DEAD OF NIGHT

Terrorist attack unleashes a wave of zombies upon a neighborhood.

 

DEAD OF NIGHT

By Joseph Crow Riley

I

It’s a near perfect day"one of those late-summer, early-autumn afternoons where the weather speaks promises of the coming coolness of the newly arrived season. The temperature is in the mid-to-low seventies. There’s no humidity to speak of. A gentle breeze occasionally makes it presence known. It’s the kind of weather that makes me want to lay around all day in a park or go see a ball game. If times were different, that’s exactly what I would do. But times aren’t different. So instead I sit balanced atop the pointy tip of my roof, surveying the neighborhood in plain view before me.

While basking in the light of day, seduced by the whispers of the breeze, I am tempted to forget the here and now, finding myself adrift in the moments of the not too distant past, a past that now seems like another life. A life, that until recently, I always thought I would freely trade away without the slightest provocation. But now I would give anything to get even the smallest piece of that life back. The cruelest curse of all is to be saddled with a longing for what was once despised and so freely bartered away.

Suddenly I’m snapped back to the moment, to where I am supposed to be regardless of wishes or bargains made with God or the fates or whatever. I hear the now familiar sound of a low, guttural groan, followed almost immediately by the equally familiar sound of a gunshot. I cradle the rifle in my lap, renewing my scan of the visible neighborhood, sharpening my scrutiny. It’s a near perfect day"except for all the damned zombies.

II

We were so unprepared for the attack. Years of planning and predicting and postulating were undone in a matter of moments. No one ever saw it coming. For years since 9/11 politicians and media gurus continually debated and discussed the eventuality of the next terrorist attack on American soil. The near unanimous ruling on the subject was that it was not a matter of "if" but "when."

Since nobody knew the when, consultants and commentators attempted to console themselves by speculating on the how, as if knowing how they would attack us would somehow make it more bearable, less traumatic, somehow less lethal. We all allowed ourselves to become deluded by our fruitless faith in foresight, inanely hoping that it would innoculate us from any real danger.

Most of the speculating centered on the media’s and the politicians’ favorite incantation "weapons of mass destruction." The great fear was that terrorists would get their hands on nuclear material or chemical weapons, or at the very least enhanced viral agents like anthrax or small pox. The anthrax fear had been fueled since the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11 when anthrax had been sent via the U.S. Postal Service to various victims, most of whom survived relatively unscathed due to the availability of the antibiotics necessary for counteracting the illness. There were plenty of antibiotics to go around on that particular occasion, but nobody knew if there would be enough antibiotics to go around should there be a large-scale anthrax attack.

The dread of anthrax was significant, but it was the threat of Small Pox that truly worried everyone. Small Pox had been successfully eradicated years ago, so there was no incentive in continuing the production of a vaccine against it, especially since people often died from the vaccination process. Granted, there was a very low incidence of people who died from the vaccine, but nobody could see the sense of potentially risking his life in order to protect himself from a disease that no longer existed. What people didn’t realize, however, either through ignorance or indifference, was that the disease did exist. It existed in laboratories throughout the world. Governments around the world continued to keep the virus and improve upon its lethal qualities so that it could be used in germ warfare, should a conflict ever have to come to that. Plus, you need the virus to make the vaccine. So as long as a potential enemy such as the Soviet Union had the virus, we needed to keep it as well. Since no one was vaccinated against it, and since there was a relatively small amount of any vaccine in existence, the threat of terrorist getting a hold of the Small Pox virus and releasing it in a densely populated area was substantial. And since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early-nineties, a lot of weapons and viruses had gone missing"so the threat was very real.

That’s just Small Pox. That’s the virus that everyone was talking about. That’s the virus that had the potentiality of being fought. There was vaccine, albeit not enough, but once an outbreak was detected, vaccine production would become the highest priority. Nobody ever spoke of the viruses that could not be stopped by vaccine. Diseases like Ebola, which essentially melts an infected person’s insides until his blood gushes from every orifice. No one ever talked about the likelihood of terrorists contaminating the U.S. beef supply with Mad Cow. No one ever mentioned that the easiest terrorist attack would come from contaminating relief food and supplies after a natural disaster such as a major hurricane or earthquake.

In spite of all of the expectations, terrorists never intended to get their hands on nuclear material or chemical weapons. They were after a virus, but not Small Pox, not Mad Cow, not even Ebola. The virus they wanted was one that most Americans had never heard of. For that matter, most governmental officials had never heard of it, so it isn’t surprising that they never planned against it. If you had told people that such a virus existed, they would laugh, or say that it only existed in the pages of poorly written fiction. I was told of the existence of the virus years ago during my brief stint as a Research Analyst for the CIA. I didn’t take it seriously, thinking that the person that told me was drunk and making up nonsense just to feel important. But the virus existed and we were all about to get a taste of what it could do.

By the autumn of 2011, the terrorist had apparently acquired the weapon that they wanted and they were ready to use it. After months of silence, a simple tape found its way to the American government. The news outlets began reporting on it a few days later. Periodic tapes had become commonplace during the previous ten years to the point that they were ignored by most people. This recording was no different, except that this time the terrorists meant what they were saying. "America will be devoured from within," the tape said, "and their own dead will consume the living."

III

I awoke in the late-night darkness with that disconcerting feeling I sometimes get"a feeling as if there is some uninvited visitor in my bedroom or in my house. It is precisely for such moments that I have dogs. As long as the dogs are sleeping quietly, I know that no intruding visitor, no haunting ghost, no alien abduction is most likely occurring. They are the best warning system ever devised. So in those moments when I feel that there is an intruder in my house, I look to my two dogs, both of which share my bed (it’s a small price to pay for a sense of security and a good night’s sleep) and I determine that if they don’t have a problem then I don’t have a problem, and I roll over and go back to sleep.

So I awoke sometime in the middle of the night with an uncomfortable feeling that something was wrong. I instinctively angled my head in such a way as to get a glimpse of the entire bed without actually lifting my body from the mattress. Seeing no dogs, I began to grope the wide expanse of my mattress with both my hands and feet, expecting to stumble upon the sleeping body of one of my dogs. The dogs were nowhere to be found.

I flipped off the sheets and sat on the side of the bed for a moment, scanning through the blackness of the night, hoping to find them sleeping peacefully on the floor alongside of the bed. Nothing. There was something distinctly wrong. I could feel it, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Something, besides the absence of my dogs, was different and unsettling.

I exited my bedroom and walked down the short hallway into the living room, stubbing my toe along the way. I whispered profanities as I hopped and then hobbled into the room. I then entered the dining area that leads into the kitchen. I walked through the kitchen and went into a tiny utility room. I peered through the darkness, seeing the glowing eyes of my dogs in the corner of the room, reflecting from some source of light coming in through the window. The larger of the two dogs lifted his head briefly, then seeing it was me, lowered his head once more, accompanied by a low whimper.

Something was definitely not right, but I just couldn’t figure out what it was. I stood in the doorway of the utility room on the opposite side of the house from my bedroom, looking at the dogs cowering in the farthest corner, and I suddenly realized what had been troubling me. "What the hell is that noise?" I asked quietly to nothing but the darkness.

It was late October and the nights get cool, but not yet cold. At least, not so cold as to close the windows before going to sleep. In fact, I like my bedroom cool, though I like the rest of the house warm when I awake in the morning. There’s nothing more comfortable than sleeping in a cool bedroom under a pile of warm blankets, accompanied by a pair of dogs lending their body heat to the experience. It’s like camping without the discomfort. Leaking in through the open bedroom window was a sound. A sound that could best be described as groaning. It was loud and it clearly came from more than one source.

I made my way back to the bedroom and peaked through the blinds in the direction from which the noise was coming. I could see what appeared to be a couple of people staggering around a neighbor’s house two doors down. Most of my view was blocked by the house in between, but I could see the street just in front of the house. The figures were moving from the street toward the back of the house. Then suddenly, a figure stumbled into my peripheral vision. It was floundering down the street, passing in front of my house, making its way toward the congregation of groaning people. I was just about to call out to the man to ask him what was going on, but before I could lend voice to my question, he unleashed a loud, rasping, guttural moan. The surprise of it muted whatever questions I had. The man quickened his pace, not running, but settling into a bumbling, excited kind of a walk.

It was a windy night and I noticed that along with the sound of the eery moaning of the careening, unidentified people, I could also hear the sound of wind chimes, arrhythmically clinking in the breeze. I was familiar with the sound of those chimes and I knew that they were coming from the house that had become the center of attention for these unnerving individuals. I didn’t know much about my neighbor who owned the house, but we have spoken on a few occasions and I learned that he was a Taoist who practiced Feng Shui. One aspect of his beliefs was the strategic positioning of wind chimes around his house to encourage good energy and repel negative forces. All of the chimes were fairly small and unobtrusive except for one on the rear corner of his house. This set of chimes were about three feet in length and made a series of loud, gong-like sounds that inspired complaints from my other neighbors when he first installed them, but their complaints failed to gain my support because the sound reminded me of church bells, and so I found it somewhat comforting. Although, that night, their sound offered no sense of comfort.

After a few moments of being totally confused, I decided that the best course of action was to call the police and complain about the gathering two doors down. I figured that if it were some kind of bizarre Taoist party or ritual it needed to be broken up, and if something was legitimately wrong and my neighbor needed help, then the police were best equipped to deal with it. Before I made the first step toward the phone, I heard the sound of police sirens in the distance. The sirens were gradually getting louder and I reasoned that the cops were already on their way.

