Drink in case of Emergency (6 page)

Tyler turned and ran now, taking the stairs two at a time, yanking the front door open and promptly slamming it behind him. The slam of the door woke Chris with a start on the floor. His head turned to face the source of the sound, Tyler at the front door.

“...The fuck, dude?” Chris began rubbing his eyes as he moved to lay back down. “Too loud.” Chris had lain back down by the time Tyler could start talking.

“I don’t want to make you panic. But I think something is going on outside.” Tyler’s voice was shaking. He could hear slow, ‘THUMP, THUMP, THUMP’ of footsteps coming up the stairs outside. He heard the familiar first squeak of wood that indicated the woman was a third of the way up.

“I don’t panic very easily Tyler. Especially when my head feels like it’s a swollen pimple ready to pop. Did we drink Gin last night? This feels like a Gin hangover...” Tyler cut Chris off by shouting down the hallway.

“Hey Justin,” Tyler shouted toward the back of the apartment, “does your neighbor have...like...diabetes or something?” Chris answered from the couch.

“Dude...nobody knows that about their neighbors anymore. Was she outside trying to give you some sugar free candy or something?”

“No...I think there’s something really wrong with her. She wouldn’t talk, and just kept trying to get to me.” Tyler continued leaning against the door, feeling the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, as the BUMP, BUMP, BUMP grew steadily closer.

“‘Trying to get to you.’ What does that even mean?” Chris was still lying on his back, with his forearm covering his eyes to keep out the bright light of the morning.

Tyler stared in Chris’s direction, but he was seeing the woman in his memory. “Like, she was stumbling toward me, and her eyes were all fucked over like in a movie or whatever.”

“Weird.” Chris mumbled as he pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger while squeezing his eyes shut. “So should we call 911 or something? I mean, for an ambulance or whatever? I think Justin took an EMS class last year...” Chris trailed off as a loud THUMP reverberated through the living room. The sound wasn’t the outside stairs anymore, it was the door. Chris’s head tilted in confusion as Tyler spun, his hands shaking frantically as he clicked home the deadbolt.

“What was that?” Chris asked, starting to sit up on the floor.

“I think it’s her. I pushed her down but I think she followed me up the stairs.” Justin’s front door had a small window next to it. Tyler moved slowly, drawing the curtains back just far enough to look out. He saw what he expected. The woman from before, leaning into the front door with her face. Her hands began fumbling around and clumsily found the doorknob. Inside the apartment, Chris and Tyler both could see the doorknob erratically twisting back and forth. The deadbolt held firm, and the door didn’t budge.

“Shit dude, open the damn door. What if she’s just having a stroke or something? You’re being a real dick.” Chris spoke as he rose from the floor, intent on moving to the door and opening it for the woman.

“You didn’t see her eyes, dude. There was something missing from them. My grandpa had a few strokes and a full on case of alzheimers. His eyes never looked anything like that.” Tyler remembered again the fog that covered them, somehow making them look animal. “It’s something else, and it’s bad.” Chris continued towards the door, despite Tyler’s protest. As Chris passed by the small window next to the door, the doorknob stopped rattling. Chris stopped his advance and stood still, three feet from where Tyler still stood, leaning his back against the door. Both friends held their breath and all was silent for five long seconds. There was a loud crash as the small window next to the door shattered inward. A small white arm reached through the now open window.

The arm thrashed around wildly, breaking away the lingering shards of glass that clung to the frame. Many of these shards stuck and tore into the pale flesh of the woman, who didn’t seem to react to the gashes in her flesh.The woman stuck her head through the now open window, and began falling into the apartment.

****

Chris’s brain felt like it was being squeezed in a vice. Somewhere in his mind he knew that he had drank beer, liquor, and wine last night. He challenged all three horsemen, and so the fourth appeared. Mind splitting hangover. This pain was slightly dulled by the scene before him.

Chris felt his feet back away in confusion, while the older woman began pushing herself back to her feet. Her right arm oozed pale purple gel from a dozen cuts and gashes, where red blood should have been freely flowing.

Her vacant eyes didn’t move, but she turned her entire head to look back and forth between Tyler and Chris, who were backing away in different directions. Tyler was backing into the kitchen, Chris was backing away more quickly, down the hallway toward the rest of the tiny apartment. After looking back and forth one final time, the woman began lumbering slowly through the living room space and into the narrow hallway towards Chris.

“Hey. Stop. Don’t come any closer!” Chris felt his voice squeak as he tried to shout the words. Chris felt confusion race through his mind as he thought of everything he knew about older women and diseases that might be able to explain what he was witnessing. The rational side of his brain could not come up with any reasonable explanation of why this woman was behaving this way, so the irrational part of his mind kicked in and threw out the word that Tyler had been thinking for the last minute and a half.

