The Most Uncommon Cold I - Life in the Time of Zombies (8 page)

    
I thought that she must be in some kind of shock.  Given the events of the day, that would certainly be an understandable reaction. I reached out to touch her shoulder and try to comfort her.  At the instant I made contact with her, I realized that I had made a mistake. Her lips curled into a sort of snarl revealing a mouth full of bloody teeth with something stringy stuck in between. I immediately backed away from her. 

     “She needed a ride to the drugstore!”  She was now shouting with
fury.  As she stood and spun around toward me, I caught a better look at what she was holding.  The sight made me gag.

     In her hands was the
head of a young woman with long blonde hair. The stringy blood-soaked hair covered part of her face, but it was clear that a large chunk had been bitten out of her cheek, and her nose was missing. The thought that I had seen this face before heightened my disgust.  

    “Bonnie, what happened?”  I asked even as my feet were moving me away from her.

     She continued to stare blankly for several seconds before repeating, “She needed a ride to the drugstore.”

     Bonnie took a step toward me and let the head fall to the floor of the garage.  There was a soft thump like an overripe pumpkin landing. At the sound, she turned her
focus to the floor. With surprising speed, she dropped to a squatting position and scooped up the head.  To my utter horror, she put her face down and took a bite out of the head. 

     My legs went weak, and I felt lik
e someone had forcefully hit me in the chest.  I stumbled backwards for several feet.  Suddenly, reflexes kicked in and I found myself running away from the scene. 

     The sight of the Jeep offered an opportunity for sanctuary. I grabbed the keys from my pocket and pressed the button to unlock the car. 
I managed to get the door open quickly and lunge into the driver’s seat.  The click sounded louder and more final that ever as I pushed the button to lock all of the doors.  As I sat there staring out through the windshield, my breathing began to slow as did my racing heart.

     I watched the
thing that in some ways resembled my wife.  It had the same height and hair and skin, but that was all.  As the thing raised its face to lo
ok in my direction,  I saw
its cold, dead eyes and knew with all certainty it was not Bonnie.  In those eyes, there were no memories of days we had spent, trips we had taken, love we had shared, and pain we had caused.  No, no matter how much this thing resembled my wife, it was not her.

     I was surprised by the anger I felt welling up inside.
This thing, which somehow had the audacity to impersonate Bonnie, became the focal point for all the disgust and horror and fury I had felt during the day.  I had never been overcome by such rage. 

     I started the car.  At the sound of the engine, the thing looked toward the Jeep.  As I revved the engine, the Bonnie-thing stood up and began slowly moving toward the car.
Its face was now entirely covered with blood and bits of something darker.  Even as it moved, it was clear the thing was not actually thinking about what it was doing.  More like sleep walking.  No, that is not right.  It was thinking, but more like an animal than a human.  It reacted to the sound of the engine and simply began moving toward. It was more or less the same thinking of a moth as it is drawn to a flame.

     The Bonnie-thing stepped unsteadily toward me.  I continued to rev the engine, and the
roar echoed through the garage. Then it began running toward me through the rows of cars. 

     I watched without emotion.  It was
just something happening outside of the car.  It felt outside of my world. 

     My hand floated to the center console of the Jeep and to the handle of the gearshift.  The Bonnie-thing slapped the hood of the car on the passenger side and began to move toward me.  When it reached the middle of the hood, I pushed the gas pedal all the way to the floor and slid the handle from P to D. 

     The Jeep lunged forward, and the thing doubled over the hood.  In the seconds it took to cover the few feet between rows of parked cars, I looked straight into the empty eyes of the thing and felt only disgust. 

     The next thing that I remember was finding myself surrounded by t
he airbags of the Jeep. For an instant, I returned to my earlier idea about all of this being a dream.  I tried to believe … I wanted to believe that all of the things I had seen were just part of a strange dream.  But I knew none of it was a dream.  People were going crazy, and something resembling my wife was squashed against the front of the car.   

     I struggled to push the door open and
almost fell out of the Jeep.  My knees went weak and were barely able to hold me as I stumbled toward the front of the car.  I slid my hand along the side of the car for support and for the sense of something tangible in a world that was fast becoming surreal.

     The Jeep had collided with a smaller dark green car and was leaking either gas or water or both.  The Bonnie-thing was squashed tightly between the two vehicles.  It was still draped over the hood, but now its head was twisted at a strange angle on the hood.  For some reason, I felt the need
to study the body thoroughly.  The anger had cooled within me.  Perhaps it was shock making me feel more analytical than anything else. I looked carefully at the thing that had so closely resembled my wife.  There was the light brown hair pulled back with a golden brown butterfly-shaped clip.

     The
hair clip took me to another place.  I remembered spending a weekend at the coast not long after I had started teaching high school.  Bonnie and I had only been married a couple of years, so it was before any of our problems began.  We had spent an afternoon walking around the gift shops of Santa Cruz.  There were lots of souvenirs and such.  I remember how excited Bonnie had become when she saw the butterfly hair clip.  I could not resist that smile and had gotten the clip for her even though she thought it was too expensive for our budget.

     I was suddenly back in the garage standing beside a lifeless body.  All at once, the overhead light sparkled off of something that caught my eye.  It was the gold ring with small diamonds that was on a
dead finger lying on the car’s hood a few feet from the head. The idea of leaving Bonnie’s wedding ring on the finger of this repulsive creature was unthinkable.  At that moment, the only thing I knew for sure was I had to have the wedding ring. 

     Without thinking any further, I grabbed the
hand from the hood.  It was shockingly cold and sort of wet feeling. Touching it made me queasy, but I forced myself to continue.  The ring felt stuck at first.  Then after forcing it around with my thumb and forefinger, it finally turned a little. I continued to spin the ring until it turned freely.  I slid the ring up the finger until it stopped at the knuckle. It refused to go any further.  With my right hand pressing the dead hand down on the hood, my left hand tugged on the ring. The force pushed the skin on the finger into a bunch around the knuckle but did not free the ring. 

