The Suffering of Fools

I awoke to the sound of Finn, squalling. We had managed to keep him quiet for so long, to teach him at such a young age to be silent, that his piercing cries sounded almost alien at first. My head pounding I looked toward his cries.

During the apocalypse, a man sees a lot of horrors. This is no great shock, no great revelation. It is one thing to see the myriad dead, even the living dead, but to see the slack and lifeless face of your wife is a much worse kind of tragedy. At once mundane, spouses perish every day, yet so incredibly personal, so incomprehensible, it is as if you are looking at a piece of yourself that has died. I belly-crawled to Finn who was wailing next to Colleen's body, clearly trying to elicit from her some reaction, some reassuring comfort. It was a pitiable sight, and for the first time since this madness had begun, I began to lose hope.

For years, Colleen and I had joked about being "Team Curry," but to us it was no joke. We were a team. For better or worse we had long since hitched our wagons together and had been hell-bent on making our way through our lives together. Her problems, my problems, they were always our problems. Looking at my wife, eyes open, slack and lifeless, I felt a part of me break and fall away. No more Team Curry.

I scooped up Finn, feeling how light and fragile and small he was, held him close and hushed gently into his ear. He calmed down almost at once, having learned, somehow instinctually, that there was precious little comfort left in the world, and to take what he could get. How in the world was I going to feed him? Take care of a baby in a world gone to rut and ruin?

But this was no time for planning, this was a time for survival, and revenge. To be taken by the undead, well, that was the heart of this particular darkness, but to be driven into this damnable silo by a living person, to be nearly shot and killed, to have lost my wife, to have endangered and possibly sentenced my son to death by a living breathing person; there was satisfaction to be had. I found that there was no pleasure to be had in ending the animation of the dead. Their soullesss eyes reflected no change, just a quiet indifference as they skulls were smashed in and their bodies dropped limp to the earth. The living however, I could make the living pay.

I looked around the silo, saw that the silo was about half full of grain. I estimated that distance to the bottom of the silo, and hopefully a door, and even more hopefully, a door that would swing out, was about twenty feet down. I would have to dive down, find the door, then come up and get Finn. Hopefully, the force of the grain expelling from the doorway would push the ghouls back long enough for me to get a running start.

I dove into the grain, pulled against the slick, hard kernels, but got no purchase. In a breath, I could only go about four or five feet before I had to turn back. It was hopeless.

Coming up for air, I looked to find Finn, saw him sleeping, curled up next to Colleen, moving fitfully against her body. I took in great heaving lungfuls of air, and noticed the quiet. The scraping, moaning sound of the pawing undead was, not gone, but faded. Very much faded. Cautiously, I climbed the rebar rings of the silo up the top and peered over the top. The gunshots from before must have attracted the mob of rot and ruin as they now swarmed outside the farmhouse. The vast majority of them were congregated toward the front of the house. Each of them stupidly clawing and grasping forward but none of them had yet breached the front door. I wanted in that house.

I climbed down, pulled the makeshift sling off of Colleen, knealt down and kissed her lightly on her rapidly cooling forehead. I grabbed Finn and put him in the sling, snugging him tightly against my chest, climbed up the rebar rings once more, and heaved myself and Finn up and over the side of the silo.

Cringing, silently cursing my damaged hand, and waiting for the bullet from the farmhouse to crash into my skull, I hurriedly climbed down the silo. I heard a shot ring out, then another, and another. Heart racing, I let go of the silo and fell the last ten feet to the ground, falling hard and not protecting myself with my hands as they were wrapped around Finn. Finn began to scream. The madman in the house put two more bullets into the silo above and the left of where I lay panting. Why would he be shooting at me when his home is surrounded by those creatures? I stood up, crouched low, and began to run toward the house, toward the man with the gun, and toward the hordes of undead, whose attention had now turned in our direction, and toward Finn's cries.

Redenbacher Blues

As a man who grew up in another world, a world where the dead stayed dead and where women and children didn't run through the countryside pursued by ravenous fetid corpses, I have had occasion to wonder what kind of a man I was. Certain other generations were not so much plagued by this question. They were plagued instead with war and famine and challenges of the mind, body, and spirit which I haven't known, and while I am dutifully grateful for the luxuries of being a product of the late twentieth century, I was never able to shake the nagging doubt. I heard stories, read novels, watched movies, all crowded with heroism and altruism, and I wondered, "What kind of man am I?" Would I stand tall in the face of danger, sacrifice myself; would I risk everything for a loved one? A stranger?

I was beginning to find the answers to my question.

When Colleen hit the grain, she and Finn sank with astonishing speed. The grain seemed to open for them, enfold them in countless tiny arms and simply pulled them in.

Another shot, this one so close to my left hand I felt the concrete shatter into stone shrapnel, slicing the top of my hand wide open and spraying my face and neck with tiny stone fragments. The blood from my flayed hand rained down onto the heads of the undead below. Horrifyingly, they opened their mouths and held out ruined blackened tongues to catch the droplets, like some nightmarish child hoping for a snowflake on a winter morning. A third shot, this one just closer still and a little higher up. I managed to avoid further damage, but whoever was shooting at me was clearly zeroing in and fast. Two shots in the seven or so seconds since Colleen and Finn sank below the grain. I leapt over the edge and heard a third shot crash into the concrete just before I hit the grain.

It was corn, popping corn to be exact. Round and hard and nearly uniform, they provided almost no surface tension and opened to accept me as readily as they had swallowed my family moments before.

What surprised me most was the sound, or rather the lack of it. The initial rustle of the myriad corn kernels brushing a slipping past one another was quickly repalced by a near total silence. And the darkness. God, back into the darkness. I felt my mind consulse and shiver at the thought of it. Even now I cannot sleep with the lights off.

Before hitting the grain I had taken a deep breath and I tried the only thing I could think to do. I pushed my arms in front of me and pulled, trying to swim through the slippery beads of corn. Almost immediately I found what I was looking for. I grabbed blindly at the flesh I felt at my fingertips, felt my hands close on arm, gripped and pulled.

There was no movement. Again I pulled, and again nothing. There was nothing for me to leveage the additional weight against. Flailing, desperate, I began in that dark silence to panic. Past the point of reason, I pulled with all of the strength I could still muster and jerked and twisted my body, letting the fear and panic control me. Had I been thinking clearly, I surely would have perished.

In my ridiculous desperate wiggling, my damaged hand struck something solid, sending a lightning bolt of pain shooting down my arm and jolting my oxygen starving brain to awareness. Grasping, I found a metal rod embedded in the wasll of that dark and terrible place and I pulled. I pulled until I felt my arms creaking, pulled until the tendons in my shoulders and back and neck threatened to tear, pulled harder, pulled until I could feel my body threatening to rip itself in half with the effort. I pulled again and again, felt something in my chest tighten suddenly, then give and tear, and I still I pulled. It was no longer black in that space, but a kaleidascope of color, fireworks bursting in my vision as the vessels of my eyes swelled and burst with the effort. Then we were moving, rising and the tension was a little less and just a little less and in a moment my face cleared the surface of the corn. I opened my mouth and eyes, sucked in great burning lungfuls of breath and with a final heave that threatened to pull something deep and permanent loose from its internal mooring I pulled my wife's face from below that hateful crop and into the light of day.

Reaching below, I fished blindly for Finn, found a small, fragile arm and yanked him free, setting him across the surface, glanced briefly at his fitfully rising chest, and passed out.

As for what kind of a man I am, I'm not sure I want to know anymore.

The Iron Chef Never Has to Deal With This Shit

“Over there! Fuck yes, and hurry. Everyone, listen up! You and you, whoever you are, start grabbing all the steel tables, turn up em upside down and push em against the wall. Let’s make those motherfuckers work to get in here.”