A few minutes passed and the sound of the police siren was deafening. A police car darted by my house and came to a quick stop just past my next door neighbor’s house. The figures around my Taoist neighbor’s other house turned and quickly surrounded the car. The officer riding shotgun had just slightly opened his door when the crowd fell on the car. The moaning figures seemed to have been whipped into a frenzy by the sight of the police car and they started pounding on it and clawing at it. Their fingernails scraped against the metal of the car in a way that was much worse than squeaking chalk on a blackboard. The ones that were closest to the officer who had opened the door grabbed at him like they were trying to pull him out of the car. He managed to force the passenger side door shut again. The crowd of about fifteen individuals, men and women, lunged themselves relentlessly at the car. A second police car announced its presence from the other direction of the street. The car screeched to a halt. I couldn’t see the second car because of my vantage point, but I could see the effects of the flashing lights and I heard one of the new arrivals order the crowd to desist. The crowd relented its attack on the first car and staggered toward the new arrivals.

"Hold it right there! Halt! Halt or I will shoot you!" the officers threatened with a voice that grew increasingly more panicked each time they spoke. The crowd appeared to be unaffected by their words. They simply moaned and bumbled toward them. The sound of shots rang out through the night air, followed by screams. The officers from the first police car were now being ignored by the crowd, climbed out of their car and I could see them firing into the crowd. Some of the people in the crowd turned back to them. The officers continued to fire at the individuals. At first I thought that they were missing their targets due to the stress of the situation. Then I clearly saw the people of the crowd recoil backward from force of the shots. But they kept walking toward the car. It was like they were bulletproof. They arrived to where the officers were and started to bite and claw at them. One was just ripped apart. The other one, after receiving a series of bites and scratches, shook his way out of the individuals that surrounded him. He climbed back into the car. I think that he was reaching for the shotgun fastened under the dashboard, but before he could secure it, he was dragged out of the car and torn to pieces.

The surreal image was illumined by the flashing lights of the police cars. The groaning stopped while the cops were eaten. The only sound was the wind chimes. Then the group of people stood up, almost as if on cue, resuming their moaning. They lurched back toward the house, apparently attracted by the sound of the chimes.

IV

In spite of my own disbelief, I began to slowly figure out what I was witnessing. The staggering crowd of people were not people at all, but were in fact the animated corpses of the recent dead. They were the active remains of individuals who had been infected with a particular virus.

I was as yet unaware that the contamination was due to terrorists activity"the terrorists had purchased the virus from Russian deserters who had not been paid in two years for their military service. Those soldiers took weapons and material with them as they left, determined to sell them to the highest bidder. This is the form of capitalism that we did not celebrate at the end of the cold war. The terrorists deliberately infected themselves and migrated to various locations around the United States. Urban settings were their prime targets, but anywhere would do. Basically the outbreaks of the virus corresponded to the locations where the terrorists died. A terrorist must have been on his way to Philadelphia, dying in south Jersey en route. The advantage of infecting a rural area like southern New Jersey is that the virus has a chance to spread all over before anybody picks up on what is happening.

I first heard of the virus by chance late one Sunday afternoon back in 1995. It was the end of October, nearing Halloween, so all of the television stations were showing old horror films around the clock. The exception, of course, was the holy ritual of viewing Sunday afternoon football. I and some others were at a co-workers house just outside of Arlington, Virginia. The Philadelphia Eagles were playing the Washington Redskins. I, of course, was an Eagles fan since I was born in raised in south Jersey. My host grew up around D.C. and was a rabid Redskins fan. For two weeks before the game we harassed each other about the woeful abilities of the other’s favorite team. We assembled with some mutual friends and co-workers that Sunday, armed with pizza, chips, beer, and whatever form of pseudo-food we could cram in our bodies, prepared to let the two teams settle on the field of battle the debate that had been raging between us. The debate was centered around the question of who was the better team. As it turned out, it proved to be the Redskins.

After the game, someone began flipping around the channels with the remote, stopping on The Night of the Living Dead, which was being broadcast in honor of the imminent arrival of Halloween. We were all government employees, working in various departments and agencies around the capital. I was a Research Analyst for the CIA, as was the host of the gathering. I had worked for the CIA just shy of two years at that time. This wasn’t the first such gathering during my two years of government service. It was common practice to drink too much and try to get information out of each other. Alcohol makes one feel important and one of the best ways to demonstrate one’s importance is to pass along information that should never be passed along. We never betrayed any state secrets or discussed classified information that we were working on, but after a few beers we would generally hint at things. Which is why I remember being so surprised by this one guy there who worked for the Center for Disease Control.

We were sitting there, many of us crammed with beer and pizza and too bloated to move, finding ourselves watching The Night of the Living Dead and I confessed something like, "This movie scares the hell outta me!"

"Yeah," he said, "It always gave me the willies too. It’s terrifying to think that it’s based on a true story." He said it in such a casual manner that I assumed he was joking, so I decided to joke along.

"Yeah," I responded, "I think I shredded the file on it last week."

"Oh I highly doubt that," he said confusedly, "there’s only one file on the matter in existence as far as I know and we have it back at the Hot Zone."

"You’d be surprised by what I can get my hands on," I continued to kid. "After all, I do work for the CIA"‘We have ways of making people talk,’" the last part of that being spoken in a cheesy German accent.

"Oh, you think I’m kidding around," he said with a flash of comprehension. "I’m not, you know. This movie is based on an actual occurrence. What you’re seeing here, in essence, actually happened."

"I know it did," I laughed, but he wasn’t laughing with me. It slowly began to dawn on me that he wasn’t joking. "Wait a minute," I blurted out in a scornful tone after a few moments of thought,

"you’re telling me that The Night of the Living Dead is a true story?"

"Yeah, well, it’s based on actual events," he said just a casually as before. "It happened back in 1947, just outside of Harrisburg, Pa., a small rural town was attacked by about twenty-or-so reanimated corpses of the recently dead."

"Zombies?" I said incredulously.

"Zombies, yeah," he confirmed plainly.

"Get outta here!" I laughed after another moment of thought. "What is this, some kind of Halloween crap? It’s a good one. You actually had me scared for a second."

"I’m completely serious," he said. "Outbreaks of a viral agent which reanimates the dead bodies of those who become infected are extremely rare, but they are more common than you would probably be comfortable with if you were aware of it. It’s rare here in the States, but outbreaks are much more frequent in third-world countries. Although, there was an outbreak in and around Los Angeles during the riots."

"Hey, Joe," I called out to the host, "your buddy here is trying to tell me that this movie is based on an actual event that happened in Pennsylvania in the 40s."

"You don’t have to believe me. In fact, it’s probably best that you don’t. But there is a virus that reanimates the dead and causes them to attack people."

"A virus, huh?" Joe responded. "What are y’all cooking up over there at the CDC?"

"It’s nothing that we’ve ‘cooked up.’ The virus occurs naturally. It’s been around forever. It’s just very, very rare. Only a few people have known about it throughout history, but there are verifiable accounts that go back as far ... well, as far as civilization itself. We have reports that the Japanese did experiments with it during the Second World War. Japanese scientists infected Chinese prisoners of war. They attempted to drop them on various American positions in the Pacific theater, but the attempts created more Japanese casualties than American ones. The Soviets captured the scientists when they entered the Pacific campaign near the close of the war. The scientist and their work were moved to Manchuria. The Soviet plan was to create an army of the undead to use against the West. Again, the number of Soviet casualties outweighed any perceived benefits. They even had to nuke on of their own cities in Siberia. They said it was a routine atomic test, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, records began leaking out of Russia and the CDC got hold of some of them. A virus that reanimates the dead is clearly something that we are interested in stopping. But we need information to know how protect ourselves against it.

By this time everyone had become a part of the conversation. "Are you trying to tell me that dead people get up and eat people?" someone asked.

"Well, not any dead person, only someone infected with that particular virus. All the dead getting up and eating the living is Hollywood. But the bodies of people who die as a result of this virus do get up and attack the living. That is a fact."

"Come on," someone countered, "if there were such a thing as zombies and some zombie virus, people would know about it."

"People do know about it. You ask most people in any third-world nation and they’ll tell you that reanimated corpses are a reality."

"Yeah, but they’d also tell me stories about other things that I don’t believe in like demons and evil spirits and witches."

"Well consider this. Every culture has stories about dead people getting up and feeding on the living. Where do you think vampire legends come from? They’re based on zombie attacks. For instance, how do you kill a vampire?"

"You stake it through the heart," we all replied, almost in unison.

"Wrong!" he retorted. "The stake was supposed to pin the vampire to the ground. The only way to kill a vampire is to cut off its head and burn it and the body. Well, that’s basically how you kill a zombie."

"So how does it work?" someone asked. "How does someone get infected with the virus?"

"It can only be acquired through contact of fluids"blood and saliva. Once infected a person dies within a span of 20-36 hours. Sometime about three hours after dying, the body reanimates and attacks any living thing it encounters."

"But why?" I asked. "Why do they attack the living? What, are they jealous?"

"No it’s certainly not jealousy," he snickered. They have no emotions, no instincts, no cognitive abilities at all. They are simply reanimated corpses that exist for the sole purpose of devouring living tissue."

"But why?"

"Think about it. Viruses have to reproduce and spread to survive. A virus this lethal isn’t going to spread at all if it just kills its host. People don’t generally share bodily fluids with dead people. Necrophiliacs aside, sharing body fluids with a corpse just isn’t going to happen. So the virus has adapted. It reanimates its host after killing it so that it can spread. The zombies attack and eat the living, not to eat them, but because a lot of people who are attacked will escape after being bitten, thus spreading the infection. The reanimated corpse is just a viral delivery system."

"Okay," someone said, "if that’s true, and if the zombie virus is that common in third-world countries, shouldn’t there be herds of zombie animals out there attacking people?"

"The virus only reanimates humans and some of the higher primates like the chimpanzee and gorilla. No other animal has a brain sophisticated enough. The virus melts most of the brain while keeping certain nerve centers functional. Every other animal just dies when infected, though it may spread the infection while its still alive. For instance, a dog my lick a person on the mouth before it dies, infecting the person in the process."

"What about mosquitoes? Would they spread the virus around?"

