You Would Too- [Part 8]
I called 911 all day. By the end of the day, I wasn’t scared so much as sick of the stench. They were busy, probably dealing with zombie attacks all over the place. Perhaps dead and zombies themselves. Or perhaps zombies had taken over everything. I did a lot of thinking, and a lot of worrying that day.
Sometime in the middle of the night, Nathan woke up, and managed to break down the door into the apartment. I wasn’t asleep. (Would you have been able to sleep during a night like that?) I heard the noise, but by the time I worked up the guts to go check it out, I found him lying unconscious in his own room, between the hallway and the back porch. He had probably knocked himself out again getting through the door. I could see the holes I made with the hammer in the back of his skull. The thick black goo and the yellow drippy stuff was pooling in the cavity. Hesitantly, I dragged him back into the porch, and boarded up the door between his room and the rest of the apartment as best I could (to get into the apartment from the back porch, you have to go through Nathan’s room).
The next week, I spent watching news stories and videos online of zombies attacking North America, especially New England. New York, which had been hit the hardest with Cinderella, was in shambles, I watched footage of what looked like dancers from Thriller stumble through the streets, carrying limbs of their victims, nibbling or ripping fingers from hands with almost rotted out teeth. I read about a strain of Cinderella finding it’s way into South America, and another in Europe. So much for targeting North America. Soon, even the people who developed this twisted disease will be walking stiffly through their own homes, biting off the heads of their wives and children, croaking like Nathan.
I locked myself in the apartment. Nathan didn’t stir. Robert might as well have been dead, for all the moving he did. Outside the windows of my apartment, I could see huge bonfires. From what I read in the news, it was probably the bodies of zombies that the authorities had rounded up. One of the fires looked like it was coming from the quad of WPI. I can only assume it’s finally closed.
Rach__l came back, of course. This time, I wasn’t the person who had to deal with it. Robert finally awoke from his doze when she showed up. I’m sure it wasn’t a wonderful thing to wake up to.
Rach__l hadn’t been put into an airtight coffin. It looked like most of her body had been eaten away by bugs and bacteria. She was almost black with rot. She still dribbles bugs behind her like bread crumbs, carrying them in her guts like a pirate carries a parrot on his shoulder. Robert hadn’t been all there when he finally came too, while she was standing in the kitchen and he was walking out of the bathroom. He ran to her and embraced her, ignoring my screams. I was frozen stiff where I stood. One zombie I could take, two was just too much. I don’t even know how he recognized her, she was so worm-riddled and rotted. I guess he didn’t fully understand how dead she was, how zombie-like she was, until she took a huge bite out of his right shoulder.
Robert had gotten away from Rach__l by yanking her head back by her hair. A lot of it just came out of her skull like cotton candy from its paper axis. But it was enough to dislodge her teeth, as well as a good portion of Rob’s shoulder. He flung her into a wall with a scream and she crumpled in a heap. A nest of roaches that had been settling in her intestines scuttled about in a disturbed manner, then settled back. We put Rach__l on the back porch, with Nathan.
09.14.01