The Most Uncommon Cold I - Life in the Time of Zombies (7 page)

     “I
’m waiting for a letter from my grandbabies.  It should have been here by now,” she repeated.

     “Is there someone I can call for you?”  I repeated.

     Without saying anything to me, the chubby, naked, older woman with curly black hair turned back to open the mailbox and peered inside.

    
Maybe it was heartless and inhumane to leave her like that, but I had other concerns just then, and I promised my conscience that I would check back on her right after I looked for Bonnie’s car in the garage.  So I backed away from her and didn’t turn around until my back pressed against the door.  I spun around and threw the door open in one move.  The white door marked “Garage” was directly ahead, and I charged through it without any thought. My only concern was simply the need to be away from that place with the naked woman.

     The garage was cold.  The shock o
f the temperature may have helped me to come to terms with everything I had seen thus far in the day.  Whatever the cause, I found myself once again doing a sort of inventory of all the strange things I had seen.  

     It was
certainly some weird shit, but I told myself that there had to be some key to it all.  There had to be some way to make sense of everything.  I refused to believe that there was not some logical reason behind the seemingly illogical things I had seen.  Dead people coming back. Half-eaten corpses  dragging themselves after me.  People in airports taking bites out of one another. All at once, the only rational explanation fell on top of me, and the weight of the realization knocked the wind out of me.

     The only truly rational explanation was
that I was hallucinating. This whole experience had to be just some sort of flashback brought on by the assortment of drugs I had taken as a college student.  It was just as possible that, at this precise moment, I was curled up in bed having an intense dream.  My mouth curled into a smile at the thought.  Could this whole thing be merely a dream?  Or rather nightmare?  Could it be easily explained away as simply a piece of undigested meat as Scrooge had done when confronted by ghosts?  These were the peculiar questions rattling around in my head.  Still, as strange as the questions were they gave me some comfort, some hope for a logical explanation.

   Then in the next moment, another
overwhelming insight slapped me.  The possibility of everything around me being simply a product of my own imagination did not change anything. I could not just stop reacting to what I saw.  I could not just stand by and watch whatever was going to happen as if it was out of my hands.  That sort of action or lack of action required a leap of faith I could not take.

     Without being
conscious of it, I had slid to the floor of the garage with my back against the door. I am not sure how long I sat there, but the reality was brought crashing back by a sudden push on the door.  From my position, I twisted around and could just see through the small glass square of the door.  The wild-looking face of the older woman with curly black hair appeared in the glass.  The pale, cold eyes were still unfocused, but her expression was full of rage.  She was shaking, almost vibrating with fury.  Her hands were slapping the other side of the door.  Clearly, she could not see me or understand why the door would not open. I kept out her sight and waited.  I am not going to lie about how I felt.  I was scared.  Plain and simple.  I was scared practically out of my mind. Previous notions of explaining things away with simple logic were gone. I might have stayed sitting on the floor against that door in the garage for five minutes or it might have been an hour. I was not in a frame of mind in which time mattered. 

     The theory is that the attacks were the result of some sort of mass psychosis...

     The thought of the comment I had written just hours earlier caused me to giggle hysterically.  The face of the older woman had been absent from the glass for quite some time, but the thought of her sent me into a new fit of giggles.

     “She sure doesn
’t look like some ‘mass psychosis!”  I joked aloud and went into more spasms of laughter.  Fortunately, I was the only one around to hear my joke. 

    
Maybe it was a way to deal with the shock of witnessing the horrible things I had seen, maybe it was a way if accepting the unacceptable, or maybe “laughter is the best medicine” as they say.  Whatever it was, after the fits of giggling had subsided, I felt more focused and able to deal with the matters at hand.  Right now, the matter at hand was checking on Bonnie’s car.

    
For some reason which I never understood, the building owners randomly assigned parking spaces to tenants.   That’s why my car was parked in a space near the door I had come in, and my wife’s car was assigned to a space at the other end of the garage.  I glanced over to see my Jeep quiet and apparently undisturbed by the strange events of the day.

    
I crossed the vast paved wasteland looking to see if  Bonnie’s little red Toyota, was in her parking space. As I was walking, I realized that once again I was holding my breath. This time my unfinished respiration was not due to a need to go undetected.  This time I was holding my breath as a way to keep hope alive.  It felt as if I kept my breath from escaping I could keep my hope from escaping, as well.  At that instant, the hope I was hoping with everything inside of me was that Bonnie’s car would be gone from that parking space.  If her car was gone, it meant she had gotten away from here and away from here meant hope of her being safe.  Even as I held my breath, something crept into my head and let me know that her car would be there, but I struggled to silence the thought.

     Despite the overhead fluorescent tubes of light, the garage appeared muted.  All of the cars cast in the
sort of gloomy rays of dusk.  As I had noted earlier, the place was surprisingly full so early on a weekday evening. I was suddenly intrigued by the number of foreign cars in the garage.  Admittedly, this was merely a distraction from the growing sense of dread that had snuck inside me.

     I rounded the corner of the last row to see Bonnie
’s car stoically looking back at me from its parking space.  It was not the punch of surprise that knocked the air out of me.  It was the forceful clench of having my fear confirmed which forced breath between my lips and made me gasp for more air. I stood right there in the cold garage and stared at Bonnie’s car. 

     For just an
instant, the idea that Bonnie might be okay even though her car was still here floated by.  Before the idea had a chance to plant itself in my head, I angrily brushed it away.

