Why are they stopping in front of our house?!
The good-mom part of me tells me that I should make the kids back away from the window—who knows what they will see? But I just can’t do it. I am paralyzed on the spot, unable to take my eyes off the Pickup Truck crew.
We watch as the nondescript men hop out of the truck in their one-piece bright orange bio-hazard suits and shiny black boots. They carry a long green-canvassed stretcher with a small body bag folded in a neat little black square on top of it. They don’t seem to be in a hurry. That’s good. They’re carrying themselves like this is all routine. Perhaps it is another case like mine; someone found a parasite and killed it. I didn’t hear a shot though, or a car.
They cross the street and politely ring the doorbell. Not our doorbell, Eric’s. This doesn’t make sense. Eric lost his wife last year, and he’s been living alone ever since. If Eric is dead in there, who called for the Pickup Truck? Who is there to open the door? I squint hard to make out who it could be but am unable to see past the crew. Whoever is in there does not intend on turning on the lights. It’s like trying to peer into an inky black cave.
Moments later, they emerge from the darkness with a full body bag. The door swings shut without revealing who’s left inside.
What is going on?
KC
It started with the Pickup Truck’s arrival three days ago. It was unsettling to find that someone had managed to get into Eric’s house without Naked picking up on it. Whatever it was, Eric must have killed it. The Pickup Truck’s crew would know who lived there; they would check to make sure the person there matched the face on their database, so it had to be Eric who opened the door. Still, how did he kill it? None of us heard a shot. This guy is like ninety-five. He’s not exactly strong enough to take a zombie’s head off with a steak knife.
So we’re all feeling a little less safe these days. How safe can we be if a zombie managed to get into a house as secure as Eric’s? Eric is one of those paranoid guys affected by the many wars he was involved in. His house was secure long before there was anything to secure it against. And how did Naked not smell it, hear it, or sense it? She’s only seven years old; she can’t be losing her doggie-senses already, right?
Well, she seems to be losing it. She started barking at twilight a couple of nights ago, especially at the back door. She would bark and growl through the dark hours, yet we couldn’t see or hear what she was barking at. Parasites have to adjust to a new host and while they work out how to coordinate their limbs they flounder about and make a fair amount of noise. Some of them seem to fall as much as Maggie Simpson, which means you can usually outrun them once you hear and smell them. We heard and saw nothing.
Naked was restless during the day as well. She would position herself at one of the back windows and growl. Her hair would stand on end sometimes too, making it look like there was a little doggie Mohawk running down her back. She would just stare and stare out at the clumps of weeds and the ivy-covered bushes. She couldn’t relax, which meant we couldn’t relax.
We were extra quiet during those days. We regressed to the behaviors we picked up when this all started, going everywhere in the house together (okay, well, not to the bathroom) and fitfully sleeping in the same room, split kits by our side. We took to staring out at our jungle of a yard, straining to see what it was that Naked seemed to see.
There was one thing we couldn’t help but see: a new dark cloud that constantly hung over our house. I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean there was a real raincloud that refused to budge. This one looked like it was getting heavier and heavier, and we expected the house to get a good soaking at any moment. Nothing happened though. It was unnerving to see it hovering there, like it was waiting for something.
RENEE
Naked’s noisy anxiety had us on edge all week. We’ve been expecting the worst, and we weren’t disappointed.
It was late at night when she started going off again. We had just drifted off to sleep when she started barking hysterically at the back door. I made the kids lock themselves in my room with their seventy-two-hour kits (or “split kits” as they like to call them) while I went to investigate. By the time I reached Naked at the back door in the basement, she was already running straight up the stairs and around to the garage door, all the time barking furiously. The words from the emergency broadcast system came to mind as I followed her: “This is an emergency situation. This is not a drill. I repeat: this is not a drill!”
Naked reserved her most ferocious barking for the door to the garage. She planted herself in front of it, her every hair on end, doing her best to intimidate whatever was on the other side. She was making so much noise I almost didn’t hear the sound of the window in the garage door to the outside breaking.
“It can’t get in,” I thought. My breaths were ragged and shallow as I tried not to hyperventilate. “A cat couldn’t fit through those French panes.”
I had underestimated the parasites. When this all began they seemed to be little more than dumb animals as they shuffled about, barely coordinated as they struggled to cooperate with each other and learn the movements of a new host. I should have realized that if they could learn how to run a new organism, they could keep on learning. This particular one wasn’t trying to get in through the window; it had a much better plan in mind. I could hear its clumsy fumbling movements as it reached its hand through the broken pane and unlocked the door from the inside.
Naked went quiet. Her hair stood up stock-straight all the way down her back. She had a crazed look in her eye and she was shaking uncontrollably. I half expected to see a puddle of pee spreading out from under her; instead I nearly made one of my own as I heard feet dragging over to our door. It stopped right in front of it. My skin went prickly and cold as I watched the handle slowly turn.
Of course it was locked. Naked and I silently backed up into the laundry room and then into the kitchen, carefully closing and locking the door between it and the laundry. I dragged the kitchen table in front of that door and called Homeland Security.
