Mistakes I Made During the Zombie Apocalypse (3 page)

• • •

You are telling someone else’s story again.

“It’s important. I can’t understand my mistakes if I don’t examine the mistakes of others.”

Don’t blame Grant for this. Especially when you are getting to the part where you failed him.

“He could have stayed upstairs.”

You could have done a lot of things.

• • •

Ian awoke when he heard the creaking of the stairs. He remembered that they weren’t alone. When he saw that Grant wasn’t in his sleeping bag he left the warmth of his own to follow after his friend.

“Why are all the doors closed and where did this blood come from?” Grant asked him from the first floor hallway. A delicate trail of crimson droplets led from room to room and Grant now had it on his feet. Ian stood on the stairs, staring down at him over the railing. He knew the answer to both parts of Grant’s question.
The girl
had closed the doors; the girl who was covered in bleeding wounds who he never found a moment to tell Grant about, she was the only one who could have.

• • •

Why did she close the doors?

“I don’t know. She must have been trying to keep the heat in or the shadows-turned-monsters out. Maybe it was Keller’s idea?”

You are transferring blame to someone else again. You know this is your fault. You didn’t do enough.

“I called to him. I remember saying something!” Ian yells as he slams a fist against the closet door. It sends a shudder through the walls of the house and dust falls down from the ceiling.

Calm down and tell them what you said.

• • •

“Come back to bed,” Ian whispered, choosing to ignore answering Grant’s questions. He needed to get Grant back upstairs before the girl woke up and he found out about her.

“’Come to bed?’ That’s some
Brokeback Mountain
shit,” Grant said with a laugh.

It was all Ian had. What else could he have said without giving away the girl?

“That’s not what I meant,” he clarified.

“Whatever you meant, I’m not coming. How the hell will I be able to fall asleep again when the floors are covered in blood? Someone’s in the house! Don’t you care?”

Ian cared about many things still. He cared not to piss off his friend, he cared to find enough food each day, that he and Grant would get out of this hellhole of a house and find a better place to survive and he absolutely cared that he had finally lost his virginity. But it did not matter to him for Grant to follow a blood trail that would lead him to another of Ian’s poor decisions.

• • •

“Grant didn’t have to follow the blood,” Ian told the fleas that he hadn’t yet managed to crush with his overgrown fingernails. “He could have waited.”

But the bloody girl couldn’t wait, could she? She introduced herself.

“She came up behind him and even though it was dark, I knew something was different with her. Because he was tall, he towered over her, but the plague made her appear larger somehow and more frightening. I opened my mouth to warn him, but a floorboard creaked as she shifted her weight. He turned slowly until they were face to face.”

• • •

“Where the fuck did this bitch come from?” Grant asked Ian without taking his eyes off of her shadowy form. He was confused because the doors were closed and zombies didn’t turn doorknobs.

A full moon cast a beam of light in through a window above the back door. The girl unintentionally moved into the glow. Grant asked again where the girl had come from. Ian, too scared to make more noise, cursed at himself in his head and didn’t answer.

• • •

You didn’t have to talk, you had other choices, but you got hung up on words.

“What could I have done? Jumped the railing and landed on her back? Told Grant to run and try to distract her while we found weapons?” Ian argues with himself, throwing his hands up in the dark of the closet in a passionate defense of his inaction.

Those are both very good options. The house is full of weapons, if you are looking for them.

“Well, I know that now!”

• • •

Behind closed door number one there was a dull butcher knife in an old knife block on the kitchen counter. Its handle already stained with a bit of red, though it was dried tomato that had never been washed off. Behind double doors numbers two and three, a coat rack tucked into a corner by the front door. Either end would be effective, with multiple prongs. In fact it had been used as a weapon twice before. The previous homeowners were an unhappy couple and the woman found it the perfect tool to wail on her husband after late night boozing.

Door number four led to the basement and a heavy wrench that would have worked well for the task of beating in the girl’s brains. The drunken husband had once considered the same thing for his wife, but fell asleep and sobered up before acting on the impulse.

A chair from the dining room behind door number five could have kept the bloody girl at a safe distance until one of the other weapons was retrieved.

Grant, alone in this event as his friend was completely worthless, saw two possible options, neither of which involved weapons or Ian. Both involved closed doors. He could run head on into the infected girl and take a moment to open a door into a room that she’d follow him into. Or, he could take the door at the end of the hall, behind him, that opened to the backyard.

The backyard. Its fence, which of course was a work of utter shit when it was first built, hadn’t kept anything out or even stood mostly upright for over ten years. The yard sat against a wooded area and beyond that, a major shopping center. Now, the backyard was full of zombies.

It was a mystery to them as to why she hadn’t attacked yet. Ian watched Grant stand there, still, as though—like a dinosaur of some kind—she wouldn’t see him unless he moved. But she could definitely see him and she was going to kill him. Like any other predator, she simply wanted a taste of the hunt. Her hungry eyes bore into him, daring him to run.

You may have heard the term ‘dumbstruck’ or ‘awestruck’ to describe an inability to act or even move because fear, beauty or extraordinary circumstances stop someone in their tracks. At that moment, Ian was experiencing this feeling for the first time. As he saw the girl’s changed face in the moonlight, he was unable to do anything but stare. She was still as beautiful as when he’d first met her. She hadn’t attacked anyone yet, meaning her face was clean and not covered in the blood and gore of others. Her eyes hadn’t sunken in or gone milky or discolored with decay.

• • •

“I couldn’t stop looking at her.”

You’re thinking of her even now.

“She was more beautiful dead than she was alive.”

Ever since you lost your virginity to the other girl, it’s all you think about.

“I don’t want to think about
her
,” Ian says. Tears begin to drop like bombshells onto the wool coat in his lap and the moth larvae there.

Tell them more about this girl then.

