Room Without a Window

Danny stumbled back from the window, eyes wide as saucers.  I had seen enough westerns and zombie movies to know that being unarmed is the same as being suicidal.  Reaching into my pocket for the switchblade I usually had, I remembered it was now sheathed in the creature I saw on my way home from the grocery store.  I started looking around the room for weapons.  Danny was pale and confused, wordlessly asking me what to do.  I told him to grab his baseball bat and double check all the locks.  As he spun around to fetch the wooden bat he kept between his bed and the wall, I heard a scream.  Nerves on razor’s edge, I flew to the window facing the neighbors’ house to see that the room wasn’t vacant as it seemed before.  Their window was about three feet below ours so I couldn’t get the best view of the attack, but I knew something very wrong was happening.  One of the frat bros that lived next door had either left his volleyball-chested girlfriend alone in the house with those things or he was the one attacking her.  Either way, I started unlocking the clasp that was keeping the window locked and grabbed the foot-long monkey wrench we use to turn the hot water on because the faucet had long since been broken.  Danny ran in with his bat, near hysterics. 

“Some slut is in trouble next door. Pull me get back in when I need you.”

“Don’t do it, Vik.  This is such a bad idea… We can’t leave this house...”

I just gave him the coldest look I could muster and said, “Nut up, dude. She needs help. Just stay here and pull us in when I tell you.”

My stomach tied itself into such a knot, it should’ve been given a merit badge.  After successfully opening the window, I slid down so my feet were balanced on the ledge of our neighbor’s window.  Through a thin layer of dust and smudges, I could see a brunette screaming her tacky head off, pushing all 98 pounds of herself against the door which was clearly being ferociously attacked from the other side.  Bracing myself between the houses, I swung the rusted wrench into the glass, shattering it instantly.  This clearly surprised and terrified the poor girl.  I slumped in through the broken window and tried to explain to her that I was trying to help.  Since she couldn’t hear me over her own frantic shrieking, I very quickly and deliberately crossed the room to where she was hopelessly trying to keep something unbelievably angry and incredibly determined from breaking the door open.  A slap to her bronzed face (which I have to admit was something I’d been wanting to do since I’d met her last month) sobered the now sniffling, stunned college dropout. 

Slowly and carefully, I grabbed her shoulders and explained to her what was happening.  “You can’t stay here. You will be killed if you try. Help me barricade this door and climb out the window into our house. My roommate will help you, but you need to hurry!”

Instead of helping me move an overstuffed armchair in front of the rattling, the frantic girl ran to the window and was immediately pulled up into our house by Danny, whose once mousey brown hair had started turning ashen.  I got the furniture into place, hoping it would hold.  While I was moving across the room toward the window and safety, I heard the one sound I least wanted to hear besides the words “Last Call for Alcohol!”  The door splintered with a crack so loud, I started brandishing the steel wrench still clenched in my fist.  I spun around to face the destroyed doorway and saw every warm-blooded human’s worst nightmare.  It had the same milky eyes and blood-crusted mouth as the creature that attacked me no less than an hour ago, but it was clearly a different person.  In fact, it was one of my neighbors.  He was the frantic girl’s boyfriend- well, he used to be. He seemed like the kind of guy that would hit his girlfriend when he was alive or uninfected or whatever, but he was clearly not trying to put her in her place this time.  Brosef was trying to eat her... and now me. 

Remembering the wrench I was carrying and flailing in half-circles around me, I brought the tool down onto undead tool’s skull.  He groaned something that sounded almost as awful as it smelled.  I deftly hammered a groove into his dome, smashing until the only thing holding him up was the ratty chair behind which his legs were stuck.  I swung around and hefted myself up onto the window’s ledge, calling for Danny to pull me up.  As I grabbed our own window’s ledge with one shaking hand and his hand with the other, I felt it.  Pressure.  I looked down and saw another one of our former neighbors trying to chew my foot.  I pulled my knee up to my chest and swung the heel of my boot into his foaming, wretched face so hard that his jaw cracked off.  As Danny pulled me through the window, it occurred to me just how close I came to being bitten.  When I first bought my boots five years ago, I swore I’d never wear anything else.  Now, as I sat on a second-hand futon and enough adrenaline to give Jason Statham a heart attack, I silently made myself and Doc Martin the same promise.

“Is everyone over there…..” the trembling girl started to ask me.

“Bro-nestown Massacre over there. Sorry.” 

“What do we do now?”

Not Your Average Invasion

I flew up the wooden stairs hugging the house in which I lived, my boots heavily landing on every three steps.  Flinging open the rusty screen door, I nearly shattered the window in the door, but praise the slumlord!, we had a cheap plastic instead of glass making the door almost impervious to my neighborhood’s kings of thieves.   My shaking hand finally slipped the key into the deadbolt, and as I heard all the locks sliding into place, I hurled myself into the linoleum-floored kitchen.  Locking the screen door then the bank vault of a back door, I slid down to the floor and pulled out my cell phone.  My hands were shaking so badly, I could barely dial the local police.  The image of that monster hurtling toward me with inhuman speed, growling and grunting like Cujo with just as much foam around his mouth, kept coming back to me when I was suddenly aware that it wasn’t the dialing that was my problem.  I checked, double-checked, dialed, re-dialed and realized that the line to New Brunswick’s finest was disconnected.  I tried 9-1-1 and all I heard was a busy signal and my heart pounding in my ears.  Just like any twenty-something in the middle of a crisis, I called my mom.  She was away on one of her vacations in Iowa or Idaho or one of those states with more crops than people.  She did some kind of cereal distribution thing so we always had samples of breakfast cereals lying around.  When she was out of town, she only took her business phone and I didn’t have the new number.  As I started to get my brain into strategy-mode and out of panic-mode, my roommate Danny flew out of his room and ran into the kitchen.  He was carrying a broom with a sharpened end, looking like a prisoner about to shiv me with the best weapon at his disposal.

