Our Undead (10 page)

Out of breath, she falls
back into the corner and sobs into her knees. And then -
*
CRACK* *crrreeeeeeak*
*SNAP*.
She raises her head and looks
around the room. She doesn't see anything at first, but then
another -
*crrreeeeeak* *POP*
- makes her practically jump out of her skin. She
squints her eyes to peer into the shadows of the room. It is much
darker now that she had broken the lamp, and she still can't see
anything, but the noises persist and then, all together they stop.
There is only silence.

Even so, she looks hard to
find something, anything in the room's obscure corners, and soon
she gets what she asks for. At the window, she sees a decrepit hand
slowly creeping in from the outside, and then the noises start up
again.
*CRACK*
This time she sees where it comes from. At the foot end of
the bed, a floorboard pops up and another ruined looking hand
emerges. Soon more pieces of the hardwood floor start popping out,
and more hands come reaching through them. The zombie at the window
slinks his head through the broken frame, and then more zombies
start appearing, coming in from both the open door
and
the window. She has
nowhere to go; no place she can escape to. The only thing she can
do is curl up in the corner, as zombies begin creeping in in
droves.

From the floor they crawl
up, from the window they tumble inside.
*BAM*
Hands punch through the walls
of the corner she sits in and claw at her cowering body. She
struggles and cries as the zombies close in on her, some crawling
and dragging themselves over her parents mutilated carcasses,
others dramatically limping in.

LongBlondeHairedGirl:
No!… Please,
no!… Stop this!… Stop!… Please! NOOOOOOOOO!!!

BOW TO THE ALTER

Everything is bright and
blurry when she wakes up the next morning. Slowly, the image of a
squirming figure comes into focus. Eventually, it becomes clear
that the killer from last night is still stuck in the door. The
rain has stopped now, and the morning sun blazes through the
cabin's front windows. Still exhausted, the girl lays there for
while, remembering the new and lonely reality she is now living in,
staring into the ever-writhing zombie's lifeless eyes. Her own eyes
have become quite lifeless themselves. The sleepless zombie is
still trying to get itself unstuck, and the girl sees that he has
made absolutely no progress. She scoffs at the stupid beast. As a
matter of fact, it looks worse off than it had been the night
before. More ensnared.

LongBlondeHairedGirl:
Psh… Just my luck.

But then, she hears
something off, an unfamiliar sound in the room that she hadn't
heard before. It sounds like a soft gurgling coming from behind
her. She eases herself up to see where the noise is coming from,
but the scene is all the same, if not worse than it had looked in
the dark. There's only one small difference. It's hard to tell, but
it looks like her mother is moving. She has to find out, so she
forces herself up on to her good left foot and hops over to
Mariam's corpse. She looks down on her mother's bloody body, then
looks away for a second in disgust, not pity or sorrow, just
disgust.

When she looks back, she
sighs a tired and frustrated sigh. During the night, her mother had
turned, and now, as Mariam looks up at her daughter, she looks up
with dead eyes and a lust for her offspring's flesh. Unfortunately
for Mariam, her mutilator hadn't left her body in a good enough
condition to get around with. The zombified mother can do nothing
but snarl at her daughter and flounder around on the floor. The
young girl can't help but get flashbacks from a recent
dream.

She looks around the room
and her eyes land on the kitchen drawers. This place has been
abandoned for a while, there might not be anything in them, but she
might as well check. She isn't about to just leave her mom there on
the floor like some pathetic immobile monster. No, instead, she
hobbles over and checks the first couple of drawers. Nothing. When
she checks the set closer to the sink she finds utensils. Some
spoons, forks and butter knifes, but nothing that would be able to
pierce the sturdy defenses of the human skull. And then she sees
the broken window.

She hops back over to her
mother's body and looks at all of the glass shards laying around on
the floor. She spots a larger piece with a long sharp edge and
instinctively picks it up, gripping it firmly with her right hand.
Looking at it with serious eyes, she knows what she has to do. This
scenario seems familiar. She descends to her knees, close to her
mother's babbling head, and lifts her stabbing hand into the air.
Mariam's mouth is filled with blood, her hair still damp from the
rainfall of the night before. She looks up at her daughter and
gnarls, glaring with eyes that have become dark and sunken in.
Mariam's crystal clear blue eyes are gone. Her mother is gone. This
is it.

With a force her young
teenaged body had never used in the past, she swings her arm, shiv
in hand, slamming the spike down into her mother's head. No. It
isn't her mother anymore. She takes the makeshift blade out of
the
monster's
head and brings it down again with the same intensity. With
this shot, the cursed body goes limp, and the girl releases the
piece of glass. It stands tall and proud in the static cranium,
mouth agape. The most erudite poker player could not read the young
blonde's stoic face to make out what is on her mind in this moment.
Blank would be the best reckoning.

She pushes herself back up
into a standing position with her good leg, never taking her eyes
off the body. It's unbelievable how much this disease has changed
her mother's body's appearance. Admittedly, they had all been
pretty filthy, her and her family, but this morning her mother's
skin complexion is all but washed out.

And then, she remembers the
cause of all of this and hears the growling coming at her from the
hallway door, a growling that becomes more ferocious when she turns
around to look at him. He is the cause. He deserved the same fate
as her mother, and she would be the one to gift it to him. She
grabs the shard out of the sulking head of the freshly killed
zombie under the window, and staggers as quickly as her unsteady
feet can handle toward her target.

