Notes from a Necrophobe

by T. C. Armstrong

  I waited until we had two days of temperatures well below freezing before I made my move. Last night felt about right, but it wasn’t until 4:00 am that enough people were asleep to let me slip away.

  I took a flashlight and a sturdy mop with me. I felt a bit stupid carrying it outside, like I was taking my cleaning supplies for an early-morning walk, but I was going to need it if I found what I was looking for. At the very least I could use it to push a zombie or two away, maybe even knock them off their feet.

  I gently slid the lock out of its track and opened the door just enough to slip through. I had layered up and thought I was ready to face the cold. I mean, how much worse could it be than the unheated inside of a refugee center? But I wasn’t prepared for the stinging power of sub-zero weather. It bit down hard on my nose and smacked me across the face with its frosty hand. I also didn’t realize how painful it would be to breath in such frigid air. It was as if a ghost had jumped down my throat and grabbed my lungs in an icy grip. I’ve never known cold like this in Virginia; we must be breaking some records with these temperatures. Maybe those little organisms brought the cold of Lake Vostok with them.

  As hard as it was to move and breath in the glass-cold air, I found it reassuring, because the colder it was, the better a chance I had of finding my enemies frozen to the spot, unable to scratch and bite. I walked across the crunchy grass of the courtyard to the gates, hoping I could manually open them now that the electricity was off.

  I stopped short of the big sliding metal slab, feeling the need to take it all in. I had never felt so alone. Behind me my family, my reason for carrying on, slept. Also behind me were new enemies ready to take it all away for a bottle of water. And there I was, outside for the first time since we ran through the other side of this very gate.

  On the other side of that gate were the dead, hundreds and hundreds of them. I listened out for any sound—like the dragging or shuffling of feet, the crunch of frozen grass beneath their tread, the noise of cloth brushing up against cloth. I heard nothing. It was all the encouragement I needed to try to open the gate.

  It was more difficult than I thought it would be. I had gloves on of course, I’m sure my hands would’ve stuck to the metal otherwise, but I still felt the cold biting through the thinsulate layer of my gloves, pricking away at my skin. It wouldn’t slide away easily either; instead it felt determined to stay fixed in its track. I tugged and grunted and the metal squeaked and groaned until I was sure I had woken both the living and the dead.

  After what felt like hours, but was probably no more than twenty minutes, I managed to move the gate back a crack. I stopped what I was doing and trained my flashlight through the opening.

  I didn’t actually need the flashlight. There was a full moon out which focused the scene beyond the gate in an eerie light. I wish it hadn’t, because before me were the frozen faces of the Infected, all in different states of decomposition. Some had skin sloughed off to the bone. Some had mottled complexions that made them look like they were never human. Some were fresh enough to still have their eyes (where are the fresh zombies coming from?), but most did not. All of them seemed to be looking at me.

  I felt sick looking back at them. I had not been this close to a dead person since we fled the Jeep and even then I wasn’t looking back at them, I was watching the gate slide away to let us in. The last memory I have of looking into the face of a corpse was hanging over the side of the roof and watching them climb on to our balcony.

  That’s the memory that snaps me back to the present and reminds me why I’m out here. I wasn’t there for my family back then, but I’m here for them now. I ignore my quaking nerves and push the fear and revulsion to the back of my mind. I’ve got a job to do. I shine my flashlight at the feet of the bodies and beyond until I find what I’m after.

  Split kits. There are loads and loads of split kits! They litter the ground, dropped by their owners who now stalk the lucky survivors who outran them. I shine my light back up to the faces of the Infected, looking for any signs of thawing or movement, but they remain rooted to the spot where they froze.

  The birds of panic awake and start fluttering in my stomach as I look out there and realize what I’m about to do. I start to move before hysteria has a chance to paralyze me again. I push hard enough on the gate to move it about four inches more and squeeze through.

