Mistakes I Made During the Zombie Apocalypse (15 page)

“Gross.”

When all but one station remained, Ian stood up and stretched. “Let’s move upstairs, we can ride this out there.”

They hauled as much as they could to the hallway at the top of the stairs and then into his parents’ bedroom. Back down in the garage, they searched for weapons. The sledgehammer was too heavy to swing with enough stopping force, so they chose a hammer from Ian’s dad’s unused toolbox and a wooden baseball bat.

“We should bring up the camping gear. At least the lanterns and camp stove in case the power goes out.” Grant held up a sleeping bag.

“Good idea.” They found several flashlights as well and Ian dug through the pantry for extra batteries.

“Wow, this is a great view.” Grant stood in front of a large window overlooking the front yard and street. “We can see everything.”

Ian hated spending time in his parents’ bedroom and didn’t like thinking about them as a loving couple. It had been a long time since he’d seen any proof of that relationship, but Grant was right, the view was unbeatable. From there they could keep tabs on the goings on in his neighborhood. It was the perfect tower base camp.

They watched other families attempt to leave their homes or secure them against invasion. Ian recognized some of the kids. He was sure his parents knew the adults.

Ian and Grant laughed at the fear on their faces.

• • •

“It was wrong of us, insensitive.”

You know that fear now.

“Too well.”

• • •

“They won’t last a week,” Grant said. “We will though. We’re gonna live like kings while we do too.”

Across the street, a “Happy Birthday” balloon bobbed above a mailbox. Then the front door of the house behind it opened.

“Look,” Ian said, pointing to the door. A woman ran from the house, blood poured from her neck and she tried in vain to stop the flow. A small, pale boy followed behind her. His face was covered in blood. He caught up to her at the sidewalk and bit her again, this time on her leg. He chewed on her flesh for a moment, but lost interest when she stopped moving.

Grant’s knees wobbled.

The hair on the back of Ian’s neck was raised.

Both boys felt their hearts begin to pump faster from excitement.

“Is that what I think it is?” Ian asked.

“Fuck!” Grant yelled. “It’s fucking here!”

Seeing the carnage on television was nothing in comparison to those front row seats.

Ian sat down at the foot of his parents’ bed. “Oh my God.”

“That, right there, is a zombie, Ian!”

• • •

From then on, they watched the number of corpses in the street multiply.

• • •

It was a sight to behold.

“I never thought I would see the day.” Ian has to be careful as he remembers the first days. Even now, he can feel his heart race at the fun they expected to have.

But it was harder than you thought. You were misinformed.

“The movies made it seem easy. Much easier than this.”

Tell them the first mistake you made. The big one. The start of it all.

“I will in the morning. I’m tired.”

• • •

In his dreams, Ian is in the closet examining old Polaroids from a shoe box when something large bumps against the closet door. He drops the photographs and listens to the soft sound of bare feet slowly shuffling on the wooden floor of the bedroom. The noise grows distant and then close until the thing slams into the closet door once more.

Is it alive or dead?
Ian wonders.

In the door there is a keyhole, small in reality, but expansive in the dream world. When Ian looks through it he can see the entire bedroom and the thing pacing there. He pulls his eye away.

Ripley’s corpse is walking back and forth from the edge of the bed and straight into the door. He forces himself to look through the keyhole again and when he does, the severed stumps of her fingers are all he can see. They no longer squirt blood; not even a drop falls from her dead body.

How did she get here?

As soon as Ian thinks it, Ripley’s corpse changes course slightly, allowing Ian to see the middle of the four-poster bed. There on its bare mattress lies a familiar baby doll, a baby monitor still duct taped to its tiny plastic head. The bed catches fire, the baby doll melts and Ian can feel the heat build in the closet.

Keller.

• • •

The vivid dream, the heat of the fire still in his mind, Ian is nervous and covered in sweat when he wakes up in the closet. He checks for the shoe box, but it doesn’t exist. He braves opening the door.