It might've been okay. If
only this zombie hadn't found them, everything might have worked
out for her and her parents. Her father would've gotten better, and
then they would've turned the cabin into a place to live. It
might've been rough at the start, but they would've stayed there
until the infection was over and life would've eventually gone back
to normal. Everything would've been fine if this thing from hell
hadn't burst in and destroyed it all. It destroyed her whole life.
He would see what it's like. She will make him see.

But then she stops. Maybe
this whole thing isn't his fault. It isn't like this one particular
zombie was the sole cause of this entire epidemic. That could be a
possibility. Anything is possible now, but the chances are less
than slim to none. This zombie had been a man once, just like her
father had been. Maybe he even had a daughter, just another lost
relative, someone out there just like her. The thought softens her
face a little, and the focused hatred she feels slowly leaves her
body. She drops her hands to her side and let's go of the large
piece of glass. It falls to the floor and breaks into smaller
fragments. Her will to kill has completely faded. Perhaps she would
put the poor soul out of its misery a bit later.

LongBlondeHairedGirl:
Ouch!

Putting too much pressure
on her bad ankle causes her to yelp in pain. She looks down at it.
A fresh scab has already been created over the wound, but blood
stains most of her right foot. It isn't literally bent out of
shape, but any pressure on it at all and a searing pain shoots up
her leg. The sensation is something like someone stabbing her in
the back of the brain from the inside. She decides that the
smartest thing to do now is to dress it, and with a quick survey
around the room, she finds the supplies she needs.

She grabs a dirty old
washcloth on the counter and hops her bum up on to it next to the
mouth of the sink. She brings her bad foot up on to the counter and
unties her shoe. Cautiously, she slides it off of her foot, and
then peels the dirty bloody sock off as well. She opens the hot
water tap on the sink and lets it run. It runs until she sees steam
beginning to rise, and then she moves herself into a position on
the counter where she can put her cut and sprain under the
flow.

When she puts it under the
water, the look on her face is a dead give away that it hurts like
hell. She grits her teeth together and groans at the pain. After
running the water over it for a while, she turns off the hot water
and takes her foot out of the sink. She examines it and uses the
dirty washcloth to wipe off her cut and the area around it, and
then she turns on the cold water. She lets it run for a minute
while looking down at her foot. Our zombie snarls at her from the
door, but she offers him no more than a disinterested
glance.

When she feels the cold
water is running at it's coldest, she brings her foot back up and
places it under the tap. It's freezing, and she gives pretty much
the same look as she did when running it under the hot water. She
moans and squeezes her eyes shut to calm the sting, and after a
proper rinse, takes her foot out from under the water again. This
time, before turning off the tap, she rinses out the washcloth for
a moment, wrings it and wipes off her leg. She rinses and wrings it
out one more time, and then wraps it around the sliced part of her
ankle, tying a firm but comfortable knot around it. She looks at
her bloody sock and tosses it away, not wanting to put that
disgusting thing back on her foot. And then she remembers that her
mother should be wearing socks.

Decided, she jumps off of
the counter and hops over to her mom's body, all the while being
watched and taunted by the caught cretin in the door. She bends
down and takes off her mom's right shoe, rips the sock off in one
swoop like a Band-Aid, and puts it on her own foot, then hops back
over to the counter and jumps back up on to her place beside the
sink. She takes her shoe and gently slips it back on. She didn't do
the best job tidying her cut, but at least it doesn't look as bad,
and she is pretty sure that it isn't infected… with
any
thing. She's just
going to have to be easy on it for a while. She drops her dressed
foot down to meet the other and lets them both dangle in the air
above the kitchen floor.

She stays there for a
second, sitting and thinking on the kitchen counter. Our zombie has
yet to stop growling and reaching out for her. While staring at
him, she glides smoothly off of the counter's rough and dusty
surface, and without averting her gaze, makes her way back to the
spot on the ground where she had slept. There, she sits down and
studies him very intensely.

LongBlondeHairedGirl:
So, what the hell is your deal?

She gets the same response
that she has been getting from the zombie since the first time they
laid eyes on each other. Even while she slept through the night, he
hollered for her. Had she not been so tired, she might have not
been able to sleep due to the incessant noise. His free arm flails
and reaches, and the one caught on the hall side tries it's best to
reach over into the living room.

LongBlondeHairedGirl:
You know,.. I could kill you. I could use almost
anything around here, and I could take my time. It wouldn't even
have to be sharp. That would just be too easy.

Our zombie growls on,
failing to understand her words. She points to a toaster sitting on
the kitchen counter to make it easier for him.

LongBlondeHairedGirl:
That toaster… See it? It's not sharp… but I could
take that toaster and beat you with it till your head caves in… and
there wouldn't be one thing you could do about it… because you're
stuck… You're helpless.

She gets to her
feet.

LongBlondeHairedGirl:
You're helpless, just like me.

She begins limping her way
toward the prisoner.

LongBlondeHairedGirl:
Well, not exactly. You're the one who's stuck in
a door, after all.

She stops walking when she
reaches just outside of our zombie's reach, and dodges his attempts
to grab at her with his free hand.

LongBlondeHairedGirl:
I gotta tell you though...
*dodge*
… "Helpless" isn't even
the word to describe how I feel…
*dodge*
… "Hopeless",
maybe.
*dodge*

His meal is so close he can
taste it, and he becomes a little crazed by the young girl's
taunting, swinging his arm harder and letting out a strange barking
like noise. The girl decides to take a calm step
backward.

LongBlondeHairedGirl:
Naw, "helpless" isn't something I feel anymore. I
can't… The only thing I have now is myself, thanks to you… But I
can't put all of the blame on you. You didn't start this whole
nightmare.