Despite her instincts to the contrary, she let the bitten woman in. The lady was a good tipper, and if anything Mallory needed to reward that. She told the lady if she tried anything funny she’d get stabbed with the shears, and wouldn’t you know, that’s exactly what happened.
“Oh Mallory, thank you dear,” the older lady had said, clutching her ruined wrist. A flap of flesh hung off it like a piece of uncooked sandwich meat.
Mallory had her sit down on the small couch in front of the shop as she grabbed a roll of paper towel from behind the counter. “Mrs. Dawkins, you understand that you’re bitten, and if the news is right, you’re gonna die and turn into one of them, right? You know that’s gonna happen right?” Mallory looked at her intently as she handed her customer the roll of paper towel.
“Oh that’s silly. That man at the store bit me, and unless he had rabies, the worst that can happen to me is I need a tetanus shot or some stitches. You can’t believe everything you see on the news Mallory.” Mallory gritted her teeth and rolled her eyes. Mrs. Dawkins had a habit of talking to Mallory like she was an infant. That drove Mallory nuts.
“I am telling you Mrs. Dawkins, if you die, and turn on me, I will stab you right in the fucking eyeball with my shears here. I am not joking.” Mallory hefted the largest pair of shears she had menacingly. Mrs. Dawkins had laughed like Mallory was a child threatening her with a squirt gun.
And now she was dead on the floor, twice dead in fact, with those same shears lodged six inches deep inside her eye socket. Fuck that old bitch, Mallory thought to herself. No tip was worth being turned into a zombie over.
It was June 23
rd
, 2010.
*****
Her whole life Mallory perpetually had long hair. Born with a thick shock of it, it was long, smooth, and black, sometimes with bright, vibrant streaks of color added in for flair. After Mrs. Dawkins had died on the same couch she sat her down on earlier that day, she’d stood up, walked nearly silently up behind Mallory as she looked at the phone book, and yanked on her hair so hard some of it had ripped free from her scalp.
Mallory let loose a bloodcurdling scream and went down flat on her back, smacking her already raw skull into the linoleum floor of the salon. Mrs. Dawkins’ dead, cool fingers had latched onto the hair so tightly that Mallory’s weight took her down as well, and the dead woman fell with all her weight directly onto the hairdresser’s chest. The air in her lungs was flattened out, and Mallory gasped, forcing precious oxygen back into her deflated chest. Mrs. Dawkins let go of Mallory’s hair and began to gnash her teeth at Mallory’s thigh.
It was late June, and hot that day. Mallory was wearing tight shorts that only reached halfway to her knee, and Mrs. Dawkins’ teeth were a scant inch away from plunging into the soft fat and meat there. Mallory’s gut reaction was to drive her knee powerfully upward, smashing it into the face of Mrs. Dawkins, sending her flopping backwards on the floor, and freeing Mallory up to scramble away. Mallory winced at the pain in her knee as she scurried on her elbows further away from the dead woman. She half noticed that there was a smear of blood on her leg, and she hoped distantly it was from Mrs. Dawkins’ busted face, and not from a bite in her own leg. She couldn't feel any pain, which was reassuring.
Mallory moved a few feet away and bumped her head sharply into the swiveling chair she used to cut hair daily. The tiny footrest poked like a knife into the spot on her scalp where the dead bitch had ripped some of her hair free, drawing blood. For a moment as she continued to suck air into her lungs, she saw white motes fly across her vision, threatening unconsciousness. She knew if she blacked out, she was dead. Mallory did her best to steady her heartbeat, and remain calm as Mrs. Dawkins slowly organized her dead self and came back at Mallory, this time to finish her off. She took a deep breath, and the stars dancing in front of her eyes disappeared.
Mallory shook sense into herself and glanced around trying to lay eyes on the pair of shears she’d had threatened her with earlier. When Mrs. Dawkins grabbed her, she’d dropped them, and now they were nowhere in sight. Mallory’s dread grew with every inch Mrs. Dawkins moved closer. In just a few seconds, she’d be on top of Mallory again, and she knew getting bitten was almost inevitable at that point. Just as Mallory’s panic was about to overwhelm her, she saw the large shears on the floor a few feet away from Mrs. Dawkins. Mallory made her move.
