Transformation

There once was a man from Michigan

Who dreamed he was eating his wife’s hand

He forgot who he was

While snacking on his cuz

What fun this man had in zombie land

Chapter Four

We all sit in the living room watching the news, save for Dad who is frying up venison and boiling lima beans for dinner. I try texting Brian’s phone a few times after I find my charger, but there are no responses. I pray he just left it at the school.

The front storm door is dead bolted, the back door in the laundry room has a tall dresser (which was a pain in the ass to get down the stairs) from my parents room pulled in front of it, and all first floor windows have furniture stacked in front of them as Mom refuses to let Carl nail boards into the walls despite his eagerness to do so. All the curtains in the house are drawn, and each of us, except for Mom, has a gun close at hand. I have a Ruger 10/22, Carl a Remington 1100, and Dad a Mossberg 500.

A collection of other odd weaponry has accumulated up on the kitchen table: two rusted machetes along with my new one, kitchen knives, a Barrett crossbow, an old ax, a tomahawk, and for some reason a banshee bat that I’m pretty sure Carl made out back one day and kept hidden from our parents in the garage until now. Mom gives him an open mouthed stare followed by a glare when he brings it in the house. I have a knife in all of my pockets, my large Cold Steel thrower is attached to my black belt, and my small Smith and Wesson three-blade set on the floor by my feet. Carl is sitting at the kitchen table with a wet stone, sharpening the rusted machetes. Maybe we are a bit over prepared, maybe this will stay under control, but then again it is always the unprepared that die, and the Marksons’ are not people to give up easily.

Dinner is quiet and eaten in the living room in front of the carnage and science on the flat screen. Eventually, we leave the television on, but turn our backs to the gore while we finish eating. I force the food down knowing I might need it, but having a hard time swallowing as I think about Mr. Tanks lying dead on the school floor still. Mom gives up on dinner after a few bites and disappears upstairs, dragging her blue blanket with her up the steps. We all go to bed in our rooms that night one by one, with a gun by the bedside, but there is little noise. The neighborhood is hiding in the quiet, like a child in hide and go seek. The only sound is a lone dog bark a few streets away. I lie in my bed, turn onto my stomach and fold my hands.

“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” I pause a moment to collect my thoughts. “God, what has happened? Are the gates of Hell overflowing or what? This isn’t supposed to happen in my lifetime. Maybe in a thousand years when I’m dead and gone, and my beliefs won’t be seen in front of my eyes. They are supposed to be easy to believe in like a kid believes in the Boogie Man because he never sees him.”

“I really hope, God, that you have a plan because this is simply not cool. As a matter of fact, this is straight up bull. Like I didn’t have enough to deal with. Just last week Mom and I were talking again, and now this? Six half-life days of Hell, and on the seventh day they rest? I sure hope so, God… I don’t want to tick you off. I’m sorry, God. Whatever I have done, humanity has done, I’m sorry, make it stop.” I feel tears in my eyes. I close my eyes until they subside. My face feels hot. “Please protect us. I don’t want another Mr. Tanks episode. Please…oh, God, let Rebecca live, let Brian be safe. I haven’t heard from him yet. Bless this household, and please let Mom one day live a cancer free life. Amen.”

I stare at the ceiling, thinking. I wonder where Brian is. I miss him, and it takes all my mental strength not to imagine Rebecca turning into a zombie and ripping out his heart. Sleep comes with worry, but sleep comes hard when it does.

I don’t remember passing out. By morning the little noise of last night has turned into silence. I wake up to the still, like the entire neighborhood is still asleep despite the sunlight streaming through my pink curtains. I head downstairs and find my dad drinking a cup of coffee and looking over bills at the kitchen table. How normal, except that it’s a weekday, not a weekend, and he should be at work. He sets his Number One Family coffee mug with our family photo from 10 years back printed on it down on the wooden table; it has faded pretty badly. My eight-year old faded self is hugging little six-year old Carl in front of a healthy Mom and young Dad, all of us in wonderfully attractive 90’s Christmas sweaters.

“Well, everyone is hiding like mice in their homes for what looks like no reason. Not one Renascentium zombie all night. Media always blows things out of proportion,” he laughs from behind his coffee.

“Yeah,” I mutter as I shuffle to the coffee pot. I’m glad Dad thinks it is over, but he didn’t see the courtyard man and Mr. Tanks. I shove those thoughts to the back of my mind where I am trying to shove Brian and Tom and the rest of my friends and family. I don’t want to deal with it this early so I try to keep the conversation normal. After all, maybe he’s right one bad day blown out of proportion. “You know, Dad, I’m going to miss you making the coffee every morning before I get up when I go to college. It’s the simple things in life, Dad.”

He looks at me with that awkward I have something I need to say look, “You know Zoe, before you leave you really ought to leave on a good note with your mom. She’s angry at the world right now, but she loves you. And you haven’t always held your temper with her either.”

I look down at the brown kitchen tile; it’s cold on my bare feet despite the May humidity in the air today. Leave it to the man of little words to say something important. So much for my normal conversation idea, other families don’t talk about this kind of stuff when they talk about college. They are happy and proud, which my parents are, but they also make it sound like a therapy get away session to leave this house and live on campus.

I think of the time Mom and I got into a fight over too much sugar in a strawberry smoothie. She was mad because she couldn’t eat something with so much sugar in it after a treatment. She swore up and down I did it on purpose; I hadn’t of course. I just have a sweet tooth. But I snapped back at her thinking she was being ridiculous and continued to drink the smoothie just to show her that I wasn’t going to be bothered by her rants. I even got out a straw to drink it to show her I thought she was being ridiculous, which was probably a bit too sarcastic on my part, but at that point I was furious. She then ran up to my bedroom. She held my work shirt for Meijer’s over the toilet, and I body slammed her thin frame into the shower door to stop her just before she let them go into the water. Things escalated into a screaming match from there. I spent the rest of the week at Emily’s house. They call it chemo brain. The anger, irrationality, temper; I called it a bi-weekly thing, and I was sixteen and mad.

“Yeah, I know,” I say to the floor. It’s funny how a person can have so many thoughts and so little words on a subject.