     I stopped tugging and considered what to do.  In my head, I told myself, “It
’s just a ring.  Not worth spending all this time over.”   But even as the words were still echoing inside, I knew this was more than just a ring.  That little gold band with the tiny diamonds was all I had left of my past, my normal past.  I did not try to kid myself into thinking it was such a fantastic past because I knew it had not been. Better than some and worse than others. Still, it was my past, and from what I had seen so far that day, the future might not be all that impressive. 

      Of course, I was assuming there was even going to be a future.  In any case, the wedding ring was
the one tangible thing I had to show that the world had once been a more reliable place.

     This was the
discussion occurring somewhere inside of me, but right then I heard none of it.  I was acting without considering my actions. I held the hand down on the hood and tugged on the ring as hard as possible, but it would still not move over the knuckle.  With the same consideration one would give to picking up a twig and breaking it, I grabbed the finger and pulled it back as far as it would go.  Other than making a satisfying cracking sound and leaving the ring finger pointed up in an obscene manner, my effort yielded no useful results.  I stared without moving for a moment.  I started to reach toward the finger once more, but then stopped and trotted to the back of the Jeep. 

     I lifted the door and looked at the old newspapers, fast-food wrappers, and coffee-stained paper cups.  I cleared them, pulled up the plastic
hook to lift the carpet, and revealed the spare tire and tire tool.  The black metal tire tool had a lug nut socket on one end and a sharp edge for prying tires off the hub at the other end.  It was this sharp edge that brought a twisted smile to my face. 

      I
carried the tool back to the front of the car and to the smashed body of the disgusting imposter.   I set the tool down next to the car and looked again at the wedding ring. The finger was still bent back at a strange angle but stayed down after pushing it with all my might. I picked up the tire tool, put the sharp end at the base of the finger where it met the palm, and moved it until the tool was perpendicular to the hand.  I took a deep breath and threw all of my weight on to the tool forcing it downward.  There was a sort of fart sound and then a scratching noise as the tool contacted the metal of the hood.  I moved the tool to the side in order to look at the results of the effort.

     The
skin looked pinched nearly all the way through.  In the next moment, I raised the tire tool directly over the same area of the finger and brought it down quickly and forcefully. 

 
   At the same instant the tire tool made contact with the finger, the eyes on the Bonnie-thing sprang open.  I saw this and dropped the tool. It clattered loudly on the concrete floor of the garage, but I hardly noticed as I stumbled back from the Jeep.  My mouth was open in an expression of absolute horror.

     The dead eyes stared fixedly
ahead.  Just when I almost had myself convinced that the eyes opening was just some reflex, the eyes shifted toward me. The mouth opened and then closed.  A few seconds later, the mouth opened again.  The lips quivered, a sort of groan came out, and then a string of sounds that was gibberish.  The mouth moved continuously and then with clear effort words were formed. 

    
“She nee...needed a r-r-r-ide to the dru-u-u-u-g-store.”  The words came out slurred and flat.  After the words stopped, the mouth continued to open and close, open and close, open and close.

     I watched as long as I could
stand it.  Finally, I grabbed the metal tire tool from the floor and moved close to the Jeep with the black metal bar raised above my head.  With surprising ease and little sound, the sharp-edged end of the rod slipped through the skull and inside the head of the Bonnie-thing.  The eyes opened wider, and the mouth flew open but nothing else on the face moved. 

     My hands
instantly came off the tool as if it had become unbearably hot.  Stumbling back from the car, I regarded what I had done.  The notion that I had just plunged a metal rod into the head of someone was too much for me to comprehend.  The things on the hood instantly became Bonnie.  It was no “Bonnie-thing” or impersonator.  I had plunged a metal rod into my wife’s head.  It took some time, but eventually I managed to tear my eyes away from what I had done. 

     I saw the severed finger still lying on the hood of the Jeep. I picked it up slowly and slid the ring over the
ragged flesh and bone at the bottom.  The finger dropped to the floor. I put the ring in my pocket and without looking at it any further, I spun around and walked quickly out of the garage.

Chapter 6

    The smoky haze of something burning stung my eyes as I walked up the garage’s sloped entrance to the street.  I felt the tears flowing down my cheeks and told myself that it was also due to the burning.  I had no destination in mind as my feet began carrying me down the street.  In the past, the streets around the apartment seemed to be busy at every hour of the day or night.  Now as I stood there in the early evening, the silence was deafening. That may sound a bit melodramatic, but that is honestly how it felt.  It was as if the silence, the absence of the normal sounds of the city, was pushing in from all around me.  Suffocating me.  Drowning me.

     All at once, I heard somewhere in the distance the faint sound of a scream.  Then as if on cue, a car alarm began blaring.  After a few seconds, a police siren began whining a few blocks away and then faded as it travelled away. 

      With the sounds to guide me, I began shuffling ahead toward the promise of civilization.  It didn’t occur to me until later that I probably did not appear much different than the mindless things wandering around.  There were a few cars moving along the streets, which made me f
eel a bit better
.  As I got closer to the downtown area with its restaurants, theaters, and stores, the activity looked almost normal.  It was certainly slower than a typical day, but even the appearance of near normality made me happy.

     I am not sure what exactl
y was going on with me.  It made no sense to be just walking around like I was.  It damn sure made no sense… Nothing made much sense after all the crazy things I had seen, but I should have been doing something besides walking around. Maybe I was in shock.  No, I was most certainly in shock.  The only thing that mattered was to keep moving, and that is what I did.