When Mrs. Thomas finally fell to the floor and stopped clinching her hands around her throat, it seemed like an eternity. It looked like a slow and painful death, but after Nikki had watched the two kill the woman in the middle of the street she felt like the old lady got what she deserved. Nikki stared at them laying on the floor and waited with the knife held tightly in her palms just in case one of them decided to get up. She felt like she was in a nightmare, or in a low budget horror film, but this seemed all too real.
Nikki let the knife slip from her hands and fall to the floor. She dropped to her knees and cried loudly with her face buried in her blood-covered hands. Eddie continued to beat on the closet door. Nikki wiped the tears from her face and stared at the closet. The door kept pushing out with each bang Eddie made against it. “Stop it Eddie! Just stop it!” She started to sob again. “Stop it Eddie. Please just stop.”
The beating stopped. Nikki looked up and shook her head. Her eyes had turned red and bags were already forming under them from a morning filled with crying and screaming. She looked at her hands and felt sick to her stomach at the sight of the blood that covered her palms and ran down her forearms. She thought about what she had just done to her neighbors. They
were
good people weren’t they?
She wiped her hands on her shirt, but the blood was still wet on her hands. She shrieked when she realized that she had cut her hands somehow. She thought for a moment and then realized in all the excitement of jabbing the knife into Mr. Thomas’s chest, her hands had slipped forward from the walnut handle and down the sharp blade. She wiped her hands again and held them against her stomach.
After Nikki cleaned her hands and wrapped them with the remaining bandages, she went back to the hallway and stared at the bodies lying on the floor. She told herself that if she didn’t move them she would throw up every time she walked past. She went to the bedroom, pulled the comforter off her bed and stopped. She noticed the sliding rear door where Mr. and Mrs. Thomas had broken in. The curtains were swaying with the breeze coming through. Some of the pictures she had stuck between the wooden frame of the dresser mirror had blown off onto the floor. One of the pictures happens to be of her and Bobby on their wedding day. She dropped the blanket back on the bed and knelt done to pick up the picture. It brought back sweet memories, which are something better to think about than two dead bodies lying on the floor of her house. She looked at it and remembered that warm summer day, July 14, some twelve years before when they had gotten married in North Carolina. It was a sweet wedding with all the traditional necessities.
The breeze picked up and shook the photo in Nikki’s hand. She snapped herself out of her memory trip and remembered she has some important business to take care of. She sat the picture on the dresser and grabbed the comforter. She went back to the hallway and flung it out, letting it float down over top of her neighbors’ bodies. She hurried back to the bedroom and closed the door.
Although Nikki was safer with Eddie in the closet, she was still sorry that she had to keep her son barricaded inside. It wouldn’t be much longer she kept telling herself. She would just need to be sure that she could make a clear exit from the house, into the car, and down the road to the hospital. She thought getting from the house would be the hard part, but what she didn’t think about was how much trouble getting to the hospital would be,
if
she would even make it there. The radio transmission had said to go into hiding, but Nikki kept telling herself that the hospital has to be a safe place. It has always been a safe place when disaster strikes.
After a short while, Nikki thought it would be best to go ahead and try for an escape from her own house. She planned it out perfectly in her head, deciding to grab Eddie from the closet and running out the front door, then heading to the hospital. She would do it all in one shot, but first she needed to go to the bedroom closet and grab a thick coat to wear, a coat that would provide padding around her arms and neck just in case Eddie started up again.
She stood in the hallway with Eddie’s backpack full of snacks, drinks, and the first-aid kit. You never know when a first-aid kit may come in handy, and for Nikki, it was twice already in one morning. She stared at the closet for a few moments with the backpack slung over her shoulder and the keys to the car in her hand.
What if there are people outside? I better check again.
So she quickly walked back to the front window and pulled the curtain back slightly. It looked dead out there. As dead as the woman that lay in the middle of the street. Nikki knew she would have to drive over the lawn to get out otherwise she would pancake the woman lying in the street, not that it would make much difference anyhow. After making up her mind that it was a safe bet to get to the car she went back to the closet. She glanced down and noticed Mr. Thomas’s loafers sticking out from the bottom of the comforter. She cringed at the sight because it reminded Nikki that she had just killed two people. How would she explain this to the police? This kind of shit seems like something that would only happen in a movie, and if it happened in real life, it was bound to be a real world fucked up situation. So maybe the law would understand.
Nikki opened the closet door slowly in hopes not to wake Eddie up. With the door slightly opened, she glanced inside and saw him lying on the floor in a pile of clothes. The tears started to fill up in her eyes again. She watched him sleeping and then thought of when he was born, lying in the baby bed at the hospital. He was so beautiful to look at and so quiet then. If she could only pick him up like a baby and keep him from waking long enough to get him in the car everything would be okay.
Eddie grunted a little and moaned when Nikki leaned down next to him and grabbed underneath his shoulders. She slowly picked him up and laid him across her shoulder. She was so upset about hurting him that she forgot about keeping his face away from her neck. If he would wake up at that moment, he could easily tear her ear off with one bite, but she was lucky enough that he stayed sleeping like the little baby he was in the hospital when he was born.
She walked slowly and almost made it to the door when the sound of a car engine came rumbling down their street. Eddie started to wake up, but without hesitation, Nikki ran him outside to the car and put him in the back seat. The second she closed the door of the car, the car that had been flying down the street came to a sudden and crashing stop two houses up. Nikki jumped and shrieked when she saw the car smash into the big oak tree in the middle of one of her neighbor’s yards. The passenger in the front seat of the car came barreling through the windshield and landed about ten yards in front of it. The passenger was a bloody mess and mangled, no way for the person to survive.