I could barely keep my voice steady as I told them “I’ve got one of them in my garage right now! Please, please come and get it. My husband is away and I have three terrified children upstairs.”
“I’m sorry Mrs. Macfarlane, but we’ve had so many requests for pickup tonight, we are unable to verify when we can arrive.”
“Seriously? Three days ago you were over within ten minutes of my call! How bad can things be?”
“They’re learning. They’re watching and they’re learning. They look for the weakest point in a house and learn how to exploit it. Your situation isn’t as dire as the other calls we’ve received tonight—at least yours isn’t in the house. I’ve got whole families trapped in one room without food and water and five of those things trying to take the door down. We’re all going to need a lot of therapy after this.”
“So what am I supposed to do in the meantime?”
The operator sounded tired. “Do you have a seventy-two-hour kit for each member of the family?”
“Of course.”
“Then keep it on hand with you at all times. Keep your family together, create further barriers throughout the house, stick to the upstairs, and be vigilant. Do you have flares? Do you have roof access?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good. If your home is overrun with those things, we can pick you up off the roof and get you to the nearest refugee center. You’re better prepared than most, so I doubt it will come to that.”
“Are you sure you can’t give me an idea of how long we’ll have to wait?”
The operator sighed. “Honestly? If I figure in the amount of calls we’ve received so far against staff availability, my guess would be three to four days.”
I returned to wide-eyed children with the bad news. We didn’t talk much after that. We quickly gathered whatever we needed to make us comfortable, took up what was left of the food and water to my bedroom, made barriers out of
furniture throughout the house, strung up the noisemakers and tripwire, and sealed ourselves upstairs.
JESSE
We live with monsters now.
It started off with one. Just one in the garage who got clever and found a way in. Now the door’s open, and who knows how many there are? Where did they come from? We didn’t have any of those Infected Dead outside for weeks and now we have a garage full of them…and it’s not just us. They’re like cockroaches these days. So many people have zombies that the Pickup Truck can’t get around to our house to take care of it.
I hate them. We have to live out of the upstairs because of them, and they stink the place up. I thought I was bored before, but last week I was able to be bored on three floors. Now we’re stuck up on one, trying to ignore the noises we hear below in the garage. At least they’re in the garage—they may be smarter, but they must not be very strong because they still haven’t got past any of our doors or windows. Houston boarded them up with another layer on top of the ones Dad had us put up and then he helped us to form walls within walls with our furniture. It was actually kinda fun, like building forts without having to worry about Mom making me put it all back. At least I was having fun. Everyone else was serious and silent.
Mom doesn’t stop me from looking out the windows anymore. I keep looking for my ghost, but I haven’t seen him since the Pickup Truck guys came to his house. Was that his body they took away? If a parasite took over my body I’d haunt the place until somebody took care of it too.
It’s more than a bit crowded since we sealed the top of the stairs. We moved up to the smallest floor in the house, and we moved up with almost all of our stuff. I’m driving everybody crazy ‘cause I’ve just gotta run, but there’s nowhere to run to and lots of stuff to run into. I can’t even use my jump rope—there’s not enough room for it to clear any of our gear. I used to run round and round the house and up and down the stairs until I didn’t feel jumpy anymore…I’m going to go crazy with all this stillness! All we do is schoolwork and play games on the Internet and eat food from a can and turn the TV up real loud so we don’t have to hear the scratching and dragging and bumping and shuffling noises that come from the garage.
Naked seems to have given up. She can’t see out the windows upstairs; they’re too tall. She’s got such a sensitive nose, I bet it hurts with all the dead body smell. She can’t pick out just one body now and bark at it—there are too many bodies around for barking to make sense. I feel bad for her ‘cause she seems sad and old from all of this. I know that she needs to run just like me, so I give her extra belly rubs to make her feel better.
I miss Dad even more when this stuff happens. He can’t get back now ‘cause the airport in Singapore is dealing with an “infestation.” I was on Skype yesterday telling him what it was like living with monsters and then I felt bad because I made him so upset and afraid for us that for the first time in my life, I saw him cry. Dad’s crying seemed to scare KC and Hou ‘cause they started to cry too. I couldn’t tell if Mom was crying—she was looking down and shielding her face with her fingers. Her shaking hands were holding her head up like it couldn’t hold itself no more ‘cause it was full of heavy thoughts.
Then the power went out and things got worse. There was nothing but the radio to listen to, and it was never loud enough to cover up all those zombie sounds. Soon, Mom wouldn’t even let me listen to the radio! I asked Houston about that and he said it was because the stuff on the radio was even worse than the stuff that used to be on TV, that they were now talking about mobs of infected people attacking TV and power stations and cell phone towers and stuff like that. He said there are even outbreaks in places they thought were totally safe. It didn’t matter after a while anyways; the hand crank on the radio broke off ‘cause Mom was using it too much after the batteries died. And if that wasn’t bad enough, things got even spookier once it got dark. For some reason, it sounded like there were more zombies around outside when the lights were out, making it feel like there was an army of the dead just outside our door.
