Authors: Jeremy Laszlo
I try the doorknob and find it locked. Groaning at the annoying difficulty of it, I take a step back and size up the door. Lexi is in no condition to take the door and as I ready myself, I take in a deep breath. Who hasn’t wanted to kick in a door at one point in their life? I slam my foot into the door, right next to the bolt lock and watch the door buckle under the blow. Taking a step back and recovering from the attack on the door, I ready myself again. With another kick, I watch as the door blows open with the force of the assault. Lifting my gun, I’m ready to put a bullet through anyone who is waiting on the other side.
Instead, all we find is a house that looks like it belongs in a noir movie. The entire thing has been violently and destructively flipped, torn apart, and searched. I look over at Lexi as she takes in the sight of the upside down sofa and the smashed coffee table. The pictures on the walls are all hanging skewed and the bookshelves have all been knocked over, spilling their contents across the dirty carpet.
“Looks like we’re late for the party,” Lexi says with a grunt.
“I doubt they were looking for a phonebook,” I say confidently.
“Probably not,” she agrees.
Confident that there’s no one hiding in the rubble and disarray of this house, we still keep our formation tight and we clear the house room by room, opening the closets that are still shut and looking under the soiled beds. Everything is filthy, covered in layers of dust and completely forgotten by the people who once called this place home. I stare at the master bathroom and leave Lexi alone in the room, searching for our unicorn. I don’t think they had a phonebook in this house. I look at the bathroom where someone took a hammer or axe to the wall tiles, leaving shards of plaster and faux marble across the linoleum.
I look at my face in the mirror. The storm did enough to wash away the ash and blood that had covered my face, but the dust has given me a haunting appearance again. I need a shower, like Greg had said. We all could use one right about now. Reaching up for the mirror, I feel around until I get a good grip and give the mirror a tug. It opens after a little pressure and I look at the broken glass shelves after the majority of the shards cascade out into the sink, breaking and tinkling as they land in the dusty porcelain. I look over to Lexi who is staring at me like I farted in church. I give her a shrug and look at the emptiness inside.
It was a long shot, but it was worth a try. Who knows what’s out there and hidden away? I try to think of where I’d hide medicine, if not in the master bathroom, and head for the kitchen. The whole place has been looted. Broken plates are scattered across the floor with the pots and silverware that were thrown around needlessly. Who does this? I look at all of it and wonder why anyone would just completely empty the contents of a house so insanely. Why not have a system to all of it?
I open the cupboards one by one, finding only the disarray of the contents inside, and eventually give up after opening the last cabinet. Everything of basic value has been stripped from this place and taken away from here. They took all the medical supplies when they took everything else.
Making my way back to Lexi I whistle at her, drawing her attention. Motioning to the front door, she nods to me in disappointment. There’s not even a landline in this house. That would have been one of the things that told us that we were in the right spot. We need an old person’s house. We make our way back to the front door, looking through the doorway at the truck, silently waiting as Greg looks all around on the inside. He’s keeping watch the best he can in his current state. That’s more than I could have asked for.
“Let’s find out what’s behind door number two,” Lexi sighs.
Chapter Four
The yard across the street looks different, aside from the fact that it’s completely dead just like everything else in the world. No, here it looks like it’s been tossed just like the house we just left, and a whole bunch of stuff was thrown out into the mud and slowly sank down under the dust and the muck as the rains came. As we cross the street, I make out what looks like a skull sticking up out of the concrete muck, a single eye socket visible and the round, bleached white dome of the skull. I stop for a moment, looking at it, wondering if the rest of the body is down there under the clay and sediment of the new, dead world.
Lexi looks at the skull for a moment and doesn’t seem to take it as the bad omen that I’ve embraced it as. She looks at it and offers a cold, indifferent shrug before moving on and walking across the lawn. The concrete driveway and the walkway are completely gone, under a layer of silt and sandy earth. I give the skull one last look before following my sister. The front door has been flung wide open. I look at the doorframe and see that whoever tossed this house took a page out of my playbook and kicked it open. I bet they felt as powerful as I did when I kicked in the other door. It’s a rush. It makes you feel invincible.
