Nancy rushed out to the living room. She found Terri-Lynn on the couch, arms wrapped around her knees, rocking back and forth with her eyes wide and round as golf balls. The banging sound continued steadily, but the teacher stared straight forward at her television. Over the noise flitting all through the apartment building, Nancy caught snippets of the anchor’s voice: “Chaos in the streets... people who appeared to have recently passed on... authorities cannot explain...”
The images on the television swam in front of Nancy’s face. Her brain was either unwilling or unable to make sense of it all. Buildings were on fire, panicked people were running for their lives in droves, and police were being taken down by groups of ghastly-looking people who seemed to be immune to bullets. Nancy pinched her arm, hard, to see if she was really awake.
“What in the name of God is going on, Nancy?” came a tiny whimper from the couch.
Nancy couldn’t tear her eyes away from the bloody images on the screen to look at her friend. “I don’t know... I... I don’t know...”
A terrible scratching came from the apartment door. Terri-Lynn sunk herself further into her couch and Nancy winced. She’d best check the peephole, she thought, though the idea filled her with dread. It took her a good five minutes to crawl toward the door, though the time seemed to her to have passed in an instant. Every bang from outside the apartment made her jump, every scratch on the door made her twitch. What was out there? Was it one of the neighbors, trying to get to safety? Or a police officer maybe? Maybe it was the fluffy white cat that had escaped Mrs Spears’ apartment. All three options seemed far too optimistic at the moment. Cautious, careful, Nancy reached out and placed a hand on the door. It shuddered gently beneath her touch as something on the other side pressed against it.
It took every ounce of courage she could muster, but eventually Nancy thrust her face up to the peephole.
The face on the other side would have been unrecognizable, even if it had once been someone she knew. Skin was peeled away in several places, flapping like loose sheets of cloth, and the eyelid seemed to have been torn completely from one eye. A great chunk of blond hair was missing from just above the left ear, and the lips were peeled back so that Nancy could see two neat rows of blood-red teeth. Four other figures - of a similar appearance - were gathered around the first one, with more at the door across the hallway. Some were pounding heavy fists against the doors, while others scratched at the wood until their fingers bled and their nails cracked away from the skin.
Nancy gagged so hard that it burned the back of her throat. She felt bile struggling to make its way up.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” she announced when she’d managed to regain herself. At the same time, somewhere in the building, someone screamed their death throes.
“Where will we go?” Terri-Lynn asked with a pitiful sob. Tears were spilling down her cheeks and she looked, for all intents and purposes, like a small child who’d had a terrible nightmare.
“It doesn’t matter,” Nancy said, a little more harshly than she might have under other circumstances. “Somewhere that isn’t here, before they manage to get through the door.” She ran to the living room window and peered down. The fire escape, that was good. The three dozen or so lifeless creatures shambling around on the street directly below, that wasn’t so good. “We need weapons,” Nancy mumbled.
The kitchen seemed like the most likely place, so Nancy ran there and ransacked the cabinets. She smashed a few dishes in the process, but took no note of them, and Terri-Lynn either didn’t hear the crashes or was beyond caring about her personal possessions. A large carving knife seemed like a good bet, though Nancy didn’t fancy the idea of getting that close to the-
She stopped in mid-thought. Zombies? Was that the word she’d been about to think? Part of her felt absolutely ridiculous for even considering it, but the other part was screaming,
Yes! Yes! That’s exactly what they are! Run for your goddamn life!
What other explanation was there? Mrs Spears had looked awfully goddamn dead, but then she just rose up and started attacking Mr Bell like a starved dog. With a sickening lurch in her stomach, Nancy recalled Ken’s story about the mystery lady from the park - they’d said she showed every sign of being dead long before she ever attacked that boy. Could it have really been true?
Thud!...Thud!...Thud!...
One of
them
was getting a little more rough with the apartment door.
“Nancy,” Terri-Lynn’s terrified voice came from the living room. “I think they’re starting to break through!”