Z...

“Is this real?” Chris shouted, his voice filled with fear, and a dash of excitement.

“That’s what I thought,” Tyler said. Now that the woman was no longer following him, he began following her down the hallway, keeping a safe four to five foot distance from her.

Zombie.

“Ummm...as excited as I am for this moment, I mean, a real zombie...I would like to survive so we can share the story later...any chance you could help somehow? Chris had only a couple feet left behind him, the hallway abruptly ended at the door to a small walk in closet. “How’d you get away from her before?”

“Umm, I guess I pushed her down with the garbage bin and ran away.” Tyler was creeping forward at the same speed as the woman was. Chris had run out of room to back up any further. He felt the doorknob to the closet bump into the small of his back.

“Don’t really have a lot of space to run. Any other ideas?”

Chris’s back was pinned against the closet door now, and he had a choice to make. He could go right into the main bedroom, where Justin was facedown, snoring loudly on the bed. The door itself was missing from the frame, as they had removed it from the hinges the night before in order to have a table to play beer pong on. His other option was to go left, into the laundry nook area, where he had just as little chance of escape, but maybe he could find a hammer or something to fight her with, assuming Justin kept tools in that part of the apartment.

Just as he was about to go left, Tyler shouted from down the hall, “Go into the bedroom,and open the closet door behind you!” Chris understood at once, or at least he thought he did. The closet door opened out into the hallway, and to the right. It would mostly cover the open doorway of the bedroom door, offering a barrier between him and the zombie. More importantly, it offered a place to deposit the zombie, assuming that Tyler was on the same page.

Chris pulled open the closet door as he backed into the bedroom. He felt the weight of the zombie press into the door and he leaned into it, holding the handle firmly and keeping his shoulder against door, hoping he could hold strong until Tyler acted. The pressure against the door continued, and pale white fingers began to creep around the edge.

“Any fuckin’ day, Tyler!” Chris shouted. A small arm began reaching around the edge of the closet door and brushed against his hand on the doorknob. He pulled his hand back in disgust as he heard a noise from behind him.

“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck.” Justin moaned as he began rolling over. “My heart has been broken by the weight of Jeremy’s big dick, let me die from this hangover in peace.”

“Any! Fuckin’! Day! Tyler!” Chris repeated himself slowly, shouting each word separately. It is at this point that both Chris and Justin heard what can best be described as a twenty five year old boy’s (not man’s) attempt at a battle cry. It was about fifty percent shout, fifty percent groan, and fifty percent squeal.

“ARRRRRRGHGHGHGHGHHeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”

Along with this they heard footsteps pounding down the hallway, Chris felt the door jerk against him as a blur passed by his narrow line of sight into the hallway. Suddenly the weight leaning against the door was gone.

Then came the crash.

“Now! Close it!” Chris shoved hard and the door swung easily, closing home. Chris continued to lean into it, Tyler standing next to him holding one of the kitchen chairs. A small crashing sound came from within the closet, and Justin spoke up from the bed.

“Ty...what’s with the screaming? And what are you doing with Beth’s chair?” Justin was still lying on the bed, but he had rolled onto his back, and with his head tilted to the side he was staring at the two friends in the hallway. “Break it if you want, it’s not like she’s going to need it. Stupid Jeremy’s dick probably has ergonomic chairs that optimize your breakfast enjoyment.” Justin sat up, hiding his face in his hands.

From within the closet, all three friends began to hear a soft thumping sound. Chris could tell that the woman inside had found the door she was forced through. He continued to lean into it as he talked.

“Justin, you know anything about your neighbor? She have any medical conditions? Or just a general lack of any sort of ability to communicate?” Chris leaned a little harder into the door as the thumping turned to pounding.

“What?” Justin sat up and rubbed the side of his head while squeezing his eyes closed in pain. “I think her name is Tina? She has a teenage son that lives with her on the weekends, and I only know that because I got in late a few times and walked by his car and it was all steamed up.”

“Kid’s got game?” Tyler asked with an abnormal amount of interest in teenagers’ amorous activities.

“Apparently so, from the sounds that were coming from it.” Justin pushed himself so he was sitting on the side of his bed. The pounding continued, consistent thumps and bumps against Chris’s back. Justin realized that the pounding wasn’t just in his head.

“Did you guys lock Scott in the closet again?”

“No...we think it’s your neighbor….” Chris answered, pausing for what he thought might be an appropriate amount of time to deliver an impossible statement. “She might be a zombie.”

“Ohh..........kay.” Justin responded slowly, processing the information.

“We’re not sure that she is a zombie, but she looked like she might be one.” Justin stared, continuing to process the information that had come out of Chris’s mouth.

