by Theo Vigo
WeepingGirl: No! It's not oookay!
The weeping girl's outburst frightens her supporter.
WeepingGirl: He's not even my father anymore… He's … he's…
Just then, the room door flies open, banging against the wall. The sound makes both of the girls jump this time, and the one with the longer hair turns to see who is standing in the doorway. The other begins weeping again.
WeepingGirl: Oh God, he's here!
When she sees the figure of the zombie standing in the door, the sight is more confusing to her than scary. She gets up from beside the crying girl and stands beside the bed, watching the zombie in a sort of trance.
LongBlondeHairedGirl: That's not your father… That's my father…
There she sees an undead version of Gary looking back at her with a blank expression. Her eyes begin to water.
LongBlondeHairedGirl: Dad, what happened to you?
Instead of answering her, he starts in her direction. She shakes her head in disbelief until she realizes that she has to get out. Her dad has turned into some kind of monster, and this cramped room is not safe. She has to leave, and she'll have to take this girl with her. Even though the girl is obviously out of her mind. She doesn't even know who her own father is, but that is no reason to leave her behind.
LongBlondeHairedGirl: Look, that's not your father, but I think we should-- AAH!!! Mom?!
Sat in the same spot where the young girl had been crying is the undead version of her mother, Mariam. With her undead father approaching from the door, and her mother now on the bed, she has no other option than to try for the window, so she rushes over to it and looks outside. There is nothing but a thin mist hovering in an infinite plane of blackness. She tries to open it, but can't find a lever or latch, or any sort of grip to make the thing work. She notices the lamp on the bedside table, runs over to grab it and after a second of thought, smashes it into the window. Glass falls all over the inside of the room, and she tries to escape out of it.
Cutting her bare feet on the shattered glass is unavoidable as she runs up to and starts climbing over the sill. She makes it half way out, but when she does, an invisible force yanks her back into the room, holds her in mid-air and drops her. She comes down hard on the floor peppered in broken glass, but gets up quickly when she sees that her undead parents are closing in on her. She tries for the window again, ignoring the spikes under her feet, and again, gets half way out, but once more, some unseen entity yanks her back inside. This time, it throws her aggressively on to the bed. She scuttles herself up quickly and falls off the mattress past her mother near to the shattered window. She picks up the strongest looking shard she can find among the myriad laid about the floor. Her zombie parents are truly creeping, but are almost in range of her as she backs herself up into the corner of the room furthest away from the door.
LongBlondeHairedGirl: Mom… Dad… I don't know what happened, but I'm sooo sorry.
She grasps the glass shard tightly with both hands, takes a deep breath and lashes out in a downward stabbing motion. The first to taste the sharp piece of glass is her mother. The point enters just above her mother's left eye and a splash of thick blackened blood squirts the girl in her face via splash back. She yelps in disgust and wriggles the transparent weapon frantically to get it out of her mother's skull. When she succeeds, her mother falls to the ground, squawking and twitching in distress. One down. She turns her attention to her father.
LongBlondeHairedGirl: I'm sorry, dad.
Her grip around her weapon intensifies again, and she performs the same downward stab for her father. He joins his wife twitching on the hardwood floor less than five seconds later. She looks down at them both, almost hyperventilating. It's nauseating, the adrenaline, the shame, the sadness of seeing her parents like that. They looked like an ineffably disgusting version of fish out of water, flapping and flipping around before her.
Should she leave them that way? No. That wouldn't be respectful. But can she finish the job? She has to. It takes a few seconds to muster up the courage, but she inhales deeply, and then bursts into a fit of screams, stabbing the blade of glass down, again and again. More and more black blood sprinkles up into her face after each saving gouge, but the adrenaline channeled throws her into a violent over-kill. By the time she exhausts herself, her parent's bodies are unrecognizable.