The open door is always ominous, haunting when we approach it. I take point on this one, giving Lexi a break from the terror of being the one in front for a change. The house looks entirely tossed, just like the previous one. Everything is completely broken, shattered, torn apart, or ripped to pieces. Once again, I’m baffled by the idea that going through a house requires destroying everything in it. It just seems so disorganized, so worthless. There’s a ridiculous amount of futility in tearing apart the house and leaving it in disarray. First of all, I know someone’s been here, meaning that there’s traffic in the area, or was. Second of all, why does everything have to be so individual? Why can’t people leave what they don’t need for others? Maybe they need a house to live in for just one night. And yet, here we stand in a house that is full of destruction and abandonment. If they can’t have this house, then no one can. Why do they always act like this? Why are humans so terrible?
But it doesn’t end there. I take a step over the threshold and look into the house of horrors waiting for us. I should have known. I should have seen it as we crossed the dead yard, the screaming skull half submerged in the clay, the dark shadows that this building casts across the face of the earth. I look inside at the darkness of the house and I feel the weight of it hanging all around me, like I’m under water. My lungs feel like they’re collapsing, crushing in on themselves as I heave my chest, trying to get a grip on the situation. I can tell by the shadows on the wall that Lexi hasn’t come in here yet and I don’t want her to. I want her to turn and run.
The house is full of death and not in the usual sense that we’ve all come to understand and feel all around us. No, this house is full of a tangible death, a sort of mayhem that I’ve never seen before. I look at the blood splattered across the wall. Someone was bleeding in here before slamming against that wall and dragging the crimson gore across the wallpaper. Whoever it was, I’m going make the comfortable assumption that they weren’t alone, not by a long shot. I look at the withered, decayed hand in the middle of the floor, blackened by the time it’s had alone, cut off from the rest of its body. I look at the hand, fingers that look like knobby claws curled in on the palm. It looks so unnatural, like it’s trying to clench onto something that isn’t there. It’s just the first appendage that I noticed, but there are countless more.
There’s no pattern to the madness, no sort of symbol or design that I can make out from everything I’m witnessing. Honestly, I think it would have been a little more comforting for me to see bloody symbols painted on the wall or the severed legs arranged in a pentagram, but there was no spiritual or philosophical reason for the carnage, which makes it infinitely more terrifying to me. Someone did this because they thought that it needed to be done. Someone entered this house and butchered everyone inside, throwing their limbs, digits, and parts all across the house. The hand is the most weathered and steadfast of the pieces that remain. Everything else has been reduced to blackened bones and dark stains underneath. It’s like shadows for things that aren’t there anymore, great blotchy caricatures of feet and rib cages.
It’s the smell that gets to me the most. There’s something about the entire house, like the whole building has had the decay and rot seeping into its very core. Its essence is corrupted, tarnished by the taint of death. I want out of this room—this house. It reminds me of the stench that came boiling out of Greg’s leg. I want to throw up. I want to vomit all over the scene of this butcher shop. The whole thing makes me just want to curl up and die on the inside.
I can feel Lexi’s hands on my shoulders as I can hear the screaming inside of my head. I see the skulls, the vertebrae, and I can’t help but feel like I’m dying inside of this house. I just want to throw up all of it... be rid of it. I want it all to end. I want everything about this twisted world to end. I want all of the madness and the insanity to just stop. I’m sick of the terror and horror of everything. I just want it all to go away.
