Mistakes I Made During the Zombie Apocalypse Read online

  The metallic scent of blood wafts up through the stairwell. For Ian, killing undead Grant was different than killing the other zombies, and not because they were friends. Grant was angrier and his eyes drilled into Ian as he attacked, as though he was aware of all that had transpired. This eerie awareness of Ian’s shortcomings was actually guilt that filled Ian. His freshly undead friend was truly just a zombie with only one need or care, to feed. But guilt is a powerful thing.

  Even though hardly a week has passed, his memories of the living Grant have faded quickly. When people you love are alive and reachable for an afternoon conversation, it’s easy to think of all the times you’ve been together and all of the fun you’ve had on other occasions. But as soon as they have left the living world, only tidbits of their life and what they meant to you bubble to the surface of your memory. It might be a unique gesture, an oft-repeated phrase, or a scent that clung to them. Ian is having difficulty remembering any of it.

  In an effort to recall something more than Grant’s anger in the end, Ian pulls his legs in tight, rests his forehead on his knees and wraps his arms around his body. He closes his eyes and searches his memory.

  • • •

  Tell us, Ian. What did your best friend look like?

  “He had very dark hair, blacker than black if that is possible,” Ian says into the darkness. “He rarely washed it. It was oily and shiny, like crow feathers. He was tall. My Mom measured us both at our house since Grant’s mom didn’t do nice things. He had five inches on me. The features of his face were chiseled. When he smiled, lines formed at the corners of his mouth. He could pass for 25. I think his fake id said that anyway. He used it for beer.”

  • • •

  Grant had been handsome before he was dead. More handsome than Ian. The girls at school chased Grant, but always regretted it. They labeled him a “jerk” or a “total asshole.” He was loyal only to Ian. Ian, with an extra twenty pounds on his waistline, was not the pick of the litter, but he was a much nicer person than his friend. Regardless, the girls he liked never liked him back. You might get a half decent guy if you combined Ian’s personality with Grant’s body. Separate they were nothing, which is partially why surviving without him was extra difficult for Ian.

  He lost half of himself when Grant died, when he killed him.

  • • •

  How did you kill him, Ian? We’re supposed to be talking about that. You won’t make any progress if you avoid the story. How did it start?

  “I was sitting next to his body, waiting for it to move again.”

  • • •

  Grant had been killed once and now he would rise again. How quickly Grant would turn, Ian wasn’t sure. There wasn’t a science to it as far as he knew. So he sat down on the floor near him and looked around at the shitty house in which his best friend had just died. There on the floor, Ian could feel a draft of cold air coming under the back door. He got to his feet, grabbed the dusty tablecloth from the unused dining room and rolled it into a long tube. It fit the breezy gap well and helped cut down on the wind significantly.

  They had talked many times in the past about the proper way to kill one another in the event of infection. A blade of any kind was too personal and messy. Both agreed on a gunshot wound to the brain, effective and easiest for the living party. Only Ian hated guns and he didn’t have one anyway. Any gun they’d found was useless to them.

  • • •

  So, you were going to leave him? Let him rise and walk alone, forever in this house?

  “I knew there had to be a better house than this one, maybe even in the same neighborhood. But it was cold outside and getting colder. I was scared of going out with no one to watch my back.”

  You decided to stay and take care of it.

  “He would have done the same for me. I needed to find something to re-kill him with.”

  • • •

  Ian wandered the first floor of the house in search of a weapon that would be easy to wield and tough enough to break a skull with minimal effort. This would have been a normal time for him to cry, but he was in shock and there was still work to be done, so he had to stay focused. He opted for a leg from one of the dining room chairs. The dining set was one of the few nice things in the house, made of solid hardwood, not flat pack crap from Ikea. He tried repeatedly to break a leg off. Sheer force could not compromise the quality and construction of the chair. In the basement, Ian located a wrench to loosen the nut that held the leg. The wrench itself could have been a better weapon from an impact standpoint but he couldn’t tolerate being closer to zombie Grant than necessary. He’d need the full length of the chair leg between them.

  He returned with the weapon in time for Grant’s reanimation.

  The chair leg felt great in his hands, sturdy, but he wished for more time to increase its lethality. There were nails and barbed wire in the basement. He could get the taxidermied elk head that was still embedded in the other body in a sitting room down the hall, but it was slippery with blood.

  • • •

  You killed more time than zombies that day.

  “I really didn’t want to come up with ways to destroy my best friend’s brain.”

  A sharp pain travels up from his hands and into his arms.

  You’re clenching your fists. You’re drawing blood.

  Ian brings awareness to his fingers. Indeed the nails at the ends of them are digging into the skin of his palms. He opens his hands and wipes the blood on his pants.

  The fleas will love you for this easy feast. Now, we were killing Grant, weren’t we?

  • • •

  It took five blows and he managed to get them all in before Grant could stand up. Panting and sobbing, Ian stood and let the chair leg drop to the hallway floor.

  Normal people would have moved the body, would have tried to keep the house livable. Normal people would have bagged the pieces and scrubbed the blood from the floorboards. Grant and Ian, together, would have, but Ian wasn’t himself anymore and Grant was a lump of non-moving flesh and bone.