"There’s no evidence that the virus is spread through mosquito bites. Mosquitoes use body heat to detect its prey. Zombies have no body heat so mosquitoes don’t bite them."

"How the hell do you even know about any of this crap?" I asked.

"Ah, well, I also have ways of making people talk," he said with an even cheesier German accent than the one I had attempted earlier.

"Well, I’m not buying any of this crap for one second," somebody finally concluded.

"That’s fine. You don’t have to believe any of it. Just remember three things: if you take out the brain you take out the zombie; burn the zombie and anyone who has died to prevent further infection; and don’t let them bite you"if you’re bitten, you’re dead. Oh yeah, you don’t have to worry about them in weather under thirty-two degrees on the Fahrenheit scale."

"Why is that?" I asked because I thought it was a rather odd thing to say.

"Because they freeze," he stated. I remember feeling stupid for not figuring that out for myself.

"Change the damned channel," someone finally said. The person with the remote flipped through the channels again, stopping on the Lon Chaney Jr. classic The Wolfman.

"Is there a virus that turns people into wolves too?" I asked sarcastically.

"Do you really want the answer to that?" he replied with a wry smile.

"You know, I really don’t."

V

I was attempting to stretch my eyes around the corner of the neighbor’s house so that I could see what was happening with the other cop car on the other end of the street. I heard a gunshot behind me. I ran to the other window to see my neighbor, who lives on the other side of the street just across from me standing on his front steps in his underwear with a rifle in his hands. I think he must of fired warning shot in the air in an attempt at getting the mob’s undivided attention. The stupid b*****d! He had no idea with what he was dealing. He assumed that it was some unruly gang of normal human beings rioting on our street for some unexplained reason. Why anybody would choose to riot on our street in the middle of the night did not appear to concern him. In the short time that we shared a street, and in the infrequent conversations that we’ve had, he never struck me as much of a thinker. I hate to perpetuate a stereotype, but he was one of those functionally-borderline Vietnam Vets that seems continuously and perilously balanced on the thin line between full-blown insanity and mild neurosis, always ready to fall on one side or the other. Ironically, he was not too dissimilar from zombies themselves"a hulking mass incapable of thought, but merely responding to stimuli rather than ever engaging reality in any serious, rational manner.

"Idiot!" I quietly hissed toward his direction through the thick glass of my window. "Get back in your house, turn off your lights, and keep quiet!" My deep-seated philanthropic tendencies told me to open up the window and yell at him to get back inside or at least fire at their heads. I came dangerously close to doing just that, but ultimately stopped myself. I knew that warning my neighbor would alert the zombies of my existence and expose my position. Then my survival would suddenly become much more precarious. So after a rigorous debate with my conscience, I concluded that my neighbor was on his own.

In leu of helping my neighbor, I decided in favor of my original plan: survival. The details of the plan were simple: I would do just what I wanted to tell my neighbor to do, sit in the dark and keep quiet. Zombies do not have any rational or cognitive abilities, so there was no reason for them to come looking for me unless I drew attention to myself. My dogs knew it. That’s why they had been hiding in the utility room all this time, making no sound, moving no muscle, drawing no attention. And since they had proven to be more intelligent than most of my neighbors on more than one occasion, I decided that their plan was a sound one. I just had to fight the tendency to want to know what was going on. I had to decide that gunshots, screams, car alarms, any sound that found its way into my house was none of my business. My business was now survival. As long as I sat quietly in the dark, the zombies would have no way of knowing I was here. And frankly, with neighbors like the one across the street drawing so much attention to themselves, I shouldn’t even register on the zombies’ radar.

He fired once more into the air. "The next shot will be at somebody’s head," he warned the crowd. The crowd seemed unconcerned about his threat. They slowly lumbered toward where he was standing. He finally fired another shot, but he did not honor his threat. The shot hit a zombie square in the chest, driving it backward a few feet, but it retained its balance and continued to stagger toward my neighbor. He fired off about four more shots before the zombies reached him. He hit a couple in the head, which erupted in an explosion of brain and bone. They dropped to the ground. The others lurched at him as he attempted to retreat into his house. He waited too long and was unable to close the door. The zombies pushed their way into his house. I saw nothing from this point on, but I heard a few more shots and his wife screaming. A moment or two later, I saw his terriers run out of the front door and flee down the street into the night.

By this time, other neighbors decided shooting at the mob of zombies was the ideal solution. I heard gun shots ranging from one end of the street to the other. The gunshots from various locations began to thin the zombie horde, not because the zombies were being stopped, but because the zombies started moving off in various directions.

Suddenly the sound of squealing tires and grinding gears interrupted the sound of gunshots, followed immediately by the sound of a car attempting to restart after stalling. Somebody apparently thought that the thinned out herd of zombies presented an opportunity for escape. The driver was between the two police cars. The driver, in a hurry, backed up in such a way that the car pointed down toward my end of the street, then darted forward, having to swerve onto a front yard to get around the police car, and in so doing, lost control of the car just enough that the front end caught the front steps of the house jutting into the front yard through which he had trekked in his escape. The brick steps provided just enough resistance to trigger his air bag causing him to lose complete control of the car. He plowed into a small group of zombies before crashing into the large oak tree on the corner.

"Almost made it," I thought as the zombies encircled his car. He tried to push his way out of the car. The zombies grabbed him and pulled him from the car and tore into him with remarkable efficiency. While the zombies were occupied with the driver, I noticed the passenger door slowly open and a young woman staggered out from the car. She didn’t appear to know where she was or where she was going. Unfortunately she headed the wrong way. Instead of heading to the corner and getting off our street, she moved back down the street in the direction of my house. Suddenly she seemed to snap back to her situation. She looked at the zombies behind her and started running down the street, quickly encountering a pack of zombies in front of my house to my right. She turned around to head in the opposite direction, but by this time the zombies were finished with her boyfriend and were moving toward her. Zombies began to exit the house across the street as well. At this point, the woman seemed to have a complete mental breakdown in front of my house as three groups of zombies were bearing down on her.

VI

I wanted to help her, but there was no way to help her without putting myself in danger. I reasoned that if I helped her, I would only be postponing the inevitable" she would ultimately be no safer and my life would be endangered as well. So I reasoned that it was expedient to let her die and ride this whole thing out until somebody finally realizes what’s going on and sends someone to help who actually knows how to deal with the situation. So my choice was simple: I could try to help her or I could live.

The zombies were slowly closing in on her. She reduced herself to a sort of crouching fetal position and screamed. God, she wouldn’t stop screaming. "Stick with the plan," I told myself. "Do what’s good for the success of the mission," I said, recalling my officer training. But she kept screaming and screaming and . . . "Damn it!" I shouted. I negotiated the darkness to the front door, went out onto the porch and threw open the storm door. "Hey! You! Get in here! Come on! Hurry up!" I shouted. She didn’t respond and thought that I attracted the zombies attention for nothing. I shouted to her again. Finally she looked up. She stood and ran to me and we both retreated into my house after first locking the storm door. The zombies followed.

The tactical situation was like this: the front porch was completely enclosed with the same material with which the rest of the house was constructed. The porch was solid. On first glance, the potential weak spots were the series of windows that lined the porch. Nevertheless, they were set fairly high off the ground. In order to gain entrance through the porch windows, the zombies would have to break the windows and then pull themselves up about four-and-a-half feet or so to climb in"-not a terribly difficult feat for a normal human being who was in fairly good shape, but I was reasonably certain that this would be impossible for zombies. Climbing is a rational skill and zombies are not rational. If enough of them were present, they could pile up on top of each other until the ones on the top of the pile were level with the windows, then they could break in that way. That would not happen any time soon, so for the moment, I didn’t have to worry about that point of entry. The only immediate weak spot was the storm door. Again, not something that would be terribly difficult for the average human being, and since the storm door wasn’t designed to fend off a horde of flesh-eating zombies, it was no more sturdy than any other run of the mill storm door. I was banking on the idea that the zombies would not be able to figure out that the door pulled outward. Unless they got lucky and pulled the door open, they would have to push their way through the door, which would buy us a couple of minutes to set up some makeshift barricade behind the main door. 

Once inside, I decided to try and build a barricade with furniture. The first piece of furniture to be moved was the entertainment center that sat along the wall about two meters away from the door. The center alone weighed at least a hundred pounds and it was loaded with a television, a VCR, a DVD player, a stereo, a DVR, and a surround sound unit. "Help me get this in front of the door!" I shouted to the woman. She stood motionlessly, clearly dazed, breathing like a dog trapped in a hot car. She looked around wildly as I yelled to her, but it was clear that she wasn’t seeing anything. "Come on! We’ve got to barricade the door before they break their way onto the porch!" She remained unresponsive. I grabbed her by her left arm and forcibly moved her to the far end of the entertainment center.

"Push, damn it!"

"What’s happening?" she shrieked. I knew this type of panic. I’d seen a couple of times before as an Air Force officer. This was pure, unadulterated, government inspected, grade-A terror"a fear so pristine that it was devoid of both reason and awareness. She crouched down, clasping her knees with her arms as she continued shrieking, occasionally saying something coherent like "What are those things?" or

"What’s happening?" Mostly, however, her words were incomprehensible.

"Look at me!" I said sternly after I picked her up by her shoulders. She looked around in a daze. Her eyes rolled around in her head like she was the cookie monster. I shook her violently by the shoulders, "Look at me!" Her eyes finally made their way to mine. "I need you to hold it together. You’re no good to me in a panic and you’re going to get us both killed. We’re going to get out of this, but I need you to get a grip. We’ll have plenty of time to panic after we’re safe. But right now we don’t have the luxury of losing it." She simply stared at me. "I need you to help me barricade the door," I said each word as if it were it’s own sentence. She snapped into place on the other side of the entertainment center and we slid it in front of the door. Then we moved the sofa, the love seat, the dining room table, anything that was heavy or awkward to move.