Out of breath, she falls back into the corner and sobs into her knees. And then - *CRACK* *crrreeeeeeak* *SNAP*. She raises her head and looks around the room. She doesn't see anything at first, but then another - *crrreeeeeak* *POP* - makes her practically jump out of her skin. She squints her eyes to peer into the shadows of the room. It is much darker now that she had broken the lamp, and she still can't see anything, but the noises persist and then, all together they stop. There is only silence.
Even so, she looks hard to find something, anything in the room's obscure corners, and soon she gets what she asks for. At the window, she sees a decrepit hand slowly creeping in from the outside, and then the noises start up again. *CRACK* This time she sees where it comes from. At the foot end of the bed, a floorboard pops up and another ruined looking hand emerges. Soon more pieces of the hardwood floor start popping out, and more hands come reaching through them. The zombie at the window slinks his head through the broken frame, and then more zombies start appearing, coming in from both the open door and the window. She has nowhere to go; no place she can escape to. The only thing she can do is curl up in the corner, as zombies begin creeping in in droves.
From the floor they crawl up, from the window they tumble inside. *BAM* Hands punch through the walls of the corner she sits in and claw at her cowering body. She struggles and cries as the zombies close in on her, some crawling and dragging themselves over her parents mutilated carcasses, others dramatically limping in.
LongBlondeHairedGirl: No!… Please, no!… Stop this!… Stop!… Please! NOOOOOOOOO!!!
BOW TO THE ALTER
Everything is bright and blurry when she wakes up the next morning. Slowly, the image of a squirming figure comes into focus. Eventually, it becomes clear that the killer from last night is still stuck in the door. The rain has stopped now, and the morning sun blazes through the cabin's front windows. Still exhausted, the girl lays there for while, remembering the new and lonely reality she is now living in, staring into the ever-writhing zombie's lifeless eyes. Her own eyes have become quite lifeless themselves. The sleepless zombie is still trying to get itself unstuck, and the girl sees that he has made absolutely no progress. She scoffs at the stupid beast. As a matter of fact, it looks worse off than it had been the night before. More ensnared.
LongBlondeHairedGirl: Psh… Just my luck.
But then, she hears something off, an unfamiliar sound in the room that she hadn't heard before. It sounds like a soft gurgling coming from behind her. She eases herself up to see where the noise is coming from, but the scene is all the same, if not worse than it had looked in the dark. There's only one small difference. It's hard to tell, but it looks like her mother is moving. She has to find out, so she forces herself up on to her good left foot and hops over to Mariam's corpse. She looks down on her mother's bloody body, then looks away for a second in disgust, not pity or sorrow, just disgust.
When she looks back, she sighs a tired and frustrated sigh. During the night, her mother had turned, and now, as Mariam looks up at her daughter, she looks up with dead eyes and a lust for her offspring's flesh. Unfortunately for Mariam, her mutilator hadn't left her body in a good enough condition to get around with. The zombified mother can do nothing but snarl at her daughter and flounder around on the floor. The young girl can't help but get flashbacks from a recent dream.
She looks around the room and her eyes land on the kitchen drawers. This place has been abandoned for a while, there might not be anything in them, but she might as well check. She isn't about to just leave her mom there on the floor like some pathetic immobile monster. No, instead, she hobbles over and checks the fir
st couple of drawers. Nothing. When she checks the set closer to the sink she finds utensils. Some spoons, forks and butter knifes, but nothing that would be able to pierce the sturdy defenses of the human skull. And then she sees the broken window.
She hops back over to her mother's body and looks at all of the glass shards laying around on the floor. She spots a larger piece with a long sharp edge and instinctively picks it up, gripping it firmly with her right hand. Looking at it with serious eyes, she knows what she has to do. This scenario seems familiar. She descends to her knees, close to her mother's babbling head, and lifts her stabbing hand into the air. Mariam's mouth is filled with blood, her hair still damp from the rainfall of the night before. She looks up at her daughter and gnarls, glaring with eyes that have become dark and sunken in. Mariam's crystal clear blue eyes are gone. Her mother is gone. This is it.
