There’s Mavis Gunnar who brought her knitting with her and seemed to be making baby clothes. Was she pregnant? Or was it for a grandchild? Mavis is kind of an old-fashioned name, so I’m guessing it’s the latter.
Tom Brody’s bag has baseball cards in it. They’re in hard plastic cases, so they were probably once worth a lot of money. He had a signed baseball in there too, and I’ll bet he was wearing his favorite baseball cap when he went down. The clothes in the bag were for a small boy, about Sarah’s size—nothing we can use to keep us warm. I can’t go through this one fast enough because I can’t handle the thought of this kid not making it.
There’s even one with a violin, but no name. The bridge is broken, which probably happened when it slipped from its owner’s back when the human part gave way to the parasites. There aren’t any clothes in there so I can’t tell if it belonged to a boy or a girl. I like to think it was a girl about my age because the music she chose to take with her is the kind of music I would choose: “Sally’s Song” from Nightmare Before Christmas, “Castle on a Cloud” from Les’ Miserables, the theme song from Pirates of the Caribbean, and some of Coldplay’s greatest hits. At this moment, I’d give up all my rations for the day just to hear this girl play her music again.
The ones I find most useful are the ones with books. Of course, the bags with extra warm clothes and gloves are supposed to be more valuable, but for me the books are a welcome sight. They’ll make a nice diversion when we’re freezing our butts off on the roof. They’re kind of heavy when you start piling them up, but I can’t resist some of these titles. I mean, who can pass up The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Guide, Sudoku For All Ages, and The Bodies We’ve Buried: CSI Training School? There’s no way I’m leaving behind titles like, The Alchemist, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or Fear, The Friend Of Exceptional People: Techniques In Controlling Fear. And just for a laugh I add, 1000 Places To See Before You Die, plus The Darwin Awards to satisfy my sick sense of humor.
I’m in my own little world when I’m with my favorite books, but from the corner of my conscience I can sense someone crying. A quick visual check around the room confirms who I thought it was in the first place. It’s Mouse, and she’s cradling a key in her cupped hands, her tears falling into and around them. I scoot over to her side and put an arm around her, blocking the view of the others and giving her the privacy I know she wants. Before I say anything, I choose my tone and words carefully. I’ve never seen Mouse cry before, and I don’t want to say something that will make her cry even more. “Mouse,” I say, “we’ve seen so many distressing things from these bug-out bags…what’s so upsetting about a key?”
Mouse hitches her breath in an attempt to stop the crying, then gives up and talks through the tears. “Do you have a key to your house in your kit?”
That sounds like a strange question to me, but I answer, “No”
“Why not?” asks Mouse.
“Because I no longer have a home to go back to.”
“Well this person did. This person brought their house key because they thought they’d need it to get back into their home when this was all over. They thought they’d be here a little while, and then they’d go back to their home, to their lives. But they never will.” She starts crying even harder. “We never will. This will never be over. I can’t even say we’re in a nightmare without end because there is an end…this ends when we become one of them.”
I don’t know what to say to that; there’s nothing pithy or comforting that can cover this situation. I just sit there while Mouse cries it out and think about all the other keys I came across; little symbols of hope, each one of them. If our house hadn’t burned down would I have continued to believe that we would one day return and resume our normal lives? Mouse and I start to filter through the bags again, but we do so more slowly, afraid of finding anything else that will hit us in the gut.
Naked’s snoring contentedly in a corner and I can see a moving shadow that confirms that Killer had saved himself. He was probably here before we were, always instinctively knowing what to do to survive. He keeps his distance from us though, preferring to stick to the dark corners of the stage. I wish he wouldn’t. I could really use a soft furry body to cuddle up to right now.
Doom, Kaboom, and Hou are off in the corner with their new toys: the disappointingly small canisters of liquid nitrogen that Ghost and Doom pinched from the janitor’s closet. I suppose they’re trying to figure out how they can be used as weapons. I hear one of them say, “You can spray it in their face!” only to be countered with, “And what will that do? Make part of their face fall off? I don’t think they care about their looks, and in case you haven’t noticed they don’t need their noses for breathing.”
I leave the Survival Kit Consolidation Project to Mouse and join the boys. Houston looks up at me with a weary expression as I approach and I can tell he knows exactly what to do with it, he just doesn’t want to do it. I look at the little red coffee straw taped to the side of the canisters and I’m thinking the same thing. He starts to hand me a can, but I resolutely put my hands behind my back. “Don’t look at me,” I say. “I’ve already got a ‘Zombie Kill-Of-The-Week.’ I took out Stacy, remember?” Hou’s face falls and he starts to peel away at the layers of tape on the side of the can.
“You’ve got a what?” asks Doom.
“It’s from the movie Zombieland. People talked about different methods others used to snuff out a zombie and the most creative kill was metaphorically crowned ‘Zombie Kill-Of-The-Week.’”