Spinning around to face Mrs. Dawkins and the shears, Mallory kicked off the pedestal of the chair and launched herself forward and past the outreaching dead lady. Mrs. Dawkins’ nails scraped tiny fissures in Mallory’s leg as she slid across the floor past her. Mallory yelped in pain as she felt the sharp fake nails dig into her flesh. As Mallory rolled away from the sharp claws of her dead customer she reached out and snatched the shears off the floor. The long, silvery point of the dagger-like cutting tool threatened the air in front of her as she brought it to bear.
“Mrs. Dawkins, I will fucking stab you in the face if you don’t fuck off!” Mallory yelled matter of factly at the dead lady. Predictably, Mrs. Dawkins continued crawling at her. Mallory tightened her grasp on the handle of the shears, waiting for the dead woman to pounce. The moment came faster than she expected.
The older lady was never one for sudden or spastic agility, and when she launched at Mallory, it was a shock. Mallory’s lone response was to thrust upward and outward with the huge trimming scissors. The timing could not have been better. Mrs. Dawkins’ sneering, deceased face, complete with milky white eyes plunged downward towards Mallory just as the shears rose up to meet it. The long metal tip of the improvised weapon pierced the soft, fleshy sac of the eyeball, and the woman’s forward momentum and weight did the rest of the work. All Mallory had to do was hold her pike up.
Mrs. Dawkins’ menace disappeared abruptly when the metal pierced her brain. She went from snarling and assaultive to dead weight in a heartbeat. The corpse fell atop Mallory and a gout of dark, dead blood sprayed out of the destroyed eye and all over her face. Mallory felt her stomach heave. Mallory shoved the body off of her, and vomited powerfully on the floor, mixing blood and bile in a foul miasma.
*****
Mallory stood up after a few long hours of laying frozen solid on the floor of the salon. The sun had finally set on her nightmare of an afternoon, and the only lights about were coming from the dull orange of the street lamps outside. She hadn’t heard a car pass in almost a half hour, and after staring at the slowly leaking head of Mrs. Dawkins for over an hour to make sure she was fully dead this time, she grew the courage to get up and look out the windows.
The town she lived in was called Westfield. It was a small city, with a few elementary schools, a Walmart, maybe a dozen restaurants, and of course, the salon she worked at. It was an idyllic small town in east coast America. The salon was on Main Street. In both directions for some ways there were smatterings of other small businesses just like this. There was the nail salon that her boss despised across the street, the floral shop, a wedding dress tailor, a Radio Shack, and a few more assorted small shops. All of the businesses looked empty to Mallory through the salon’s window.
The street itself was completely empty as well. All the parking spaces were empty, and not a single soul was to be seen. Somewhat unusual for it being just nine or so at night during the summer. Mallory backed away from the window and nearly stumbled over Mrs. Dawkins’ dead body. She gave it a swift kick to the midsection in retaliation.
“Bitch,” Mallory muttered under her breath. The old bag was still trying to kill her. The raven haired blood soaked salon worker walked back into the break room and snagged the remote off the desk. With any luck at all, the television would still be working. She thumbed the power button, and the screen flashed to life. It was set to the Lifetime Network, which to her was total drivel. What’s that Mary? Your cousin had sex with your aunt and the resulting love child is now dating your step son? Who gives a shit? Seriously. She flipped the stations until she got to the local news channel. After making sure the news was still live on the air, she rested her bruised ass on the desk and gently rubbed the raw part of her head where the hair had been yanked loose. If she poked the ruined scalp too hard, the stars came back, and she felt dizzy. She took her hand away.
The news was bad.
No surprise there,
she thought to herself. The most shocking thing she saw as the newscaster droned on and on, repeating the same warnings over and over and looking at hand shot footage was the eerie darkness of the newsroom set. Some of the lights must have been broken, or turned off. The normally vibrant room was cast in a dull shadow, and it made the rough cheeks of the normally clean shaven anchor look like he hadn’t shaved in days. The set was disheveled, he was disheveled, and she knew it was bad because the news man NEVER looked disheveled.
The news, no matter how ugly, no matter how bad, was always delivered by people that looked perfect, in a room that looked perfect.