  The smell gets stronger every day, reminding Ian that decay happens and although the house was cold with winter air, it wasn’t cold enough to slow the process much. Necessity doesn’t make killing someone less horrific. A set of biting teeth doesn’t make bashing a head in less likely to scar someone for the remainder of their life. When Ian fell asleep in the closet on the first night after dealing with Grant, he dreamt of the sound of the wood hitting his head and the gurgling noises that came from his throat as it filled with blood.

  The images and sounds fit nicely into his growing library of nightmares.

  • • •

  You aren’t telling them everything, Ian.

  “What am I leaving out?” he screams. “He’s gone! Nothing’s going to bring him back!”

  It’s the second time you killed him. Tell them why his eyes held so much anger toward you.

  “He had every right to be angry with me! He died in the first place because…”

  …I DIDN’T PLAY HERO

  In every house they’d had the pleasure of occupying, Ian and Grant had a rule about keeping all of the interior doors open. It was important to leave oneself as many exits from a room as possible. With a vicious zombie on your toes, every moment was precious. Earlier, on the night he ended up dead, Grant heard noises from the first floor of the shitty house. Bravely, or stupidly, he crawled from his sleeping bag and went downstairs to find the cause.

  • • •

  You are telling someone else’s story again.

  “It’s important. I can’t understand my mistakes if I don’t examine the mistakes of others.”

  Don’t blame Grant for this. Especially when you are getting to the part where you failed him.

  “He could have stayed upstairs.”

  You could have done a lot of things.

  • • •

  Ian awoke when he heard the creaking of the stairs. He remembered that they weren’t al
one. When he saw that Grant wasn’t in his sleeping bag he left the warmth of his own to follow after his friend.

  “Why are all the doors closed and where did this blood come from?” Grant asked him from the first floor hallway. A delicate trail of crimson droplets led from room to room and Grant now had it on his feet. Ian stood on the stairs, staring down at him over the railing. He knew the answer to both parts of Grant’s question. The girl had closed the doors; the girl who was covered in bleeding wounds who he never found a moment to tell Grant about, she was the only one who could have.

  • • •

  Why did she close the doors?

  “I don’t know. She must have been trying to keep the heat in or the shadows-turned-monsters out. Maybe it was Keller’s idea?”

  You are transferring blame to someone else again. You know this is your fault. You didn’t do enough.

  “I called to him. I remember saying something!” Ian yells as he slams a fist against the closet door. It sends a shudder through the walls of the house and dust falls down from the ceiling.

  Calm down and tell them what you said.

  • • •

  “Come back to bed,” Ian whispered, choosing to ignore answering Grant’s questions. He needed to get Grant back upstairs before the girl woke up and he found out about her.

  “’Come to bed?’ That’s some Brokeback Mountain shit,” Grant said with a laugh.

  It was all Ian had. What else could he have said without giving away the girl?

  “That’s not what I meant,” he clarified.

  “Whatever you meant, I’m not coming. How the hell will I be able to fall asleep again when the floors are covered in blood? Someone’s in the house! Don’t you care?”

  Ian cared about many things still. He cared not to piss off his friend, he cared to find enough food each day, that he and Grant would get out of this hellhole of a house and find a better place to survive and he absolutely cared that he had finally lost his virginity. But it did not matter to him for Grant to follow a blood trail that would lead him to another of Ian’s poor decisions.

  • • •

  “Grant didn’t have to follow the blood,” Ian told the fleas that he hadn’t yet managed to crush with his overgrown fingernails. “He could have waited.”

  But the bloody girl couldn’t wait, could she? She introduced herself.

  “She came up behind him and even though it was dark, I knew something was different with her. Because he was tall, he towered over her, but the plague made her appear larger somehow and more frightening. I opened my mouth to warn him, but a floorboard creaked as she shifted her weight. He turned slowly until they were face to face.”

  • • •

  “Where the fuck did this bitch come from?” Grant asked Ian without taking his eyes off of her shadowy form. He was confused because the doors were closed and zombies didn’t turn doorknobs.

  A full moon cast a beam of light in through a window above the back door. The girl unintentionally moved into the glow. Grant asked again where the girl had come from. Ian, too scared to make more noise, cursed at himself in his head and didn’t answer.

  • • •

  You didn’t have to talk, you had other choices, but you got hung up on words.

  “What could I have done? Jumped the railing and landed on her back? Told Grant to run and try to distract her while we found weapons?” Ian argues with himself, throwing his hands up in the dark of the closet in a passionate defense of his inaction.

  Those are both very good options. The house is full of weapons, if you are looking for them.

  “Well, I know that now!”

  • • •

  Behind closed door number one there was a dull butcher knife in an old knife block on the kitchen counter. Its handle already stained with a bit of red, though it was dried tomato that had never been washed off. Behind double doors numbers two and three, a coat rack tucked into a corner by the front door. Either end would be effective, with multiple prongs. In fact it had been used as a weapon twice before. The previous homeowners were an unhappy couple and the woman found it the perfect tool to wail on her husband after late night boozing.