 
The door was strong, the lock was good, and the barricade was secure. I knew that nothing was going to come through it any time soon. I was, however, less certain about the window positioned just next to the door. I knew if they got in, that’s the route they would have to take. I wedged a couple of small bookshelves in the pile of furniture in front of the window. I loaded them with books, trinkets, anything that offered any sort of weight. They would be difficult to move, but not impossible. This was a concern, but it was also good news. If they got through the door, I’d have to deal with fifteen, twenty, or more zombies at once. If they forced their way in through the window, they would have to crawl through it one at a time. If I had to take on a zombie, I’d much rather do it one on one, rather than one against fifteen or more.
 
"Come on," I said to her, leading her from the front room. I went into the hallway, pulled apart the hanging ceiling that hid the pull down stairs that led up to the attic. "Get up there," I commanded. "Pull the string up and don’t make a sound. They won’t know you’re up there if you don’t make any noise. Stay at the top of the stairs. Don’t walk around. Just stay put and you’ll be fine."

"Where are you going ?" she demanded. The panic was ebbing back into her voice.
 
"I’m going to make sure my dogs are safe. But I’m afraid those things will get in before I’m done. I’m going to put them in the shed in the back yard. It will only take a couple of minutes. If they get into the house, I’ll have to make a break for it outside. If not, I’ll join you in the attic when I’m done. If I don’t make it up to the attic. Just stay there and be quiet. You got that. Don’t make a sound. Don’t move. Don’t open up the attic unless I tell you to, okay? If I have to run, I’ll come back with help. So stay put!"
 
"Why don’t we just sneak out the back door and run away?" It was a valid question, one I had considered myself a few seconds earlier. The answer that reason produced as a rebuttal to my fear also I had come up with in response seemed to be equally valid.
 
"Where would we run to?"

"I dunno," she admitted, "the police station?"
 
"That’s at least two miles away," I rebutted. "We don’t know how many of those things are out there. This is just our street. For all we know, what’s happening outside could be happening everywhere. I’m not going to wander around aimlessly and defensively, hoping to stumble upon a safe place. We need to get up high. I’m pretty sure those things can’t climb. The attic’s the safest place. If we stay quiet, they won’t know we’re up there. They’ll ransack the place and move on when they don’t find anything."
 
"Are you certain of that?"
 
"Yes!" I lied.
 
"How can you be so sure?"
 
"I’ll explain everything to you when we’re safe. For now get up in the attic!"
 
"But..." she squeaked, "I don’t want to be up there alone."
 
"I know, I don’t want to be alone either. Just trust me, there’s nothing I want to do right now more than run up into that attic and wait this out, but I have to make sure my dog’s are safe."
 
"Why? Let’s be safe. Let the dogs take care of themselves."
 
"That’s not who I am. It’s an honor thing. When I agreed to the commitment of taking care of them, I agreed to make sure that I would do whatever I could to make sure they’re safe and sound. It’s an honor thing. I have a duty to them that supercedes fear." She looked at me as if I were the biggest idoit in the whole world. "Look," I said, "you’re not going to be alone for long. Just give me a minute and I’ll be in the attic with you. We’ll ride this out together, okay?"
 
"Okay," she relented, yet clearly unconvinced. She ascended the steps to the attic. She turned and sat at the top of the steps, looking at me anxiously. I lifted the steps, closing the entrance. It felt like lowering a coffin into the ground.
 
"Pull the string up," I ordered. The string receded and disappeared. "I’ll be right back." I paused to scan the barricade to see how it was holding. One of the zombies had smashed through the window with its arm. The arm flailed wildly, as the zombie clawed at the objects that formed the barricade. I saw that I was rapidly running out of time.

 

VII

I quickly and quietly moved to the utility room and whispered for my dogs to come to me. They weren’t budging. I had to pick up one, quietly carry it out to the shed, and then repeat the process. The terrier wasn’t much trouble. She only weighs about twenty pounds. She shook violently as I carried her. The shepherd mix was a problem. He weighed about eighty pounds, and when he got into his head the notion that he was staying put, it was difficult to change his mind. I forcibly picked him up. It took a couple of attempts to get the right angle and the right balance. His trip was less quiet since we constantly seemed to be banging into things along the way. Also, I was beginning to feel the pressure of concluding this task in a timely manner. The zombies would be in the house soon and I didn’t want to be anywhere downstairs when that happened. I half carried him, half dragged him out to the shed. I quickly explained to them, as if they could understand what I was saying, that they’d be safe in the shed if they kept quiet. I closed and bolted the door and made way back inside.

I quietly closed the back door as I reentered the my house. I had that feeling like someone or something was going to reach out and grab me. I lightly passed through the utility room trying not to make a sound. I took about two steps into the kitchen when I suddenly saw the figure of one of the ghouls in the room adjacent to the kitchen. The figure was perfectly framed by the doorway, blocking my route to the attic. It stood, spasmodically looking around as if it were agitated. It happened to turn in my direction and noticed me standing in the kitchen, attempting to be invisible in plain sight. It moaned in that distinctively zombie way and charged at me with surprising speed. For a brief moment I was too stunned to do anything, but I snapped out of it by the time the zombie was almost on top of me. I quickly grabbed it by its clothes and pulled, using the force of its attack to send it flying behind me, landing in the utility room. I pulled the door closed and started running through the rest of the kitchen into the next room, heading toward the hallway where the entrance to the attic was located.

"Open the attic!" I shouted as I entered the room that led to the hallway. "Put the stairs down! Open the..." A second zombie was in the house. I never saw it coming. I was so focused on getting up to the attic, I was blind to everything else. It came at me from the left, almost managing to get me in a bear hug. I lunged my elbow into the center of its face, but it had little effect. Zombies don’t feel pain. Somehow I shook it off, resuming my trek toward the attic. I could see that she had lowered the steps. I was almost there.

"Oh my God! Look out behind you!" the woman in the attic screamed.

The zombie grabbed me from behind just before I could get to the steps. It had me

around the arms and I couldn’t shake free. I turned a bit to the right, raised my feet in the air, and pushed off the wall, sending me and the zombie hurtling backward. The zombie crashed on its back with me crashing on top of it. When it hit the floor, it exhaled in a way that sounded like it had the wind knocked out of it, and for a second, I forgot that zombies don’t breathe. I quickly scrambled off the zombie and half crawled, half lunged toward the attic steps. Once more I was at the steps about to ascend, but the zombie had recovered and grabbed me by the ankle as I was crawling up the steps. It yanked at my ankle and I fell forward, smashing my upper body and the right side of my head against the wooden steps. It drug me downward, my head smacking against each one of the steps before I finally stopped.

I kicked at the zombie’s hand and wrist with my other foot, breaking its hold on me. I realized that I had to be rid of this zombie if I was ever going to make it up the steps. I also heard the first zombie crashing its way through the utility room door. I rolled to the left, and spun on my knee, facing the attacking zombie. I could see into the living room and noticed that a third zombie was about halfway through the window. But I saw something else as well"my samurai sword that hung on the wall behind where the entertainment center used to be. I dashed into the living room toward the wall, grabbed the sword and unsheathed it. The zombie I had been battling with was right behind me. It lunged toward me and I swung the sword perfectly, catching the zombie in the side of the head, expected it to cut through the top of the zombie’s skull. Instead, the blade broke away from the handle. "Damn, ceremonial piece of crap!" I thought as the zombie seized me. I managed to hold it at arms length. It continuously snapped at me, trying to bite at my arms, my head, anything that it could get its mouth around. It was pushing hard to get to me, so as with the first zombie I had encountered, I used the force of its attack against it and sent it flying behind me to my right. It crashed though the window. For a moment it was held in place by the thick shards of glass that were still attached to the pane.

Now I was on the attack. I quickly squatted down and picked up the sword blade that lay at my feet. I charged the first zombie that was now in the process of charging me. There would be no mistakes this time. I wouldn’t use the side of the blade. I would use the pointy tip. I thrust the blade into the zombie’s forehead and it went limp. By that time, the other zombie had pulled itself from the shattered window and it was now bearing down on me. I grabbed the end of the blade tightly, stepped on the incapacitated zombie’s face, pulled the blade from its head, turned and thrust. The blade entered the zombie through its open mouth. It went through the roof of its mouth and came out the back of its head. For a few seconds, which felt like an eternity, it remained active, forcing itself toward me while the blade continued to slide through its head. Then as it was almost within biting distance, it dropped.

The zombie that was worming its way through the window had finally slithered through the pieces of furniture and plopped on the floor. I made a few quick attempts to extricate the samurai blade from the head of the zombie I had just dispatched, but the blade wouldn’t come out. After a couple of tugs, it was clear to me that I was weaponless, so I sprinted to the attic steps. I ascended the steps, reached down and started pulling the steps up.

Before I could close up the attic, the third zombie wedged its hand between the folded up steps and the ceiling. It started pulling the attic steps back down. The zombie had the benefit of the better angle and the use of its weight. I, however, had to fight against gravity. My new companions assisted in the struggle to close the attic, but it was clear that we weren’t going to win this battle without something to turn the tide in our favor. I feverishly looked around for something to use as a weapon. I saw a large box about a foot or so away from where I was.

"Slide that box over here!" I barked. She slid the box the foot or so to where I was. It took a couple of good pushed before she could manage it because of the weight of the box.

"Geez," she grunted as she pushed it, "What’s in here?"

"Books."

"Books?" she rebutted, "Books? How the hell are books going to help?"

"Knowledge is power," I said dryly. She correctly appeared unamused so I added, "We’re going to hurl this box of books at that zombie."

"Will that kill him?"

"No, but it should knock him back so we can pull up the steps. That box weighs like a hundred pounds. Coupled with a good toss and gravity, it’s going to generate a hell of a lot of momentum. Come here and hold the steps and I’ll pick up the box."