  I find myself weaving through a forest of the dead, picking up split kits here and there like I’m picking flowers in the woods to bring home to my mother. It’s taking longer than I thought it would since I have to light my way with the flashlight. I don’t want to fall into one of those ditches like the one that ate our Jeep. I don’t bother looking for it. Ghost told me soon after we arrived that it had already disappeared. Every now and then I catch sight of the faces around me in the flashlight’s beam. I wish I didn’t. They all seem to have these accusatory expressions that say, “That’s mine! Put it back! I’ll get you for this.”

  The weight of these packs is killing me! I wonder how many trips I can make before the sun comes up and warms this open-air morgue enough to reanimate the corpsicles. I’ve got packs slung over my aching arms and have threaded the rest of the kits on both sides of the mop that now sits across my shoulder blades. I’m struggling with my load when something runs at me, knocking me off my feet.

  I scream. I jump. I drop everything. I run away from it. It’s all I can do to keep from wetting myself. But it keeps following me! I’m running full tilt, but it’s still there, right at my heels. I try to force myself through the slim gap in the gate, but it’s too narrow for me to dive through and I soon find myself stuck.

  It’s here next to me. I wish I could see it in the dark. What does it want? I find out quickly enough. It wants me. I know this because it starts kissing my hand. Well, kissing in the way doggies kiss.

  “Naked!” I cry in joy and relief. All the adrenaline that flooded my veins drains out through my feet. If it weren’t for the gate holding me up I would have collapsed on the frozen ground. I would have knelt there and thrown my arms around Naked’s warm neck and let her lick my face. I still can’t see her that well. There’s not enough light to make out a dark brown Labrador, but I can feel her whole back end wagging enthusiastically.

  I wiggle back through the gate and trot back to the fallen kits. I load some on Naked’s back like a packhorse. I thread the rest back on to the mop handle, and then I walk crab-like to the narrow gate.

  Some of these backpacks are too wide to go through the gap easily, so I push them in one by one through to the other side. As I shove the last one in, I feel my heart stop. I’m done for. My hand has just made contact with someone, and that someone grabs on to me before I have a chance to jump back. And then I feel stupid when the owner of that icy hand says, “Here, let me help you with that.”

  For the second time that morning, I go weak in the knees with relief. It’s just Kaboom. Great, he must have heard me scream. I hope none of the girls heard me scream. I’m not proud of it but it was dark. I was hanging out with the damned, and I was being chased by something unseen. Kaboom doesn’t comment on my earlier outburst. He just picks up bag after bag and piles them behind him. I hear more voices sounding off in the distance and realize that Kaboom is only part of the relief effort. When I look beyond him, I can see an assembly line of people, mostly from the Dumb Luck Club, and they’re running the packs all the way back to the school. I hope Andrew’s followers are still sleeping. I don’t want my hard work to end up in his hands.

  My mother’s frightened pale face briefly replaces Kaboom’s. “Houston!” she hisses through the gap, “I thought you were dead! How could you do this to me? You’ve got to come back right now.”

  “Mom, there’s a road full of split kits with valuable water and food. I mean, yeah, they’re surrounded by zombies but they’re frozen zombies! They can’t move enough to bite. Besides,” I point to Naked, “look who I found.”

  Mom looks as happy as Naked does whe
n she sees her, but she still wants me out of harm’s way. “We’ve got enough kits, sweetie. Please come back with me.”

  “We can help him Mrs. MacFarlane.” Doom and Kaboom are both at the gap now. “But we need to keep moving…we don’t know how much longer these zombies will stay frozen. Let us help Houston gather a few more kits and then we can all go back in.”

  “I’ll stay with them,” says a voice behind Mom. It’s Mr. Cromwell, the only other grown up out here. “I’ll make sure they’re safe and out of here before there’s any danger.”

  “Besides,” adds Doom, “the others won’t stay asleep. If you don’t go back soon, you might have a scuffle over the kits we already have. Don’t worry about Houston. We’ll look after each other.”