”You! Find as many mop handles, table legs and chair legs as you can break off and bring them here. You have two minutes. NOW!”

“I need oil of some kind, or lard or something slick, right now and lots of it, gallons if you can find it……..Perfect! Good, grab it and pour that shit all over the floor by the hole in the wall. Let’s try to make ‘em crawl to us.”

“Someone bring me a small sharp knife….., thank you. What’s your name? Fuck, right, sorry, anyway, I need you to get me as many small appliances with electric cords as you can right now. Be back here in one minute. As many as you can.”

“Colleen, find the thermostat for that walk in, turn it down as warm as you can, take Finn, and lock yourself in. Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP COLLEEN. THERE’S NO TIME FOR THIS. Sorry. Look, you can’t protect Finn and fight at the same time, I need you in that walk in right now, this isn’t a suggestion, GO, GO, GO”

“Okay, thanks for the knife. Where are my appliances? Get over here! Now! C’mon c’mon c’mon, that’s enough, FUCK!, there’s no time, bring them all here, now.”

“I need you to take this knife and cut the power cords off of the appliances, fast as you can and try to fray the edges, expose as much bare wire as you can.”

“Okay, every one listen up, I’m going to try and electrify the tables, if you touch the steel, you will die, so stay the hell away from them”

“Get over here, you, you, and you, and help me move these refrigerators. After they get through these tables, I want them bottle necking through here. MOVE MOVE COME ON! Push. Good, good, that’s fine. They’ll have to come between here now. Oh fuck I can hear them. Fuck, fuck fuck. “

“Enough, enough. Okay, listen up everyone, we have exactly no time. Everyone grab a chair leg or a broom handle or something, the longer the better. Hey! Put down the fucking knife, man, they don’t care if you cut them. We need to smash their fucking heads in, and that’s a lot harder to do than it sounds, so if you can trap them or immobilize them or whatever, good, great, we’ll come back for them if we live through this thing, but whatever you do don’t forget about them. They will grab you even if they are supremely fucked up, so stay away from the mangled ones. Stay together as much as you can.

“Here they come, here they come, Oh mother fuck me, here they come.”

I’d like to say that the rest of the battle was a blur, that it was over before we knew it, but it wasn’t. There’s a kind of hyper-clarity to the memories of a trauma that convinces me that if we were made, we were made by someone intent on sowing the seeds of our self-destruction into the very mechanics of our minds. They came full force, no trickle, no prelude, but a wave of them, stinking like raisins, sweet and musty and obscene, moaning that low dry sound, the sound of unthinking need. They came with their hands almost comically outstretched. I might have laughed if not for the knowing that their grasping claws were aimed at our soft, living flesh. When I close my eyes, I still hear them, much like you might feel the soft bob of the ocean even after you’re back from sea. When I eat, I smell them, and when I sleep, I feel those cold, hard hands pulling dumbly at my flesh.

The tables did slow them down at first. The electrical current turned them stiff as boards. From where I stood, table leg clenched in my hands like a bat, I could see every muscle in their bodies contracting, turning them to statues. They began to smoke and twitch. I hoped and feared that they would catch on fire, but none of them did. They just stood there looking rather like far too realistic Halloween decorations. But it didn’t last. It couldn’t. There were too many of them, and all too soon they had jostled the tables enough to knock the frayed loose wires clear. As quickly as they had turned to stone, they turned back, moving forward like a terrible switch had been thrown.

The oil on the floor worked no better. They fell all right, each one of them that I saw cross that slick tile floor went down in a heap, but they didn’t even try to stand back up, they just crawled forward, slipping less now they were on all fours. They came at us like animals, never once changing their terrible relentless pace. It was my intention to stay together, to try and hit them as they crawled toward us one at a time down the refrigerator hallway I had made, but our line broke before it had a chance to get started, and a young man rushed forward to club the closest ghoul to us. Even as he ran forward, I could see what was going to happen, I tried to warn him, but there was no time. One minute he was running forward, makeshift club raised for the killing blow, the next he hit the oil slick himself. His feet flew out from under him and he landed sickeningly on his head. Almost immediately, blood began to pool around him and his legs twitched spastically, beating a staccato rhythm on the tile. In a moment, the ghouls were on him, ripping and pulling, biting at any exposed flesh they could get. This was by far the most successful diversion. Another moment and the young man’s legs stopped twitching. Somewhere in that room, someone screamed. A man, a woman, I don’t know, but that scream unleashed the pent up fear and anger and sadness we all had been feeling since this nightmare began. In a moment, we were transformed into animals ourselves. We were rage embodied; we were each one of us the personifications of unchecked hate. We were no longer a group, but lone warriors that happened to be fighting the same enemy in different wars. As I ran forward, pistoning my club down upon the heads, necks and whatever else I could strike, I was no more aware of my comrades in battle than a tiger is aware of a fly. I struck everything that reached for me, everything that stank of death and threatened to destroy me, my life, my family.

As they pressed forward, I became aware, for a split second, that the woman in front of me was the same one that had been so kind to Colleen a few moments ago. Even as I recognized her I was striking the second and third blows, sending blood high into the air with each impact. Looking back, I believe she had turned. I know when I struck her, that she was already one of them; that she had changed before I struck her down. When I dream though, I still see that smile just before her face is crushed.

Just as I was pulling my club up again to face the next of them, I felt a great tug, and my table leg was pulled from my hand by the outstretched hand of a crawling zombie. As soon as he had the club he dropped it, reaching back up toward me. I was defenseless, surrounded. Desperate, I aimed a kick at its head. Its open jaw clicked shut hard, and from between the shut teeth fell the front half of the things tongue. I reached out a hand, flailing for anything to use to escape their terrible press. My hand hit metal and I grasped and swung for the first thing coming toward me. I saw with horror even as I swung, that I had nothing more substantial in hand than an enormous metal whisk. The flimsy metal wires bounced harmlessly off the face of the creature, and in moments I was in his grasp. His hands and arms worked to pull me closer to the snapping jaws of its mouth even as I pushed and struggled to keep him at bay, but he was stronger than I was, and my face was being steadily pulled closer and closer toward him. I searched about for something to use, some secret final something to get me out of here, when I saw the toaster.

It sliced through the air like a potentially delicious morning star, building speed and energy as it swung from its cord and ended its descent in the skull of the creature. Immediately, its hands released me and it fell to the ground. I spun around to see my savior, and was both grateful and horrified to see Colleen, standing without Finn, bloody toaster cord wrapped tightly around her hand.

“Finn’s fine. He’s in the freezer, and I think there’s a way out. C’mon” she said.