There is the sound of a gunshot from what sounds like a few doors down. It echoes off the backs of the plastic siding of suburbia. Dad and I look at each other for a moment, then he goes back to shuffling through the bills and takes a sip of his coffee, clearly wrong in his earlier statement. I walk to the cabinet above the stove and find a box of cereal in the dark stained oak cupboard. I pour myself a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and sit down with my own cup of coffee at the blue gray marble countertop with my back facing my dad. This morning has already reached a new level of strangeness, so pretending that neither of us is present seems like the best plan of action. We both seem to agree to this in our own way as we continue on with our separate routines. We have often gotten along in such a fashion as father and daughter. Dad is the introvert and Mom is the extrovert. I conform to both.

Hours pass, it’s 3:55 p.m. as I look at the stove clock over my shoulder. Around noon helicopters and planes began flying overhead. The noise is still going on, but I have tuned it out. I find myself tense every few minutes, and I have to force myself to relax. I am sitting in the living room on the blue La-Z-Boy recliner that matches our carpet. Mom is napping on the leather couch in the corner opposite of me under the yellow rose blanket she used to set on the floor for our sleepovers when we were little. I am trying to read Things Fall Apart for my English class. I am pretending we will have school come Monday; however, it isn’t really working out. I cannot read more than a sentence or two without having to stop or reread everything on the page. I find myself staring at our bookshelf, filled with dictionaries, a Bible, old textbooks from my parents’ college years, and a few classics like Moby Dick. The backs of the books' pages dissolve into shadow with the black paint of the shelf.

Mom starts moaning in her sleep again. Softly, always softly, but just loud enough to hear and make my stomach churn with pity. I wonder if she dreams the few days after a chemo treatment, and if so of what? Or if it just takes so much out of her that her body goes into one of those sleeps where it feels like five minutes but it was really ten hours. She used to always tell me her dreams before she began sleeping more than living. They were always so strange, full of her childhood and wild animals coming to get her, but not in these past few months. There is always one week after the treatment when the house is oddly silent, and everyone tiptoes around so as not to wake her, and all of Carl and my friends stay away like we are housing a dirty little secret.

Mom rolls over on the couch and her eyes open up just a crack. She gives me the smallest smile. She starts to get up, achingly. Her back is arched as she hobbles down the hallway to the bathroom near the back door. I go back to reading my book.

Mom has been back there for a good five minutes; she must be feeling ill. I begin to stand to go check on her to see if she needs water. Crash. Mom screams.

I can’t move fast enough. I throw my book to the ground and run through the kitchen and down the back hallway to the half bath. The dresser we had stacked in front of the laundry room back door has been knocked over. The drawers are face down with jeans sticking out from underneath. The bathroom door is pushed open and there I see Mom.

She is on her knees leaning over the toilet with her arm over her head defending herself. The yellow light illuminates the small bathroom with a sickly glow. She looks pathetic with vomit on the side of her mouth and eyes wide with fear, as our neighbor, Ms. Findlay, stands over her in an awkward bow legged stance. I pull a small switchblade out of my pocket as Ms. Findlay begins to growl, of all inhuman things, at my mother. Mom’s eyes widen, and I feel my muscles tighten around the handle. I plunge the silver blade into the soft spot at the back of her skull with one fluid movement. I give it a jerk upward to be sure to slice through the cerebral cortex; the growling stops. Ms. Findlay crumples, as I pull the edge of the knife out, into a heap on the floor next to my mom. Mom dry heaves into the toilet, from the circumstances or the chemotherapy, I don’t know.

I move my eyes from Mom to Ms. Findlay. I can hear my own deep breathing. I killed her on instinct to save my mom; I know it. I hadn’t even given it a second thought. It was Mr. Tanks all over again, coming after Rebecca, but this time I wasn’t going to watch someone bite into my mother. I feel eyes on me, and I look up to see Mom staring at me with a stunned expression. I look back at her with what I am sure is a blank stare. I can’t worry about how my outside appears when I can hear my own heart beating in my ears. I drop my knife to the floor.

Dad and Carl are there a few seconds later. They take in the sight and Dad helps Mom to her feet. She holds his hand for balance as she steps over the body. Her eyes are still wide, and she doesn’t speak, which is strange for her. Dad takes her down the hallway, I hear her dry heave once, and I know it is dry because the sound of puke hitting the floor never comes.

Carl and I look at each other and then down at our dead neighbor. “She always was a bit of a stiff,” I say as I attempt to roll her over with my foot. Sarcasm after stabbing someone in the head. What is wrong with me? I see a gaping hole where her stomach should be. That explains the gunshot from breakfast time.

“Bad timing, Zoe,” Carl replies, but I see a smirk, maybe videogames have poisoned him? Or maybe we are both freaks who can joke after something like this and we just haven’t come to that conclusion yet? “Think it’s safe to move her? I mean can we be infected?”

“Well, it’s not a disease, it’s that Renablahblah element that’s doing this. But…let’s just play it safe,” I advise.

I can hear Dad coming back down the hallway to the laundry room. He enters the backroom and lifts the dresser into its place against the door. Then after some fumbling around behind the washer with a swear word or two thrown in, he drags it in front of the home dresser defense.

“So where are we putting Ms. Findlay, Dad?” I ask when he is done. Her pale corpse is a nice contrast to the red painted walls.

“Well, I guess we should just leave her outside away from the house for now. We should probably call the cops so they know we weren’t the ones who shot and killed her the first time,” Dad says as he rubs his eyes with his pointer and thumb. He sounds shaky. The day is taking its toll on him. The gray hairs are visible where a year ago his hair and beard were brown. I can tell he is trying to stay calm and not show his feelings. He has been doing the same thing with Mom, trying to keep calm around us kids.

I step out of the bathroom to the laundry room and reach above the dryer and pull out some old gardening gloves of Mom’s and hand them to my dad and brother. They lift Ms. Findlay together, and I watch as her long, purple sundress drags the ground. Her large, round, glasses are askew and her gray roots are showing through the short brown hair.

“I can’t believe I did that,” I think aloud. Dad looks up at me as he walks backwards down the hall. His face conveys little expression, like mine.

“Yeah, well it was her or Mom, and she was already dead,” Carl says. “I’m kind of shocked you knew how to kill her, or had the guts to at least.” I’m silent as they take her to the only door we have left open. The sliding glass door in the dining room. How did I do it? It was a reflex, maybe too many zombie movies, or maybe I’ve been playing with knives too long.