  “And we’ve got Naked with us.” I try to say reassuringly.

  I can see Mom’s conflicted, but in the end her worry about the others bears out. “Just ten minutes more, please!” she says before she sprints back towards the entrance. Kaboom, Doom, and Mr. Cromwell squeeze themselves through the gap in the gate and join me. “This is a really clever idea, Hou,” says Mr. Cromwell admiringly. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it.”

  “I can’t believe Ghost didn’t think of it,” says Kaboom.

  “Maybe he did, but it never got cold enough for him to do something about it,” I muse.

  “So you really thought this up on your own?” Doom says wistfully.

  “Yeah, but it was the soldier’s idea first. Besides, I needed to do something to prove I wasn’t a dead weight. And before you ask, no, I wasn’t about to involve anyone else in case it didn’t work.”

  “Less talk, more collecting,” says Kaboom. “These frozen stiffs are seriously creeping me out.”

  We work in grim silence after that, venturing further and further out to scoop up the kits and weaving in and out of the frigid dead to push the kits through the gate, confident that the line will do its job and move them inside. We no longer look up at the faces of the Infected while we work, especially since the sun has risen. We don’t want to lose our nerve when faced with the different stages of decay and those accusing, sightless eye sockets. I wonder how Doom could offer to help when his family has to be among these bodies.

  Suddenly the silence explodes into sound and frantic action and everything seems to be happening at once. First I hear Jesse’s voice pierce the stillness from the roof. I don’t have time to think, “How did she get up there?” before Naked starts to bark. And then I register what Jesse is saying.

  “Mommy, the zombies are crying!”

  The four of us look up in sharp surprise, first at each other, then at the Infected. They do indeed look like they’re crying, but it’s not because there are tears running down their faces.

  It’s because they’re thawing.

  We have been gathering packs in a daze and were so single-minded in our task we didn’t register how much warmer it was getting in the sun. Every cell in us is aware of it now.

  My mother’s screaming from the gate “Get back! Get back now!” but she doesn’t need to say anything. We’re already sprinting and ducking and diving and shoving stiffs right and left before they gain full movement. Naked trails behind us, and she’s barking threateningly all the way.

  Doom squeezes right through the narrow opening, followed by Kaboom, but like before, I get stuck. The zombie nearest the gate grabs my arm and brings its head down to bite, but Naked jumps on its neck and knocks it over. I’m grabbed by another one, but Mr. Cromwell pushes it away with the mop. Other hands roughly pull me through the gap and then try to push the gate shut once Naked and Mr. Cromwell are through, but it’s taking too long and a bouquet of arms are now blocking the opening. We give one almighty shove, hoping the thaw will let us close the gate on the arms but it’s no use. There’s too many of them.

  We give up trying to close our last line of defense and haul it back to the school, scooping up packs as we go.

  KC

  I thought Mom was going to have a heart attack when I told her about Hou, and I was sure she was going to have a stroke when she found out that Jesse was on the roof. We had been so preoccupied with saving Houston and the split kits that we took our eye off her. She got mad at being left out and decided to go onto the roof to see for herself what was going on. Good thing she did too, or we wouldn’t have noticed the dead were thawing out.

  I don’t want to think about what would have happened if Houston joined the Infected, so I distract myself by sorting through the packs they just brought in. We’re lucky that Andrew and his crew were too lazy to wake up, but they’re up now, and they’re looking expectantly at the booty Houston scored for us.

  Hou’s a hero! He put himself at great risk to help us survive. He’s an even bigger hero to Jesse because he brought Naked back with him. He didn’t exactly seek her out and carry her back to Mclean High, but if he hadn’t been out there, we wouldn’t have had any other way of getting her back. The Infected would have used her as bait to get us to open the gate, or Naked would torture us with her barking until she froze to death. I think she ditched the soldiers once she realized we weren’t with them. Naked is totally valuable as a zombie detector. They must have had her on a leash at all times so they wouldn’t lose her. In my heart of hearts I like to think that one of the refugees let her off the leash out of guilt for abandoning us.