She slid over to the steps and tried to keep them up. I picked up the books and positioned myself. "On the count of three, let go of the steps. One. Two. Three." She released her grip on the steps and the attic entrance flew open. I hurled the box of books at the zombie, hitting it square in the chest. The plan worked. The zombie flew back about five feet. It proved to be less than a perfect plan, however. The box of books landed on the steps. The steps were wide open with a hundred pound box of books on them. I tugged at the steps a couple of times. The box of books tumbled off and I pulled the entrance to the attic shut. The combination of the struggle and the falling box of books had damaged the stairs. When I finally pulled the attic steps up, I noticed that they didn’t seal neatly with the ceiling, but were hanging down a bit.

The zombie was apparently back on its feet. Clawing at the ceiling in an attempt to find its way to where we were. I knew that the house would soon be lousy with zombies, one of which knew where we were. Even if the steps had closed properly, there would be a good chance that one of the zombies would get its fingers into the space between the attic and the ceiling and pull the steps down. This possibility now seemed like a certainty with the steps unable to be closed properly.

I took my time, thinking long and hard for a few moments until I came to a conclusion, "We’re not safe here."

VIII

"What do you mean ‘We’re not safe here’? You said we’d be safe up here? Why aren’t we safe here? You said we’d be safe!" She continued on like this for some time.

"Okay, calm down," I suggested.

"Calm down? Calm down? I don’t believe that you just told me to ‘calm down’! I’ve been in a car crash! I’ve been attacked! Scott was pulled out of the car right in front of me! They ripped him apart! Those things ripped him apart and ate him, right in front of me." She looked as if she were about to lose it again. "I don’t understand what the hell is going on! There’s things trying to kill me. I’m trapped in an attic with some guy I don’t even know. But I’m here because you said that I’d be safe up here. Now your telling me that I’m not safe after making me trust you. And if that wasn’t enough, on top of everything else, now you have the audacity to tell me to calm down? Screw you!"

"Okay, are we finished?" I said in a condescending manner, "Because if we’re not, we can just sit here and you can yell hysterically at me until those things break in and kill us, or we can do something about it."

"What can we do? We’re trapped up here. There’s no place to go!"

"I have an idea."

"Coming up to the attic was your idea."

"And at the time, it was a damned good idea. But the situation has changed. They know we’re up here. That wasn’t part of the plan."

"If you would have just come up here instead of screwing around with your dogs, we’d be safe now."

"Well if I didn’t have to rescue you, I wouldn’t have had to make sure my dogs were safe. For that matter, I wouldn’t be crouching up here in the attic trying to figure out what to do next."

"Rescue me?" she exploded defiantly. "Excuse me, but I’m not some damsel in distress who needs rescuing"and I certainly don’t need to be rescued by you."

"Oh really?" I retorted.

"Really!" she countered.

"Well excuse me. I didn’t realize  that crouching in the fetal position in the middle of the street was the universal code for ‘I’ve got everything under control.’ I was safe and sound until you and your boyfriend decided to take a little joyride into a pack of zombies."

"Scott," she inserted.

"What?" I replied.

"Scott. My boyfriend’s name was Scott."

"Yeah, now his name is "lunch."

"You sonofabitch! I don’t believe you said that!" She started punching me as she spoke. I realized that I was out of line as the words were leaving my mouth, but it was one of situations where I couldn’t stop myself from saying it, even though I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do. I had too much adrenaline coursing through my veins to be polite. Tears started leaking from her eyes, and she began to sob with a quiet defiance, making it clear that she didn’t want to give me the satisfaction of crying in response to something I said. "We were trying to escape, you jerk," she eventually croaked.

"Well you certainly did a bang up job." The pun was intentional.

"Well at least we were doing something. We weren’t just hiding in the dark waiting to die."

"No, you decided to meet death head on. How exactly did that work out for you?"

"You smug sonofabitch," she hissed disdainfully in a voice that was slightly more than a whisper, "your plan doesn’t seem to be much better, does it?"

"It’s kept you alive this long. Right about now I’d say it’s working a bit too well for my liking. Oh and by the way, sitting in the dark and keeping quiet wasn’t sitting around waiting to die, it was the smart thing to do. Even my dogs knew that. But once I rescued you"and like it or not, I did rescue you"the plan needed to be changed. We had to get to safety. All of us! My dogs included. I’ve known them a hell of a lot longer than you, and quite frankly, at the moment they appear to be smarter and more agreeable than you or what’s his name."

"Scott." she yelled. "His name was Scott and you’ve forgotten it already."

"Whatever. The point is if I’m going to risk my life for you, what do you think I’m going to do for them?"

"They’re just dogs and we’re people."

"That’s one to look at it. But the way I look at it is they’re my dogs and you’re just people."

"You’re an idiot."

"Maybe."

"We should have made a run for it out the back door."

"Where would we have gone? This is just our street. Do you think this is the only street that this is happening on? Not to mention that you were hysterical when I let you in."

"I was not hysterical!"

"You were hysterical. I wasn’t about to pin my survival on someone who was less than rational."

"I would have been fine!"

"You would have gotten us killed!"

She was quiet for a moment, trying to think up a biting response. The zombie had been scratching at the ceiling and I knew that the longer we stayed put the less likely it would be that we would survive. "Look," I said, "what we should have done is no longer an issue. For good or for bad, you chose to listen to me up to this point. All I’m asking is that you listen to me a little while longer. We can pick up this argument when we’re safe. But for now we have to get out of here."

"Where are we going to go? We’re trapped."

‘Maybe not. Look." I pointed across the attic to a small metal grate. It was there to ventilate the attic and let the heat out during the summer. "I think I can knock that out of the wall and then we can scramble onto the roof."

"What makes you think that you can knock it out of the wall?"

"Because this house is a piece of crap. You should know that. You live in one exactly like it. I’m reasonably sure that I could kick out the wall, let alone that grate."

"It doesn’t look very big."

"It’s not, but it’s big enough for you."

"What about you?"

"I’ll try, but I may not make it. So you’ll go first. That way you’ll be safe."

"Who am I, Spiderman? I can’t climb up the side of a house onto the roof."

"The roof of the utility room will be just below. Slide through the opening, onto the utility room room and then lift yourself up to the top of the house."

"There’s no way I can do that!"

"You’ll be fine. Trust me."

"I won’t be fine and I have no reason to trust you."

"Yeah you do," I responded coldly, "for the moment, I’m the only one in the near vicinity that’s not trying to kill you."

IX

"Okay, here’s the deal about the attic," I explained before we moved toward the opposite end of the attic, "the floor isn’t safe. Much of the attic floor is nothing but insulation resting on a thin piece of wood or something holding it up. So we’re going to have to walk on the crossbeams. That’ll be the most solid part of the attic. And they’re probably not all that sturdy, so we should try to walk as close to side as possible. You got that?"

"Side, not middle, got it."

We started for the grate. The walk along the crossbeams was easier in theory than in practice. The attic was nearly pitch black. The outside light of the nearly full moon was breaking its way through the grate, making it visible and allowing a slight amount of light into the attic which would have been impossibly dark without it. I led the way, about two or three crossbeams ahead, periodically turning around to watch her shadow making the trek behind me. Suddenly I heard a crash behind me. I turned around and noticed that her shadowy figure was no longer behind me. I deduced that he must have misplaced a step, missing the crossbeam, falling through the attic floor. I quickly maneuvered back to where she had fallen. She caught the beam on her way down, dangling from the attic floor which also served as the living room ceiling.

I could tell that more zombies had entered the house during the time that we had entered the attic. This was obvious by the increased sound of the distinctly zombie moan, which became all the louder and more excited when they suddenly noticed a late-night snack dangling in front of them from the ceiling like a spasmodic pinata. By the time that I reached her, nearly every one of the zombies in the house had converged on her. She started screaming and convulsing, attempting to pull herself back up into the attic before a zombie could lay its teeth into her. I hovered above her, standing with each foot on one of the crossbeams around her, stooped down, grabber her by the arms and pulled up. The good news is that she only weighed about a hundred pounds or so. That matched with the adrenaline coursing though my veins at that moment made her seem particularly light. I hauled her back into the attic, her legs feverishly kicking and pumping the entire time until they rested safely upon the attic floor once more.

"Are you okay?" I shouted

"I think so."

"Are you bit?"

"What?"

"Did any of them bite you?"

"I don’t know." She took a second and performed a mental scan of her body. "I don’t think so. No!" she concluded.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah, I’m sure."

"I need you be absolutely sure that none of them bit you."

"I’m fine," she asserted with an annoyed tone.

"Okay, let’s keep going. This time watch where you step." In spite of the darkness, I could see the two barrels of disdain that she shot in my direction with her expression. I turned my back to her, pretending not to notice, and resumed my trek toward the metal grate.

After what seemed like forever, I finally arrived at where the grate. I carefully balanced myself so that my head, back, and butt stretched across three beams and started kicking at the grate with the bottom of my foot. I kicked at the corners successively and occasionally kicked right in the center of the grate. After about twenty or so such kicks, it plopped from the wall and fell onto the roof below. It was fairly light and didn’t make much noise. I stuck my head out and saw that none of the zombies seemed to notice the sound of it falling. They were all too focused on gaining access to my house via the front door.

Suddenly I heard the attic steps creak and I could see a beam of light break into the attic from where the steps were. "They’re in," I announced to no one in particular. For the passing of a moment or two, we were both paralyzed as we realized that zombies were plodding their way into the attic. I saw the head of the lead zombie bobbing up the stairs. Once at the top, it started scanning its surroundings. Its systematic scan of the attic eventually made its way toward where we were. I don’t think that the zombie saw us per se, but it definitely knew we were there. Once it had turned one hundred eighty degrees and faced our direction it unleashed a chilling, moaning howl that immediately attracted the other zombies. The zombie torpedoed its way toward us, stepping on a weak piece of the attic floor and crashing through to the room below.