“She chased me upstairs and broke through the window.” Tyler offered. Justin blinked his eyes a few times, hard and slowly. The full force of the information sinking in.

“You’re telling me that my neighbor, cranky old Tina, chased Tyler up to the apartment. Then she broke the window, so you locked her in the closet?”

“She chased me down the hallway, too. That’s how we got her in the closet. Tyler used Beth’s chair as a battering ram. That’s what the screaming was.” Chris finished, and Justin let out a heavy sigh.

“And this isn’t a joke?” He asked hopefully. Both men in the hallway shook their their heads slowly. “Well...maybe it’s a group hallucination?” he added with the same hopeful note.

After a short silence that was only broken by the thumping against the closet door, Justin bellowed “Scott! Wake up!” Across the hall, in the bathroom, a gurgling moan was produced, not unlike some of the noises that the unfortunate Tina had been making.

Tyler and Chris exchanged tense looks, both worrying that Scott might have turned into a zombie as well. The gurgle died off, and was followed by a shout. “Who gave me Tequila?” I can smell the Mexican anger.” Tyler and Chris both relaxed at the shouted accusation.

“Shit....you really have my neighbor locked in the closet?” Justin had a resigned look on his face as he delivered the statement.

“Well not exactly. Because the door doesn’t lock. She’s more just ‘contained’ for the time being.” Chris replied, gesturing to the door’s handle to demonstrate the lack of locking mechanism. It was at this moment that Scott appeared in the hallway, staring down at a cell phone in his hand.

“Hey, could I borrow one of your phones? I was going to call in sick, on account of the Mexican vengence coursing through my veins.” Scott put the phone away and looked up, still speaking in the same even tone, “and we should probably call the cops if you really do have a woman trapped in the closet.”

“Call the cops and tell them what? Hello sir or madam, me and my three male friends have a forty year old woman locked in the closet because she scared us, and now we don’t know what to do about it.” Justin replied sarcastically, finally pushing up out of the bed and into a standing position. Chris saw him waver a little bit as the blood rushed away from his hungover brain.

“It’s not that big of a deal. She broke in, right?” Scott’s question was less a question and more a statement.

“Right through the window. She’s got the cuts to prove it.” Tyler responded, finally setting down the chair in the doorway of the laundry room.

“Then we’ve got that. Could someone borrow me their phone, or not?” Justin and Chris both pulled phones from their pockets and lightly tossed them to Scott. With the grace and athleticism of a two year old girl, Scott deftly reached out and dropped both phones on the hallway floor.

“Shit...sorry.” Scott reached down and picked up the phones. After pressing a few buttons on Chris’s phone, he shook his head in frustration and tossed it back to Chris. A few moments later he did the same thing with Justin’s phone. “Nope.”

“Well, this sucks.” Justin said with a sense of calm that can only exist in the face of terrible news received during an overwhelming hangover.

“You know if any of your neighbors have a phone?” Tyler asked, hopefully.

“Well, she was bleeding purple blood, so she really might be a zombie. How about we just run down the street yelling for help until someone calls the cops and we can just lead them here?” Chris’s suggested.

“Oh, she’s a zombie?” Scott asked, his voice thick with sarcasm. Before Chris could respond, Justin spoke up.

“If we’re leading police to my apartment with a woman locked in the closet, I’d like to talk to them beforehand, just to give us the teeniest, tiniest chance of not getting arrested on the spot.”

“Okay. But we need to resolve the whole issue of not being able to call my office, much less the police.”

“You said that she lives alone during the week? Maybe she’s got a landline phone we can use?” Chris suggested, the complete silence that followed his question was only broken by the inconsistent thumping in the closet.

“So. Not only have you locked my neighbor into my linen closet, you also would like to break into her home.” Justin stated as pulled a wrinkled t-shirt over his head.

“Pretty much. Unless you have a better idea. Do you really call it a ‘linen closet’?” Chris replied sarcastically.

“Fuck.” Justin rubbed his head in pain, at the hangover, and the frustration of everything that had happened in the last twelve hours.

****

Chris was able to solve the lack of a lock on the hall closet by wedging a table between the doorframe of Justin’s bedroom and the closet door.  When the woman attempted to push the door open, the table wedged in tighter, she was trapped.

Justin felt badly for leaving his neighbor locked up in a closet, but after he saw the broken window and purple goo on the floor of the living room, he couldn’t completely dismiss the tale that Tyler and Chris were weaving, no matter how much he wanted to. As ‘Tina’ continued her steady pounding on the closet door, he followed his three friends out of the apartment and towards her house.

All four friends blinked painfully into the morning sunlight, feeling like while they slept, the sun had somehow moved closer to earth, causing the blinding pain that shot through their dehydrated brains.