There will be time, there will be time, to murder and create

I have no idea what the hell is wrong with Colleen. As if it isn't enough that the goddamn world seems to have been infested (infected maybe?) with the un-fucking-dead, now I've got the damn wife passed out and muttering about hippies and quarantines and god knows what else. She passed out after we kicked down the first wall; a time that seems so long ago, but that I know (think, I don't really “know” anything these days) was still part of today. What does a day even mean anymore? There's no natural light down here (and while we're at that, can someone tell me just how in the hell we have power ?) and all of the other markers of a sane and routine existence have long since ceased to be. Its funny how so often my days have been defined by the proximity to a meal. In real life, I remember thinking, it's lunchtime, or almost time for dinner, or, my favorite, time for a midnight snack. Time was so closely tied to the normalcy of everyday things, of eating and sleeping and obligations like work and home, bath time for the kiddo, nap times. All the parts of a normal day had their own special time. So when the hell is drag-your-unconscious-muttering-wife-on-a-makeshift-hammock-
fashioned-from-a-blanket-through-a-secret-underground-military-
compound-that's-been-overrun-by-zombies-time? Huh? Just when the fuck is it time to look startled at a man whose become a leader of a sequestered people when he suggests that the only way to get out of the room currently besieged by dead accountants and high school students is to kick a hole through the plaster walls and hope that what lies on the other side is a room moderately more safe than the one we are in? And who in the jumping jesus christ on a crutch is going to tell me when its time to hand your infant son to some stranger and ask another to help you drag your wife through the tiny gaps in the walls even as the door behind you begins to crumble, splinter, and give in from the terrible weight of the hungry dead? I wonder, as I put my aching foot into and through the next wall only to feel my foot immediately gripped by cold iron hands that pull me off my feet, knocking me to the ground, just what the clock for these times looks like. Do we meet for lunch when the big hand reaches ghouls and the little hand is resting on the image of a small band of deliciously named strangers pulling on my shoulders to haul me back through and out of the reach of the hungry hands that are trying to rip and pull my leg through the gap I created in the wall? I'm hardly even surprised when they succeed, and I tumble backward into the room we are now trying to escape, the seventh such room, the seventh safe wall we've kicked through, and I hardly even feel anything anymore as I brush myself off, and turn to a different wall at a right angle to the one that is now alive with grasping hands and stupid hungry faces. It's time, I think a little crazily, to try a different wall. Without any real thought, without a plan, knowing that when all the options are equally unknowable, any attempt at knowing is a fruitless waste of what seemed to be very precious time, Sage and I wordlessly begin to kick at the plaster interior wall at a right angle to the wall we came through and also perpendicular to the wall of new threats, the pandoras box I just kicked open. We were hoping to use this method to avoid hallways and corridors, open passage areas, and so we had to be conscious as we navigated of where we thought the hallways would be. I imagined briefly what that moment would be, the first kick from my now wobbly legs noisily breaking the plaster, announcing like a dinner bell to the streaming, meandering undead that dinner was served. I could almost hear their moans growing louder as we inadvertently opened our tiny world up to the threat just a few inches of plaster away. All of these thoughts, these images (I never used to be a visual person, but when presented with horrors, my mind seems to have kicked itself into horror overdrive) flashed through my torn and exhausted imagination without registering an emotional response. At this point, I almost didn't care what happened. I was becoming a machine, reduced to fighting only because fighting was what was next. There it was again, I thought, hauling Colleen's unconscious form none too graciously over the powdered gypsum and between two wooden studs (wooden studs, this was an old facility) and into the next room, grateful for its interiority and silence. Next. Next room, next time, the time that follows or will follow this time. I felt myself becoming somewhat punchdrunk with the exhaustion of it all and didn't care. I looked around this new room, this room of now, and stopped thinking all together, gaping stupidly. We stood in a huge commercial kitchen, gleaming of stainless steel workspaces and industrial cook tops and ranges. A massive steel door revealed a walk in freezer or cooler, and I could hear the almost insanely comforting and familiar hum of its compressors. Dinner time I thought both sarcastically and with total seriousness. I was hungry. Very very hungry. I tried to remember when I had last eaten and realized I didn't know, couldn't remember, didn't care. What I cared about was eating now, eating next, and eating a lot. I became aware a moment later of Finn's screaming and realized he'd been crying, bawling really, for who knew how long. Who could blame him. This wasn't a baby's world, hell it wasn't an adults world. This was a world where only the mad felt safe, and they were wrong to feel it. This was the place, I realized. This was where we had to make a stand. This kitchen, these freezers, all of it was ours to claim, and our only chance to survive. We had to eat now, or be eaten. Even as I realized this, I saw the same thing flash across Sage's eyes and we looked to each other grimly. Something terrible was going to happen here. He knew it; I knew it, and we both knew, even as we began to slide a huge stainless steel freezer to block the hole in the wall we had just climbed though, that it was time.

My chimpanzee wears a flight suit

We made it about halfway down the hall when we heard the screaming start. Sage, tied to the wheelchair, bloody glass held to his throat, tried to turn in the direction of the commotion, but winced and pulled back. The razor sharp glass sliced him shallowly but cleanly across his throat, tracing the direction of his turned head with a thin line of blood. I hurried the wheelchair down the hallway, neither of us talking, both of us knowing in the back of our minds what those screams meant. Silently, Sage pointed his way through the maze of corridors. I was running now, holding the glass only loosely in my hand and away from his throat as the sound of the screams grew more insistent. A bit out of breath, sweating with exertion and fear, we stood outside a door, next to which a small placard said simply, Nursery. I looked down at Sage, who nodded, but otherwise did not move.
“Turn the handle, Sage.” I said
He calmly reached forward, gripping the metallic handle and opening the door wide. I pushed the chair forward and entered the room.

It was a nursery unlike any I'd ever seen. When you think of a nursery, ones mind typically drifts to wall murals of puppies or smiling cartoon characters, of cheerful colors and toy boxes, diaper bins, and night lights. This nursery had none of these. In neat, military order, stood clear plastic bassinets atop bare metal stands with casters. There were dozens of them, in long perfect rows stretching down the length of the long, narrow room. Harsh fluorescent light saturated the room, exposing the pneumatic bank teller tubes that came down next to each of the bassinets. At the same time that I understood what I was seeing in the teller tubes, I also noticed the harsh metal grid that covered the top of each of bassinet. I had enough time to wonder why these people had turned the bassinets into cages, when I saw Finn.

It was clear that whoever had taken him had tried to make him comfortable, but it was equally clear that this “nursery” was not equipped for children nearing their first birthday. He was sleeping, apparently safe and sound, but was laying on a heap of blankets and towels surrounded by a stack of upturned clear plastic bassinets that were forming a ring and thus a make shift playpen around him. With a sense of relief greater than I had known possible, and far more visceral than I expected, I rushed toward him. Only as I bent to retrieve him did I notice that I was still clutching the shiv that had gotten me this far, and it was then that I realized that Sage was no longer under my control. Wide eyed, I swiveled around, half expecting the old man to be running for the door or inches away from me with murderous intent. Instead, he sat calmly in the wheelchair, smiling bemusedly at me, as if he couldn't understand my relief at finding my son intact. I looked at Sage for only another moment, then I reached out, and still keeping my eyes locked onto those of the old man, I set the shard down in the nearest empty bassinet. Then I turned away from him, bent down, and picked up my son.

He stirred a little when I picked him up, and his tiny moan of sleepy complaint reassured me of his basic safety once again. Clutching him, I turned to see Sage, still seated in the chair, gingerly exploring the shallow wound around his neck. Smiling, he said, “So, shall we collect your bride then?” and without another word rose nimbly from the chair and began toward the door. I had no choice but to follow.

Entering the hall jolted me out of the grateful reverie I had been feeling. I could hear a low steady humming sound that I at first took to be some enormous machine, but which I realized a moment later was a deep, throaty moaning that seemed to fill the corridors with the thrum of hungry, stupid, violence. Hurrying now, Sage and I raced further through the labyrinthine hallways, and I had to concentrate as I ran in order to read the signs that marked our progress. With some alarm, I noticed the words quarantine as we pushed first through one set of double doors, bursting into what looked to be a large showering room, and pushed almost immediately again through another heavy set of doors. We were now clearly in a hospital setting. The institutional paint on the walls, the large centrally located desk with a bank of monitors (only one of which was on, and on which was displayed a blinking alarm), and the steady monotonous beep of some impossible and necessary machines. The moaning had grown fainter as we ran, and we began to slow to a walk as we made our way through what was obviously the quarantine wing of what I was coming to realize was a very large compound. Sage paused for a moment before a door simply marked “recovery,” then turned the handle and entered the dark room.

From inside, I heard the thick grunt of someone exerting a mighty effort followed by a deafening crash. I rushed forward and threw open the door, Finn was now awake and began to scream. It was probably the sound of that cry that saved Sage from another kick, as he lay tightly curled on the floor against the wall, holding his right side. Colleen's foot was poised above his face and was ready to drop onto his face, but she didn't bring her foot crashing down. Instead she looked up at Finn and myself and began to weep even as she abandoned her attack and scrambled to her feet.