I bend down and pick my bloodstained knife up off the floor. I set it on the bathroom sink and follow them down the hall and go to the home phone in the kitchen since I left my cell phone upstairs. I dial 911.

The line is busy. I try again, and again, and again. I decide to try again in about 20 minutes. I head back to the bathroom and grab the sky blue hand towel from the sink to clean up the blood. The blue and ugly red contrast brightly. I stare at the cloth and think it is such a fitting color to clean up blood. It is cold and depressing like rain and tears. I finish cleaning and throw the towel away. I wander around the corner into the living room. I’m shaking. Mom is there with a bucket by her side sitting in the blue chair I was in earlier. I sit down on the floor next to her.

“You okay?” I ask. I’m trying to hold my hands still in my lap.

“Zoe,” she sounds even weaker now, but alert, “thank you.” She sounds like that is not at all what she wants to say, especially seeing as that did not answer my question at all, but I leave it alone to let her rest.

“Take care of my garden, Zoe,” she looks straight at me so I have to look into her hazel green eyes. They are a bright color in the iris, but the whites of her eyes are bloodshot.

“Mom, stop.”

“No, Zoe, I won’t stop because it won’t stop. I’m scared. I probably won’t make it until next spring. So please just listen to me and do as I ask. Take care of my garden and help Carl. You are young, but he needs your help more than you need his.”

“This is ridiculous, Mom. You…you have to set a goal. You have to be a grandma and spoil my kids and send them home hyped up on sugar before you can die old. So there,” I break eye contact. The carpet in the living room swirls as I search it for something to stare at. It’s blue, a darker blue than the towel, but a sad blue all the same. She smiles at me then grabs the remote from off of one of the oak end tables.

She turns the volume up on the news, and we watch the happenings unfold. There is footage of someone burning a corpse and the police arresting the man. The silhouette cast by the fire of the man struggling against the police is chilling. It’s a good thing we decided against burning Ms. Findlay. At the bottom of the screen rolls a banner, “WARNING: Renascentium victims can spread the reanimation radiation through open wounds without first being deceased.” I think immediately of Brian. He took Rebecca home; she was bitten by Mr. Tanks. I can’t let myself think of these things or I’ll cry during a zombie outbreak and everyone knows tears in an apocalypse means certain death.

Mom falls asleep watching the news after about a ten minutes of the same gore and terror. I get up and cover her in the yellow blanket again despite the fact that the day isn’t cold. I wander upstairs to find my cell phone and try the police again. Busy. I throw the phone on my bed with shaking hands.

I hear hammering coming from downstairs. I guess Carl and Dad have decided to board up the house against Mom’s wishes. Thank God.

I grab my laptop and go online. I Google “How reanimation spreads,” seeing as I must not have watched the whole news report at the moment it was explained.

I find a YouTube clip of a CNN report. The same Bill Nye The Science Guy is standing there, but this time he is clearly reading a teleprompter. He begins talking, “It seems that the victims of the Renascentium element can spread the element to others via blood or saliva.” His eyes read back and forth. “The concentration of it in the body causes it to be able to affect others longer than the original half life caused by the meteor sho…,” and the video stops. Buffering, wonderful. I hit refresh and the screen goes to white and the message, We’re sorry, but the site YouTube.com is currently undergoing work. We will have it back up as soon as possible, sorry for the inconvenience.

I sigh and shut my laptop. The sun is sinking behind Tom’s grandmother’s line of maple trees. I get up and walk the few feet to the light switch. Nothing. I try again, still nothing. I try a third time and this time rapidly flick the stupid thing even though I know there is no hope.

“Friggin’ A!” I mutter to myself. “Power’s out!” I shout for the whole household to hear.

I go to my desk underneath my windowsill and rummage through the mess of office supplies for a lighter. I find a little purple Bic and light the three-wick candle on my dresser. I love the smell of vanilla, despite the circumstances surrounding its use. I inhale deeply as a little stress relief, but it doesn’t last. I feel nervous more and more with each minute. My stomach is tight, my mouth is dry, and I can’t stop shaking.

I decide to make my way downstairs and share the news that the depressing ability to spread will last longer than six days. As I walk to the stairs I try the police one more time. This time there is no busy signal, there is nothing but dead air. My heart drops. I look at my phone and see that it has one bar of battery left. I stop halfway down the steps before turning and running back up to the bathroom. Just in case the power stays out I begin to fill the tub up with water so we will have something to drink. I sit on the edge of the tub and wait. Deep breaths in and deep breaths out. I shut the water off and head back down the stairs.

On the last step I feel my phone vibrate in my hand. It’s a text message from a number I don’t know.

From: (313) 242-8169

If you have your phone on you, it’s Brian. I left mine at the school, found this one in my neighbor’s house. I’m coming over later, hope you’re at your house. Love you.

To: (313) 242-8169

Love you, too. How are things on your end? We’ve boarded up the house…Mom was almost bitten.

I can’t convey how terrified I am right now through text. Everything I type seems minimalized.

From: (313) 242-8169

I’ll tell you everything when I get there. I’m walking so I’ll be about an hour.

To: (313) 242-8169

Walking!?!? Don’t come if you don’t have to. Stay inside and protected. Be safe!

He doesn’t reply. Oh, this is bad. He is walking to my house during a zombie outbreak, in the dark. Why is this horror movie cliché happening? I take my throwing knife and flick it into my purple carpet with more force than necessary to make it stick. I swallow, but there is nothing to go down. My throat is as dry as a cotton ball. As stereotypical as the situation is I can’t help but feel guilty because even though I told him to stay safe, I would prefer he comes here. I suppose human nature dictates this, but try as I might I hope he faces the very possible dangers as a knight in shining armor to reach me. I feel sick for being so damn girly. I am an intelligent, skilled, individual woman, I think to myself, and I yank my knife out of my floor.

As I walk to the kitchen I see that Carl and Dad did a smashing good job on boarding up the windows. The few old boards we had in the garage cover the front windows with a few gaps in-between boards just big enough to fit a shotgun through, and as I enter the kitchen I see they demolished the blue painted bookshelf in Mom and Dad’s bedroom to cover those windows. There is a pile of books on the table next to the assortment of weapons. Dad sees me from the living room.