Dragging me out of the house, Lexi lets go of me as I drop to my knees on the lawn, taking in gulps of air, trying to suppress the horror that was building up inside of me. I can’t be in there. I can’t be around any of that. It’s too much right now, I’m not at my best. All I can think of is Noah and Marco. I can see all of their faces in the darkness of my mind’s eye. I see it and I try not to picture them among the decayed back in that house, but it’s hard. I look at the sky and feel my hands stop shaking. I ‘m better than this. I’m stronger than this. I blink and feel the cold air on my skin and relax.
As I look over at the truck, parked in the middle of the intersection, Greg rolls down the driver’s window and stares at me. I know he’s curious about what just happened, but I’m not willing to risk using my voice. I’m not willing to risk anything just now. Lexi stands at my side, looking at the house, oblivious to Greg and the baffled look on his delusional face. I want to tell him, but I’m not going to. Why bother him? He would immediately think that it’s not safe here for the four of us and that we should get out of here. I’m not ready to have that conversation.
Greg shrugs at me, wondering what happened, but I don’t bother with a response. Looking at the parched earth, I can see the handle of a kitchen knife barely at the surface of the earth beneath my feet. I look at it and push myself up.
On your feet, Val
, I tell myself silently as I give Lexi’s shoulder a gentle nudge, encouraging her to come with me across the street.
I look at the third house, a two story house with paint that has been coated with dust that has caked over the surface, giving it a dull appearance that makes it seem completely faded. It looks like a photograph that’s sat in the sunlight for too long. I stare at it, feeling like the whole thing is sort of forlorn, forgotten. I take a step forward and cross the dusty street. I look down at my feet and I can hardly see the street under the hardened mud that had snaked across the road during the last storm. The whole world is fading away. It’s like we’re just the remains of an experiment gone wrong, and now the earth is reclaiming all that we tried to conquer.
Trying my luck again, I reach for the door handle and feel it open without any kind of resistance. Smiling, I push open the door, holding my Sig ready to kill anything waiting for us. I’m not sure what I’m more worried about running into, dismembering psychopaths or ravenous, cannibalistic zombies. I suppose either of them would be trouble. I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised by anything anymore. Why worry about things you can’t change and that sort of stuff. I look at the floor, seeing dusty footprints that had at one time been fresh but are already covered with a film of dust thick enough to tell me that whoever came through this front door last is long gone.
I step over a bookshelf and look at the sofa in the front room, cut open and the stuffing torn out of it. It’s next to a broken short table that had held a vase of fake flowers on it. The chairs that had flanked the table are broken, the wooden legs missing. My eye is caught by the particle wood desk that sits against the wall, a computer sitting on it, a thick layer of dust covering it. There’s a penis drawn in the dust. Stand up guys were here, clearly.
Making my way through the house, I spot something that makes my heart jump with excitement. I look at the cord snaking out of the wall and running along the base boards. Picking up my pace, I follow it, checking the rooms before I enter them, my Sig ready to put down anyone who’s coming for me. There’s no one in the next room and as I enter it, I immediately peg it for the dining room. I look at garbage strewn across the floor and wonder what kind of college frat party happened here. Looking at the small end table that’s been knocked over, I see the base of the phone. I have no clue where the phone is. It’s not in the cradle when I check, but I realize quickly that it doesn’t matter where the phone is. I have no intentions of using it, not that it’d work. I pull up the table and listen as the junk sitting on it falls over, dropping from the drawers and the cubby that’s holding everything. Behind me, somewhere, I can hear Lexi moving about.
The end table has weight to it and that strikes me as incredibly suspicious. I look at the drawer and see that it’s stuffed with a whole bunch of random, assorted junk. I smile, I found their junk drawer. Stuffed in the drawer, I find what we’re looking for and I’m so happy that I could scream. Grabbing the phonebook, I feel the brittle, old pages of the book and pull it out, the weight of it stinging against the palms of my hand. I don’t care. I’ve found it. I have the phonebook. Flipping it open, I look at logos, mascots, and all the phone numbers listed in it. I flip it over and check the cover. It has Dayton on the cover and I’m flooded with hope. I look up and resist the urge to call out to Lexi.
