by Doug Ward
I was starting into my second hour of watching the news feeds. The people were sickened all over the place; mostly in cities, but it was happening all around the world. The only concrete connection was that; transmission was by infected people biting others who were not infected. The whole newscast seemed so surreal.
The newscaster sipping from her cup of coffee reminded me. "Mel!" I thought, snapping back to reality. I raced for the cordless phone. Melissa had wanted to ditch our landline, but I couldn't let go of the comfort of a home phone just yet. Checking the answering machine, I saw it flashing one new message. Pressing the play button, a little too hard, I listened to my recorded voice speak our greeting.
"No one is home right now; but, after the beep, leave us a message and we will get back to you as soon as we can."
The machine beeped and my heart skipped a beat, ready to snap into action as soon as she gave the word.
"This is a message from Congressman John R. Noble. Are you aware that the Democrats want to remove God from the classroom..."
I leaned my index finger on the stop button. When prompted, I deleted the message. The red, flashing light winked out and did not return. I picked up the hand device and pushed talk. There was no sound. Not even the rhythmic buzzing of the disconnected signal. I replaced the phone in its charging station and sighed.
Remembering my cell phone, I reached into my left front pants pocket and fished around. Where had I put it? The pit of my stomach seemed to twist. It was in the car.
As I approached the front door, I could hear Mrs. Crawford still thumping at the entrance. Her attempts were half-hearted. She might be losing interest, but if I were 82 and had recently lost a hand, I wouldn't be too patient either.
Looking through the peephole, I could see my neighbor. The floral housecoat she wore stuck to her bloated form by a congealed coating of blood, creating a disgusting caricature Having a background in biology, I was well aware that if a bite spread the disease then it was quite probable that it could be transferred by any bodily fluid. A bite, drool, or even a scratch could be the vehicle, whatever this virus or bacteria would use to propagate itself. All that viruses want to do is to create the next generation of their species.
Even though Mrs. Crawford was small and old, she could be extremely dangerous. I abandoned the idea of a frontal assault on the geriatric corpse and looked out some of the other windows on the ground level. This way I could narrow down my options.
There was a sparse scattering of undead ambling about the neighborhood. I can't believe I was so distracted that a few hours ago I thought these walking corpses were hung-over college students. The way they lurched and, in some cases, were missing a limb or were dragging a leg behind, how oblivious was I? It could have been the lack of sleep or, maybe, the idea that I thought I was in trouble with my wife.
At that moment, I saw the door across the street open and Jim and Marcy's teenage daughter, Jen, walked into view. Dressed for a jog, she had headphones in her ears. She appeared not to notice the dead reacting to her presence as she stretched her hamstrings by touching her fingers to her toes. The music she was listening to must have blocked the sounds of the zombies as they shambled toward her as quickly as their broken forms would allow. I watched helplessly as she straightened, an undead postal worker, her mail bag still slung over his shoulder, approached her from the front. His mouth opened wide, stained red like a six-year-old at a spaghetti dinner. Jen lifted her hands to her head, screaming. She was pumping her legs up and down, shocked and terrified, unsure what to do.
Just as the mail carrier looked like he had her, another jogger, this one undead, took her from behind and planted her, face first, on the lawn. Blood arched out as plague-covered teeth rent flesh from the young girl. I was about to lower the blind when I noticed Mrs. Crawford's bulk cross the road to join the feast.
This is my chance, I thought as I sprinted for the front door. With the zombies distracted, I might be able to get to the car.
Back on the first floor, a quick peek through the spy hole in the door confirmed my belief. I swung the door open and fast-walked around the puddle left from my neighbor's missing limb. I went quickly and quietly to the car. Recovering the phone from the passenger seat, I hastily made my way back to the house. Stealing a glance across the street, I could see that the undead were enjoying their feast. Jen had bought me the time I needed to gain a possible connection to my wife. She had paid with her life, but it wasn't my fault. She was the one who had neglected to watch the TV this morning. She was the one who chose to isolate her senses with loud music. In a way, she had deliberately hampered her chances for survival. Take that mom! Who said TV was bad for you?