“What did the police say?” He says with a nail in his mouth.

“They never answered, Dad. And now the line’s gone dead.”

“You’ve got to be freaking kidding me. Now I’m gunna have the neighbor rotting in my back yard.”

“Guess so, Dad. I tried over and over again to get through. No doubt they have their hands full.”

“Yeah, no shit,” I know he is mad at the circumstances and not me, but I still feel like I am being scolded.

I turn to the fruit basket on the counter and grab an orange. It is no use talking to Dad anymore. He is in a bad mood, no doubt because now he can’t watch television among other things such as the neighbor attempting to eat his beloved. I grab a few candles from a drawer by the stove and light them before it becomes too dark. I light and scatter them around the kitchen and living room. I bring a few to the guys, who are now finishing up in the back room now.

I sit in the living room peeling an orange, making sure that every vein of rind is off the back of the slices before I eat it piece by piece. The little dangling pieces of non-fleshy fruit always disturb me. I take my sweet time eating the orange, playing with it as I sit alone in the living room watching Mom sleep, distracting my anxious boredom. I think about Brian and the time elapsed since he contacted me. Every bite I take gets harder and harder to swallow. This could be the last I’ll ever eat; the other day could have been the last time I saw Brian, and today could have been Mom’s last sunset.

I have always known Brian, but I never actually knew him until sophomore year. I had seen him in the halls and on the playground since my Virtue Elementary days, but always as a faceless person. Our paths just never crossed, always kept different circles of friends. I didn’t even know his name. Then came a day when I couldn’t handle the everyday fights anymore in this house. It was about eight months after Mom had been diagnosed. She was trying radiation therapy for the first time instead of chemotherapy. She was getting her strength back. She was on the couch for a few days. Then the nurses came out to the house and took care of her. Her energy was back, at least until the next wave of treatment scheduled for two weeks from then.

I was up in my room when I heard yelling from downstairs. It sounded like Carl and Mom. Through the vents I hear, “Well then I give up! I give up on making dinner, I give up on cleaning, I give up on being a Mom, I give up on this cancer. I quit!”

Someone throws something glass, and I hear it shatter on the wood kitchen floor.

“Just because you’re sick doesn’t mean you can treat us like crap the entire time!” I hear Carl yell. He sounds so loud it seems like he is going to do damage to his vocal cords. A door slams, and it is quiet.

I go downstairs. In the kitchen Mom is sitting at the kitchen table. She has her head in her hands, sobbing. I move to take the chair next to her. I put a hand on her shoulder and wait while she cries.

“What happened?” I ask after she’s calmed down a bit.

“Carl. He’s impossible. I feel good today, Zoe. I wanted to make dinner so your Dad didn’t have to after work. I was going to make stuffed peppers.” I make a face; neither Carl nor I like stuffed peppers.

“He made the same face!” Mom yells.

Crap. “I’m kidding, Mom. I don’t like them, but I’ll eat them.”

“Yeah, well your brother just went ahead and started making his own food as I was cooking. That’s an in my face I won’t eat what you cook.”

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“Mom, he’s never eaten them before.”

“Your dad likes them.”

“I know,” I concede. I am getting nowhere. I hear the front door open, and I look at the stove clock. Dad is home. I get up from the table and slip out the back door from the kitchen to go find Carl before Dad does. He is about halfway down the street when I catch up to him.

“Hey!” I shout.

He turns around, “Hey…”

“Wanna talk?”

“I don’t get it. One second it’s fine and the next boom, she’s mad.”

“Dad said something a few days ago. Chemo brain, he called it. Or at least that’s what he said the nurses called it. Patients who have chemo for a while tend to be angry for no reason, forgetful too, like pieces are starting to go missing.”

That was the first day Carl and I realized our mom was changing, and might not come back. I spent the rest of the week going to the park after school. I hadn’t been a frequenter of the park since I was a little kid, but I found myself doing my homework on the benches instead of my bedroom.

Brian was there a lot just walking around or shooting a basketball. At first I didn’t notice him, but by the second day he noticed me. I was buried in a geometry problem when I saw the orange basketball get set on my bench.

“You know reading that much will hurt your eyes,” he said.

“Oh, um yeah. Geometry calls.”

“You did homework for three hours straight yesterday and you are going on hour two today. Take a break.”

My head does feel fuzzy from staring at text book pages for so long, “And do what?”

“Play basketball?”

Brian and I became good friends after that, then really good friends. I went to the park to hang out with him everyday. After a few months he asked me why I would do homework anywhere but home. I remember that evening. I shut my textbook and sighed. He put his arm around me, and I told him about Mom’s cancer. He listened and I realized that was something I needed, a listener. He didn’t try to say he was sorry or pity me, just listened.

As I near eating the last piece of my orange my phone vibrates in my pocket. It’s a phone call this time.

“Brian?”

“Hey, Zoe. Thank God, I’m in your neighborhood, and I...”

There is a quick beep and then silence. I look down; my phone is dead. I do not know what comes over me at that moment, but I grab a long smooth, rusted machete from the table, freshly sharpened courtesy of my brother. I slap each pocket in turn feeling for a blade before I walk to the front door. I shove the couch we have as a blockade aside and creak the door open. I step onto our front doorstep, on a mission.

I see pitch black outside, the entire neighborhood still in a powerless darkness. The sky is clouded, and the moon is a sliver behind the dark gray clouds. How close was he when he called? I walk to the edge of our yard where the darkened lamppost is. I peer into the shadows, searching for him. Then I see movement. My throat tightens, and my heart becomes louder in my ears as my muscles tense.

I inch silently towards the moving shadow. I tighten my grip on my machete. The figure moves toward me with a slight limp. I crouch low behind a bush in Tom’s grandmother’s yard in an attempt to camouflage myself. A thicker cloud moves over the sliver of moon and I am in complete darkness as I hear the footsteps move past me only a foot away on my right. I aim my machete by rearing my hand back to be able to strike with force, ready to stand up and plunge my blade into the neck if I was mistaken about the shadow creature

“Brian,” I whisper.

The figure stops mid-walk. I hold my breath.

“Zoe?”