Sunlight fills the room and for the first time in months, apart from his fever and the passionate time he spent in bed with Ripley, warmth fills his body. She, of course still trapped in a shipping container, is not pacing the floor. The bed is empty. The mostly abandoned house smells worse than ever, but Ian is so relieved to be alone, it doesn’t bother him.

I told you that talking about everything would make things better.

“This was my idea.” Ian says. He walks to a window and lets the sunlight fall on his face.

Then you know you aren’t done yet.

“Yeah,” he says with a sigh. “None of this would have happened, except that…”

…I GLAMORIZED THE APOCALYPSE

Grant and Ian often talked about their plans for the zombie apocalypse. In a world where most every move of theirs was dictated or determined by an adult, it was fun to ponder survival and a life without rules. They read gun magazines, but never made it to the range. Ian’s father was also scared of guns. Grant’s dad couldn’t be trusted with a weapon, even if he had been around. As a nurse, Ian’s mother had seen firsthand what guns did to bodies; there was no way in hell that she’d allow them near one. Instead, they played first person shooting games to practice their aim.

They haunted the dehydrated food section of the sporting goods store, seeking new products to try. When his allowance allowed, Ian would buy a few of the plastic bags. Then he and Grant would spend a weekend taste testing as they dreamed about the abandoned houses they could inhabit when the world ended, larger and more lavish than their own.

• • •

Like this house.

“No, nothing like this shithole. All the good houses are ruined.”

Even your own.

“It’s good that it got burned down. It was about to be destroyed from the inside anyway.”

The divorce.

“When Grant and I were gathering supplies, I found the paperwork on my mom’s desk.”

Irreconcilable differences.

“That’s an understatement. The world ended and they went to their jobs across the infected city from one another. And they never once tried to make it back. Not even to me.”

• • •

Before the zombies actually existed, Ian and Grant sat at the mall, watching people, pretending they were mindless and dead.

“That man, over by the piercing kiosk,” Grant would start.

Ian would find the appointed victim and describe the ghastly wound he had suffered that brought about his demise. “His left arm is torn off at the elbow. The infection started there. He died of blood loss and came back.”

“We could use the janitor’s mop,” Grant would continue. “Maybe sneak by the zombie and head into the knife shop to sharpen the handle into a spear.”

“Why not just use something from the knife shop itself as the weapon?” Ian might ask.

“That’s obvious. We need to challenge ourselves. There won’t be weapons lying around in the event of a real zombie apocalypse.”

“Right,” Ian would agree. “Even the security guard’s gun would be empty by the time we could take it.”

“Most mall guards don’t have guns,” Grant would point out.

“Only stupid batons and handcuffs,” Ian would realize.

• • •

You used to be so good at finding weapons.

“Kind of. Grant was always more creative.”

   Now that we’ve gone over the story, he was better at most things.                              

“Why the fuck are you saying things like that? I brought you here to help me!”

It’s called tough love.

“And now that I’m listening, you won’t shut up. I can’t hide from you.”

You can’t hide from anything.

• • •

“Behind the Starbucks counter,” Grant had once suggested. They would pick places to hide until it was safe to come out and explore.

“Under a pile of clothes from the racks at JC Penney,” Ian said.

But none of it felt real. The games weren’t desperate enough. It was all talk, just talk.

They wished for it to happen as they watched one Romero flick after another. They played video games where they could build any weapon they wanted and where ammo and first aid kits littered the city.

A plague so great it would destroy nations;
that
was the plague of their dreams. And it was a plague that they were going to survive together. They wished for it.

• • •

Boy, did you ever get what you wished for!

“Part of it anyway.”

You were fooled like the rest of the world when it started, though.

• • •

When it started, Ian thought it was bird flu; or swine flu, or mad cow disease, or anything other than the zombie apocalypse. The CDC reported it, but after their previous marketing campaign that featured zombies, few took them seriously. He laughed at the news anchors tossing the word ‘zombie’ around as though it was a possibility. The news anchors laughed too.