There was little time for a reunion however. Even as we held one another, Colleen now grasping Finn to her chest as if fearful he would disappear from her arms again, a middle aged woman followed by Hawthorne breathlessly dived into the room. I realized even as they turned to shut the door that I could hear that moaning again, now much louder and more insistent. If a sound that never changes pitch or tone could seem excited, this one did, somehow seeming to build in intensity as well as volume even as Hawthorne threw himself against the door and locked it, sliding with his back down the heavy wooden door with a sigh of obvious gratitude. Sage was wincing, but beginning to extricate himself from the metal food cart that he had crashed into on his ignominious crash to the floor. Looking around at the room we were in for the first time, I could see a cot that had been rigged with straps, a rather more normal hospital bed covered in what looked to be very old, but very serious blood stains, heavy duty ceiling mounted surgical lighting, a row of monitors, blood pressure cuffs and other assorted medical paraphernalia, and a large armoire. In short, it looked rather like a birthing suit at an advanced but not terribly hygienic hospital. I shuddered to think of what went on in this room that caused all of that blood, and caused whoever it was in charge of this place to deem it unnecessary or too dangerous to clean.

Even as my mind began to mull these things over however, the first of the pursuing undead thudded into the door, fingernails hungrily scraping and clawing at the thick wooden door with such vigor that I immediately began to fear that they may, given time, make some progress. A second later and the next ghoul sent a shudder through the door frame, colliding with all the force of its ravenous desire, then another, and another, each body sending vibrations through the door and floor, shaking small flakes of ceiling dust upon our heads, landing in our hair like drywall snowflakes. Impossibly, this continued for the better part of an hour. Sometimes there would be several minutes between new ghouls, sometimes only seconds or less. I counted at least fifty of them out there, each pressing against the next, clawing and scraping, and most horribly of all, moaning. Finn was screaming now, inconsolable even as he fed from Colleen in the farthest corner of the room. Without thinking, without saying a word to one another, Sage, Hawthorne, and the woman whose name I didn't yet know and I began to push, pull and slide every single thing we could move up against the door.

When there was literally nothing left to pile against the door, I looked at Sage. He looked back, still calm, but no longer wearing that infuriating “What, me worry?” half smile.
“I think,” I said, “it's time for an explanation.”

The old man nodded simply, and sat down indian-style on the linoleum. He motioned for me to join him, and I did, sitting across from him. The others sat too, and Colleen scooted from the back corner of the room, still fiercely clutching Finnegan. We formed a small circle, a band of six survivors, so far, of this madness. Clearing his throat, Sage began to speak.

“Of all the men and women who are part of this project, I'm the oldest. I've been living down here since I was born in 1947. I was part of the original experiment, at least that's what I've been able to gather. I don't remember any adults living here as part of the project I mean, not when I was a kid. There were fifteen of us then, and we lived here from the moment of our births, and for at least fourteen of us, until our deaths.” He looked significantly at the besieged door, and added, “and probably the fifteenth as well. Most of the others here are our offspring, our children if you can call them that, although we were never really their parents. None of us ever had any family other than good old Uncle Sam, and he sent his finest to do the dirty work, changing diapers every three hours like clockwork, and feeding and bathing us on a tidy schedule. I never found out if the project had a name, they didn't really talk to us about what was going on, but they talked about us, and around us enough to know that I was part of the alpha group, and I know enough of my greek alphabet to assume then that I was part of that first wave. You are sitting right now in what I think may be the largest underground city the world has ever constructed. I've been exploring it, mapping it really, in detail now for the better part of twenty years, and I still find a new passage every few months. This place is big, bigger than you can possibly imagine, and as far as I know, we're the only humans left. Make no mistake though, we're not alone.” He looked again at the door, “and I don't just mean them. You see, after World War II, Uncle Sam got it into his head that he needed test subjects, human test subjects, and lots of them. They weren't trying to build perfect soldiers or any of that crap, they just needed plenty of human material that they could experiment on, test new drugs, new gases, new viruses, new weapons, and sometimes all of these at once. That's where we came in. We were grown here you see. You've heard of test tube babies? Well we're the next logical step, only taken by Uncle Sam long before the private sector ever even dreamt of fertilizing the egg out of the womb. We are quite literally the product and property of the United States government, born as children of cold war hysteria and biological advances as questionable as any drummed up by the Fuhrer himself. Mostly, they weren't trying to grow full people, only parts that could be independently tested, experimented on, fucked with. A lung here to test the oxygen absorption rates of poisonous gases, an eye there to set maximum levels of radioactive exposure against soft tissue. We, the people, so to speak, were walking petri dishes, and nothing more. One by one, those that I knew, I guess you could call them my family, fell victim to an experiment that went too far, but not until enough of them was harvested for the next generation of human guinea pigs to be cloned. It was only a matter of time then until I met my own fate, called from my cell and led to my medically approved death. I was saved by the very thing that emptied this facility, by the accident.”

Sage trailed off, looking off into a past I could not imagine. Just as he opened his mouth to speak, Colleen interrupted, the anger and fear in her voice cutting through the room, “I don't really think we have time for this right now. Does anyone know how the hell we're gonna get out of here, cuz I'm not sitting in this room with my baby waiting to die.”

Sage's eyes snapped back into gentle focus, “I think I know a way.”

Turned Tables

The tip of the long triangular glass shard pressed against the base of the woman's throat, indenting the soft flesh, my shaking hand tracing a tiny cut back and forth as the first drops of blood begin to slowly well up from the shallow wound. Dimly, I could hear the young woman's panicked breathing, just as I was vaguely aware of the rise and fall of her chest as she struggled for enough air to calm her panic. My left forearm clamped tightly around the side of her neck, and I used as much pressure as I dared without choking her. Looking down at the hand that moments ago had punched its way through an observation window in the medical suite we now found ourselves in, the hand that, with its partner, had battered two members of this cult just hours earlier, I marveled at its effectiveness. My hand, already beginning to bleed from the press of the sharp glass against palm, knuckles grotesquely bruised, purple, and swollen, strips of thin pink flesh hanging limply in jagged tiger stripes from the tips of my fingers to the top of my elbow. Looking down at that great tool of our humanity, five fingers, a thumb, and, when necessary, a fist, I steadied my hand and my resolve. They took my wife. They took my son. If I had to take one or all of their lives to get them back, I was steadfastly determined to do so.

As we stood there, panting amid the upturned exam table, rolls of gauze and tape littering the floor, obscuring somewhere in their midst the syringe loaded with god knew what that had surely been meant for me, I considered my options. I didn't want to kill this woman, at least not yet. Over the past few days, my compunction about killing my fellow man had waned significantly, but I still didn't feel like a murderer inside. Besides, I needed this girl's heart to continue thumping in her chest for a least a while longer until I could figure out an angle and gain some real leverage in the situation.

I stood there thinking, the slim, older man who had accompanied this woman to the medical suite where I was locked, started to back slowly toward the door that led down the hallway. I locked eyes with him to let him know that I saw him, and he froze I realized that they must see me as a madman right now.I had hours earlier beaten two of them as badly as I was able until I realized they had taken Finn, and now I had another of their friends gasping for air with a shard of bloody window glass at her throat.Trying to regain some measure of sanity over an already insane situation, I looked hard at the man.

"Hey, buddy.What's your name?" The man started at the sound of my voice and I realized that I hadn't actually spoken until now.

"Your name buddy." I said, more forcefully and with growing anger, "What is your fucking NAME?” He gulped a bit, and stammered, "Hawthorne...what are you going to do to Ginger?"