I’m glad it’s fall and we’re not freezing or burning up here, but all we’ve got to do is read books in the daylight (yawn!) and play card games. It got even more boring still when we went through the rest of our batteries…we only used our flashlights for emergency use, so that took awhile. Mom’s phone battery eventually went out too, so we couldn’t talk to anyone anymore. I heard her on the phone crying and begging the government people for help right before her phone died out. I asked Mom what we were going to do now if we needed help, and she said we’d get on the roof and use the flares the government issued until someone came and got us.
One of my favorite ways to entertain myself was to wind up Houston and KC and then get them in trouble for yelling at me, but that doesn’t work anymore. Now they don’t react to anything I do. They’re as quiet as Mom. They stare out the window or into space. Sometimes KC pretends to read her book, but I can tell that she hasn’t turned a page for ages; she just sits there holding the book, staring at it like she’s looking into a tunnel. This makes things more humdrum and dreary than ever, ever before.
That’s why I was so excited when I saw the new people next door.
HOUSTON
We all jump at the sudden noise of Jesse’s excited voice. “There’s people next door again! And they’re new!”
“More of your ghosts Jesse?” sneers KC.
“Are you sure it isn’t Laura’s family?” Mom asks.
“No, I’ve never seen them before. So far all I can see is guys.”
We all go to the side window in Jesse’s room to have a look. We can see movement, but not people.
“They could be zombies,” ventures KC. “Maybe they found a way inside their house too.”
“There’s no such thing as zombies, KC,” Mom says automatically, but then she trails off with “Oh, never mind…whatever…”
“What if they were dropped off by Homeland Security in the night? Remember what they said on the radio? They’re weeding out the troublemakers in refugee centers by dropping them off in abandoned homes with a government-issued survival kit and a ‘good luck!’” I say helpfully.
“Idiot! Why would Homeland Security come to drop off people and not take care of our infestation?” KC barks.
“KC! Be nice!” Mom barks right back at her.
“Sorry, Mom, but you know it’s true.”
Mom’s about to start a lecture on keeping contention out of the home, but the sight of the unknown people next door silences all of us.
Mom lets out her breath in relief. “They’re not zombies. They’re moving with purpose and they’re talking to each other.”
“How many can you see?” KC asks.
I can make out five of them. They look familiar, although I swear I’ve never met them. They’re dressed in camouflage just like hunters. Unshaven, pot-bellied hunters. I wonder to myself if this is what a school bully grows into.
“They look like they’re from West Virginia,” offers KC. “They’re a walking stereotype of the unofficial West Virginia state slogan.”
“Which slogan?” Mom asks.
“You know—‘Virginia is for Lovers. West Virginia is for cousins.’”
“KC!”
KC quickly changes the subject. “Mom, they’re all carrying shotguns.”
“Maybe they know about the area’s zombie problem and want to be prepared,” I muse.
“Why are they putting Laura’s stuff into their backpacks?” Jesse wonders aloud. “They’re taking more than just food.”
Mom’s eyes narrow with worry and suspicion. “They’re not settlers. They’re looters.”
“What’s a looter?” Jesse asks. “Is it worse than a zombie?”
I speak without thinking, “Yeah Jesse, looters are worse. They’re not limited in movement and thought like a zombie, and some are willing to kill to cover their tracks. These guys can get through our defenses in ways a zombie can’t.”
“Housto
n!” Mom hisses through clenched teeth. “Not in front of Jesse!”
How much longer does she think she can protect my little sister from our new reality? No one can afford a childhood these days. But I take one look at her face and feel bad for speaking out. “We’re surrounded by monsters.” Jesse whimpers.
“Well, one monster may take out another” I offer. “We’ve got a garage full of the undead with a door open to the outside; if they try to loot our home, the zombies will get to them before they get to us.”
“Let’s just hope that they only go for abandoned houses. Most of these guys are cowards. They’re not going to want a confrontation” Mom suggests.
Yeah, let’s. And in the meantime, I’m going to take this opportunity to convince Mom to let me have a gun too.
RENEE
They’ve come for us tonight. By the time they appeared on our lawn I remembered where I had seen these men before. I had seen them on TV. These were the death row prisoners that had been turned out onto the streets by their guards, the ones whose pictures were flashed on the screen the first week of the invasion. I know they saw me at the window, so I made sure they noticed me with my gun. It didn’t have the effect I was aiming for—they just laughed at me. I hoped that they had their fill of supplies and valuables from Laura’s house and that they would soon be on their way. I wondered how much more they could carry as it was. I didn’t hear a car, and Naked didn’t bark at their arrival. Then Houston pointed out the large pickup truck parked in front of Laura’s house. They must have coasted down the hill in it, looting as they went. The back was filled with survival paraphernalia, the most valuable swag being the bottles of water. People were willing to trade anything for a bottle of water these days.
Notes from a Necrophobe Page 5