The zombie crashing through the floor suddenly inspired me with a moment’s confidence. I figured that the odds of a mindless zombie making its way successfully to where we were would be unlikely, but I also knew that there was a possibility that one or two, or even more would somehow get lucky. We had to get out onto the roof. "Come on! Climb through," I ordered.

"No," she replied bluntly.

"No? What do you mean ‘no’?"

"I mean NO!" she said defiantly, "I told you, I’m not going first. I can’t climb up onto the roof."

"Yes you can. Just trust me."

"No you trust me! I can’t do it." I examined what I could see of her face. The larger hole in the side of the attic allowed for more light and I could see that she wasn’t merely being difficult, her face was that of someone skirting on the edge of panic. I realized that if I sent her through the hole first, she would find some way of getting herself killed in the process of climbing onto the roof. By this time, two more zombies had made their way into the attic, noticed us, and fallen through the attic floor in their effort to get to where we were.

"Why don’t we just stay here?" she offered after a moment. "The zombies can’t get at us. They’re not smart enough to walk on the crossbeams."

"They have the advantage," I thought out loud, "when they fall through the floor, they can just try again. They’ll just keep coming. Over and over until one or more of them eventually gets lucky enough to make to where we are. And when that happens, there’s no place for us to run. We’re trapped. We have to get onto the roof. It’s the only safe place.

"Are you sure that we’ll be safe on the roof?" she asked in a tone of voice that was both desperate, serious, and hopeful.

"Yeah, I’m sure," I said in an attempt to both reassure her as well as myself, "they can’t climb. There’s no way they’ll make onto the roof. We can sit up there and fire off fireworks and attract every zombie in town and still be safe. I’m certain of that."

She looked at me with a newfound sense of confidence, "You’ll have to go first. I’m afraid I’ll slide off the roof without you there to help me. I need you to help me."

Her words had lost the venom that her recently passed sentences possessed. Instead, she sounded calm and reasonable.

"Okay," I decided, "I’ll squeeze through, and then help you through. Do you think you can do that?"

"I have a better chance of making onto the roof that way than on my own."

"Alright, hold tight." I attempted to squeeze through the opening. My romantically selfless intension had been for her to squeeze through and get to safely while I took my chances in the attic. I never really meant to force my way through the narrow opening. But now there was no way to get her to safety without getting myself there first. I pushed my way through the hole. I had to arrange my shoulders so that they could press through the diagonal corners. I could feel the edges of the hole scraping away the skin from my shoulder and my love handles and eventually my butt. A couple of times I was certain that I was wedged in the opening and never getting anywhere ever again, but somehow I kept pushing my way through.

I had gone head first, on my back, looking upward. I felt the cool air strike my face as I tried to push my way through. It’s odd, but as I squirmed from the attic wall, I noticed the starlit sky for the first time in months, maybe even years. Pegasus was sprawled out in the sky as I dangled from a small opening in the side of my attic like a worm dangling from and apple or an ear of corn. And like a worm, I suddenly felt like bait. Tearing the skin from my body the entire time. I suddenly understood the meaning of the word sarcasm, which comes from an ancient Roman form of torture where they would scrape the skin from the body of the victim until his body was raw and exposed.

I could hear the young woman screaming at me to hurry up the entire time I was attempting to force my way through the hole. I have to admit that it was a little annoying, if not distracting. What I didn’t know was that the cause of her bossiness was panic inspired by a particularly fortunate zombie that kept making its way to her initially patient location. A zombie that had climbed into the attic had charged at her like all the others, but as it fell through the floor, it somehow caught itself on the crossbeam. It slowly pulled itself up and equally as slowly slithered across the attic floor toward her. Its body was stretched over two or three crossbeams so that its weight was evenly distributed and as parts of it crashed through the floor, the rest of it kept the bulk of its body in the attic, where it simply readjusted itself and continued to slink relentlessly toward her.

I looked toward the hole, expecting to instruct her to come out and grab a hold of her arms of something as she did. I surprised to see that she was already halfway through the opening by the time I started to call down to her. She reached her arms up toward me. I grabbed her forearms just below her wrists. Suddenly she kicked herself out of the opening. She started sliding down the roof, and for a moment I started sliding too. I thought that I would either drop her or slide off the roof with her, but somehow I stopped sliding and tightened my grasp. I pulled her back up toward me.

The head and arm of the zombie popped through the hole, violently reaching for her and groaning wildly. I yelled at her to jump up onto the top of the house. I looked around for anything I could use as a weapon. I wasn’t sure if it could get through the hole or not, but it wasn’t something I felt I could leave to chance. I saw the metal grate lying on the roof. I grabbed it and felt it’s edge. It was somewhat sharp. I placed the edge against the neck of the zombie and pushed down with all my weight. The metal grate sunk into its neck but stopped at the bone. I stood up and stomped on the top the grate until it worked it’s way through the bone and severed its head from its body. The head rolled off the roof and bounced on the ground below. It was still biting and gnashing. The brain was still in tact, so the head was still “alive.”

I climbed onto the top of the house. We moved to the top center of the roof and looked down at the zombie-filled street. We could hear zombies crashing beneath us inside my house. We could also hear the desperate moaning of the zombies in the street now that we were in their plain sight.

The cool breeze flowed against us and I could hear my neighbor’s wind chimes off in the distance. They had ceased to be the center of undead interest since I had made myself known to them. I quickly turned to scan the backyard. No zombies had bothered to venture back there and the shed housing my dogs remained unnoticed.

We both surveyed the devastation of our neighborhood from our new vantage point. We could see houses that had been broken into. Scott’s car sat silently, yet still sort of smoldering from its collision into my neighbor’s tree. Unmanned police car lights flashed unceasingly, creating a strobe light effect that seemed to increase the dramatic effect of what was happening.

When we were finished scanning our street, our eyes met, and we just sort of looked at each other for a while. I think we were trying to figure each other out. After all, we had only just met and it had already seemed as if we’d spent days together. The only thing that we knew about each other is that we lived a few houses a part. I didn’t even know her name. For that matter, she didn’t know mine. We had become comrades, albeit occasionally belligerent ones, but we shared something that most people never get to share"survival.

"What do we do now?" she eventually asked. It was a fair question. I had been asking myself the same question ever since we arrived at the safely of the roof.

"I guess we wait," I said, continuing to look at the flashing lights of the police car.

"Wait for what?" she insisted.

"I don’t know," I admitted. "Sooner or later someone has to figure out what’s going on. There’s only what? Twenty, thirty zombies here? That shouldn’t be too hard to deal with. Then again, who knows how many of these things are running around. For all we know we could be all that’s left of the world."

"Don’t say that!" she asserted.

"Yeah, you’re right. Forget I said that. There’s no reason to assume the worst yet," I said, still watching the flashing lights of the police cars. It was as if there was something obvious that I needed to know and their flashing served as some sort of morse code for my subconscious.

"If only we had some weapons," she said after a few moments of silence, "then we could fight them."

"If we had weapons," I said, never breaking my gaze from the flashing lights, "then we could make a break for it. It would be suicide for us to make a break for it, aimlessly wandering around, hoping to find help. But if we had weapons, we would have a fighting chance . . ." For the first time in my life I cursed the fact that I was a liberal and had no guns in my house; although, even if I did, I doubt that I could get to them now. I continued to watch the flashing lights, hypnotized, trying to figure out what they were trying to tell me. And suddenly it hit me like a rusty pipe smashed against my head.

She had evidently spent enough time with me in crisis situations to read my total lack of a poker face. She saw the wheels spinning within my mind and finally concluded, "You have a plan, don’t you?"

I continued to watch the flashing lights of the abandoned police cars. Then I turned to face her. I looked deeply into her green eyes and announced, "I think I’m beginning to have one." She looked at me with a hopeful, yet confused expression. I looked back toward the flashing lights and explained, "There’s a whole freekin’ armory right in front of us. All we have to do is get to it.”

X

“I don’t know your name.”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, Juliette,” she stammered, “Julie. My name is Julie.”

I told her my name, following it with, “I have an idea.” She looked at me as if I were a used car salesman trying to sell her the ugliest car on the lot. “There’s no zombies in the back. And all the zombies that were on the street seem to be focused on us up here or destroying the inside of my house. I’m going to slip down the back of the roof, hop the fences through the backyards, sneak up the street, and get to the police cars. There should be plenty of weapons in them. I’ll get what I can carry, and then I’ll come back here.”

“How are you going to get back up on the roof?” she asked sensibly.

“Look,” I pointed to a place behind my house, “my neighbor has a ladder hooked up on the side of his toolshed. I’ll use it to get back up.”

“We just met, and you’re already always trying to leave me,” she said with a smirk.

“I came back the first time, didn’t I? And if you want me to come back this time, I’m going to need your help.”

“What do you need me to do?”

“I need you to stay here in plain sight. Actually, I need you to draw attention to yourself. As long as they’re focused on you, they won’t be focused on me. Once I’m back with the guns, we can figure out what we’re going to do next.”

“I’m not crazy about this plan,” she confessed.

“Trust me, I’m not happy about it either. But you’ll be safe up here, and as long as they know you’re up here, I think I’ll be safe down there.”

After stalling for a few minutes, I slid down the back of the house, landing in the back yard. Every house on the street had chain-linked fences surrounding the back yards, so I had to silently run through the back yards, hopping the fences as quietly as I could until I got to the end of the street, then slip over to the police cars without being noticed. Every little sound seemed like it was being broadcast over a loudspeaker, but the ghouls were too focused on Julie on the roof to notice. I wasn’t wearing any shoes. They were in my house, along with a hoard of undead Americans. I was not expecting to invite a group of zombies in my home and I was still wearing my sleeping clothes, which was a pair a sweat pants and tee-shirt. Occasionally, during my trek through the back yards, I would step on something hard, or sharp, or just generally painful, and I had to use all of my willpower not to shout out in pain, or even whisper profanities. The pointy tips of the fences poked the bottom of my feet as I hopped over, and the fences themselves made a metallic “ching” sound that, at least in my mind, echoed loudly throughout the neighborhood, causing me to pause after each fence to see if anything had yet noticed me. So far, so good �" I was about halfway down the street through the backyards. The further away I was from my own house, the more certain I was becoming that this was not such a good idea.

