. She heard their deep, raspy breathing and could tell they were out for blood. She knew she could jab the knife into the first, but what would she do about the second one. She thought maybe if she stabbed the first one in the chest, pulled the knife out quickly, and rushed at the second one if that would work. Then she thought, what if the knife sticks in the first one’s chest? What would she do then? She gasped for her breath and felt her chest rising and falling quickly. She felt faint and her stomach started to twist, making her want to throw up. She swallowed and tried to keep everything down while the two people, or hostiles, moved closer to her. It was all or nothing. She grasped the knife tighter with both hands and took several deep breaths. She prepared herself for the inevitable. She was ready to attack—

  The closet door shook on the hinges as Eddie started into one of his frantic rages again. The pictures on the wall shook, too. Nikki seized the moment and ran out of the kitchen screaming with the knife held up above her head, ready to stick it in which ever one was leading the way.

  The knife went deep into Mr. Thomas’s chest and pushed his shirt out to a point from his back. Blood quickly spread on the front and back of his shirt. He let out a deep groan as Nikki screamed, trying to pull the knife back out. She ran at him so hard that she pushed Mr. Thomas up against Mrs. Thomas. The knife stuck about two inches into Mrs. Thomas’s neck. She was shorter than her husband and it worked to Nikki’s advantage.

  Nikki kept screaming as she tried to pull the knife from his chest. It lodged tight between his ribs. His eyes met Nikki’s as he growled and then fell to his knees. Mrs. Thomas grabbed her throat as blood spurted through her hands and sprayed onto Nikki’s face. When Nikki figured out the knife was not coming out, she screamed and ran back into the kitchen. She grabbed the next largest knife she could from the cutlery set and went back to the hallway. Mr. Thomas lay dead on the floor, but Mrs. Thomas was still holding her throat as she bumped from wall to wall in the hallway, gargling blood and gasping for air. Nikki thought of running at her and finishing the job, but it couldn’t take much longer before Mrs. Thomas would be just as dead as her crazy husband. How much blood could be in this crazy bitch’s body, thought Nikki.

  “Fucking die already,” screamed Nikki as she waved the knife at Mrs. Thomas. “Die you crazy bitch!”

  When Mrs. Thomas finally fell to the floor and stopped clinching her hands around her throat, it seemed like an eternity. It looked like a slow and painful death, but after Nikki had watched the two kill the woman in the middle of the street she felt like the old lady got what she deserved. Nikki stared at them laying on the floor and waited with the knife held tightly in her palms just in case one of them decided to get up. She felt like she was in a nightmare, or in a low budget horror film,
but this seemed all too real.

  Nikki let the knife slip from her hands and fall to the floor. She dropped to her knees and cried loudly with her face buried in her blood-covered hands. Eddie continued to beat on the closet door. Nikki wiped the tears from her face and stared at the closet. The door kept pushing out with each bang Eddie made against it. “Stop it Eddie! Just stop it!” She started to sob again. “Stop it Eddie. Please just stop.”

  The beating stopped. Nikki looked up and shook her head. Her eyes had turned red and bags were already forming under them from a morning filled with crying and screaming. She looked at her hands and felt sick to her stomach at the sight of the blood that covered her palms and ran down her forearms. She thought about what she had just done to her neighbors. They were good people weren’t they?

  She wiped her hands on her shirt, but the blood was still wet on her hands. She shrieked when she realized that she had cut her hands somehow. She thought for a moment and then realized in all the excitement of jabbing the knife into Mr. Thomas’s chest, her hands had slipped forward from the walnut handle and down the sharp blade. She wiped her hands again and held them against her stomach.

  After Nikki cleaned her hands and wrapped them with the remaining bandages, she went back to the hallway and stared at the bodies lying on the floor. She told herself that if she didn’t move them she would throw up every time she walked past. She went to the bedroom, pulled the comforter off her bed and stopped. She noticed the sliding rear door where Mr. and Mrs. Thomas had broken in. The curtains were swaying with the breeze coming through. Some of the pictures she had stuck between the wooden frame of the dresser mirror had blown off onto the floor. One of the pictures happens to be of her and Bobby on their wedding day. She dropped the blanket back on the bed and knelt done to pick up the picture. It brought back sweet memories, which are something better to think about than two dead bodies lying on the floor of her house. She looked at it and remembered that warm summer day, July 14, some twelve years before when they had gotten married in North Carolina. It was a sweet wedding with all the traditional necessities.

  The breeze picked up and shook the photo in Nikki’s hand. She snapped herself out of her memory trip and remembered she has some important business to take care of. She sat the picture on the dresser and grabbed the comforter. She went back to the hallway and flung it out, letting it float down over top of her neighbors’ bodies. She hurried back to the bedroom and closed the door.

  Although Nikki was safer with Eddie in the closet, she was still sorry that she had to keep her son barricaded inside. It wouldn’t be much longer she kept telling herself. She would just need to be sure that she could make a clear exit from the house, into the car, and down the road to the hospital. She thought getting from the house would be the hard part, but what she didn’t think about was how much trouble getting to the hospital would be, if she would even make it there. The radio transmission had said to go into hiding, but Nikki kept telling herself that the hospital has to be a safe place. It has always been a safe place when disaster strikes.

  After a short while, Nikki thought it would be best to go ahead and try for an escape from her own house. She planned it out perfectly in her head, deciding to grab Eddie from the closet and running out the front door, then heading to the hospital. She would do it all in one shot, but first she needed to go to the bedroom closet and grab a thick coat to wear, a coat that would provide padding around her arms and neck just in case Eddie started up again.