     “She is not okay!”  I shouted inside my head.  “There is no sense pretending that she is!” 

     I continued to stand there gazing at the red Mustang.

     Somewhere I had heard the idea that you should leave home every day as if it would be the last time to see loved ones.  I had never given the
notion much thought beyond its greeting card sentimentality. However, now I was overcome with emotion as I thought back not only on what I had said the last time I saw Bonnie but also of the things I had said and done over the last year. 

     According to her, the
trouble between us had started long before that afternoon when I came home to find her with Ron Thomas, the principal of her school.  They were not in bed but were obviously headed in that direction.  Bonnie wanted me to believe that they were just having a drink and talking about school.  However, I reminded her I was a reporter and had some experience with recognizing reality.  Although she never admitted that she had any sort of relationship with Thomas, the incident became a signal for just how far apart we had grown.  I thought how disagreeable I had been.  Rather than facing the deeper problems in our marriage, rather than making an attempt to improve our relationship, rather than doing something productive, I continuously brought up that afternoon as a way of punishing Bonnie and blaming her for every problem we had.  Now it all seemed so stupid, but that did not change anything.

    
I walked slowly to the car as if it was some sacred monument. As ridiculous as it sounds, I was sort of in awe of this thing that had belonged to Bonnie. It was the final connection to my wife. I am not sure exactly when I started crying, but suddenly I felt the warm moisture of tears on my face.  I reached up to brush the tears away, and the action brought me back to the reality of the garage and the red Toyota a few yards away from me.

     As I got closer, I saw a
wide, dark puddle of what at first looked like oil on the floor beside the car.  I squatted next to the pool and touched it with my index finger.  The liquid was
warm
.  I drew my finger back and looked closely at it.  All at once, the realization of what it was hit me solidly.  The fluid was clearly blood, and there was a whole lot of it on the floor.  I looked around but saw no source.  I stepped around the puddle and tried to make sense of what I saw.  There seemed to be no sign of how the blood ended up in this spot.  I looked at the puddle of blood up close, and it occurred to me that I was not seeing something.  Then I realized that the puddle extended to the area beneath the car. I knelt down and peered under the Toyota. 

     I could see the
gleam of light reflected off of the blood even under the car.  I also caught the shape of some small shape on the floor just on the other side of the car.  I stood slowly not entirely certain that I wanted to see what was on the floor on the other side of the car.  For a moment, my feet felt too heavy to lift.  I took a deep breath as preparation for what I might find and took a step and then another.  Eventually, I reached the other side of the car. 

    
My hand on the car was the only thing keeping me from collapsing to the ground.  I looked down to see what the small shape was and then I puked all over the floor behind the little red car.

     There on the
floor battered and covered with blood that made it almost unrecognizable was one of Bonnie’s fuzzy pink slippers. 

   
My mind immediately flashed back to the first time I saw her wear them.  It was two summers ago right after my first feature story ran in the newspaper, and I had celebrated by getting drunk with some friends at a bar near the office.  Not sure if I got home by taxi or if someone from work drove me.  But I did remember stumbling through the living room at around two o’clock in the morning and breaking a lamp.  Bonnie had come charging out of the bedroom in a baby blue bathrobe and those fuzzy pink slippers. I had laughed so hard that I had nearly pissed myself.  Bonnie had initially been enraged, but soon she was laughing along with me.  I had joked that she would soon be wearing curlers in her hair and gossiping with all the neighborhood women. 

     The
memory made me smile and then cry at what that fuzzy pink slipper in that puddle of blood meant had happened to my wife.  My emotional reaction was interrupted by a sound from behind me. 

Chapter 5

     There was a sort of soft scratching sound coming from the other side of the garage.   It was easy to find the exact source of the sound since there was a trail left as if something had been dragged from the puddle of blood. It looked just like skid marks left by tires.  That is, except for the color was red.  My eyes reflexively followed the path. 

    
Whether it was simple curiosity or something more, I was immediately enthralled by that path of smeared blood and wanted to follow it wherever it led.  My feet carried me forward as though someone else was controlling them.  I could not say how long the journey across that room took or the precise manner in which I completed the journey.  All I know is that I found myself coming to full consciousness as I stared at the source of the scratching sound.

     In the corner of the room in a crouch holding something
bloody with both hands in front of her was Bonnie.  Her eyes were downward, fixed on the thing in her hands, so we did not make eye contact at first. 

     I stood there at the end of the last row of cars
, watching her.  She was still wearing her old blue bathrobe and one fuzzy pink slipper.  The difference now was that blood soaked her clothes. She continued to fidget with the bloody thing in her hands.  From where I stood, I could not tell what she was holding.

     Like someone sneaking up so as not to scare
away a wild animal, I inched slowly closer to the corner where my wife was crouched. Both my sight and Bonnie’s became absorbed by the thing in her hands. In fact, I was concentrating so intently that I did not immediately notice that Bonnie was no longer gazing at her hands.   Her eyes were now raised toward me.

     But they were not the deep blue eyes I had come to know. 
These e
yes were pale as though
the color had been washed out, and they were without the spark of life that had always shone within them.

     “She needed a ride to the drugstore,” Bonnie muttered. 

     “Who?”  I asked as I moved closer to her. “Who needed a ride to the drugstore, Bonnie?”

      My words appeared to
startle her as if she hadn’t seen me. Her head tilted slightly as she looked right through me. 

     “She needed a ride to the drugstore,” she repeated
quietly.