I hopped into the backyard of the last house on the street, swiftly crossed the small yard, and hopped the fence on the other side, and crouched as low as I could. I was now on the sidewalk of the street that intersected with mine. I nervously looked around and saw nothing out of the ordinary. It all looked so normal and still. I rose and carefully moved along the side of the house and peered cautiously around the corner and looked up the street toward my house. I saw the two police cars and the crowd of zombies crowding in my front yard and on the street in front of my house. 

The closest police vehicle was about a house-length away. I darted over to it. The doors were open and the remains of the two police officers were laying partly in and out of the car. When I say “remains,” I mean remains as in “left-overs.” The two cops were completely ripped apart and there was so much blood. The blood was a problem, not because it was nauseating or gory, but because the cops had been eaten, so their corpses were infected, which as far as I was concerned meant that their blood was infected too. Since I was barefooted, and since I had stepped on so many hard and sharp objects, including the chain-linked fences, I had to be extra careful around the blood. I wouldn’t want to step in it anyway, but I feared now that I had cuts or wounds on the soles of my feet that would make infection certain if I trod on infected blood. I could not see any way to get to the car without stepping in the blood. 

One of the cops was lying in a way that his legs were clear of the blood lying in the road. I sneaked over to him and searched through his pockets. I found a key chain and went to the back of the car looking for a key that would open the trunk. After some trial and error, I found the key that unlocked the trunk and slowly opened it. It squeaked as it opened and I nervously looked around the car to see if any of the zombies had noticed. They were still obsessed with Julie. She was on the roof of my house making “Whoo Hoo” noises and yelling things at the zombies. I searched through the trunk and found some extra clips, but no other guns. The side arms were in the center of the blood puddles and the shotgun under the dash was unobtainable because it seemed like a river of blood was flowing between me and the open doors of the car. I also found some road flares. 

I had to sneak up to the other car. I had some ammo, but no guns. The second car was close to my house. It was risky! But ammo with no guns was useless. I went to motion to Julie to really draw attention to herself, but instead saw her almost hopping up and down, pointing behind me and shouting to turn around. Panic leaped upon me, but before I could turn around, I felt a hand grab my shoulder. I spun around to see a figure crouching over me. I looked into the face and it smiled. It dawned on me that this was one of my neighbors being curious and not a zombie. I grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him forcefully to the ground, hissing “Get down, you fool!”

“What’s going on?” He demanded from me, for some reason deciding I should know. His question was too loud, and I scrunched up my face and motioned with my hands for him to shut up. I could see from his concerned expression that he had an idea that we were in a dangerous situation, but I could tell by his volume and demeanor that he had no idea just how imperilled we actually were.

I whispered quietly, yet forcefully, “Now that you’re here, hold these.” I handed to him the clips and the road flares. “Don’t drop them. Don’t lose them. I’m going up to see if I can get access to one of the guns. You stay here and be quiet! Stay out of sight!” He started to talk but I immediately and forcefully brought my index finger to my lips, effectively shutting him up before he spoke. 

I peered out to Julie once more and signaled her to really draw attention to herself. She understood and did all that she could to let the zombies know that she was there. The zombies seemed to be getting �" for lack of a better word �" excited by her efforts. She was whipping them into a frenzy. They started groaning louder than before, reaching up to her, clawing at the side of my house, even pulling the siding off the house. I slithered up to the other car, moving around the open driver’s side door. I was surprised to see the shotgun lying on the floor. Apparently the officer unlocked the gun and intended to use it but was torn apart before he could. I carefully slid the gun out of the car, placing it carefully on the road next to me. I frantically searched the body of the officer and around the car for keys, extra shells, guns, clips�"anything. I found nothing. 

Although I didn’t know it yet, I made the mistake of shifting the cops body forward, leaning him against the steering wheel, but was in too much of a hurry to shift him back. I picked up the shotgun and began to sneak back. Suddenly, from the corner of my eye, I saw a pistol lying in the middle of the road. I would have to risk exposing myself to the zombies to get it, but if I could get it, it would be something. Right now, I only had three or four clips that had no gun to go with them, a shotgun that had a couple of rounds in it (but at least could be used as a club or as a weapon even if I had no shells to fire) and a bundle of road flares. I needed that pistol.

I quietly crawled toward the pistol. I peered around the car �" the zombies were focused on Julie. I could get the gun quickly and quietly and they would never know I was there. Then I could sneak back down the road, move behind the houses, and make my way back to my house through the backyard. I would have to bring my new found companion because he had my ammo. 

I darted out a bit and stretched my arm out to the gun, when suddenly the horn of the police car started blowing loudly. The body of the officer had shifted and slid. The weight of his dead body was now pressing against the horn. I was frozen in mid grasp �" hand reaching out to the pistol. Remaining perfectly still, I move the direction of my head to see what the zombies’ reaction was to the blaring car horn. Each and every zombie had turned in my direction, and was looking directly at me. It seemed like a long time passed before anything happened. I was there on my belly, stretching for a gun; the zombies were standing in a crowd looking at me. Just when I thought that maybe nothing was going to happen, and that we may stay like this forever, one of the zombies howled widely and the others joined in, and they advanced.

I slid forward, grabbed the pistol and leaped to my feet. Julie once more tried to regain their attention but it was useless. They were focused on me. I raised the gun, picked the lead zombie and aimed at its head. I calmly squeezed the trigger. “Click.” I squeezed again, less calmly than before. “Click.” I started squeezing in desperation. “Click. Click. Click. Click.” I suddenly realized why the gun was so far away from the blood. The police officer must have discharged all the bullets and then panicked, throwing the gun at the zombies before they killed him.

I once more demonstrated my expertise with profanity as I turned and bolted down the street, slapping my bare feet on the asphalt as I ran. My companion rose and started running with me. He shoved the clips into his pockets and I tossed him the pistol. He bumbled it and juggled it, but managed to keep hold of it while running. 

“Don’t lose that!” I shouted.

“What now?”

“Follow me!”

We ran down the street, turned the corner, went behind the houses, and hopped the fence. This time there was no stealth. It was sprinting and hopping. Most of the zombies were following the path we took, and they were stymied by the fences. The fences are only just higher than one’s waist, so some of the zombies flipped over, some were pushed, but it gave us some time to get back to my yard. Other zombies were coming from the front yard of the houses and would have cut us off if not for the fences. We arrived safely in my backyard.

“Help me get this ladder.” We went to the toolshed of the house just behind me. There was a fence of course, but the shed was against the fence and the ladder was almost in my yard. We tugged at it a couple of times and pulled it off it’s hooks. I took the ladder and extended it, leaning it onto my house. “Go!” I yelled. He stumbled up the ladder. A couple of zombies had found their way into my backyard. I moved toward the closest one and pounded the butt of the shotgun against its head. It dropped. I ran to the ladder and climbed. By the time I was at the top, two ghouls had reached the bottom of the ladder and pulled on it so that it started sliding. I climbed onto the roof and the ladder fell away to the ground. 

I was back where I started, on a roof with a woman I didn’t know and a pack of flesh-eating zombies attacking my house �" only now I had picked up someone else along the way. I sat on the roof, catching my breath. I asked for the guns and the clips. I laid the shotgun and the clips and the flares carefully on the roof, making sure they did not slide off. I removed the empty clip from the pistol and replaced it with a full one. More zombies were finding their way into the backyard. Another group remained in the front of the house. I guess they were the ones that were inside or on the porch trying to get inside. 

“Well, the good news is we have a couple of guns.”

“What’s the bad news?” Julie asked, knowing from the tone of my voice that there was bad news to follow.

“The bad news is that even though we have a couple of guns, we don’t have a lot of ammo. And now, instead of just having zombies in the front, the house is now surrounded. So I don’t know how we are going to get out of here now.”

“Let’s just shoot our way through,” the stranger suggested.

“And go where? Besides, as soon as we fire the guns, any zombie that is not already here will be drawn to the sound.” I thought for a while. “If only we had my car keys, we could jump down where they are the fewest and fight our way to the car.”

“You said that was stupid when Scott and I tried that.”

“I still think it’s stupid. It’s just as stupid for us as it was for you. But we can’t stay up here forever and we need to come up with a plan.”

XI

We sat for a while on the roof, trying to come up with a plan as to what to do next. Julie still insisted that we shoot all the zombies and drive away. It didn’t sound like a bad idea, but I figured that each clip had somewhere between nine and thirteen rounds. That would handle most of the zombies here, but what about the zombies that we would encounter en route. “Besides,” I reminded her, “it isn’t just shooting these zombies, we have to shoot the ones in the back, get into the house, shoot all of them, get the keys, and then shoot all the zombies in the front and on the side, without any more showing up, and without the ones we aren’t shooting swarming us while we shooting the others. And where do we drive to?”

“They have to be broadcasting something on the radio. Telling people where to go,” said the stranger. 

“Maybe,” I said. Then turning to Julie, I asked, “Where were you and Scott trying to get to?”

“Scott thought that if we could get to the marina, we could take his family’s boat out and be safe on the water.”

I thought about it. “I take it back. That was actually a good idea,” I admitted. “The boat would have a radio. We could talk to somebody and find out what’s going on. Is this just us, or is it everywhere?” 

The stranger groaned. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

“One of those things bit my arm earlier. I opened the door to see what was going on. I saw a man in the street so I shouted out to him. He just turned all weird and looked at me. Then he stumbled toward me. I asked him again what was happening. He just kept coming. When he got to me he growled and howled. I don’t mind telling you that scared the crap outta me, so I ran back inside the door. But he was wedged in the door before I could close it. That’s when he bit me. I was trying to push the door closed and I guess my arm was exposed. And he just clamped on my arm. He would have pulled a chunk off of my arm if you two hadn’t gotten their attention.”