“Jesus Christ, Vikki! What the hell is going on?!” He was wearing his signature grey sweatpants with the mustard stain that looked like Abraham Lincoln and a black Rutgers hoody with a cracked vinyl “R” on the back.  “Chris just called.  He said something happened at the student center.  A crazy mob or something…  are you OK?”

“I don’t know… I… I… I think I just killed someone… thing.. .something..  God, I don’t know!”  Danny took one look at me and knew something very wrong was happening. He scooped me up off the floor.  My brain snapped into go mode.  “Ok, Something is going on.  Is our internet working today?”

“If the neighbors didn’t put a password on the wi-fi.”

“Check the campus websites, facebook, see what the hell is happening.  I’m going to make sure all the windows are locked.”   I ran into Danny’s room.  If his window wasn’t locked, it wouldn’t be a problem; there was a dresser, a pile of clothes, and a mysterious crust on a dinner plate blocking the whole thing.  If anyone wanted to get in or out of it, they’d be horribly out of luck.  I double-checked the window from the living room over-looking a scenic brick wall.  The house next to ours was so close we could spit on it, and sometimes did if their frat parties got too loud and we couldn’t turn our own stereos louder.  That window was locked and from the looks of things, the neighbors weren’t home.  I spun around and flew into my room to check the last of the windows.  Throwing the curtains back, I flicked the lock closed and that’s when I saw it. 

Danny’s voice floated across the hallway.  “Hey Vik!  Come look at this video!” 

“Ummm… I think you need to see this first…”

He walked into the room, stepped over to the window, and yelped.  I would have laughed at this feminine squeal if I didn’t know why he was yelping.  We looked down on the street and there it was- hundreds of decaying, bloodied creatures that looked like shambling corpses pouring out of bushes, side streets, and climbing on cars, smashing windows, everywhere.  They were everywhere.

How It Started

Don’t listen to the news.  Well, not about the zombies, but the weather and sports are fine, I guess.  The media are part of why all this mess started in the first place.  See, it’s a lot like how that Three Mile Island thing happened, everyone in charge knew they had to evacuate and get away from the sprawling danger, but those people didn’t want to start a panic so they just didn’t do anything.  When one of those pharmaceutical plants had an outbreak, they didn’t want a panic, so they just left the public to their own devices.  We didn’t know anything was wrong until it was too late.  When people couldn’t ignore the smashed windows and screaming from all around us, the news stations reported riots to each of their areas. They didn’t say it was happening everywhere, the level of fatalities, and they didn’t show the bodies with impossible injuries standing up in the streets and viciously biting the healthy “rioters.”  Some of them made up stories about hokey race rifts or sports team upsets.  The blogs telling the truth were shut down immediately or passed off as crazy internet-freaks writing fan fiction to George Romero. 

I’m not an expert and I’ll be the first to admit there’s a lot I don’t know about the Infection, but everyone who lived through it has one of those “Where were you when…” stories.  This is mine.  I watched the movies, read the books, even a few comic books when I was a kid, and I always thought of what the best course of action would be if something like that happened.  Trust me, you can’t plan for something like this.  Sure, you can have the fall-out shelter, the store of weapons and supplies, but what if it hits when you’re on vacation? Or on the turnpike? Or just at the grocery store? That’s what happened to me.  I was just picking up a few essentials- cigarettes, wine, whiskey, etc.  The lights went off, and all the toddlers in the carts with their legs dangling helplessly started wailing, the cashiers tapped their three inch-long fingernails against the useless registers, and I popped open one of the bottles in my cart.  After almost twenty minutes of being annoyed to death (which I found out later is not the worst way to go) I headed to the parking lot to find carts overturned and cartons of milk and orange juice splattered across the black asphalt. Starting to get that unsettling feeling where someone’s watching you, I power-walked away from the store with the idea that as soon as I made it behind my locked door I’d be safe.  I almost made it to my apartment a half mile away without seeing  a single person or what had become New Jersey’s biggest problem after corrupt politicians and a shortage of hair gel in Seaside Heights.

Just about two blocks from my humble abode, I saw a person, or what used to be a person, only three houses away stumbling down the street.  I wouldn’t have gotten that close if I had seen the blood.  All down the front of his blue and white striped t-shirt was about two pints of rust-colored blood with that unmistakable ruby red tint.  I froze at the same time his nub of a nose started sniffing the air.  His milky eyes settled on me standing a hundred feet from him with nothing in my hand but a half-empty bottle of pinot and a lit cigarette.  I didn’t live in the best part of town so I always had my trusty switchblade in my pocket.  I threw down the cigarette, kept the wine, and flicked open the blade.  If it was a human coming at me, I might’ve aimed for his gut, hoping to incapacitate but not really wound anyone.  Something in my own gut was telling me that particular tactic wouldn’t apply.  Instinct took over, and the adrenaline coursing through my body thrust the blade into the slobbering, blood-covered thing hurtling toward me.  Right into his ear.  He collapsed so fast, I had to shuffle back into my neighbors ‘ azaleas to keep from getting his blood on me.  I chalked the 20$ blade up to a loss that I’d replace later and high-tailed it the two blocks home without seeing even a stray cat.   They used to say that in New Jersey, only the strong survive.  After the infected started to attack, that motto was put to the test.