Oh my God. I have to help them.
Her first thought whenever something horrific happens is to help the person in need. As much as she wanted to just get in her car and drive away, she felt compelled to run over to the car and check on the driver. So that’s what she did.
The driver of the car was slumped over the steering wheel when Nikki got to the car. The airbag had deployed and he was still wearing his seatbelt, but somehow, his entire face and front of his shirt was covered in blood. Surprisingly, he was still breathing, but let out slow and shallow, blood-filled breathes.
“Are you okay?” asked Nikki. She grabbed his shoulder and leaned him back in the seat. “Oh Jesus.” She stepped back from the car door and put a hand over her mouth. She wanted to scream at the sight and knew there was no way his face ended up ripped apart from an airbag hitting it.
The driver slowly turned his head toward Nikki and spoke in a slow and choppy tone. “She...tried...to...eat me.” He looked up at Nikki with his left eye. The right dangled from its socket and lay against the shredded remains of his cheek.
“What happened to you?” She stepped up to the car and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Who did this to you?”
The man’s arm shook as he raised his finger to point to the woman lying in the grass in front of the car. “She...started...biting me.” His breathing sped up and his left eye opened wider. “She growled...and then...started eating...my face.”
Nikki put her hand back over her mouth and started shaking her head in disgust. She looked at the blood-covered woman on the ground and back to the man in the car. In the split second she took her eyes off the man, he stopped breathing and his left eye stayed open. Nikki screamed at the sight of the dead man staring at her. She turned and ran back to her car, screaming her head off.
She nearly fell down when she stopped suddenly on the wet grass of the next-door neighbor’s lawn. Nikki grabbed her chest as though she were having a heart attack. It’s not every day that you see a crowd of blood thirsty, growling people coming down your street. It looked as though there could be fifty or more. Nikki could have just as easily assumed there were more than a hundred.
“Oh my God?” Nikki screamed.
She stood staring at the mass of hostiles coming her way. They were walking slowly and were bumping into each other with one thing on their mind when they saw Nikki standing there with her mouth hanging open. Fresh meat. That’s what they were thinking. How could they have known that she was there? Maybe they could smell her. Maybe the living body puts off an aroma like a sizzling steak on the grille. The crowd let out a deep growl when they noticed her.
Nikki gasped as she dug her feet into the soft grass to get a better stance when she took off running to her car. All she had to do was open the driver door, get in, and drive away to safety with Eddie sleeping in the back. The only problem was that Eddie was no longer in the back of the car. She looked in the rearview mirror to see her son sleeping, but he wasn’t there. She turned and looked over the seats and saw that he was gone.
“Eddie,” she said as she looked around outside of the car windows. “Come back!” She shook the steering wheel out of anger that she left her son in the back of the car like someone at a supermarket with his dog in the hot sun. Eddie may have sounded like a dog this morning, but he certainly should have been safe in the back of the car for the five minutes. She kept looking around and noticed the crowds of hostiles were now only a couple of houses away. “Go away!” She screamed in their direction, but they didn’t listen. They kept coming closer and closer. They had no plans of leaving until they could take a bite out of Nikki.
She slammed the car door closed when she got out and ran back toward the house. She noticed the front door was wide opened and hoped Eddie had run back inside. She ran in the house and closed the door so hard the WELCOME HOME sign hanging on it went hurdling across the front lawn. She locked the deadbolt and put the safety chain on, then slid to the floor on her knees. She started to cry and her stomach hurt. She felt as though she would pass out. Her eyes started to close when her sobbing had died down to a whimper. She couldn’t bring herself to look up to see if the hostiles were coming directly for her house. She nearly dozed off to sleep, but the sound of chewing and smacking lips behind her drew her attention.
Eddie had pulled the blanket away from the Thomas’s bodies and was sitting on top of Mrs. Thomas’s chest. Blood ran down Eddie’s face as he sat staring at Nikki with what looked like an ear hanging out of his mouth. His eyes fixed to her like a wolf ready to attack its prey. He was enjoying the flesh of the dead woman, but now there was a live and breathing person on the floor in front of him.
“Oh, Eddie,” Nikki said. She shook her head and held her hands up for Eddie to come to her. “Please don’t do that honey.” She tried to stay as calm as she could while her son feasted on Mrs. Thomas. She didn’t want to let him continue, but she was so stunned at seeing her son this way that she could barely move an inch. She just sat there watching him as he watched her.
Eddie sat staring at his mother for what seemed like an eternity, but it had really only been about thirty seconds. It must have went through his ten year old mind that the woman sitting in front of him had busted his nose earlier and locked him in the closet. She was a tough prey. He must have thought it would be easier to sit there on top of Mrs. Thomas and fill his stomach with her flesh and blood than to try to go after the mean woman sitting by the door. He would go after her when he would be ready to eat again, but for the time being, the dead woman would be enough to pass him over until later. He kept his eyes on Nikki as he brought his face down to take another bite from Mrs. Thomas’s face.
Nikki felt her throat start working and twitching as she watched her son tear away at the dead woman’s face. The sound of the tearing flesh was making her start to lose her mind. She pulled herself together just enough to get on her knees and look out the window to check on the hostile party. She let out a sigh of relief as she watched them pass by and keep on going. Only a few of the hostiles stopped at the bodies by the Cadillac, but they didn’t bother with them. There must be fresh meat down the road somewhere.
NASHVILLE