With a force her young teenaged body had never used in the past, she swings her arm, shiv in hand, slamming the spike down into her mother's head. No. It isn't her mother anymore. She takes the makeshift blade out of the monster's head and brings it down again with the same intensity. With this shot, the cursed body goes limp, and the girl releases the piece of glass. It stands tall and proud in the static cranium, mouth agape. The most erudite poker player could not read the young blonde's stoic face to make out what is on her mind in this moment. Blank would be the best reckoning.
She pushes herself back up into a standing position with her good leg, never taking her eyes off the body. It's unbelievable how much this disease has changed her mother's body's appearance. Admittedly, they had all been pretty filthy, her and her family, but this morning her mother's skin complexion is all but washed out.
And then, she remembers the cause of all of this and hears the growling coming at her from the hallway door, a growling that becomes more ferocious when she turns around to look at him. He is the cause. He deserved the same fate as her mother, and she would be the one to gift it to him. She grabs the shard out of the sulking head of the freshly killed zombie under the window, and staggers as quickly as her unsteady feet can handle toward her target.
It might've been okay. If only this zombie hadn't found them, everything might have worked out for her and her parents. Her father would've gotten better, and then they would've turned the cabin into a place to live. It might've been rough at the start, but they would've stayed there until the infection was over and life would've eventually gone back to normal. Everything would've been fine if this thing from hell hadn't burst in and destroyed it all. It destroyed her whole life. He would see what it's like. She will make him see.
But then she stops. Maybe this whole thing isn't his fault. It isn't like this one particular zombie was the sole cause of this entire epidemic. That could be a possibility. Anything is possible now, but the chances are less than slim to none. This zombie had been a man once, just like her father had been. Maybe he even had a daughter, just another lost relative, someone out there just like her. The thought softens her face a little, and the focused hatred she feels slowly leaves her body. She drops her hands to her side and let's go of the large piece of glass. It falls to the floor and breaks into smaller fragments. Her will to kill has completely faded. Perhaps she would put the poor soul out of its misery a bit later.
LongBlondeHairedGirl: Ouch!
Putting too much pressure on her bad ankle causes her to yelp in pain. She looks down at it. A fresh scab has already been created over the wound, but blood stains most of her right foot. It isn't literally bent out of shape, but any pressure on it at all and a searing pain shoots up her leg. The sensation is something like someone stabbing her in the back of the brain from the inside. She decides that the smartest thing to do now is to dress it, and with a quick survey around the room, she finds the supplies she needs.
She grabs a dirty old washcloth on the counter and hops her bum up on to it next to the mouth of the sink. She brings her bad foot up on to the counter and unties her shoe. Cautiously, she slides it off of her foot, and then peels the dirty bloody sock off as well. She opens the hot water tap on the sink and lets it run. It runs until she sees steam beginning to rise, and then she moves herself into a position on the counter where she can put her cut and sprain under the flow.
When she puts it under the water, the look on her face is a dead give away that it hurts like hell. She grits her teeth together and groans at the pain. After running the water over it for a while, she turns off the hot water and takes her foot out of the sink. She examines it and uses the dirty washcloth to wipe off her cut and the area around it, and then she turns on the cold water. She lets it run for a minute while looking down at her foot. Our zombie snarls at her from the door, but she offers him no more than a disinterested glance.
When she feels the cold water is running at it's coldest, she brings her foot back up and places it under the tap. It's freezing, and she gives pretty much the same look as she did when running it under the hot water. She moans and squeezes her eyes shut to calm the sting, and after a proper rinse, takes her foot out from under the water again. This time, before turning off the tap, she rinses out the washcloth for a moment, wrings it and wipes off her leg. She rinses and wrings it out one more time, and then wraps it around the sliced part of her ankle, tying a firm but comfortable knot around it. She looks at her bloody sock and tosses it away, not wanting to put that disgusting thing back on her foot. And then she remembers that her mother should be wearing socks.