I smile. I lower my weapon and stand up. “I found you!” I spring up from my hiding place and hug him. I feel like a little child playing hide and go seek. I am so glad he is okay. Brian is the only person I can act that way around and not feel like a loon with a grin on my face.

We walk through the yard to the front door hand in hand and machete in the other hand. I open it slowly to avoid the noise until it is all the way opened so we can both walk inside together. I hear a buzzing. The lights come on with a flicker from the street lamps. Then the doorway is filled with light from the house. There in the glow of the door I see Tom’s grandmother lying on the ground just 10 feet from us in the grass, curlers still in her hair and dressed in a pink nightgown. She looks up at me, her eyes are glazed over in the yellow light. Her mouth is covered in blood, like a clown’s smile painted on. She focuses on us and then she slowly opens her mouth and shrieks a blood-curdling wail. Shivers are sent down my spine. I break out of Brian’s hand to cover my ears. The scream hurts so bad.

She starts to make a move to get up from the grass. We bolt inside. I slam the door shut and I run to the couch to shove it back over the door. Brian comes to help me. Carl runs down the stairs to see why there is screaming and sees Brian and me struggling to hurry.

“When did you get here?” he looks at Brian.

“Uh, just now,” he replies. He is pushing the couch with me over the blue carpet.

“You guys opened the door? Is shit going down?” He sees our panicked faces, but once again he sounds excited. I swear I see the hint of a smile.

Dad comes running into the room as well, with his shotgun in his hands pointed up at our small frosted entranceway light that we must have left on before the power went out earlier.

“Hey, Dad. Perfect timing. We need another neighbor killed,” I say. My palms are sweaty, and I feel shaky, but my mouth is spewing sarcasm. This seems to be a real problem for me.

Pounding starts on the door so hard it shakes. Carl leaps off the last step with his lanky legs, and peers through the cracks of the wood. His eyes are narrowed to peer into the darkness, and his lips stay normal, calm, like he is analyzing. He runs back into the kitchen, presumably to grab his gun. Then another set of pounding fists starts on the right front window behind the boards. I grasp my machete and stand behind Dad waiting just in case something makes it in. I hear a gunshot go off a few doors down; then I hear a gunshot go off right next to me.

“Fuck!” Brian and I yell simultaneously. The ringing in my ears is so loud that Mom’s yelling from behind us sounds intelligible.

Dad has pulled down the window on the left and shot through the boards. The pounding on the front door stops. Another shot and the pounding on the right window stops, as well.

“Someone turn off the damn lights!” Carl yells as he looks out the window Dad just fired from, his shotgun in hand.

Brian runs to the switch. We are in darkness in the front room, an eerie quiet settles on us after the gunshots. There is heavy breathing from everyone.

“Make sure all the lights are off; I’m taking Ruth upstairs,” Dad says from behind me and I hear him tromp off to the living room.

Suddenly everyone scatters. I run to the kitchen and hit the lights, and I see Dad go to the living room and help Mom up who has been sitting in her chair, tense, with all the commotion. She must have found the energy to somehow get up though because there is a long kitchen knife in her hand held by white, bony knuckles. I look out the sliding glass door in the kitchen into the backyard. There are two more zombies walking along our fence trying to get in. One repeatedly walks into the fence like someone in an insane asylum. I start to pull the last living room couch to the door, our only exit. We hadn’t tried to block this door before because the fence is a defense in itself, and we had run out of wood, but now I don’t take the chance.

Carl and Brian walk into the dark kitchen and see what I am doing. They grab the blue rocking chair and flip it upside down and fit it on top of the left side of the couch like a puzzle so that we have a wall of furniture. The urgency in everyone’s movements is palpable. Next we each grab one of the four chairs around the kitchen table and do the same on the other side of the couch.

“There’s two more right outside the fence,” I say. Brian anxiously walks to the table and examines the pile of weapons.

“Banshee bat?” he asks.

“Yup,” says Carl nonchalantly with an over exaggerated shoulder shrug.

His timing is perfect, I laugh. Brian gives me a strange look as though I’ve lost my mind, and I probably have. Dad comes downstairs holding a long stemmed blue candle from his bedroom. He looks serious; the laughter ceases. We all immediately start looking for more candles in the drawers, except for Brian who has no clue where such things are. He keeps himself busy by peering into the darkness of the backyard to watch the zombies that are just shy of knowing we are here. The one that was walking into the fence seems to have forgotten its goal now that all has gone quiet and shambles alongside the other back and forth.

“We could have target practice,” Carl mumbles as he rummages through a drawer.

“Yeah, sure Carl,” dad growls, “invite a horde by picking off two. Use your damn head.”

I feel scolded for my brother, as a heat washes over me.

“I was kidding,” Carl whispers, but he keeps his back turned to everyone.

We end up finding a package of 100 tea lights in the laundry room in a cabinet above the dryer, a few large scented ones from my room, and two long stemmed red candles come out of the drawers in the kitchen. Soon the kitchen and the living room have more dim flickering lighting added to the few candles I found earlier.

I look out into the night, seeing the shadows move both by reality and imagination.

“We should move, being in a suburb right now probably isn’t the safest thing,” Brian states.

Dad looks up at him, his face blank. I can tell he is thinking about Mom. She has another treatment scheduled in a week and a half in the next city over. Her chemo port is still in, and can only be disposed of by a trained nurse.

“Yeah, well we can’t exactly pick up and leave. We don’t have anywhere to go and Mom won’t be feeling good for about another three days at minimum,” snips Carl, clearly thinking the same thing as Dad and me.

“Yeah, but we need a better plan than just fighting as they come into our home. It looks like half of the neighborhood is undead,” I say in a defense of Brian. He has a point even though it is blunt.

“Watches?” says Carl.

“And more defense. This whole couches and washer and dryer precariously stacked business is going to get us all killed. I’m a tad shaken, no lie,” I say even though the last sentence is obvious. I’ve been shaken for days now. “How about Dad and Carl take a watch tonight. One upstairs facing the front yard and one upstairs facing the backyard. Brian and I can go around the house and try to work with what we have to block the downstairs entrances better.”

“We still need at least one way out, Zoe,” says Carl.