This scared her. Never mind the blurred footage of people attacking each other in central park like maniacs, or the security camera tape from a bank that caught a man using the ATM being eaten alive by a pack of roving, undead lunatics. They couldn’t blur out all the pools of blood. Just like how Mallory could look away from the blood and bile on the linoleum in the shop, but the smell lingered in her nostrils like acidic rotting entrails. She watched the unkempt newsman for an hour, and made the decision that she had to get the hell out of the salon, and to somewhere much safer.
*****
Mallory inhaled deeply and looked her reflection in the eye. She stood in front of her own styling station with a fresh set of shears and murderous intent aimed at her own hair. As much as she loved the long, silky locks she conditioned with great regularity, her hair had nearly gotten her killed once today, and she knew if she didn’t trim it down right now, she was inviting disaster once more.
The small hair cutting tool opened in her trained fingers and snipped gently at the hair above her ear. A tiny lock drifted to the floor, settling like a long black snowflake. She looked down at it and exhaled sadly. With the first snip completed, her courage swelled.
"I know you're beautiful, but you gotta go. You're too long, and if you think about it, we'll save a fortune on conditioner. Raven locks I love you, but today, I bid you farewell." And the hair began to steadily fall around her, forming a black ring on the floor at her feet.
Mallory hadn’t cut her own hair in years. It was always a recipe for style disaster, especially for someone who prided themselves on looking good, and making others look good professionally. Mallory took her time, cutting snips here, then there, trying to give the rough, awkward cut some semblance of intent. She didn’t want to look like she’d been attacked by a lawnmower, even if it was the end of the world.
After laboring for an hour trying to get it short enough to ensure that it wouldn’t be yanked off her head again, yet long enough to still look like she cared about it, Mallory sat the shears down and evaluated her work. It was cute. Not sexy. Very metropolitan. It would do for the end of the world.
She needed weapons. There had to be more of the zombies like Mrs. Dawkins outside, and unless she had a way to kill them, she might as well just stay put and wait for the cavalry to come rescue her. Mallory looked in every drawer, in every closet, and in every nook and cranny in the salon, and gathered anything and everything that might pass for a usable weapon.
Oddly enough, there was very little of use in the salon. She found a hammer, several brooms, a roll of duct tape, and a half dozen large trimming shears, including the pair she had to yank back out of the eye socket of Mrs. Dawkins. Weaponry was not part of the salon planning process. Mallory applied her inner MacGyver, and got creative with what she had.
The two brooms became homemade spears. She snapped the bristles off the end and used the sharp edge of a shear and the hammer to split the end of the wood so she could lodge one of the other pairs of shears in the end and fasten it with the duct tape. The resulting weapon was for all intents and purposes, a very dangerous short spear. She made two of these. The hammer itself stood alone as a suitable weapon, and the larger pairs of shears would serve as fine daggers.
"That'll do," she said to her reflection, putting on the meanest face she could muster. She thought of Schwarzenegger in that movie with the alien in the jungle.
In the back room she found a pair of her co-worker Clara’s pants, which she changed into. The thin fabric would offer only slight protection to her legs if she was bitten, but even the thin cotton was better than exposed bare skin. Out of the lost and found bin she grabbed a baseball cap and stuck it on her head. She grabbed a small sweater as well, and slid that on. A discarded red bandana was tied around her face just over her nose to help protect against the spray of blood. She still didn't know if this was spread through saliva or blood yet, and she thought the bandana might be helpful. It wasn’t much, but it was the best armor she could manage on short notice. At least everything sort of matched.
Mallory gathered her weapons as best she could, and walked to the door. She looked long and hard at the small metal knob that once turned, would unlock and open the door, either setting her free, or sending her to her death. She took a deep breath, resolved that she would make the three block walk to her apartment building as fast as she could, and twisted that knob. With a hollow metallic click the door came loose of the frame, and she exited the salon, walking out into the cooling June night air. She locked the door behind her.
*****
Mallory made it a block before things spiraled out of control on her. She was never one for any kind of athletic endeavor, and with a small smoking habit to boot, Mallory wasn’t in anywhere near the shape needed to run all the way to her place. As a result, she had to trot for 30 or 40 feet, then slow to a creeping walk to catch her breath, and then repeat the process again. It was exhausting for her, but it was the best she could do. She tried not to cough.