  Door number four led to the basement and a heavy wrench that would have worked well for the task of beating in the girl’s brains. The drunken husband had once considered the same thing for his wife, but fell asleep and sobered up before acting on the impulse.

  A chair from the dining room behind door number five could have kept the bloody girl at a safe distance until one of the other weapons was retrieved.

  Grant, alone in this event as his friend was completely worthless, saw two possible options, neither of which involved weapons or Ian. Both involved closed doors. He could run head on into the infected girl and take a moment to open a door into a room that she’d follow him into. Or, he could take the door at the end of the hall, behind him, that opened to the backyard.

  The backyard. Its fence, which of course was a work of utter shit when it was first built, hadn’t kept anything out or even stood mostly upright for over ten years. The yard sat against a wooded area and beyond that, a major shopping center. Now, the backyard was full of zombies.

  It was a mystery to them as to why she hadn’t attacked yet. Ian watched Grant stand there, still, as though—like a dinosaur of some kind—she wouldn’t see him unless he moved. But she could definitely see him and she was going to kill him. Like any other predator, she simply wanted a taste of the hunt. Her hungry eyes bore into him, daring him to run.

  You may have heard the term ‘dumbstruck’ or ‘awestruck’ to describe an inability to act or even move because fear, beauty or extraordinary circumstances stop someone in their tracks. At that moment, Ian was experiencing this feeling for the first time. As he saw the girl’s changed face in the moonlight, he was unable to do anything but stare. She was still as beautiful as when he’d first met her. She hadn’t attacked anyone yet, meaning her face was clean and not covered in the blood and gore of others. Her eyes hadn’t sunken in or gone milky or discolored with decay.

  • • •

  “I couldn’t stop looking at her.”

  You’re thinking of her even now.

  “She was more beautiful dead than she was alive.”

  Ever since you lost your virginity to the other girl, it’s all you think about.

  “I don’t want to think about her,” Ian says. Tears begin to drop like bombshells onto the wool coat in his lap and the moth larvae there.

  Tell them more about this girl then.

  • • •

  Her face was relaxed and there was no hint of the attitude with which she’d come in. Her skin was a smooth, porcelain plain. The wounds that covered her body no longer seeped blood, as her heart was still. She was the calm before the storm.

  Her beauty, too, moved Grant, but he stayed unmoving due to a paralyzing fear. The beast was before him. He muttered Ian’s name just loud enough for him to hear it. The girl let out a hiss or yowl comparable to a large cat sending a warning signal to potential prey. It was low and wet.

  Hearing it, Grant decided it was time to move or die. He turned to his right and reached for the kitchen doorknob. She jumped on him and they fell into the passage between the hall and kitchen.

  “Ian! Ian!” he yelled, over and over.

  • • •

  “And still, I stood there.”

  You stood there and watched it happen. Didn’t even descend one single step.

  • • •

  Not until Ian saw a wash of blood on his friend’s arms did he regain awareness of the situation. Suddenly the sounds of flesh tearing and the smacking of the girl’s feeding lips filled his ears. He took a step down the stairs, but again froze, remembering that he was weaponless. And despite the fact that she was satisfying her hunger, the killer in her was still on high alert. If she heard him, she would attack him as voraciously as she had Grant.

  In mere minutes his best friend, whom he’d known since
he was three, had bled completely out. As though she could tell he had expired, the girl stopped devouring his flesh. She wandered away down the hall, leaving Grant’s body to rot like a forgotten plate of no longer desirable food.

  Crying on the stairs seemed like a good idea. Grant was his last friend, and again if Ian was being realistic, his only friend. But now a killing machine walked the first floor and he’d seen the undead scramble up stairs before. He had to take care of her before she realized another perfectly edible person was nearby.

  He carefully made his way to the bottom of the stairs and, judging by the trail of bloody footprints she left, the girl was in the sitting room. What a zombie would do in a sitting room did not concern Ian, but he was very interested in the mounted elk head in the living room across the hall.

  • • •

  “You forgot to list it as a weapon.”

  I didn’t want to give your story away. Besides, I already mentioned it. Go on…

  • • •

  Ian lifted the hunting trophy from the wall and, though it was stuffed, it weighed nearly fifty pounds. He hefted it and ran at the girl, whose back was turned to him. One of the horns slipped easily into her flesh and he used his momentum to push her against the wall of the sitting room. Still she tried to bite him, craning her neck without respect for the vertebrae in it. Ian had no qualms or queasiness. He could no longer see her beauty, only her evil. Her face was caked with bits of Grant’s flesh and smeared with his blood. It sent him into a rage.

  He jammed the horn deeper into her body and moved it up and down to rip her apart. Then he pulled away and shook the elk head to remove her from the horn. Though her body had several holes in it, she moved to attack once more. He tripped her and stood on top of her, his feet sinking into her gut. From this position of power, he dropped the elk head on her skull. Her intestines were squishing up between his toes, but all he wanted was for her to stop glaring at him. He picked up the head again and made sure to send a horn into her brain.