“I know, Carl. I’m not stupid. I’ve seen the original Night of the Living Dead. I’m not cornering myself when a horde goes Chuck Norris on our house.” So we split. Dad and Carl head upstairs with guns in hand, and Brian and I begin moving furniture around to create the ultimate furniture fort. Who knew those skills would come in handy one day?

We start with the entranceway. I wish I could go outside and move Tom’s grandmother; it feels so wrong to leave her body out there, but I can’t open that door again with an unknown amount of walking corpses hiding in the night. We pull a large watercolor painting of a garden down from the wall opposite the stairs and a few small family photos and break the frames. We nail the boards across the crack between the door and the wall in the doorframe. As we finish the last board I ask the question that should have been on my mind since he called me.

“Why were you alone?”

He goes back and hammers in a few nails that are jutting out a little bit, furrowing his brow more with each strike.

“That’s a really good question...I don’t know,” he says after a minute.

“What?”

He sighs, “When I got back to my neighborhood Rebecca was still unconscious. I had to get her home so they could call an ambulance or something, if they could. I had an inclination as to what she would become,” he pauses, “her house is on the street one over from mine. I passed my house going to hers on purpose to ease my mind that my parents were safe. I saw both my parent’s vehicles in the driveway, Dad’s truck and Mom’s Fiesta.”

“I thought to myself, good, they’re together. I pulled into Rebecca’s driveway and her mother rushed out immediately. She must have been watching from the window. She took her in her arms and thanked me as she ran into the house yelling for her husband to call 911. Strong woman to carry a 13 year old like nothing. I got back in my truck and drove home, only this time my dad’s truck was gone. I hadn’t passed my house more than five minutes ago, and it was gone.”

“So I went up to the porch and tried the front door. It was locked, which is weird for my family. So I got my key out and went inside. It smelled like peaches, one of my mom’s favorite candles. I walked past the bookshelf right on the inside of the doorway and I saw the candle’s wax was still liquid. I searched everywhere, Zoe. I screamed and I screamed. I even went banging on the neighbor’s doors. No one would answer.”

“They left me, Zoe,” he started to cry, just a few tears. I have never seen Brian cry before. He was like a little boy. “I waited all night and all day for them to come back,” he said through the tears that were now freely flowing; I leaned over and hugged him close. I had no words of comfort to give.

I hear a few gunshots go off over the sound of Brian sniffling in my ear. I can’t tell where they are coming from though, perhaps next door. Then it is so quiet on my end as he weeps I can hear every breath he takes.

As the tears become less I try to think of something to say, “Why did you walk here?”

He turns his head, tears now dry, and begins to gather up the tools to move onto the next room without saying a word.

“Brian. Why did you walk?”

“Someone siphoned the gas out of my car last night,” he gets up and grabs all the tools in his hands and walks into the kitchen. He is visibly still upset by the conversation about his parents. He walks quickly, as if he is running away from the topic.

I remain seated, thinking about his parents, especially his mother. She has never done anything to me personally, but she’s never done anything for me either, or anyone for that matter that I know of. His parents’ lack of interest in anything but themselves was the reason Brian was at the park when we met. Why would he stay home when no one cares?

I remember a night when we were sitting in the park after dark. We had just started dating. It was a Friday night, and I had snuck out of the house to meet him. I took a bottle of whiskey from my parents' stash with me. My mother had always said it was okay to drink to relax, and to relax was what I needed. It was the day my parents came into my room to tell me that the doctors said the tumor hadn’t shrunk at all in the last few months. It was inoperable, end of story.

We sat on a park bench that night and had a few shots. It was the first alcohol I’d ever had in my life. It was disgusting, but after a while I felt the head rush, and my emotions came out. I poured my heart out to Brian. I told him how I missed my old mom. The one with energy, who got up with us in the morning for school, baked us cookies for the first day of school, remembered our every friend. In return he told me he wished his mom had just once been like that. She wasn’t ill, my mom was, and she still tried. He told me his mom never woke up with him. After the first grade he was on his own for school. She never baked, cooked, or did anything beyond what she had to legally. I was shocked. I had thought those were things all moms did.

Crash. No time to reminisce. I run to the kitchen just behind Brian. My wall of couches has failed, and it appears that five friendly neighborhood zombies are the culprits. I’ve had it with this. I feel my hands clench into fists and my breathing quicken.

I reach into my back pocket and pull out one of my longer knives and flick it open. I grab my thrower with my left hand out of its belt loop sheath. One of the zombies kind of looks like his mom. Good. I smile.

The creature with blonde hair and brunette lowlights comes at me in blue jeans and a tight, orange tee shirt. Her over bleached hair is sticking out in all directions and is covered in sticky looking blood clumps. A chunk of her neck is missing and the blood has smeared onto her face. I walk forward, take my leg behind her opposite one, and swipe. She falls with her arms outstretched at me, and I go down on one knee. I rise up quick enough to meet her chin with the added force of my standing up and my arm strength. My pocket knife goes clean through and the point comes out near her nose on her right side. She doesn’t even flinch, just chomps her jaw at me. I use the knife in her face as leverage and pull her forward as I take my thrower and pull her into its blade right at her temple. She goes heavy as I pull my knives out. The sickening sound of the blades sliding out gives me a queasy yet satisfied feeling. My breathing begins to slow. Am losing my mind?

I hear a high-pitched screech from one of the zombies followed by a gunshot to my right, and I look in time to see Suzie, the little 5th grader in pigtails a few doors down, fall with a bullet hole through her forehead. The doorframe to the outside shatters little wooden splinters everywhere as the bullet passes through. Brian took her out with a pistol. Where did he get a pistol? My ears are ringing so badly now with all these close range shots, but the adrenaline of the moment keeps me focused. I hear a yell and turn to see a man lunge at me from around the marble countertop. His hip bumps the counter and he stumbles giving me time to think. I toss my thrower into my right hand and quickly twist using my hips for momentum and plunge my favorite knife into his eye socket. The blood oozes around the hilt. I feel it ooze onto my hand and through my fingers.

The last two creatures are walking away from me. I hear a whooping noise from behind me. They start towards the sound, and Carl appears out of the doorframe to the kitchen. He takes the butt of his shotgun and pushes one of them back. In the time that the zombie takes to stumble and regain its balance Carl has turned his gun around like a color guard and aimed. Bang. The creature goes down, its face not even a face anymore but swiss cheese due to close range buckshot.