“Oh” says Doom thoughtfully. “Um, so what does that have to do with us?” He’s watching Houston as he carefully scratches off the last bit of tape, then removes the coffee straw and screws it into the spout. Houston doesn’t say anything while he works; he just keeps looking over at the doors. They’re heaving now with the steady weight of a zombie surge, the hinges groaning under the pressure but holding fast…for now. The chains and locks Doom tied around the handles are still there, but the Infected have successfully pushed them in far enough to create a gap between the doors, an opening large enough to expose part of their desiccated faces. Houston takes a deep breath. He turns back to the group, grabs two cans and then heads for the doors, shaking the canisters as he goes. He calls back over his shoulder “Arm yourselves, gentlemen, and follow me!”
He stops right in front of the doors and then leans dangerously close to the one-inch gap between them. Mom calls out in alarm, “Houston-pull back!” but he ignores her. As if guided by the memory of my own zombie kill, he finds what he’s looking for: an empty eye socket. He jabs the coffee straw all the way into the oozing black hole and presses down on the trigger.
Hisssssssss goes the can. Thud goes the zombie.
“NO WAY!” Doom squeals. “Look what Houston did! Zombie Kill Of The Week! Zombie Kill Of The Week!” Doom is actually dancing his way down the aisle to the doors in his excitement to have his own kill. And the amazing thing is, he gets his chance. I thought these guys were supposed to be fast learners. If I were them, I would have stood well back after the first one had his brain frozen; but no, they all stay at their post, pushing and “watching” through the crack between the doors. I run the rest of the canisters to the kill crew and hand them out like party favors as Houston, Doom, and Kaboom jab straws into every eye socket they can find. My mind goes back to a science class I had where the teacher put various things into a small vat of Liquid Nitrogen. My favorite part was when he dipped a rose into it, then taped it lightly on the side only to make it completely shatter—just like glass! I wonder if that’s what happens to their brains when they hit the ground. Is there enough Liquid Nitrogen in those cans to saturate their whole head? If we opened the doors right now, would we find a bunch of headless zombies? If so, never mind this being the most creative way to kill a zombie, it’s the most creative way to decapitate someone! Not that I have anyone in mind.
So Mom had a zombie kill, I have a zombie kill, and now Houston has a zombie
kill. Actually, Houston now has several zombie kills. Ordinarily this would bother me, but a disturbing little voice in the back of my head tells me I’ll have plenty of opportunities to up my count. Then the cynical side kicks in and I wonder how old Jesse will be when she has her first zombie kill, a morbid rite of passage in a modern world.
I’m about to hand over the last can of liquid nitrogen, wondering if we should hold on to at least one of them, when a piercing scream fills the auditorium. My insides go cold as I hear Mom cry out over the scream, “Water! Coming in from under the door! Run!”
RENEE
I was already nervous at the kids’ close proximity to the dead and I was even more nervous when the Infected wouldn’t retreat at the frozen deaths of their colleagues. “They’re too smart to play the victim and keep taking it,” I thought. And yet I was so relieved to get a break from the knocking, from all the pushing on the doors and the constant threat of them bursting through, that I let them carry on with their nitro-freezing.
Dorothy was the first to say something. “Watch the floor,” she said. “They’re using the classic technique of distraction to keep you from focusing on their real plan.” As usual, Dorothy was right. There were no fresh eyeballs to be seen through the space between the doors, so the ones who were “looking” through were probably on their last legs. I guess while the boys were freezing the older-dead, the freshly dead were rigging something up to flood the theater with a parasite smoothie.
It was Mouse that saw the first rivulets of water creeping under the door. She screamed a scream that seemed incapable of coming from her. It was the scream of someone who couldn’t bear to watch any more of her friends die. It was a scream meant to stop anyone in their tracks no matter what they were doing. It was a scream that I could not make but could definitely feel as I faced losing two of my children after all we’ve been through.
KC, Houston, Doom, and Kaboom booked it back to us, but not before they got the soles of their shoes wet. These kids were running faster than Olympians, but the downward slope of the floor to the stage aided the water’s flow and stayed hot on their heels. What began as fingers of water turned into sheets but even so they managed to reach the stage before the water did. I was relieved, but I couldn’t let them up yet, I couldn’t let them bring that water up here with us. “Sit on the edge of the stage and kick your shoes off—they’re wet!” I bellow. The look of shock on their faces confirms they didn’t realize there was water at their feet before they started running. They kicked those shoes off like they were on fire and scurried to the back of the stage.
Jesse, Sarah, and Mouse start to grab the rearranged split kits and head for the stairs to the clubhouse, but before they can reach it Mr. Cromwell holds up his hand and in a commanding voice calls out, “Wait!”
Everyone stops in their tracks and together we watch the water rise. Dorothy, Mr. Cromwell (does this guy even have a first name?) and I tiptoe up to the edge of the stage and peer over the side. The thing is, the water isn’t rising that much. It’s at its deepest where it hits the bottom of the slope and the bottom of the slope is the stage, and even then it’s only about two to three inches deep. More water has been added to it as it seeps under the doors and down through the seats but this is sporadic and comes in waves. “There’s only salt water in the plumbing,” Mr. Cromwell says. “They can’t have a large source of infected water here.”
“They must be filling buckets of it from the flooded basement.” says Dorothy. “No one wanted to go down there, so the soldiers didn’t bother to lock it up.”