I just stared at him. My mind was racing. He had no idea that he was a dead man. Soon would come the illness and he would be dead. Then he would be one of them. I remembered that my two companions knew nothing about what we were facing, and that I only knew because of a chance meeting of a friend of a friend at a football game years ago. I guess my expression betrayed my thoughts, because he looked at my expression for a moment and said, “Why? Do you think I should get to a hospital or something?”

I thought for a moment about telling him that he was going to be dead soon. That he would not only die, but he would then be reanimated and attack us. I thought about telling him that as far as I was concerned, he was the most dangerous man in the world; he was even more dangerous than those things that were trying to get at us; he was more dangerous because he was up here with us, and they were down there where they could not get at us. I thought about all these things and then just smiled and said, “Nah, you’ll probably be okay. It doesn’t look like he got you too badly. When we get off this roof, we’ll get you some antibiotics and you’ll be fine. Wait a minute, what’s that?” I pointed to something behind him. He turned to look. I raised the pistol and pointed it to the back of his head and pulled the trigger. He dropped like a sack of wet flour. 

Julie screamed out, “You killed him! You killed him!” 

“He was dead already. I just sped up the process.” 

Julie stared at me with disbelief. “Are you going to kill me too?” she asked.

“Are you bit?”

“No.”

“Then I have no reason to kill you.”

“You’re a monster!”

“No, I assure you, I’m very human, and humans survive.” I explained to her about the virus and that it is passed through bites. I explained that he was infected. My explanations did not seem to quell her vexation.

“He wasn’t a zombie yet!” she insisted. “He wasn’t even sick. You don’t know he was going to change.”

“I know,” I insisted. “I know a lot more about this than you. He was infected. He was going to die and change.”

“Maybe so,” she conceded, “but he wasn’t dead yet. You shouldn’t have killed him. You shouldn’t have made that choice for him. It wasn’t yours to make.”

“Whether or not he was showing symptoms of his illness, whether or not he was dead or alive, whether or not he was trying to kill us, he was infected! That means he is carrying around his infection. The more we are exposed to him, the more likely we will be exposed to the infection. He was bleeding. What if his blood got on you �" into a cut, or a scratch, or somehow got in your eyes. Just being infected is a danger. I did the right thing. Feel free to disagree with the choice I made, but that choice made you safer than if I didn’t make it.”

I examined the lump that lay on the edge of the roof. Blood was flowing and dripping into the gutter and an idea sparked. “Okay, new plan. We’re leaving!”

“What? Where?” Julie stammered. “How can we leave now when we couldn’t a few minutes ago?”

“Easy. I’m going to drop his body into the front yard. We’ll climb down onto the utility room roof and then to the ground, and we’ll make for the police station on foot.”

“Won’t they follow us?”

“The ones in the back won’t know. The ones in the front will be too busy eating him. The police station is only about two miles away. We’ll head there. We’ll be careful and keep to the shadows. They’ll be harder to see in the dark, but so will we. Our plan is stealth. If we see any of those things, we’ll hide if we can. We only engage them if we have no other choice. We can only fire the guns as a last resort because when we do, we are essentially ringing the dinner gong and letting any zombie know for miles where we are.”

I told her to get down onto the utility room roof. I gathered up the flairs and the clips. I had the idea of using a flare to keep the zombies in the backyard occupied. I lit one and tossed it into the back corner. The zombies began to move toward it. Taking up the shotgun, I used it to push the body from the roof. It landed with a loud noise, not quite a thud, but sort of a wet, muffled kind of thud. The zombies in the front encircled the body and began devouring it. I climbed down onto the utility room roof, the shimmied down to the ground. I leaned the shotgun against the side of the house and motioned for Julie to follow. She slid down, dangling from the roof. I reached up and grabbed her by her waist and helped her down. We scurried behind the passenger side of my car. The zombies were focused on the meal. I scanned the direction we were about to journey. It looked clear. I pulled on her arm and started to run. She followed.

We were off my street onto another. We ran a short distance to a church yard and crouched behind some bushes. Nothing to see. So we darted another forty or fifty yards and stopped and looked. We slowly made our way onto the road that lead to the police station. It was still dark, but the sun would be coming up soon. We made our way to the station a piece at a time �" running a short distance, stopping and hiding behind something so we could scan ahead, and then moving again. The way was mostly clear. Occasionally we came across a zombie or two, but we hid and maneuvered around them. Only once did we have to engage a zombie. There was no going around and he was shuffling in our path. I told Julie to wait and I leaped out from the bush we were crouching behind, ran toward the zombie and hit it with the butt of the shotgun before it even let out a moan. It fell to the ground and I smashed its head in with the gun. Then I wiped the gun clean as much as I could in some nearby grass. And we continued on.

We made it to the police station and it was locked. I pressed a button outside the door and was greeted by a voice asking what we wanted. We wanted in, I told them. I heard a buzzing sound and felt a slight vibration on the door. I pulled it open and we were inside. We weren’t the only people to go to the station. The place was packed with confused people looking for help and answers. I told the police all that I knew of the situation. I told them about the virus and that the reanimated corpses of the dead were attacking the living, and that the only way to stop them was to shoot them in the head, or bash in their skulls. They didn’t seem to believe me, but at the same time, they seemed to be interested in any information, no matter how crazy it might sound.

I learned from them that the outbreak was sporadic and spread over a wide and random area from Philadelphia to Atlantic City. It was worse in the urban areas because more people were infected before anyone knew that anything out of the ordinary was taking place. We were in between both, in the country. So there were fewer zombies, but there were enough. I told the police that they should inspect the refugees for bites and scratches, and quarantine anyone who may have been bitten. At first they dismissed it until I explained that there may be people walking around with an infection that they could easily transfer to the rest of us without realizing  it. The inspections began with me and Julie and then moved to the crowd which had gathered. Some people who were suspected of being bitten were taken away to be placed in cells so they could be watched. 

From this point on we were safe. Nothing was getting inside the station that the police did not want in. The crowd was being examined. Some people were being quarantined. I relaxed for the first time since I had awakened earlier that night, and I actually let myself fall asleep.

XII

I don’t know how long I had nodded off. When I awoke in the police station, the events of the night seemed like an eerie dream. I was even tempted for a moment to believe it was a dream until the awareness of where I was came back to me. Julie had drifted off to sleep next to me and was curled up as best as she could be on the chairs in the waiting area of the police station. I asked around and was told that the National Guard was arriving soon to “mop up” our area. Those of us in the police station, as well as any survivors they came across while mopping up, were going to be taken to McGuire Air Force base, where we were to be quarantined for seventy-two hours. 

Julie and I were separated once we arrived at the base. After three days of observation and medical tests, we were returned home. The street still looked like a war zone. Houses were busted up and windows broken. It looked even more surreal in the daylight. I entered into my house. It was a mess. There was a chemical smell. I deduced that it was a disinfectant sprayed about the house by the National Guard or maybe the CDC was there to kill any remnant of the virus that may have gotten onto anything in the house. Even still, I decided to burn most of what I could. 

I went to the back door and stepped onto the front steps. I saw my dogs lying in the yard. They were alive and whining. “Crap! It’s been three days since they’ve been fed.” Someone must have discovered them in the shed. There was a bowl of water placed in the shed for them that was almost empty. At least they had something to drink. I hurried back inside and placed food in their bowls and took it out to them. Their tails wagged weakly as I placed the food in front of them where they lay in different spots in the yard. And I went back inside to start cleaning up.

I would like to say that life soon got back to normal. It did not! Cleaning up was no easy task. Julie showed up as soon as she was returned home. She said that I and the dogs could stay with her until I got the house sorted out. Her house was mostly untouched. As I cleaned through the rubble of my home, I prayed for an early, long, and cold winter. I destroyed and burned most of what I had and started over from scratch in terms of furniture, my bed, clothing and sheets. Most of it was destroyed anyway, and I decided not to take any chances with what was not.

I spent that winter placing flooring in the attic. I had decided to move into the attic in case of another outbreak. There were periodic reports of an outbreak here and there on the news from that point. I put a solid door in my hallway so I could close that off and buy some time if I needed it. I reinforced the attic stairway entrance so that when the stairs were pulled up from inside the attic, I could slide bars across them so that it could not be opened from outside. I also made an a second entrance to the attic through my bedroom closet, placing a ladder in the closet to climb through a hatch that I could lock from inside the attic once inside. I also worked out a network of connecting the houses roof by roof, so that we could cross from house to house on our side of the street; yet the plank bridges we used to connect the houses could be detached if zombies ever made it onto a roof. 

Most of us on the street survived the first official, major zombie outbreak our civilization could cite. Some tried to pretend that it did not really happen, or at least tried to pretend it did not happen. But as the weeks followed, and reports of zombie outbreaks periodically popping up here and there, it became harder and hard to deny. The local news even added zombie report just before the weather, and started referring to the time at the end of winter when it started to become warm again as “Zombie Weather.”

The fact is that even though most of life could once more take on the trappings of normalcy, there was no normal any more. The world had changed. Life and death had changed. There was no going back to a world that was. The world that is was all we had now�"it made no sense to deny it. Just adjust to it and move on. As a species, we have to adapt or die, and I was not yet willing to die, so adaptation was the only thing left for me to do. I was determined to be ready for the next outbreak. As it turned out, I did not have long to wait.

THE END

Reviews

[Rob Santana]

Hey what a creative story! I like how you incorporated 9/11 in the beginning of the story. You have a great imagination. I noticed the TO BE CONTINUED? Maybe it's up on your profile I wil check. But really looking forward to reading the next part. For me zombies never get old as far as movies and books go. I am a huge zombie,horror,gore fan. I look forward to reading your other work as well.