Tomato Soup for the Zombie Soul

by Soyle E. Rosen

The Origin of Mad Melissa

Mad Melissa, or “M&M” as she came to be known, earned her title the hard way. Cornered with her father at the outer wall of the third floor galleria, she fought off the zombie horde, and came away with barely a scratch. No one knows how she did it, and so far hasn’t been stupid enough to press her on the subject...

If someone had told me a year ago that I would have a reputation for swinging a machete and decapitating the undead with one smooth, sweeping motion, I would have said they spent too much time sitting in the cheap movie theater watching old horror films. Before The Collapse, I was a stereotypical valley girl. I spent most of my free time in my room with the door closed, surfing Instagram and Twitter. When I actually got together with my friends, half the time I didn’t even notice what they were wearing. We had become so obsessed with our phones…

On The Day, I had my headphones in and was listening to Ariana Grande. The volume was turned up to max, so I didn’t even hear the screams until they started tearing down my door. The virus turned you in less than a minute. No one has yet figured out how that is even possible. But it was my little brother and my mom ripping at the wood of the door with their bare hands. What probably saved my life was that I was a troubled teenager and at the time didn’t really like either of them all that much. They were slobbering, scratching their faces with their fingernails, as they broke through the cheap plywood veneer. I watched in fascination. Already long since forgotten was the basic understanding of how to turn a doorknob. My bedroom door didn’t even have a lock on it.

So you can understand my initial surprise while seeing them. At first I thought it was a joke, but we weren’t any where near Halloween, and the blood was real. I ran through the stages pretty quickly: denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance. Then I added another one: pity mixed with revulsion, and a barely conscious urge or sense that all was right with the world. I still have trouble admitting this even today, but I felt a feeling of poetic justice watching them debased to mindless animals as they were. They deserved it, and I did not.

The instinct of any teenage girl when faced with unspeakable horror is to scream and run. I was out the back window onto the lawn before they made it through, and suddenly saw that I was not alone. Our neighbor, Mr. Watkins, who was the local mailman and must have just gotten home, was still in his blue uniform. On the shoulders he had round patches of a man riding a horse, reminiscent of the Pony Express. I got transfixed on them for a moment because they were bright red in color. Weren’t they usually white?

He stumbled his way towards the waist high hedge that bordered our properties and got caught in it trying to work his way through to me. He looked comically drunk, but the look in his eyes was unmistakable. Pure hunger. After seeing mom and Jeff, I was pretty sure he was even farther gone. I suspected he had already consumed his family, but there was no time to check, and I never went back to see.

I looked around. All the neighbors were stumbling around on the street, running into parked cars, or falling over on their front lawns like some weird summer block party had just gotten over with and there were no designated drivers around to give everyone rides home. Later on, we, the survivors, mused about the fact that it had happened around 6:30 at night. It was the worst possible time. It was still light out, and everyone was home from their day jobs. That’s probably why it spread like wildfire through residential areas.

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I looked for an opening, a way to get away from all of them. As I ran, I realized that a new chapter in my life story had just begun. I wondered how long of a chapter it would be, and if, sooner than I liked, “The End” would be the denouement to its rising climax.

I managed to make it to a local park that had dirt trails feeding into it that only the local kids knew of. It had been a way for us to get together at night without using sidewalks that our parents could spot us on, and when I broke through the trees and brush into the open, I was relieved to see there was no one else there. The park was run down, with a few old swing sets and an overgrown tennis court, so it was rare to find anyone making use of it near nightfall.

My first rational thought involving long term planning was that my father might still be okay and I should try to get to him. He worked in an isolated office park that was mostly just a server farm. The computers outnumbered the humans thirty to one and his office building was almost completely automated. The office was three miles from our house along a county highway that he drove each night to avoid traffic on the interstate overpass that they had built up a few years ago. Not many people used the old county road any more, so I found my way to it and walked along it deep down in the brush along the side of the road. The land was flat and unencumbered by trees, so I should have been able to hide from observation by the occasional wandering undead. I had already begun to think of them as zombies at this point, though I really had no clue what was going on.

When I arrived at the office complex it looked as deserted as the park, but it always looked that way. A parking ramp structure served the entire area so there were no surface lots, and I didn’t see anyone wandering around. I knew it would be too hard to get into my dad’s building and get his attention unannounced. There were just too many security doors to pass through. So I headed directly for the parking ramp. Dad always parked on the upper level. He liked to take a look out over the expanse of suburbia before he drove home, and catch a quick smoke. Mom still thought he had long since quit but I knew better.

In the quietness of the early evening, I ducked under the ticket gate and headed up the ramp on foot. The guard at the gate was absent but the gate was still down. That was weird. Normally, even out among the miles and miles of concrete and glass, you could hear insects and birds chirping. The office park had extensive landscaping. But it was eerily quiet, as if the whole world was holding its breath. I felt as if I was being watched as I moved up the ramp but I couldn’t see anyone spying on me. Later on, this natural intuitive sense of the undead gathering nearby would be an instinct we would all come to rely on to save our lives. After about twenty minutes of walking up the curved, stained concrete of the ramp, I made it to the third level and spotted my dad’s car It was an old beat up wood paneled station wagon built in the 70s. It was ages beyond its natural life span but he kept having it repaired out of some misguided sense of nostalgia for a more innocent youth when he had met and courted mom.

I walked up to the car and peered in the driver’s side window. It was empty, of course. At that point a sense of foreboding really started to grip me. I looked around, and saw nothing in the dimly lit, cavernous expanse of the ramp, so I moved over to the outer wall and looked down. Below me on the immaculately manicured lawns, amid long strips of ornamental trees, a crowd was gathering. It was clearly a crowd of the undead. Randomly, some of them looked up at the building and spotted me. That was my first mistake. They began to move almost as a single organism, swelling towards the ground level entrances to the ramp. I wished there had been some way to barricade the door.

I thought about my father. To leave his office, he didn’t have to step outside. He would take the elevator down to a ground floor corridor that led to the parking ramp. Maybe there was still hope of meeting up with him. I began to seriously wish I had some kind of weapon to defend myself with, anything at all really, even something as mundane as a baseball bat.

I won’t bore you with the details of what happened next. I waited, paralyzed with indecision, while the undead mob got closer and closer. Dad did eventually show up, but they were not far behind him. We hugged, trying to convey our mutual perplexity, fear and sorrow about what was happening. There were no words. Even Ariana couldn’t evoke the meaning of such a moment given the chance.

Eventually, we found our backs to the waist high outer wall of the ramp as the zombie horde surrounded us on the third floor, slowly moving closer. I glanced down below and an equal number were milling about on the second floor level, gazing up at us as if waiting for a tasty, fresh morsel to fall their way.

We were unarmed. Suburban, civilized folk don’t usually go about their daily routines packing. My dad made a quick decision. I’m still proud of him for it. Somehow he must have thought I could get away. My guys still pester me every day to tell them how I did it, but if I revealed the truth, I’m sure I’d lose my status as their leader. So I keep my mouth shut. Maybe one day the whole shocking truth will come out. Once they know, they will probably turn on me too. But I’m no teenage softy any more. Betrayal is common among the living, even though its reducing the number of survivors to next to nothing…

I will say only one thing about dad. He lived up to that old Jimmy Stewart movie he loved, Its a Wonderful Life, where Potter, the evil rich guy says to Stewart, “You’re worth more dead than alive!”

And that baseball bat? Let’s just say I found the equivalent, and right in the nick of time.