I paused for a moment to calm down, then forced myself to speak as calmly and amiably as I could "I'm gonna kill her where we stand if you don't find a way to bring me my wife and my son, in one piece and in about two minutes Hawthorne." The girl, Ginger (I hated knowing her name) sobbed when she heard this, and I tightened my grip around her neck. Hawthorne stared stupidly at me for a moment, as if he couldn't believe what was happening. Then something in his eyes changed and he turned and ran down the hall. I heard his footsteps retreat as his shoes slapped the linoleum floor.

It's a long two minutes, holding a hostage. Not a lot to keep your thoughts at bay, and as each moment passes your mind oscillates wildly. You begin to wonder if you have the nerve to do this thing, to kill this person who has, reluctantly to be sure, protected you so far. You wonder if maybe you shouldn't just let go, make a break for it. Maybe kill the girl as a diversion. I tried to think of a story from the news or even a movie or television show where the hostage taker came out ahead. All that came to mind were murder suicides, police snipers, and swat teams. Not a lot of comforting thoughts.

I heard the sound of footsteps approaching. I am annoyed and a little unnerved that they sound so...casual, the footsteps of a Sunday stroll. When Hawthorne steps into the room, it is with a renewed confidence. Behind him, an older man, bald with a short cropped white beard. He had the look of a modern-day Freud without the pipe or pretension. I distrusted him immediately. I was clearly the only one. Upon his arrival into the room, I could feel Ginger relax a little and her ragged breath turned into even, steady gasps. This was a development I wasn't expecting. Clearly, this man was in charge around here, and he showed no outward sign of concern over the sight of one of his (followers?) friends clutched back to belly with an apparent lunatic. I sensed immediately that he would try and defuse me, to talk me down as it were. I immediately sought to defuse myself and thus foil his gambit by remaining calm and steady.

Who are you?" I demanded, striving to keep my voice in check.

"My name is Sage," the man spoke calmly, evenly, "who are you?"

I debated about giving him my real name for a moment before I answered, "Tom. Where's my family, Sage?"

"They're safe, just like you are, and just like I know Ginger is. You're not a killer Tom; I know that. So why don't you just let Ginger go, and we'll talk about this." He sounded comfortable, confident, like a man who was used to having people follow his lead. I tried to disappoint him.

"Why don't we talk about this right now, with Ginger here?"

He sighed as if my answer upset him and looked down for a moment. In a flash, his head snapped back up and he had a pistol aimed at us. I felt Ginger tense, and before I could do more than tighten my grip on her neck and twist, he fired. Instead of the sharp report I expected, there was a soft whoosh of gas escaping at speed. That small defensive twist was all I needed however and the dart hit Ginger in the shoulder. Almost immediately, she began to sag. As she fell, I was forced down with her until she lay passed out propped against me, both our butts solidly on the cool linoleum floor. Her unconscious body formed a near perfect shield, but completely pinned me to the ground. Getting up and running was out of the question. I decided to force my hand. I held up the shard of glass, now sticky with my own blood, and showed it to Sage. Slowly, deliberately, I lowered the tip to her throat and started to push. Almost immediately, blood began to run from her neck. So far, I knew the wound was superficial at best, but it wouldn't take much of a slip to end this poor girl's life. This was a bluff, but I had to make it look real. I pressed harder and the first couple of millimeters of the makeshift blade disappeared into Ginger's flesh. The blood began to flow a little more freely. Although not the rhythmic spurt of an arterial gush, it was a steady stream of crimson now.

"All right, all right," said Sage wearily, "I'll take you to them. Just let Ginger go."

"No deal. The girl comes with me.I want a wheelchair and I want it now.I'm done playing games here."

Sage nodded to the tall man who ran a short way down the hall.In the moment he was gone, Sage and I stared at one another, each desperately trying to find weakness in the other. Soon enough, Hawthorne returned with the wheelchair and made as if to push it toward me. Realizing I couldn't maintain my position and move the unconscious girl into the chair, I settled on a new ploy.

"No. Sage, you get in the chair." Hawthorne made as if to protest but was waved off by Sage, who sighed another world-weary sigh and sat reluctantly in the chair. Hawthorne looked confused and terrified. "Okay, now Hawthorne, turn the chair around and wheel him, back first to me." He turned the wheelchair around and pushed it to about three feet in front of me. "Closer Hawthorne, all the way to my feet." He obeyed, but stood there unsure what to do next. "Okay, now you go out into the hallway and stay turned away from me. I want to see your back. If you so much as twitch, I'll kill both of them, so this is on you, get it?" He nodded and began walking into the hallway. When he got about a dozen paces into the hallway he stopped. Slowly, carefully, I stood up, letting Ginger go for the first time in an eternity. I stepped forward to the back of the chair. "Put your arms behind your back." He did as he was told, and I watched those arms fixedly as I knelt down, heart in my throat, and pulled a shoelace as quickly as I could from my shoe. I tied his hands together and put the shard of glass to a new throat. "Time for us to take a little walk Sage. I'll drive, you navigate.Take me to my wife."

Somnolent Wishes

I prefer my dreams to reality lately. In my dreams, I am nearly always powerful. In my dreams, I am ready and equipped. I dream of a competent, quick moving me. Like I said, I prefer my dreams to reality.
Colleen doesn’t know what happens when the men and women separate every morning. She has no idea that while the women gather and work, laboring together inside the camp, safe on the interior of the fences, digging latrines and building a tidy little infrastructure, we are taken outside for a different kind of work.
The trucks always come to the side of the camp furthest from where the women are working. No one actually told us not to tell the girls where we go or what we do all day, but no one has to. Even on the first day out, we knew something was wrong. As we civilians climbed into the camouflaged transports, a silence crashed onto us, rendering each of us still and mute. Not a man amongst us even looked up as the trucks bounced along. Heads down and silent, each of us recognized how truly alone we were at that moment.
We would eventually learn to look forward to those quiet rides in the transport trucks, moments of silence, no spouses to look into the eyes of, no hard eyed soldiers gripping guns like talismans.
They called it, “Bioreactive Containment and Disposal.” I never really got over the grand presumption of the military, finding such important sounding names for sorting the corpses, former military in one pile, usually smaller and fresher, the undead in another much larger and infinitely more fetid pile. The strongest, healthiest of us were usually handed a small four pound sledgehammer right out of the truck. I think this was why the grunts knew they didn’t need to tell any of us not to say anything. “How was your day today honey?” I could hear Colleen asking. “Oh, no big deal,” I would reply, “Spent the morning caving in the skulls of mostly dead soldiers and immobilized civilian zombies with a sledgehammer. Then we poured gas on the lot of them and gave them the Auschwitz treatment. Typical day at the office.”
Some days, if the skirmishes the night before were lower key, we would get a break from the gruesome task of ‘Bioreactive Containment and Disposal’ and we would reinforce the fences and other defenses that surrounded the camp. Twelve hours laboring in the sun, building and repairing fences and that felt like a vacation, anything not to feel the terrible weight of that sledgehammer in my hands. I asked one of the soldiers the first day if they called our work on the fence “Non Oxidative Metallic Structure Construction and Maintenance.” Without a smile, I was handed a large pair of bolt cutters. I decided to keep them.
And now I find myself here, in this cornfield, with what I can only assume is an overrun military camp behind me, an abandoned town in the middle of corn country nearby, and my infant son sleeping fitfully on my chest. Before we left camp, I dreamt of protecting Colleen and Finn. In my dream, I was armed and confident. Here, I’m exhausted and exposed, and my only defense for my family is a pair of bolt cutters. I close my eyes, and for the first time since I held it in my hands, I found myself wishing for that tiny sledgehammer. Colleen said she would take first shift. I only hope that the rustle the cornfields make will warn us if any of them show up.