• • •

Her face was relaxed and there was no hint of the attitude with which she’d come in. Her skin was a smooth, porcelain plain. The wounds that covered her body no longer seeped blood, as her heart was still. She was the calm before the storm.

Her beauty, too, moved Grant, but he stayed unmoving due to a paralyzing fear. The beast was before him. He muttered Ian’s name just loud enough for him to hear it. The girl let out a hiss or yowl comparable to a large cat sending a warning signal to potential prey. It was low and wet.

Hearing it, Grant decided it was time to move or die. He turned to his right and reached for the kitchen doorknob. She jumped on him and they fell into the passage between the hall and kitchen.

“Ian! Ian!” he yelled, over and over.

• • •

“And still, I stood there.”

You stood there and watched it happen. Didn’t even descend one single step.

• • •

Not until Ian saw a wash of blood on his friend’s arms did he regain awareness of the situation. Suddenly the sounds of flesh tearing and the smacking of the girl’s feeding lips filled his ears. He took a step down the stairs, but again froze, remembering that he was weaponless. And despite the fact that she was satisfying her hunger, the killer in her was still on high alert. If she heard him, she would attack him as voraciously as she had Grant.

In mere minutes his best friend, whom he’d known since he was three, had bled completely out. As though she could tell he had expired, the girl stopped devouring his flesh. She wandered away down the hall, leaving Grant’s body to rot like a forgotten plate of no longer desirable food.

Crying on the stairs seemed like a good idea. Grant was his last friend, and again if Ian was being realistic, his
only
friend. But now a killing machine walked the first floor and he’d seen the undead scramble up stairs before. He had to take care of her before she realized another perfectly edible person was nearby.

He carefully made his way to the bottom of the stairs and, judging by the trail of bloody footprints she left, the girl was in the sitting room. What a zombie would do in a sitting room did not concern Ian, but he was
very
interested in the mounted elk head in the living room across the hall.

• • •

“You forgot to list it as a weapon.”

I didn’t want to give your story away. Besides, I already mentioned it. Go on…

• • •

Ian lifted the hunting trophy from the wall and, though it was stuffed, it weighed nearly fifty pounds. He hefted it and ran at the girl, whose back was turned to him. One of the horns slipped easily into her flesh and he used his momentum to push her against the wall of the sitting room. Still she tried to bite him, craning her neck without respect for the vertebrae in it. Ian had no qualms or queasiness. He could no longer see her beauty, only her evil. Her face was caked with bits of Grant’s flesh and smeared with his blood. It sent him into a rage.

He jammed the horn deeper into her body and moved it up and down to rip her apart. Then he pulled away and shook the elk head to remove her from the horn. Though her body had several holes in it, she moved to attack once more. He tripped her and stood on top of her, his feet sinking into her gut. From this position of power, he dropped the elk head on her skull. Her intestines were squishing up between his toes, but all he wanted was for her to stop glaring at him. He picked up the head again and made sure to send a horn into her brain.

Ian fell to the side of her body. His feet wore a layer of excrement and newly rotting insides. He held his head, panting and crying and trying to avoid looking at his feet. Instead, he observed something on the girl’s wrist. Below the scars and wounds that would never heal, she was wearing a bracelet made with silver beads. Four of the beads had letters engraved on them. He turned them to reveal the name. L-E-N-A. He didn’t know how to pronounce it since she’d never told him her name. Lee-na, Lay-na. It might even have been short for Helena, or maybe a name he’d never heard of as parents were naming their kids all kinds of weird names these days.

• • •

“Her name doesn’t matter.”

Then you should tell them, like you told Grant’s body, how the bloody girl got inside.

“No one needs to know that.”

It might help you get rid of some of the guilt.

“Ha!” Ian laughs. “Nothing but death will take away my guilt.”

You must be held accountable for your actions.

He takes a deep breath in, itches a particularly bothersome fleabite on his thigh and begins.

“We had found a place we thought was safe but the reinforced door didn’t matter because…”

…I LET THE WRONG ONE IN

The sun was working its way toward the horizon and Grant and Ian were upstairs in the bedroom of the house, going through what belongings were left between them. It was a grim situation, but they knew that every house in the neighborhood was a potential treasure trove of food and supplies, once they could get to them.

“We’ll have to stay inside and let the dead calm down. It could be a couple of days before we’re able to sneak around out there.” Grant unrolled his sleeping bag on the dusty floor and pulled out his iPod. Little battery remained on the device, but he needed to unwind from what they’d been through earlier that day so he popped the earbuds in and lay down.

Ian set his sleeping bag on the bare mattress of the four-poster bed, but, instead of lying down, he searched the house.
There has to be something of value
, he thought. Two other bedrooms on the second floor, one the master, held little more than the room in which he’d left Grant. The living room, sitting room and dining room downstairs held only old furniture, nothing of real use unless Ian got creative or, later, desperate. The basement was likely to produce something of value, but he wasn’t yet willing to venture into its dark recesses alone. The only room left was the kitchen. Ian prepared himself to be let down, especially since there had been another family in the neighborhood capable of raiding the place.

All ten of the counter’s built-in drawers were empty and he checked five cupboards before he found anything still edible. The sixth cupboard’s two shelves held four cans of soup. He held one in his hand. The expiration date was difficult to make out, but the can wasn’t dented or bloated. They would feast tonight! He was about to grab the other cans and bring them to Grant when a soft knock came on the front door.

Ian closed the cupboard. It seemed ominous that an outsider would find them just as they found food. He couldn’t let someone take their supplies again, but his curiosity won out. He went to the heavy drapes of the living room and glanced outside. A beautiful girl, covered in small, bleeding cuts, was standing on the front porch. He watched her for a while, hoping she would leave.

• • •

Ian can feel the anger growing in him.