Smucker's Raspberry Preserves

I awake still lying on the rotten floor of the tree house shrouded in an early morning fog. My arm still throbbing with raccoon bite. The soft moans of the undead below did not go away while I was dreaming of soft Mexican beaches.

Here, the dead do not rest.

Today is the day I will need to get out of here, “here” being this tree house, this situation, this life perhaps? My stomach growls in anger. My thirst is almost unbearable. Void of modesty I drop trow and relieve myself through the cracks in the tree house floor. Any live person who might show up at this moment and happen to see me peeing would bless me with welcome embarrassment. The droplets of urine land on the little boy whose carcass stands swaying and clawing at the tree trunk.

I sit Indian-style on the floorboards for about an hour and near hysteria once again, I put one hand over my eyes as I audibly pray to God for help through cracked sobs. With the other hand I unwittingly grasp for the edge of the tree house floor. The gray dry rotted wood gave up almost immediately and I pulled and jerked the broken off piece and held it in front of my surprised face. A two-footer, sharp on one end and with just a bit of life left in the middle to provide strength. This was the answer. Halting my sobs and prayers, I got up and onto my knees and began madly yanking at the floorboard strips tearing up splinters and stubbing my thumb on a rusty nail. I was clawing for my own salvation. Dead wood for dead heads.

By the time the fog burned off and the morning sun was nearly blinding I had a good-sized pile of spikes for which I was sorting by size and strength. The larger men zombies would need to be taken out first. I gingerly lowered myself, hands sweating, on the shaky wooden tree house ladder with the largest of the makeshift spears. The undead farmer in his overalls moaned loudly and reached his rotting limbs up to reach me. And I’m just barely out of his reach as my hands shake with adrenalin – one clinging to the tree ladder and the other raised above my target. I bring it down with a powerful grunt and plant it through the top of the semi-soft cranium with a "flump". Farmer drops to his knees and then falls over, face down into the soft green grass. The other three are oblivious totheir comrade’s termination and stumble around his second-time corpse, tripping here and there.

With a slightly renewed confidence that this would work, I bared my teeth and hissed. "That's it. Get over here, you fuckers!"

I pull out another stake and took out Neighbor man likewise. The little boy, however, got it through the eye. It went deep enough to short circuit him and disgusting, smelly aqueous humor dripped out of his socket before he hit the ground. That’s all that mattered, his ending. And then the little girl was spiked through her blonde pony-tailed head, no problem. She didn't scream. The blood wasn’t even really blood but clotted and congealed like Smuckers Raspberry Preserves. I should have been throwing up by now. Is this what is called desensitizing? Or just pure survival?

I gratefully jumped to the ground, keeping low and hunched over where all four bodies lay scattered, keeping an eye out for any movement. In a moment of dramatic victory and going against my better instincts I felt a rage well up within me. I bent down to the ground and dipped two fingers into a pool of red ooze and then traced a cross on my forehead before breaking into a sprint toward my parents' house.

I think I left myself in that tree house. This was now Me [Version 2.0].