Carl runs around the second one and grabs the banshee bat from the table. He turns around with the last zombie right behind him and swings moments before it’s jaw clenched into his shoulder. The bat lands on the side of the face of the last creature. There is a bloodcurdling smacking and crunching sound as the nails penetrate the skull. Carl pulls, with some effort, the bat out of the face. Bits of flesh dangle from the nails.

“Yeah!” Carl yells. He holds the bat up high like a victory torch.

I stand up and stare at the mess. Somehow I feel better even though my knees feel weak.

“What happened to your watch, Carl?” I ask suddenly, remembering why this shouldn’t have happened at all and feeling ticked off.

“Zoe, there were about four more of them, Dad and I got to them. You’re lucky I killed what I did before they got through. It’s hard as Hell to hit a target with a shotgun in the dark. Besides, wasn’t that frickin’ sweet?”

“Mom is going to flip.” The mess is horrid. “Did you see any more coming?”

“No, they actually all came from one house. Someone must have been hoarding up together. Came from two doors down, the Bales. They started pouring out when you guys were hammering. We just have to be quieter until we figure stuff out.”

“What are we going to do about this door? We don’t exactly have the materials to block this now. Damn, glass,” says Brian kicking a shard back outside with his shoe.

“Actually the Bales have a ton of wood in their backyard. They were going to build a shed, remember?” Carl says to me.

“So a suicide mission? A damn horde just came from their house, Carl,” I snap.

“Do you really think they had more than nine people held up there? Maybe one or two zombies left at most.”

He’s probably right, I’m convinced. I nod my head and turn to Brian. He is standing there with the pistol still in his hand. “Where did you get a handgun? You’re 18.”

He smiles, “I found the guy who siphoned my gas, and I asked for a fair trade.” The look on his face reminds me why he started kickboxing. Major stress relief. I almost feel bad for the guy.

“Kids!” I hear Mom yell.

“Ruth, stay upstairs,” I hear Dad yelling from somewhere above us.

“Get out of my way, Jared.”

“Mom, it’s fine,” I shout up to the ceiling.

She comes into the kitchen anyway. She holds Dad’s shotgun down by her side, even though I’m positive she hasn’t shot one in 20 years. She means business. Her eyes open wide at the site of the kitchen. There are bullet holes in the wall by what was the door. Chips of wood and granite are missing from the side of the counter, and bits of corpse are everywhere. Carl sets the banshee bat dripping with blood down behind him out of sight, and pushes it further back with his foot because that is what she is going to really care about.

“Oh my God. What the Hell happened? Is everyone okay? Who’s going to clean this? I swear if you kids expect me to clean this you have another thing coming.” Her eyes are bugging out of her head, and her cheeks are getting red as she turns to each one of us. She is a ticking time bomb for rage.

“Mom, it’s fine. I’ll clean it,” I say because I knew it to be true. Carl doesn’t even know where the mop is.

“I can’t handle this. I need to go lay down.” It appears the fire has died out from her venture downstairs to see that her kids are safe. She turns and begins the hunched over journey back up the stairs.

“Jared, I’m so tired,” I hear her say as they reach the landing.

“I know, Ruth. I know,” I hear.

I look around at the chaotic mess surrounding me. Is it even worth cleaning? I’m not sure we can even stay here anymore. I tell the guys there are gloves under the sink; they are on body duty. I go for the cleaning supplies. As I reach for the bleach, I realize I’m not shaking anymore. Is this crazy zombie-killing thing becoming easier? Am I that sick? Or is it just getting easier to defend my family?

Carl and Brian take the bodies out the back door hole one by one, piling them up in the far back corner of the yard opposite of my throwing tree. They come in after the last corpse, Suzie, as I am sweeping up the blood-smeared glass.

“The side gate was wide open,” Carl says to me.

“I was wondering how they all got over the fence at once,” I mumble to the yellow broom handle. I’m still ticked at him for not giving us more warning other than a few gunshots.

Carl pushes anyway, not giving a damn I’m mad at him, “So do you think we will be safe for the night? I don’t think we can get Mom to move for the next few days until the chemo crap leaves her system.” He leans on the chipped door frame, crossing his arms. His blood spattered white shirt looks like he is about to go trick-or-treating.

“Well there isn’t much of a way to blockade the downstairs until we can get over to the Bales tomorrow,” I say.

“Tomorrow? Why can’t we do it tonight?”

“Carl, do you really want to go over to the yard where nine zombies just came out at night?” asks Brian. “I think we should all stay upstairs and have one person on watch at the staircase all night.”

“That doesn’t settle with me,” I say, putting my hands on my hips. “It would be just our luck that in the morning Dad comes down to grab a banana and some half zombie that was sliced in two by a chainsaw has entered the house and has now had his ankle for breakfast.”

“Okay, they can watch at this door,” he says, rolling his eyes.

“Two people, at all times,” I put my final word in.

“Okay, sounds like a plan to me,” says Carl.

I finish cleaning up as best I can. Brian moves the furniture out of my way and back as I go, luckily a warm May night and the gaping zombie hole isn’t a weather problem, yet. I hear Dad coming downstairs. His footsteps are heavier and slower than Carl’s. Mom must finally be asleep, which isn’t all that hard for her to do when it is her bad week.

As he enters the kitchen Carl and Brian get up to talk to him about the plan we have concocted. I finish the sweeping. They explain the plan for tonight to him. He looks relieved. I’m sure he was thinking the same thing as us; that Mom wouldn’t make it. Not to mention the fact that we don’t exactly have a set destination.

Dad says goodnight to all of us and heads back upstairs. Carl and I take the first watch. Brian says he is exhausted from his walk here and soon follows Dad. I am not sure whether I am overjoyed he is here as I watch him walk up the stairs to my room, or if I am a little scared of him with a gun that he beat off a guy. If I had the strength would I have done the same thing to someone who had wronged me? Weird combinations of feelings were never my forte. Feeling more than one thing at a time makes me feel like I am on a rollercoaster with my guts rising in the air and my head unable to focus. So I usually just end up with a blank expression on my face that people take as I don’t care, which often gets me into trouble at home. Carl comes down shortly after and sits at the kitchen table with a rag.