  Morale is good at the moment. I’m trying to ride that wave of happiness along with the others, but I look at the number of kits we collected, and then I look at the number of people we still have here and I know that we’re looking at about a couple of week’s worth of food and water at the most. Of course, the drifters think we should party it up and live a little with what we’ve found, like it’s mad money or something. Andrew seems to think he deserves more as well, despite the fact he didn’t risk so much as a hair on his head for any of this.

  Here’s the problem: although we desperately needed new food and water to keep going, Hou’s split-kit raid may have brought us closer to death’s door. Actually, death has come to our door. I don’t blame the guys for leaving the gate open, it was too frozen to move and there wasn’t enough time to get it to shut. But there’s a major drawback to an open gate. The dead made quick use of it. They’ve been squeezing through the narrow opening all morning. It kills me that we don’t have a weapon to pick them off with. If we had a gun, I could stand on the roof and shoot them one by one as they entered the gate until they plug up the opening with their own bodies. What really kills me is that I didn’t think of bringing a weapon to the gate and delivering “fatal” head wounds as they tried to fit through the opening. Everyone was too busy fleeing and dragging food and water in to stop and think of this. This thought constantly hangs over my head as the ultimate missed opportunity.

  It doesn’t take long before our courtyard is filled with the undead. We fortify the doors and windows with any little piece of furniture we can get our hands on, but our barricades cannot keep out the sound of the scuffling and shuffling the Infected make as they search for a way in.

  Before the soldiers left, my least favorite job was cleaning the bathrooms or cooking in the kitchen, but now the worst job is guarding the entrances. Mom said we could do this in shifts; guess that way we can share the horror, or just get a break from it every now and then. I’m still afraid I’m going to lose my mind doing guard duty. Too many horror movies have trained my brain to expect a bloody arm to shoot through our makeshift barriers any minute and grab me by the throat.

  So this is where we are now, the enemy without and the enemy within. I can’t decide which one wants to kill us more—Andrew’s group or the Infected.

  I’m still proud of my big brother and his quick thinking, but I know it’s only delayed the inevitable. Mom explained her plan to the Dumb Luck Club last night, the one about dividing the supplies and breaking off into two bands of survivors. No one came up with an alternative. We’re only too happy to avoid a fight and get away from Andrew a
nd his losers.

  Shades of death hang in the air and in my thoughts. I find myself saying the same words in my mind that little Sarah has been saying aloud the past week.

  It’s only a matter of time now…

  HOUSTON

  Mom called everyone into a meeting to tell us that we need to pick a place to have our last stand and fortify it, instead of us dividing ourselves up to guard various entrances and exits. She didn’t mention the part about not trusting some of these people to do an effective job of safeguarding. She was probably thinking of what really goes on when she assigns people to guard duty. If they’re Andrew’s followers, they’re plotting away instead of watching. If they’re one of the drifters they’re relying on a locked door and nodding off to sleep. And then there’s the ever-growing crowd of those who have given up on life and the pursuit of happiness. They blow off guard duty to curl up on their cot and stare dead-eyed at the wall.

  But my mother didn’t mention any of this. Instead she announced, “This isn’t a Scooby-Doo movie folks! There will be no more splitting up to go down dark hallways.” This was met with a sigh of relief from all. Finally, we found something we can agree on.

  We eventually picked out the hall between the main office and the theater that faces the entrance of the school. The office gives us a place to sleep, the hallway gives us a place to keep an eye on what was going on outside, and the theater gives us a place to hang out in. I listened as my mother deftly manipulated the discussion towards this final decision, knowing that she had the clubhouse in mind as a backup plan. Naked sealed the decision with her doggy-sense: she barked at every hallway except the one we chose.