Moving down the stairs and across the green lawn, the group came up to Tina’s single story, light blue house. The grey front door stood ajar and the group hesitated before walking in.

             
“There’s no traffic.” Chris noted thoughtfully.

             
“Well we don’t really get traffic out here, I mean, not until you get out of the ‘burbs.” Justin replied.

             
“No, he means there’s no cars. At all. You can’t hear any cars on the road. I noticed it earlier, before she started chasing me.” Tyler said, looking around. It really was unnerving, how quiet it was. Scott noticed that he could hear a few birds chirping, but even they seemed quieter, as if in the silence they were more aware of their voices and suddenly a little shy. Scott tried to listen carefully as they walked, hoping to hear the far off hum of traffic on the highway. They had reached the concrete front steps to Tina’s small house, and still, Scott could hear nothing.

Maybe I’m just congested from drinking, so my ears aren’t working right? Scott’s rationalization was interrupted by Justin’s voice.

             
“Well...let’s get this over with. I know we blocked the hall door with the kitchen table, but I figure the longer we keep her in there, the worse it will look to the cops.” Justin moved quickly up the steps and pushed the gray door wide open. “Hello? Anyone home?” Justin continued through the open door, followed by his three friends. Scott was the last through the door, and unconsciously pulled it closed behind him.

             
The front door opened into what appeared to be the living room. The house was messy, newspapers and dishes and laundry strewn about. Scott reflected that it seemed to be a normal American amount of mess, as opposed to a post-apocalypse amount of mess.

Scott’s nose was ambushed by the familiar aroma of fresh coffee wafting from the kitchen. The aroma caused a conflicting feeling in him, both craving and nausea.

The television in the living room was on, Scott could tell by the small green light next to the ‘power’ indicator. Despite the power, the picture was black, as though the TV was on a dead channel. There were a few blankets piled around the base of the couch that seemed to leave a trail that lead toward the door. There was a half full bowl of popcorn on a coffee table in the middle of the room. Somewhere down the hallway, an alarm clock was beeping loudly, presumably from a bedroom.

             
Chris comfortably sauntered into the room and sank into the couch. Immediately reaching for the bowl of popcorn.

             
“Dude! We’re not here to hang out.” Justin said, the stress evident in his voice. Chris was crunching the stale popcorn and reaching for the television remote when he responded.

             
“Mmmmphhhhfff. fa phone mud e itchin.” Chris was pointing toward the next room, which appeared to be the kitchen, based on the table that was visible through the doorway.

             
“I’ll go check for a phone.” Scott said as he walked through the door into the kitchen.

             
“Glad you could understand him.” Justin looked around the room nervously while Scott moved into the kitchen. Tyler was staring out of the living room window toward the street. Scott heard the rest of the conversation from the kitchen.

“You see something? Cops?” Justin’s voice still tittering with stress.

             
“No...still haven’t seen a single car drive by. It’s just weird.” Tyler mumbled, still facing the window.

             
In the kitchen, Scott quickly found a cordless phone sitting in it’s charging cradle. He picked it up and hit the ‘on’ button. Holding the phone to his ear, he heard the familiar hum of a dialtone. He quickly hit nine, one, one, and held the phone up to his ear.

A full sixty seconds of ringing passed.

Riing. Pause. Riing. Pause. Riing. Pause.

Scott felt the weight of the situation press on him with each pause. “Umm...guys...we might have a problem here.” Scott clicked the phone off, but carried it with him back into the living room.
             

“The line dead?” Justin asked, taking a couple steps toward him.

             
“No...it’s weirder than that,” Tyler and Chris both looked at him as well, “Nobody is answering.” Justin’s face twisted in frustration.

             
“Dude, forget about your stupid job for a minute. You are supposed to call 911, not your damn lab.” Justin squeezed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and pointer finger, fighting off the headache of his hangover, along with exasperation with his current predicament. “I hope you enjoy the idea of having a boyfriend named ‘Tiny’, because I’m about 85% sure we’re all going to prison after this.”

             
“Justin. Calm down. I’m calling the cops, and nobody is answering.”

             
“How is that supposed to make me calm down? Not only is there a woman possibly in the middle of a stroke in my linen closet, but we can’t even call the proper authorities to arrest us for locking her in there.” Justin looked exasperated, his face flushed with anger

             
“It’s more of a storage closet.” Chris offered from the couch.

             
“What?” The statement caught Justin off guard, and his anger dissipated, unsure of where to focus.

             
“A linen closet is typically just shelves. There’s no open space to hold a vacuum cleaner or broom or female zombie. You know, because they’re too big.” Chris held up his hand, trying to show the average height of a female zombie.