Decided, she jumps off of the counter and hops over to her mom's body, all the while being watched and taunted by the caught cretin in the door. She bends down and takes off her mom's right shoe, rips the sock off in one swoop like a Band-Aid, and puts it on her own foot, then hops back over to the counter and jumps back up on to her place beside the sink. She takes her shoe and gently slips it back on. She didn't do the best job tidying her cut, but at least it doesn't look as bad, and she is pretty sure that it isn't infected… with anything. She's just going to have to be easy on it for a while. She drops her dressed foot down to meet the other and lets them both dangle in the air above the kitchen floor.
She stays there for a second, sitting and thinking on the kitchen counter. Our zombie has yet to stop growling and reaching out for her. While staring at him, she glides smoothly off of the counter's rough and dusty surface, and without averting her gaze, makes her way back to the spot on the ground where she had slept. There, she sits down and studies him very intensely.
LongBlondeHairedGirl: So, what the hell is your deal?
She gets the same response that she has been getting from the zombie since the first time they laid eyes on each other. Even while she slept through the night, he hollered for her. Had she not been so tired, she might have not been able to sleep due to the incessant noise. His free arm flails and reaches, and the one caught on the hall side tries it's best to reach over into the living room.
LongBlondeHairedGirl: You know,.. I could kill you. I could use almost anything around here, and I could take my time. It wouldn't even have to be sharp. That would just be too easy.
Our zombie growls on, failing to understand her words. She points to a toaster sitting on the kitchen counter to make it easier for him.
LongBlondeHairedGirl: That toaster… See it? It's not sharp… but I could take that toaster and beat you with it till your head caves in… and there wouldn't be one thing you could do about it… because you're stuck… You're helpless.
She gets to her feet.
LongBlondeHairedGirl: You're helpless, just like me.
She begins limping her way toward the prisoner.
LongBlondeHairedGirl: Well, not exactly. You're the one who's stuck in a door, after all.
She stops walking when she reaches just outside of our zombie's reach, and dodges his attempts to grab at her with his free hand.
LongBlondeHairedGirl: I gotta tell you though...*dodge*… "Helpless" isn't even the word to describe how I feel… *dodge*… "Hopeless", maybe. *dodge*
<
br /> His meal is so close he can taste it, and he becomes a little crazed by the young girl's taunting, swinging his arm harder and letting out a strange barking like noise. The girl decides to take a calm step backward.
LongBlondeHairedGirl: Naw, "helpless" isn't something I feel anymore. I can't… The only thing I have now is myself, thanks to you… But I can't put all of the blame on you. You didn't start this whole nightmare.
She backs up a couple more steps.
LongBlondeHairedGirl: This isn't your fault… I won't kill you… yet. I've seen enough death in the last week to last a lifetime… my life time, at least.
OurZombie: GrrrrooowwaaaaoorrrrrrAaa!!!!!!
LongBlondeHairedGirl: But then what should I do with you?
Just then a rumble comes up from her stomach, and the hunger pangs help her decide what she must do next.
LongBlondeHairedGirl: Ugh, I'll figure you out later. I need to eat something. (sighs) And, you're blocking the way to our supplies. Well, at least that's one thing I can give you all the blame for. Hmmm…
<><><>
Back inside of the former sickroom, the sun's rays shine radiant through the room's single window. It spills into the room, and the sparkling light glimmers over the abandoned blankets, as well as the other belongings left on the floor by it's previous tenants. Flecks of dust shimmer as they float through the sun's golden transparency. Despite the small traces of blood scattered about the floor, it would be hard for one too imagine the horrors that had taken place in this setting, so appealing to the eye.
**CRAAASSSH**
A toaster comes flying through the window, crash lands inside the room and tumbles until it is stopped by the wall. Soon after, a chunky tree branch follows, poking in and out of the window frame, clearing all the glass left behind by the toaster. The girl had gone outside and broken this huge stick off of a nearby tree, and now she swings and slides it across the whole frame to make sure it is completely clear of glass before jumping in. She already has a cacked ankle, and does not need cuts to go along with it. So when she feels that it's clear enough, she tosses the branch inside and starts pulling herself up into another one of last night's horror scenes.