Nancy settled for the carving knife.
She ran back out to the hall, where Terri-Lynn was standing with her hands to her face like she was clutching an invisible security blanket. There was a long, thin crack in the apartment door.
“Out of the way!” Nancy ordered. She shoved Terri-Lynn to one side, ran to the opposite side of the couch, and started to push it toward the door. It was heavier than it looked. “Give me a hand for fuck sakes!” she shouted at her neighbor. Terri-Lynn jumped a little, hesitated, and then grabbed the back of the couch and started to pull. A few minutes later they had half the living room piled up against the door.
“Okay,” Nancy breathed, clutching her knife. “Let’s go.”
“
Where?!
” Terri-Lynn cried miserably. She was gazing out the windows and her face was pale as snow. “They’re everywhere!”
As she looked down on the busy street full of death and destruction, Nancy felt dizzy and overwhelmed. It was true; they seemed to be multiplying exponentially. Every person killed rose up and became one of the hoard. They were shambling and slow, but there were dozens of them on the street below, and from what she’d experienced so far they were unexpectedly strong. If even one caught hold of them and held them long enough for others to approach... But they couldn’t stay here and wait for the ghouls to make their way into the apartment either.
“We’ll try the bar first,” Nancy decided suddenly. “It’s a strong building that we can hole up in, and I’ve got the ke-” She trailed off and groaned. Yes, she had the keys, but they were in her apartment. She could get to her living room via the fire escape, but would it be worth it? She didn’t, after all, know what was going on at that end of the hall.
Nancy considered the options for what seemed like a terribly long time before deciding that she’d risk it. Her car keys were there as well, after all, and she didn’t think they would make it very far without a vehicle.
“Stay here,” Nancy told Terri-Lynn. “If they get through the door, or if I’m not back within ten minutes, make a run for it down the fire escape and don’t stop running until you find somewhere to hide.”
Terri-Lynn’s eyes were huge and brimming with tears. She looked like she might argue, but at Nancy’s glare she simply nodded.
Climbing out onto the fire escape was hard enough all on its own. The sun was starting to rise above the buildings and Nancy found herself in a state of terror, wondering if the creatures below would see her and try to climb up for her. She satisfied herself with a meek reassurance that they were so slow she’d see them coming from a mile off, and began to walk as quietly and quickly as she could over to her apartment’s living room window.
When she reached her destination she discovered a hitch in her plan: the window was shut and locked from the other side. She’d need to smash it to get in, and attempting to do so with her fist might get her wrist slit open. She could use the butt of the knife, but she’d have to hold the blade in order to do that, and she might tear her hand open. Both options were counter-productive. She could wrap her tank top around her hand and punch the window, but she’d have to take it off and she wasn’t even wearing a bra-
An insane little thrill of giggles almost burst from Nancy’s throat. She felt like she must be losing her mind. The city was being overrun by zombies -
yes, zombies, god dammit!
- and here she was worried about someone seeing her bare breasts.
Any inkling of shame pushed out of her mind by survivalist instinct, Nancy set down her knife, took off her top, and wrapped it around her right fist. She pulled back, clenched her fist tight, and hesitated for only half a moment as she wondered if she had enough strength to smash the window. Finally she squeezed her eyes shut and hurled her fist forward. The sound was loud and made her jump, but the window fell apart beneath her fist, leaving only a few jagged shards behind. She was surprised, to be honest, and suddenly felt that whoever had purchased these particular windows didn’t have the tenants’ safety in their greater interests.
Careful not to cut herself, she cracked the last bits of glass out of the window frame, put on her somewhat-worse-for-wear top, and retrieved her knife. She had one arm and one leg through the window when she caught sight of something out of the corner of her eye. Her heart skipped a beat. Her apartment door was wide open, and from the sounds coming down the hallway, it seemed that the hoard down by Terri-Lynn’s apartment had heard the shattering of the window.