“The stage is pretty high,” I affirm, partially to myself. “Even if they form an assembly line of water buckets, they won’t be able to flood this place.” The three of us sit back with a sigh of relief. Well, not exactly relief—it’s more like we’re just too trauma-weary to care. It feels like these things are pushing us until our backs are up against the wall. First they take over our house, then our neighborhood, then the grounds of our school, then the school itself, then the theater and now the only patch left for us to live on is the stage. Why does this make me feel like an animal being herded into the corner of a cage?
They won’t let us stay here indefinitely. I look at what’s left of the Mclean Refugee Center and rally the remaining survivors. “Let’s hurry up and fill our bug-out bags with what we need. We can stay here tonight with a lookout, but have the kits up in the clubhouse ready to go to the roof.”
In the stillness that follows I hear KC turn to Nadia and say, “I win.”
JESSE
I’m pretending to be asleep again.
I shouldn’t need the sleep anyways ‘cause I feel like I went to sleep when Doom shut that door on Sarah and the others, and I didn’t wake up till Sarah kicked Doom in the shins. But if I was asleep, then why do I still feel tired?
Everyone else seems worn-out. We’ve got our kits packed like we’re going somewhere and we’re all huddled up in the back corner of the stage by the stairs to the clubhouse. Normally I’d feel really cold, but we’ve put on new layers of clothes from the bags Houston picked up and we’re all pressed up against each other. Sarah’s sharing Linus’s blanket with me, or at least she was. I had to move away from her because she moves too much in her sleep. She also makes noises like she’s having one of those nightmares where you’re being chased but you can only run in slow motion, and I don’t want to be near her if nightmares are catching.
I’m doing what I usually do when I’m pretending to be asleep—I’m listening.
“It’s quiet…” Sounds like Doom. I guess he can’t sleep either.
“Don’t say it…” KC breaks in.
“…too quiet.”
“Do you really think now’s the time for clichés?”
“No, seriously—where are they?”
“Oh, they’re there all right.” Mom this time.
“Is it because there’s no light in the cracks of the doors? Are they still pressed up against them?”
“There wouldn’t be any light anyways. It’s night and there’s no electricity!” KC snaps.
“Why don’t you kids try to get some sleep?” Granny breaks in. “You need the rest and we don’t know what we’re in for tomorrow.” Huh, I thought she’d try to be more soothing than that. She sounds as blunt as KC right now. In fact, she sounds like she’s the one that needs sleep.
A shaft of light slices across my eyes and I open them long enough to see Mr. Cromwell at the edge of the stage shining his flashlight around the place. He probably wasn’t trying to wake me up, he was just checking on Sarah again.
“Is the water any higher?” Mom calls out.
“No, I think you were right—they tried and failed to get us with infected liquid and they know it’s no longer worth their while.” Mr. Cromwell’s at the front of the stage, but he sounds farther away than that.
“So how can you tell they’re there?” Doom isn’t going to let go of this conversation.
“Can’t you feel them?” KC says. “Can’t you smell them?”
“They’ll always be there, sweetie.” Granny says, sounding even more tired than before. “They’ve got nothing else to do.”
“If they’re intelligent, I wonder if they get bored,” KC says with a yawn.
“I think the lack of having anything else to do makes them obsess over us.” Doom yawns this out too.
“Well, it’s nice to be wanted.” Granny says, but she doesn’t sound like she means it.
Things go quiet again. Nobody says anything else for a while. I start to wonder if they’ve fallen asleep, but then I hear Dorothy softly say, “Look at those kids—it looks like a sleepover.”
“Doesn’t look like a sleepover to me,” my mom says with a smile in her voice. “If it was a sleepover, none of them would be sleeping.”
“Or one of them would be sleeping, and the rest would be drawing on her face!” I can hear Nemesis laughing as she says this.
“I remember sleepovers,” KC says sadly.
Pause.
“I remember dancing in the rain,” adds Dorothy.
Another pause.
“I remember hanging out at our local swimming pool all day long,” says Doom.
Mr. Cromwell holds back his flashlight search long enough to turn to our group and say, “I remember being in contact with everyone at all times and when I didn’t want to be, I just switched everything off.”
Houston starts to stir next to me. He sits up and scoots towards the others on his bum. “I remember crushing on this girl in our neighborhood who used to walk her dog past our house. I remember I used to walk Naked to see if I could run into her sometime and when I finally did run into her I was too embarrassed to say anything.” Naked lifts her head at this like she remembered that too. Maybe she was thinking, “I’d be embarrassed too if I was walking around naked.”
“I remember hanging out at the mall with my friends on a Saturday.” This time it’s Mouse. Guess I’m not the only one who was pretending to be asleep. I remember that Christmas rhyme Mom used to read to me once a year and I think, “It’s a mouse! And it’s stirring!”
“I remember that too,” Nadia says. She’s got one of those little battery-powered lanterns with her that she turns on, lighting up our faces. No one tells her to turn it off, to stop wasting batteries. I think we need light more than we need to be careful.
Notes from a Necrophobe Page 28