After I finish bleaching the entire kitchen, and Carl has wiped all the weapons clean, we flip the couch over the right way and settle it in front of the hole that was the door. We have our guns held by our sides. This is going to be a long night.

We sit on the couch in silence for quite some time. I would guess about an hour or so. I feel sleepy, which is strange considering I should be wired, but the neighborhood seems calm and restful. I can even hear smaller animals skittering around under the night blanket. My eyes sting with the effort not to shut them. I need to talk to stay awake.

Carl breaks the silence for me, “You know, Zoe. I’ve always thought I’d be really good in a zombie apocalypse if it ever happened…I just never did figure Mom would be this way. A few years back I had the perfect escape plan for arming all of us and surviving, but after Mom got sick I never redid my plan. I imagined we could harbor in the house for a day and pack up some survival stuff. Then we could drive out of here and head north to that cabin we used to stay at every summer by that small lake. I always thought maybe we might need to bike instead, given crammed roadways.”

“I know what you mean…Hell, I never redid my plan to just live in general after Mom was diagnosed. You know for the past three years I’ve just been telling myself she will be fine. She will be one of those inspirational stories people hear about cancer. But she’s so thin now and sick. She doesn’t really look like Mom much anymore. She’s like a skeleton. I don’t know if…” Carl cuts me off.

“I know. I did the same thing. Now though, in the last month I’ve seen it. She’s different, like she isn’t trying anymore. She hasn’t yelled at me in weeks,” he laughs, “And if this zombie crap, like in the movies, keeps going, and she can’t make any more treatments, I just don’t know.”

“She can’t die yet. She still has to see you graduate. Not just me, besides Mom has always wanted grandkids. So she still has a few years left at least.” I sound like a Lifetime movie, I know, but that’s how I see it. I used to think all of that was sappy crap, I never cried during movies where someone was dying. I knew it was sad, but you just never think it will happen to you…until it does. Then your friends look at you like you watched that movie. Like it is sad for you and they know that, but life for them will go on as normal.

“Remember that time we all played wiffle ball in the backyard? The day Mom and Dad told us?” I ask.

“Yeah, even Mom played.” I smile at the memory of the warm August day.

“Life isn’t like that. I thought we would have a ton of memories similar to that after Mom found out.”

“Yeah, it’s just the same fights, but more often and more heated,” Carl says.

“She’ll live. Even through this. The Markson’s are badass.”

“Hell yeah we are,” he agrees.

We sit in silence, and in the dark my tired mind is turning. We did play wiffle ball after Mom and Dad told us. It was the last thing I remember that day. It was the easiest to remember, which is probably what my parents were hoping for, but the rest of the day’s memories are still there when I stop to think about them.

Dad and Mom had gone to the doctors a lot that week together, which was strange. It was a Saturday afternoon. Dad went to each of our bedrooms to tell us to come downstairs, instead of yelling through the floorboards. When we both made our way down, there was Mom standing, not sitting in the middle of the living room. Her arms were crossed over her chest in her blue V-neck. She told us to sit down. Carl and I looked at each other, something was wrong, but we couldn’t figure out what. I remember thinking I was in trouble. The wind blew a warm breeze through the curtains. It was a beautiful day. Dad walked into the living room and stood by Mom. She began telling us about how she had been at the doctors a lot this week and how much she loved us. I still didn’t get it. Tears began rolling down her cheeks. She couldn’t talk anymore through the tears. Dad finished for her, “Your mother has cancer.”

I don’t remember too much about the rest of the conversation. My mind was reeling. Trying to think of other people I knew with cancer or shows. Mom looked healthy. I remember a family hug and all of us crying together. Then our parents said it was just a point that we needed to make an effort to create more memories. We headed out into the back yard with the ball and bat.

I stare out our broken glass backdoor. My mind comes back to the now. Thinking and making connections that only happen in the stillness.

“You know what, bro?”

“What?” he sounds tired.

“Zombie viruses or Renascentium elements are a lot like cancer. Cancer doesn’t give a shit if it kills an old woman or a little girl.” I think of Mrs. Shoe and Suzie. “It wrecks your body and you can’t do anything to stop it or prevent it from spreading. You hurt the ones you care about because you’re not you.” Carl is quiet, thinking.

Then I hear footsteps on the stairs. It’s Brian.

“Hey,” he whispers.

“You’re up already?” I ask.

“Yeah, kind of hard to get a solid night’s sleep. I figured you could go upstairs and sleep for a bit.”

“You care, Carl?” I say.

“Nope,” he turns back around to face the door, but I see how sunken and tired his eyes look in the candlelight.

I get up and kiss Brian quickly before I head upstairs. I take my gun up with me; Brian has his pistol on his belt.

I walk as quietly as possible up the stairs. It’s not too difficult given the worn carpet on them with years of tag played on them; even now in high school when our friends do find their way here we play tag in the house.

I get to my room and lock the door. It’s hot upstairs; maybe the heat will rot the walking corpses this summer. Wouldn’t that be a nice solution, far fetched globally, but nice to think about. I smile at the thought of their limbs just falling off and life returning to normal. I pull my shirt off over my head and slid out of my pants. I haven’t looked in a mirror, but I know they must be covered in blood just like Carl. I slip into an old baggy shirt in the moonlight. I stare at the bloodstained clothes on my floor. Scooping them up I walk to my window and open the screen to the night air. It’s black and calm. Tensing my arm I throw the clothes as far as I can, and they land in the street.

I get into bed and throw off the comforter, lying there under just the sheet. I listen to the night for a bit, and then it hits me. I don’t hear the planes anymore. I listen for what feels like half an hour to the deafening silence. My mouth feels dry. This is bad. I roll over onto my elbows and fold my hands together.

“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take,” I find the last line particularly important tonight. I swallow a shadow of fear. “God, I still have no idea why this is happening. I guess I don’t know why you did this, yes, I am blaming you, God. You did this. Just please help me. Let the army come, the cops, the neighborhood watch for Heaven’s sake! Let them blast them all away! Let this pass. Let me be everything I need to be and more. Protect Mom and Dad, Carl, Brian, Tom, my aunts and uncles, Lila, and Emily, please, please and please let my mother one day live a cancer free and happy life. I’m begging you. Amen.”