School Daze

I know precisely what madness looks like. I can identify the impossible juxtaposition of the real and the unreal; I know the chaos. I know the smell, sweet like rotten flesh, and thick like the musk of a cornered and rabid animal, and you cannot help but breathe it in; in and out mechanically, inexorably drawing the fetid stench of raw death further and deeper into you. Soon, the chaos around you settles into your bones, it becomes you, propping you up; your very being dependent on it until you feel stretched thin and tight around it, flesh beating like some hellish drum across the face of insanity. Time slows, and pauses, but despite what they say, it never stops, eager to show you the next gory vignette. Here a woman huddled over her toddler, shielding his corpse as shuffling damnation slowly closes the last gap that will ever matter for her. Even when you try and look away, that moment burns, stays inside you, and even when you try to shake it, try to move your eyes, to shift, to run, you become awash, swept up and away into the next mad moment. Madness creeps into you, it drifts up into your brain like vapor, penetrating you even as the screams and moans of fear and rage and stupid, unthinking hunger bounce and echo off the same cheerfully colored cinderblock walls that once bounced and echoed the joyous shouts of children, children almost certainly now lost to a walking, grinding abomination. There is no way not to take in the screams of impossible agony and terror. Sounds of madness drift like a soft killing mist around you, and you are covered, blanketed in thick, wet woolen horror. I daresay, I know madness, and for a moment, maybe two, I was consumed by it, became it, and reveled in the terrible glory of awful and final knowing.

It was maybe two minutes, maybe less, that I stood stock still, dumbstruck as they poured in, filling the gymnasium like some cold writhing tsunami of rotting death. I watched, even as they moved further and further toward us; I watched as they cornered a woman and a terrified boy of no more than three (Did I know her? Maybe I did, earlier perhaps, even today. It seemed so long ago already). I was powerless, unable to move, rooted in the glossy wooden gym floor as one of them, a bald, fat man, obscenely naked except for a John Deere trucker hat and a terrible dry maroon gash in the fat of his prodigious belly, grabbed the child with his enormous, fat hands. I watched as the child was pulled and shaken, first screaming, then more terribly still, silent, an impossible tug of war between ghoul and mother. It takes so little time for a life to extinguish, quick as a candle flame.

I think it was the child’s flopping, lifeless head whipping back and forth that snapped me out of it. I blinked, and in a moment was back, present and accounted for, stranded in the center of the gym, Colleen holding Finn who was wailing. He was nearly impossible to hear over the din of slaughter and fear. I think my inaction saved us, or at least bought us the few moments we needed. As the dead piled through the door, everyone retreated, yelling and screaming, running to the sides and rear of the gymnasium, becoming trapped against locked doors and immobile walls. Standing in the heart of the carnage, we were almost invisible, unmoving. I looked forward, to the door they were still streaming into. A few feet back from the door, lay a dead soldier, and above him three of the politely, almost affectionately referred to “infected” crouched over his lifeless body feeding like lions on the savannah. Near him, unused, was his assault rifle, and on his belt, what looked to be a pretty serious pistol.

I turned to Colleen and, knowing it was the only way to guarantee she would not argue, I screamed at her, “Right fucking behind me! Not a foot, not a fucking foot away from me! Now!” and I took off running toward the dead soldier and toward the streaming masses of undead.

As I ran, I slowed for a moment and grabbed one of the aluminum and canvas cots. I braced it hard against my chest, crouched low, still running and slammed into the the feeding undead, feeling Colleen pounding along behind me.

The force of the impact sent the three sprawling from the corpse, and I fell, hard to the unforgiving gym floor. I tasted blood and felt a bit of a tooth and what I thought was the tip of my tongue swirling like a coppery stew in my mouth. There was no pain and I swallowed instinctively, pulling the broken bits of my mouth into my stomach. Crazily, I thought “Best fucking meal since we got here.” I scurried quickly on my hands and knees searching for the gun like a lifeline. I found it, and as soon as my hands closed around it, Colleen screamed.

I stood up, swinging the rifle as I came up and slamming the butt of the gun up under the chin of the zombie who had closed in on my wife and child. The impact shocked my hands, and I grimaced, struggling to keep hold of the rifle. The thing’s head snapped up, hard and fast, and its head seemed to lock at an unnatural angle. It went down like a tongue of bricks.

I looked around. They were coming in around us in a circle of gaping death, closing the gap to no more than ten or twelve feet in a ring around us. I looked down at the gun, flipped the safety off, and took aim.

Thankfully, the gun was not set to fully automatic, and I was able to shoot carefully. I shot and spun, shot and spun. I didn’t hit my target everytime, I won’t pretend I did. I was scared, but a strange calm had settled over me, and I started putting bullet after bullet into their stupid groaning skulls. One by one, they began to fall, forming a small wall of twice murdered corpses around us. Colleen was crouched with Finnegan, watching my back as I aimed, shot, aimed, and shot. When one of them got too close, she would tug on my pant leg, giving me the time to swivel around, aim, and shoot.

The ghouls had stopped coming in through the door, and after what seemed like hours, but couldn’t have been ten minutes, the gymnasium was clear. Colleen and I stood, lone survivors in the center of a scene of such bloody wrath it would have seemed impossible in any but this mad new world we found ourselves in. I looked down at the dead soldier whose gun had saved our lives. Stooping, I closed his eyelids, then stripped him of two more clips, his pistol, and two clips for that. I tried to hand the pistol to Colleen, but she shook her head, eyes terrified, but clear, sane, and with perfect understanding. Without another word, we ran out, into the camp.

Everywhere, fires burned. A semi truck was crashed through the razor wire fencing, trailer open. Around us, we heard gunfire, small explosions, screams, and moans. Gesturing for Colleen to follow, we ran out of the camp, and into the fields of corn that seemed to stretch for miles.