I closed the door and slammed the deadbolt home with a satisfying click. As I tiptoed around the puddle of my neighbors' congealed blood, I pushed the power button on to wake up my phone. No connection again. The news station had mentioned that cell towers were at capacity, as people tried to contact loved ones. Maybe this was the problem. I slid the cell phone into its usual pocket and wandered into the kitchen. My stomach growled as I poured milk on my cold cereal. Fetching a glass of orange juice and spoon, I took my meal into the living room to check for any updates on the situation.
They were showing live footage of hoards of zombies attacking people on the streets of various cities. Police fired indiscriminately into crowds, trying to contain the violence. A news ticker ran at the bottom of the screen telling all people to stay in their home, not to go outside. It said that the country was under martial law. The weirdest thing was that it included a line saying that the president was alive and well in an undisclosed location. What did I care if he was alive or not? That jerk was probably in a bunker sipping champagne and eating pheasant under glass while I ate Corn Flakes and was being protected by a thin layer of vinyl siding. And I voted for that jerk!
After eating, I went upstairs to our bedroom and sat on my side of the bed. My eyes strayed to the nightstand where a picture of Melissa, beside the shore of Lake Erie, leaned in its stand. She loved that lake. We took pilgrimages to see it at least twice a year. It was our dream to buy a home near the water and retire there.
Mel was out there somewhere. Was she alone? Was she safe? I knew these thoughts were destructive. I had little control over the situation. I lay back onto the bedspread, enveloped in its warmth and comfort. We had just redecorated this room. It took the entire weekend. She helped me strip the wallpaper and then we had painted it a blue-gray. I can still remember her look of terror as she knocked the can of paint off the ladder. It took us hours to get it completely off of the hardwood floors. She always had a smile on her face. Everything would always be ok when I looked into her beautiful, confident eyes.
A scream woke me with a start. The room was still lit by the late afternoon sunlight pouring through the thin window sheers. I sat up and scanned the room for danger. Another call of terror sounded outside. I moved to the window and pulled the thin material of the shears to one side. Mel had insisted that we cover the bedroom windows with curtains, even though I insisted that the angle of visibility wouldn't allow anyone to see us naked. She didn't listen. To be on the safe side, she had hung the material.
Jim was on his front porch trying to hold a struggling Marcy from running onto the lawn as their daughter, Jen, walked slowly toward them, dragging a bloody leg behind. Marcy fought with all her might to run to the animated corpse that formerly was her daughter. She screamed again and I could see, even from across the street, that her face was wet from tears. My neighbor's attempts to hold his wife back failed as she slipped past, ducking under his last futile attempt to grab ahold of her.
Marcy ran, crying, right up to her now-deceased daughter and enveloped her in a comforting embrace. Jen dipped her head and, from what I can imagine, tore out a chunk of her mother's throat. Blo
od sprayed into the air as the wounded woman dropped to the ground. Jen followed her, dropping to stained knees and continuing the gory feast. I diverted my eyes to Jim, who recoiled in horror, retreating to the open doorway. There he stood, supporting himself on the frame and lowering his head, shoulders visibly heaving as his body racked with sobs.
As he stood there, his daughter lifted her head and started to rise. Jim stood still, not noticing. As his reanimated daughter unsteadily stepped over her prone mother and approached her father, I struggled with the latch on the top of our window. Just as I pushed it open, I could hear a man's voice pleading for Jim to go inside.
"That isn't your daughter anymore, Jim," said the voice. "Get inside and lock the door."
I joined the voice. "Listen to him, Jim. You need to get inside."
Jim's head slowly swiveled up, bringing the lurching corpse into view. After a brief hesitation, he slowly entered the house and, with a last look at his undead daughter, he reluctantly closed the door.
The corpse that I had known as the girl next door raised her blood-soaked hands and began to slap at the closed portal. I leaned out the window and looked to the left, seeing another of my neighbors, Dean Walker, looking back at me from his second-floor window.
There was silence for a moment. We connected. We both knew that the world was coming apart. It was a bond that two humans have when all else is lost. He became distracted and turned, looking inside his house a brief instant, then swung back towards me.
"I have guns," he offered, then, disappeared inside, closing the window behind him.
I didn't know what to do. I kept looking over at Dean's house waiting to see if he would return. I felt very alone. Looking back across the street, I saw that Marcy's corpse was now being devoured by three more of the creatures. They made growling noises as they fought for a good position to dine. The sounds were drawing more of their kind to the feast. But the corpse that was Jen continued pawing at the entrance to her home.