No, I can’t. If I call out to her, I could bring down an army of those flesh-crazed monsters and I’m not in the condition to fight them all off on my own. No, I have to be smart. I have to think before I act because we’re in no condition to put up a fight. We need to be stealthy about the things we do from here on out. If we want to survive with better luck, then we have to make it ourselves. We can’t keep charging around like a bunch of bulls in a china shop. I’m sick of getting hurt. I’m sick of people dying. It’s time to be smart about things.
I make my way through the house, listening for sounds of Lexi. As I make my way through destroyed room after destroyed room, I begin to realize that the whole world must be like this. Everyone must have set up camps somewhere and started making their way outward, searching for supplies that they need. I look around at everything that has been taken from this house and wonder if there’s even a house out there that hasn’t been picked over by scavengers. It’s not a personal thing, that I feel like we’re out of luck, it’s just reality. I understand why they did it. I understand the need for it; I just think I would have been better about it if I’d been given the chance. There’s plenty of stuff that we could use here if we had a base of operations. I try to think of what the reason was why we didn’t loot the surrounding area when we were at the beach house. We had supplies, weapons, and everything that we’d needed to do the job right. I shake my head. If I’d known what the rest of the world was like, I wouldn’t have squandered my time by being nice and gentle.
I find myself in the master bedroom, following the sounds of Lexi’s soft movements that I’m honing in on like a bat. Stepping over a pile of clothes that has nearly stopped the door from being opened, I put my Sig on safety and holster it behind my back. I look into the bathroom where Lexi is digging through the medicine cabinet behind the mirror. She looks at me and holds up a bottle of antacids and some rubbing alcohol. I hold out my hand and take the rubbing alcohol from her. We’ll definitely have a need for it later on. Lexi shrugs at me, telling me silently that she’s found absolutely nothing of value in this house, just like the others. She meets my gaze and I smile at her while I hold up the phonebook in front of her. It’s a brief moment of victory for me. She probably never thought we’d find a phonebook in a million years. Yet, here it is in my hands.
Lexi shakes her head and motions for me to come with her. As she leads me out of the master bedroom, I follow her through the house. She leads me through the kitchen and before we can make it to the edge of the room, I freeze. It hits me like a bolt of lightning and I can’t help but freeze at the sight of it. Clarity washes over me but hesitation holds me at bay while I stand there, gripping Lexi’s arm and pulling her back into the room with me. She turns and looks at me, confusion etched across her face as I stare at the wall.
It was the shadows that caught my attention at first. They’d been slow, lethargic, and I’d almost thought that they were trees blowing in the wind. Of course, trees don’t exist anymore. After a year of this, I thought that I would get a grip on all of it, but sometimes I’m a slower learner than I’d like to admit. I hold her arm and watch the shadows shuffle, move lazily across the room in a sliver on the wall of light coming in through the sliding glass doors. Lexi sees the movement too and immediately investigates it, but she moves as silently as a ghost drifting through the house, hunting down the source. She only has to look a little before she finds it. I move with her, looking back at the yard, seeing exactly what I expected to find there.
A section of the back wooden fence of the yard has collapsed from the weather or some other reason in the past year. No matter what happened, the fence has buckled and sagged over, making way for dozens of the zombie cannibals to shuffle their way into the yard. Like in a trap designed for a crab, the zombies have managed to wander in, but remain unable to find a way out. They’re filling up the back yard and just standing there, brushing the palms of their blackened hands against the fence, searching for a way to escape. There’s something feral in their movements that makes me want to get away from them as quickly as possible. There’s a sort of uniform look to them that I find completely unnerving. As they move, clawing at the walls, staring up at the sky as if they’re expecting the face of God to appear and guide them to the afterlife, I can’t help but want to bash all of their heads in. There’s a sort of arrogance in their presence, like abominations walking upon holy ground. It shouldn’t be. They shouldn’t be.