In her rush to get to the door, Nancy tripped over the window frame and nearly impaled herself on a particularly large chunk of broken glass that had fallen against an end table.
That would have been fucking stupid!
thought the tiny part of her brain that was still making random observations.
The door! The door! Get the fucking door!
shrieked the other, more instinctive parts of her brain as a wide-eyed, blood-spattered face began to peer around the corner.
How she made it to the door on time, she’d never know. Whether it was through a burst of adrenaline or pure, dumb luck, a second later Nancy found herself leaning against the apartment door, the dead bolt clutched closed in her shaking hand as her zombified neighbors began scraping and pounding at the thin wooden barrier between them. Her heart was racing in its own little marathon. Nancy thanked the stars for the one tiny sliver of luck that was the lethargic lack of speed in these creatures.
She should hurry, she thought. What had it been...three or four minutes since she’d left Terri-Lynn? She didn’t want the other woman to think she’d been abandoned.
Nancy ran for her bedroom, where she knew her keys would be in the work pants she’d worn yesterday and left at the foot of the bed. But as she dashed toward the discarded pants, a shiny salvation caught her eye. On the furthest wall from where she stood hung something that really had no business being in a young woman’s bedroom, but was something Nancy loved. It was a ceremonial katana, a gift from an uncle who’d taught English in Japan and was very interested in martial arts and ancient samurai culture. Nancy didn’t know if it was actually meant for real combat, but she’d kept it clean and sharp over the years, and at this moment it looked exceptionally appealing to have at her side.
She ran for the sword, strangely excited to have its heft in her hands, but was stopped suddenly as her tank top tightened around her and pulled at her body.
Eyes wide, Nancy swung her head around.
Mrs Spears, her white hair drenched in blood that ran from her eyes and mouth, was standing there staring at her, looking for all the world like a rabid wolf. She had reached for Nancy and caught her by one of the straps of her top. With a gasp of terror Nancy realized that she’d forgotten the carving knife in the living room in her rush to shut the apartment door.
If there was anyone left alive in the apartment building, they would surely have heard Nancy’s scream.
For her part, she was able to think quickly. Before the zombified Mrs Spears could grab her with the other pale, dead hand, Nancy grabbed at one of the tears in her shirt and ripped as hard as she could. The top fell into three pieces, and the force of Mrs Spears’ pull caused her to topple backward a few steps. With those few extra seconds, Nancy vaulted over her bed and snatched the katana off the wall. In a fit of panic she ripped off the ornamental sheath and threw it at Mrs Spears. The red and gold covering cracked her square in the face, but it may as well have been a ball of tissue for all the stopping power it possessed.
Nancy held the katana in both hands, pointed it at her enemy, and found that she was shaking too much to hold it steady. It was heavier than she remembered.
“Mrs Spears?” she whimpered, a last-ditch effort to prove that this was all some sort of insane misunderstanding. “Are you...alive in there? Somewhere?”
The decaying body that had once been Nancy’s elderly neighbor groaned, a long and horrible noise that would haunt Nancy’s nightmares for a long, long time. It raised one arm, set two wide, empty eyes on its prey, and began to shamble forward. The movement was slow, and the implication of it was truly awful.
“I’m sorry, Mrs Spears,” Nancy whispered.
With all the power she could muster, she drew a wide arch and swung. The katana connected with a
thump
into the creature’s neck. Blood splattered across the floor, and the zombie stumbled to the side, but it wasn’t a killing blow. Nancy pulled back and swung again, this time missing the neck and hitting the side of the face. More blood, and the head whipped to one side from the force, but the feet continued to shuffle forward.
The sight of her elderly neighbor, bleeding more than anyone had a right to bleed, with huge chunks missing from her neck and face - and yet still advancing - broke something in Nancy’s mind at that moment. She leaped forward and swung straight down, onto the skull. The sword almost got stuck, but she wrenched it free as Mrs Spears’ hands groped forward. Blood sprayed in every direction as Nancy slammed the sword down again, and again, and again, and again...