Most people would have turned away from the scene; but, as a trained scientist, I could keep my discomfort compartmentalized and take this moment to study this small segment of their ecology. They were like lions jockeying for a place to feed after the alpha male eats the choicest parts. The strange thing about lions is that the females were the ones who actually hunted, for the most part. Another similarity is that feeding is a hazardous time.
The undead ate their victim slower than a pride of lions would have, but they exhibited some of the same basic habits: growling if another encroached too close to their chosen spot and occasionally swatting or facing off over a choice piece of flesh. After about an hour they began to disperse. In the end, there were about twelve of the creatures that fed on the woman. Many walked away with some part or chunk of the flesh to eat as they left, gnawing on their prize as they lurched, probably in search of another living being.
Only Jen stayed behind, door covered with gore, as she tried to gain entrance. As I scanned the horizon, I could see that smoke was billowing into the sky from multiple areas. Sirens wailed from distant emergency vehicles and the sound of gunshots popped from a myriad of directions.
It was early evening now. I checked my phone and saw that there was still no connection. Worrying about Melissa, I cautiously walked downstairs to check the news. I wondered if it was a localized event and if the police or the National Guard were working to get this under control.
I pushed the power button on the remote and was immediately greeted with a newscaster, dressed in a rumpled gray suit, reporting on the very subject. I didn't recognize the man, but he looked visibly shaken, his hair in disarray and his eyes were open too wide. A ticker at the bottom of the screen scrolled through a variety of safety zones.
"The whole metropolitan area remains under martial law as the strange outbreak sweeps the entire region," he said while wringing his hands over the stack of papers in front of him. "Emergency staff are currently in the field to be joined shortly by National Guard units. A government spokesperson assures us that containment of the strange occurrences of manic homicide should occur shortly and that all persons should stay indoors and away from windows. Do not attempt to go outdoors for any reason." As the harried journalist continued, I decided to turn to a more reliable source of information; the Internet. I typed into the Google search window the words "zombie outbreak" and immediately got hundreds of thousands of hits.
Not knowing where to start, I clicked on the top website and the screen filled with pictures of undead attacking people on the street. The header read, "It is actually happening! The dead are walking and attacking the living." I spent the next hour pouring over site after site of eyewitness reports of undead biting living people and how the living people turned into more undead. Theories ranged from the end of times to a virus, cosmic rays, and one even speculated that it was a Communist plot.
Mel had insisted I open a Twitter account a few years ago. We even spent a few weeks worth of evenings having brief conversations with people on that social media site. Even though I spent very little time on Twitter, I had hundreds of followers. Many were trying get rich schemes or were pretending they were someone who was famous, but that just added to the fun.
I logged on to my account and the feed was all about the zombie outbreak. People were telling anyone who was reading where to go for a safe place. Others were warning about safe zones that were overrun by the undead. Many were retweets about places that they had never been. They were all just trying to help.
Amid the directions were tweets accusing the government of tampering with biological weapons and other equally absurd accusations. The feed flew by so fast it was hard to read. Every time it refreshed there were fifty to a hundred new tweets. I logged off the site and went to a new page. This website offered a long list of things to do to stay safe and survive the outbreak.
Keep all lights off and fill the bathtub with water were at the top of the list. Shave your head and wear tight clothes so the zombies can't grab you easily were other useful ideas. I thought some of the best were to hole up in Masonic Temples. The reasoning was that they had food but little to no windows. I thought a prison might be better, but I didn't want to have to create a login and password to leave a comment on the site.
A siren rushing past my house brought me to my senses. The man on the television was telling his viewers to isolate anyone who has had an encounter with the infected people. He said to keep the sick in a secure area or to bind them if they had nowhere to secure them.
I couldn't believe this was happening. It was like a dream, and it was certainly a dream I wanted to wake up from. A shot sounded from across the street. I went to the window and saw Jen, still on the porch. She was soon joined by the upper half of her mother, who was scratching at the kick plate at the bottom of the door. I had a bad feeling about what the shot meant, but wholeheartedly hoped I was wrong.
Chapter 4
Melissa
Yesterday