Garage Days

I cannot pretend I wasn’t angry. I had camped out for a while on the roof of the garage looking for any sign of Colleen and Finn. That is, until I started coughing.
I couldn’t help it. The acrid fumes from the burning house were drifting toward me, covering me in thick, oily black smoke. I wondered vaguely which of my treasured belongs was being incinerated and spewed into the air, drifting onto me, covering my body, burning my eyes, and caking my lungs with what seemed like pure acid. Were these fumes the photos of my family; were they charred and vaporized bits of wedding gifts, or the ashen remains of the dogs I had yet to move out of the house before the fire began? Regardless, I could see through the smoke wandering figures moving through the neighborhood. They didn’t seem particularly interested in the burning house, but once I started coughing, they grew very interested indeed.
I tried to stop coughing, but sitting on the roof, the smoke was thick and heavy, and I couldn’t get away from it. Within a couple of minutes, there were six of them moaning and reaching for me up on the roof. A few moments later and there were a bakers dozen, all groping and clawing at the garage, as if they could climb straight up its walls by the sheer force of their indomitable hunger. I looked around frantically, still coughing, tears streaming from my burning eyes, hoping to find something other than the couple of crowbars I had grabbed earlier. I desperately began peeling off shingles from the rooftop and slinging them down at the creatures below. I must have thrown fifty of them when I noticed something. Not only was this a grossly ineffectual waste of time, but the ghouls didn’t even raise a hand to protect themselves. As shingle after shingle whizzed into their heads and faces, often opening wide, if not particularly devastating wounds on them, they quite literally didn’t blink. They just kept scratching and clawing upward in the same dead mechanical motion. Experimentally, I took my longest crowbar and held it loosely down toward the unruly mob. Although they pawed at my nearer arm with some renewed vigor, not one of them thought a moment to reach up and grab a hold of the steel bar that waived down at them. I lay on my belly, and reaching out as far as I dared, I swung the bar in a wide pendulum arc and crashed the steel of the crowbar into the skull of the nearest zombie. The horrid thing’s skull cracked with a sort of hard thud, and the old woman’s corpse unceremoniously fell to the pavement below. In a moment, another zombie filled in the gap left by the fallen monster and met the same fate. One by one, they came into striking range, and one by one, I crushed their skulls. It was easier and easier as their bodies built a grisly stepstool, bringing each of them closer and closer into the reach of my swinging steel.
As soon as they were dispatched, I jumped down and opened the garage ducking inside. As much as I wanted a better view to wait for Colleen and Finn, I needed to breathe, and no view was going to do Colleen any good if I was swarmed by hordes of the undead.
Amusingly, I wasn’t in the garage organizing my provisions much more than twenty minutes when I heard Colleen screaming and yelling. I opened the door. Over their shoulders, I saw what looked like the whole neighborhood shuffling and rumbling their way toward us. I nearly threw them inside and slammed the door shut. There was little time for celebration. I held my wife and son for only a few minutes, breathing in their scent, and crying softly in gratitude. Our reunion was interrupted a few moments later by the sound of their hands scratching and clawing insistently at the heavy garage door. It was impossible to tell how many were out there, but their sound grew louder and louder as more and more of them tried to scratch their way in. I knew we couldn’t stay here too much longer. Sooner or later, either they would get in or we would be forced out for food or water.
I handed Colleen a hatchet and a small crowbar. I had Excalibur tucked in my belt, a crowbar in one hand and a large shovel in the other. Hastily, I pushed the lawnmower over to the main door and turned it on, clamping a zip cord over the throttle to keep it going. I hoped the sound of the lawn mower would draw them to the front of the garage. Without waiting to see if it worked, I jumped onto a worktable and kicked out a boarded window in the rear of the garage.
Thankfully, there were no zombies immediately behind the garage. I climbed out, and Colleen followed, climbing out the window with some difficulty. Trying to stay as quiet as we could, I hopped my back fence, and again helped Colleen over. Staying low and quiet, we jogged quickly to the neighbors house.
I broke the window in the door, reached inside and unlocked the door without a moments hesitation. Funny how quickly we lose our social taboos in a crisis. We hurried into the dark and silent house, straining to hear the sound of undead footsteps above our frantic beating hearts and panicked breath. I heard nothing, but didn’t feel too reassured. Once I had checked each room of the house, I relaxed a little. In a small wooden box hanging above a coathook in the hallway, I found a neatly labeled display of what I assumed were spare keys, and including what I had been hoping for, car keys. Without a word, and with Finnegan strangely sleeping through it all, Colleen and I crept into the garage, got into the dark green SUV that waited for us there. Feeling safer, I backed out of the garage, pausing only briefly at my burned out shell of a home and the dozens of undead pawing and moaning at my garage door.
I thought we were in the clear, at least for a while, but as I turned onto route thirty, I was immediately forced to a stop. In front of me was what looked like a military blockade, and without a moments hesitation, three soldiers leveled their rifles at us in an unmistakable sign of hostility. Quickly, and not particularly kindly, we were forced out of the SUV. It looked like martial law had been affected, and it looked like we were stuck right in the middle of it all.

Contact

I thought I had it all pretty much covered. You see, the idea was to fortify the house in such a way that I wouldn’t even have contact. Seems funny now, watching the house I spent so many hours renovating burn to ground from the roof of my garage.

I never got to work on the garage. The garage was supposed to be fixed up this year. I had big plans. Of course that tends to be me in a nutshell: big plans, a lot of stalling, and poor execution. Poor execution. Maybe not such a great choice of words considering. I’m trapped here on the roof, my neighbor’s corpse sluggishly bleeding in the middle of my suburban driveway, watching a blaze roar through my house and all I hear is Flanders voice in my head, “We’re in a dilly of pickle.” Good to know I haven’t lost my sense of morbid humor at least.

My neighbor was a nice guy; I guess was being the operative word here. I could never remember his damn name, but we’d wave genially at one another as we went about our lives. I was thrilled when he moved in and started sprucing up his yard. Until his corpse became what I suspected was at least a semi permanent fixture in the driveway, he really prettied things up around here. Until he attacked that is.

The thing is, I really thought I did a good job on the house. I put those cheap little motion alarms on all the windows and double boarded them as well. I had plywood screwed into the studs running first horizontally across all the windows, then a separate small sheet backing that up running vertically. Its really amazing how quickly you can get things done when it doesn’t matter what it looks like. If anything tried to get in a window, the alarms would sound once the glass broke, then whatever, or whoever it was would have to get through two sheets of ¾ inch plywood. Even if it wouldn’t keep everything out forever, at the very least it would slow them down. I put old school four by four braces up across the front door that no one uses, and where I thought I was really clever was by the side door. This was the door everyone really used to get in and it was the most vulnerable, being at ground level. I built a braced frame at forty five degrees to the inside of the door so that anything that broke through would be automatically forced down into the basement. Granted this is where Pretzel, our tenant lived, but he wasn’t home and I figured it was time for all of us to make sacrifices. To get upstairs I built a door into the artificial wall that was padlocked and that could be braced shut by more four by fours. It wasn’t pretty, not even close, but it was built strong. By the end of the building I was getting pretty tired. I had hauled up all of our camping stuff into the upstairs and was headed back from the garage with a handful of tools when I saw him standing in my hallway.

Like a dumbass, a tired and worried dumbass, but a dumbass nonetheless, I had left the door open while I made my trips out to the garage. I don’t know when he got in, but there he was, big as day, black as night, and covered with what I assumed was his own blood. Vaguely, I could hear my phone ringing over the sound of my heart beating. Both sounds seemed incredibly loud. Without hesitating a second, he started to come at me. In the movies, they moan, but I didn’t hear anything but the sound of my own panicked breathing. I backed up into my kitchen as he closed the gap, not fast, but steady, and cut off my escape down the stairs. I looked at the other door and realized that it would take me too long to get past my own defenses. Even as I looked around, he kept coming, ever closing that distance. I dropped the tools in my hands and kept backing up. He was in the exact worst spot now, blocking the living room and the stairs leading down and out of the house. I searched around for a weapon, but as you might imagine didn’t have anything more deadly than a chef’s knife in my kitchen. I had stowed all of my camping gear in the dining room and I quickly made for that, remembering the small, dull old hatched I always keep in our stuff. Throwing aside sleeping bags and a tent, I got to the big Tupperware bin with all of our camping gear I threw aside propane tanks, coleman fuel, garbage bags, waterproof matches, and other useless shit. Just as my hands closed on the hatchet, I felt incredibly strong hands dig into my shoulders pull me off balance back into the kitchen.

In what seemed like an instant, he was on me, snapping his jaws like an angry dog, inches from my face. He was so strong, that really surprised me, and he didn’t stop pressing for even a second. I know for sure that if this had been a fair fight he would have killed me. In another moment, I would have felt his cold (he was so cold) teeth clamp down, crushing their way through my thin pathetic skin, grinding muscle and fat until the skin burst, not from being cut open, but from the pressure of his unskakeble jaws. It would only have been another moment if I hadn’t been able to bring the tiny hatchet up and around and club him in the left ear. I didn’t hit him smoothly, or even particularly hard, but it was enough to scramble free, panting with exertion and fear. As I pulled myself up, I must have bumped the stove and lit one of the burners. I heard them clicking and smelled the rotten egg smell of gas, and, as I stumbled forward I heard the woompf of the gas catching and then the familiar flutter of the blue flames flicking back and forth in the open air. My neighbor stood, bracing himself on the stove in a disturbingly familiar pantomime of humanity. He didn’t even blink when his hands touched the blue flames. He didn’t turn his head when his shirt caught on fire. He just kept coming after me, so fucking steadily. I ran down the stairs and out the door. I should have shut the door, trapped that burning fuck in the house and let him roast in the hell he made for himself, but I still didn’t want to abandon the house. I didn’t know yet that the flames had spread onto the nylon fabric sleeping bags that lay next to where we had been struggling. Instead, I waited outside the door, panting, hatchet raised above my head. When that flaming monstrosity calmly stepped out of the front door, I brought that tiny axe down onto his exposed skull with all the strength I had, driving its dull steel blade past the scalp, splitting the skull, and finally stopping rammed deep into the monsters brain, about halfway through his right ear. He dropped (oh thank god he dropped) like a stone to the ground, pulling my hatchet out of my hands. Slow, thick blood, blood like cherry jello, coagulated and dark, spilled from his ruined head. Without a second thought I grabbed the hatchet, using my foot to brace his head and pulled it from his skull like Excalibur from the stone. I looked around in a frenzy, bloody hatchet raised up and over my head. My heart was pounding and I was shaking, not with fear but with the adrenalized blood rush of a first time killer.