He wrote off the random attacks as drug fits and his mom and dad, who both saw a lot of folks on drugs, agreed. But as drugs tests came back negative, the medical world was running out of reasons.

And when they actually believed it was happening, their reaction was excitement. The boys wanted to get outside and play like children off of school due to snow, to get in the middle and prove themselves as fit to survive.

• • •

You prepared for a completely different end-of-days.

“A far more splendid one, ripe with ammo, food, and weapons.”

A showdown in which Grant and you were bigger, stronger, more determined.

“And much less terrified.”

Now that you see the mistakes you made, would you change them if you could?

“Hindsight is 20/20, but even though I see the mistakes I made, I can’t imagine that I would have the strength to do things differently if I had the chance. It would still be me. At some point I was bound to screw up. Grant, too cool to live, was doomed to die. And I, I would end up alone in the zombie apocalypse. ‘You can’t do anything right.’ Grant said this to me once after I broke his skateboard while attempting a trick I knew I couldn’t pull off. It hurt to hear him say that because it was an accurate observation, a definite fact. And Grant
still
chose to come to my house on the first day of infection. That was perhaps his one mistake in life, keeping a screw-up for a best friend. I won’t find an uninfected girl or a gun (with any ammo), I won’t go out in a blaze of glory (I’m too chickenshit to attempt it). I’m not even sure I can go downstairs again. Grant and Lena’s bodies are still there. I may have to jump out of the window and attempt a safe landing like Ms. Kitty. It would be best if that didn’t end as well.”

What are your options?

“Stay here in this closet and say farewell to my respiratory and general health; inhaling particles from disintegrating clothing and watching the fleas get fatter on my blood under the dimming beam of my flashlight?”

The batteries won’t last forever.

“Wait for Keller to decide to burn down the house with me in it?”

Death by fire is not advisable, but Lena’s razor blade is still downstairs.

“Is suicide by rusted blade more advisable?”

Just one little cut is all you’d need. Otherwise you’ll starve.

“And wait until the bodies and the world below me rot away?”

There is not one shred of glamour in that. But your story doesn’t end here, in this house.

“No, not inside of it. Not on the front lawn. Maybe at the sidewalk, I can’t be sure because the end of my story hasn’t happened yet.”

Still plenty of time to make more mistakes.

“At least one more. I’m sitting here wondering…”

…DID I WAIT TOO LONG TO MOVE ON?

Ian hears voices. More voices than his own. There are people outside. Real, living people, not the dead ones. He wants nothing more than to talk to them, to see faces that respond. He wants to be alive with them.

He has tried many times before to find the courage to stand up and make that next, most difficult decision, the decision to leave. But things have become comfortable to him in his uncomfortable closet in his mostly abandoned house.

“My legs are too weak,” Ian whines to himself.

They can still carry you.

“The voices have faded. I’ll never catch up,” he cries.

You have to try!
his mind screams.

“Move! Move!” Ian yells aloud. “Get the fuck out of this place!”

I think you’re ready to tell this story as your own now…

• • •

My knees and back ache from the wood floor of the closet and I can barely pull myself to my feet. I feel as though I might have petrified if I’d stayed there an hour or two longer. Even though I’ve lost so much weight that my pants are threatening to leave my hips with every step, the floorboards still creak under my feet as I hobble to my backpack. I stare at Grant’s bag; still in the center of the monument I built, though slightly askew from digging for the beans. I leave it there. It feels right, like a tombstone atop a grave, a testament to his existence and his death below.

My belongings packed, the few items I have left to my name, I head to the top of the stairs. Here, the bile rises in my throat for the smell of decay is too strong. I hold it down as I descend into the deepest pit of my own personal hell. Grant’s body blocks my path. It is a writhing puddle of goo, flies and maggots. There are so many of the wriggling things that I can hear them devouring him. Smudges of blood shaped like the long back legs of a rabbit lead the way into the kitchen, but I don’t have time to seek him.