  She stood in the hallway with Eddie’s backpack full of snacks, drinks, and the first-aid kit. You never know when a first-aid kit may come in handy, and for Nikki, it was twice already in one morning. She stared at the closet for a few moments with the backpack slung over her shoulder and the keys to the car in her hand.

  What if there are people outside? I better check again.

  So she quickly walked back to the front window and pulled the curtain back slightly. It looked dead out there. As dead as the woman that lay in the middle of the street. Nikki knew she would have to drive over the lawn to get out otherwise she would pancake the woman lying in the street, not that it would make much difference anyhow. After making up her mind that it was a safe bet to get to the car she went back to the closet. She glanced down and noticed Mr. Thomas’s loafers sticking out from the bottom of the comforter. She cringed at the sight because it reminded Nikki that she had just killed two people. How would she explain this to the police? This kind of shit seems like something that would only happen in a movie, and if it happened in real life, it was bound to be a real world fucked up situation. So maybe the law would understand.

  Nikki opened the closet door slowly in hopes not to wake Eddie up. With the door slightly opened, she glanced inside and saw him lying on the floor in a pile of clothes. The tears started to fill up in her eyes again. She watched him sleeping and then thought of when he was born, lying in the baby bed at the hospital. He was so beautiful to look at and so quiet then. If she could only pick him up like a baby and keep him from waking long enough to get him in the car everything would be okay.

  Eddie grunted a little and moaned when Nikki leaned down next to him and grabbed underneath his shoulders. She slowly picked him up and laid him across her shoulder. She was so upset about hurting him that she forgot about keeping his face away from her neck. If he would wake up at that moment, he could easily tear her ear off with one bite, but she was lucky enough that he stayed sleeping like the little baby he was in the hospital when he was born.

  She walked slowly and almost made it to the door when the sound of a car engine came rumbling down their street. Eddie started to wake up, but without hesitation, Nikki ran him outside to the car and put him in the back seat. The second she closed the door of the car, the car that had been flying down the street came to a sudden and crashing stop two houses up. Nikki jumped and shrieked when she saw the car smash into the big oak tree in the middle of one of her neighbor’s yards. The passenger in the front seat of the car came barreling through the windshield and landed about ten yards in front of it. The passenger was a bloody mess and mangled, no way for the person to survive.

  Oh my God. I have to help them.

  Her first thought whenever something horrific happens is to help the person in need. As much as she wanted to just get in her car and drive away, she felt compelled to run over to the car and check on the driver. So that’s what she did.

  The driver of the car was slumped over the steering wheel when Nikki got to the car. The airbag had deployed and he was still wearing his seatbelt, but somehow, his entire face and front of his shirt was covered in blood. Surprisingly, he was still breathing, but let out slow and shallow, blood-filled breathes.

  “Are you okay?” asked Nikki. She grabbed his shoulder and leaned him back in the seat. “Oh Jesus.” She stepped back from the car door and put a hand over her mouth. She wanted to scream at the sight and knew there was no way his face ended up ripped apart from an airbag hitting it.

  The driver slowly turned his head toward Nikki and spoke in a slow and choppy tone. “She...tried...to...eat me.” He looked up at Nikki with his left eye. The right dangled from its socket and lay against the shredded remains of his cheek.

  “What happened to you?” She stepped up to the car and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Who did this to you?”

  The man’s arm shook as he raised his finger to point to the woman lying in the grass in front of the car. “She...started...biting me.” His breathing sped up and his left eye opened wider. “She growled...and then...started eating...my face.”

  Nikki put her hand back over her mouth and started shaking her head in disgust. She looked at the blood-covered woman on the ground and back to the man in the car. In the split second she took her eyes off the man, he stopped breathing and his left eye stayed open. Nikki screamed at the sight of the dead man staring at her. She turned and ran back to her car, screaming her head off.

  She nearly fell down when she stop
ped suddenly on the wet grass of the next-door neighbor’s lawn. Nikki grabbed her chest as though she were having a heart attack. It’s not every day that you see a crowd of blood thirsty, growling people coming down your street. It looked as though there could be fifty or more. Nikki could have just as easily assumed there were more than a hundred.

  “Oh my God?” Nikki screamed.

  She stood staring at the mass of hostiles coming her way. They were walking slowly and were bumping into each other with one thing on their mind when they saw Nikki standing there with her mouth hanging open. Fresh meat. That’s what they were thinking. How could they have known that she was there? Maybe they could smell her. Maybe the living body puts off an aroma like a sizzling steak on the grille. The crowd let out a deep growl when they noticed her.

  Nikki gasped as she dug her feet into the soft grass to get a better stance when she took off running to her car. All she had to do was open the driver door, get in, and drive away to safety with Eddie sleeping in the back. The only problem was that Eddie was no longer in the back of the car. She looked in the rearview mirror to see her son sleeping, but he wasn’t there. She turned and looked over the seats and saw that he was gone.

  “Eddie,” she said as she looked around outside of the car windows. “Come back!” She shook the steering wheel out of anger that she left her son in the back of the car like someone at a supermarket with his dog in the hot sun. Eddie may have sounded like a dog this morning, but he certainly should have been safe in the back of the car for the five minutes. She kept looking around and noticed the crowds of hostiles were now only a couple of houses away. “Go away!” She screamed in their direction, but they didn’t listen. They kept coming closer and closer. They had no plans of leaving until they could take a bite out of Nikki.