That was about an hour ago. Now I’m sitting on my roof, feeling less than triumphant. My phone was in that house. My life was in that house. I had little more than a couple of crowbars I pulled from the garage, Excalibur, my hatchet, and no word from my wife. Where were they? Where would I take them to be safe? How would we get there?

Old Yeller

There’s a big difference between fantasy and reality. In a fantasy, for example, its kind of fun to try and think of how to fortify your home against hordes of the undead. In practice, there is nothing at all fun about racing through The Home Depot terrified at the prospect of forgetting that one crucial thing that will make the difference between life and death. In practice there’s nothing worse than desperately racing an unseen but deeply ultimate clock, wracking your already exhausted, nerve-shot brain trying to remember every little nook and cranny you will need to reinforce in your shitty fifty year old brick starter home. No, in practice, there was nothing fun about getting my supplies at all.
There weren’t a hell of a lot of belly laughs wondering desperately about how many and how long, and no one smiles wide at the thought that their wife and infant son are out somewhere in the world, and you’re not around to protect them. Some things should stay in the realm of fantasy. Some things should, but didn’t.
Things still seemed pretty normal in the world so far. I knew things would quickly devolve into a hellish maelstrom once things got out of control and began to really spread, but so far everyone around seemed to be acting pretty normal. Everyone but me, the guy loading his small truck so full of lumber and tools that it would have been comical had there not been a very real possibility of the truck failing before I got home. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Very thankfully.
I was not so thankful after I hung up with my wife. She was driving home from her monthly La Leche League meetings with Finnegan, and from our conversation, three things were made abundantly, horrifyingly clear. The first was that there were already zombies in Joliet, enough that they were wandering the back roads she was taking home. The second was that she was terrified, and the third was that despite my yelling, actually yelling at her, she was insisting on coming home. I had no idea if the dead were risen already around here, but I did know that I didn’t like the idea of her traveling toward a larger population center over thirty possibly zombie infested miles from her current location. I guess I knew a fourth thing. That if she was anything, Colleen was stubborn. I just hoped her bullish streak would see her home safely.
When I got home, I remembered the dogs. Funny to say I know, but that’s how I felt. Surprised. In all of the mental chaos that ensued after I first realized just an hour and a half ago what was happening, I had forgotten that I had two very friendly, very spoiled, and possibly murderous dogs. What if they barked when zombies came? Might be nice to have the warning, but it just as likely might draw more of them to me. What if they got bitten? Would they be a good distraction while I escaped, or would they turn on me as undead hellhounds? I didn’t much relish the prospect of feeling the jaws of my beloved pets close on my flesh, rending me asunder with their once loving jaws. I wanted to pretend that I didn’t know what I had to do. I wanted to, but I didn’t have the time. I couldn’t let them stay, and I couldn’t let them go, and even more, I couldn’t wait. I had a home to fortify, tools to get from the garage, a ladder to build into the attic, and no time for any of it.
I sobbed. I wept openly and unabashedly, looking for all the world to see like a blood spattered madman even as I loaded sheet after sheet of lumber into the house. I didn’t own a gun, a problem which I knew I would have to remedy. If it was that difficult to kill two loving companions, how much harder would it be to stop the dead?

The Grocery Store

I don’t read tabloids. I am not into celebrity gossip and I don’t believe in the Loch Ness monster or Miracle diets, but now and again, I’ll pick up a copy of the Weekly World News. Standing there at the grocery store waiting interminably for some high school dropout to methodically work their way through the evidently arduous and time consuming process of picking up items and passing them briefly over a scanner, I am occasionally sucked in by some ridiculous and inflammatory headline. Batboy marries Sasquatch, Pope meets with space aliens, diet coke tastes like real coke and other absurdities bring enough of a smile to my face to make it worth the three dollars and ten minutes it takes to scan through the wretched pseudo journalism. So when I saw the cover proclaiming that the end was again nigh, I sighed with the kind of tired amusement I reserve for the harmless and stupid and picked up a copy to leaf through. The bemused smile quickly fell from my face as soon as I reached the center story. Normally, the stories are poorly written, barely edited, and the photographs owe more to Photoshop than they do to Kodak. This story was different. First of all, the photograph didn’t look manipulated, shit it didn’t even look very good, but it did look real, and because of that, it was deeply unsettling. Further, the story was written well, very well. Whoever had taken the time to write this article did so with what appeared to be a genuine utility with the language, something that could not be said for anything else that this particular piece of literary flotsam had ever produced. This story wasn’t about little green men and women with two hundred pound tabbies, this article was an obviously researched and documented piece about a small town in Arkansas just outside of Little Rock. More specifically, this was a story of a town called Hudson where fourteen people were killed and partially eaten in their homes in the middle of the day for no apparent reason by two preeteen girls wearing Justin Timberlake shirts. According to the story, the police had to fire on the girls a total of thirty nine times before they went down and stayed down. These girls were so intent on their feast, that when the gunshots first started ringing out, one of them refused to leave the body of an elderly gentleman upon which she was she was dining. According to the story, she didn’t stop eating until one of the officers shot her square in the center of her snarling forehead. The photos showed the aftermath, typical crime photo stuff mostly, but what chilled me the most, was one of the officers holding his arm and being loaded into a stretcher in a waiting ambulance. The funeral for the half eaten victims was set for the following day. It was with a heavy heart that I saw the date on the story. It was three days ago.

I knew what was happening, what my friends and I always joked about happening. This was the beginning. The zombies were here.I also realized that the world didn’t know yet, that the article I read was buried in a nonsense rag, and that everyone around me right now believed they were perfectly safe. I looked down at my self, cheap khaki pants and a cheap cotton shirt, work shoes and about twenty five bucks in my wallet. I could see the paunch of my not insubstantial belly hanging out over my pants. I hoped I would be able to protect myself, my family, my friends. I was worried. I didn’t know if I could run a mile, I wasn’t really sure how far out of shape I’d let my self get, but I suspected it was pretty damn far.I pushed my grocery cart out of the aisle just as it was my turn to pay. I took a long last look at the cart full of tasty little indulgences and heavy pre packaged foods. None of these would do now. I grabbed a new cart from the front of the store and started walking, then almost running down the aisles. I filled my cart with bottles of water, cans of beans, batteries, and ramen noodles. Lots of ramen noodles. I figured they were easy to keep and light weight if we had to leave home. I grabbed things of the shelf in ridiculous numbers. Money didn’t matter anymore, I had a lot of credit and I was gonna use every bit of it I needed to in order to survive. I grabbed every box of matches they had. I thought better then of the cans of beans, too heavy, but didn’t bother to put them back. I filled my cart with bags of beans and rice and panting furiously I ran to checkout, where I waited in line, my insides boiling at the stupidity of this goddamn queue when there was so much to do. I didn’t look at the cashier as he rang up my odd little collection of emergency rations and dozens of packages of batteries. How could I look at a man who didn’t know he was going to die? How could I look and not tell him? Worse, how could I tell him so he’d believe me? There was no way. I knew this and so I looked at my ridiculous shiny work shoes and the round shape of my belly as it stuck defiantly out over my belt. How long, I wonder, will that last?

Tom