Put the small stuff into perspective. It’s better to be wrong and alive than right but eating brains.
We sat in the car with the doors locked, the panting noise of our matching breathing the only sound either of us made for a long time.
“We should turn on the car so we can listen to the radio and see if there are any bulletins,” David said beside me. “I’m starting to think this might not be an isolated incident.”
I nodded but when I lifted the keys to the ignition I couldn’t fit them in the hole because I was shaking so hard. I tried once, twice, and finally David caught my fingers and helped me guide the keys into place.
“Thanks,” I whispered without looking at him as I turned my wrist and the car roared to life.
He reached out to turn on the stereo and we were greeted by the sounds of the CD in the player. My annoyance, forgotten for a while, returned tenfold.
“Jesus David, fucking Whitesnake,” I snapped as I turned in my seat to glare at him. “Who listens to that eighties-butt-rock shit anymore, let alone buys it in CD format? You realize you actually had to go out into the world and spend money on this, right?”
“I like Whitesnake,” he said, and his angry expression probably matched my own pretty fucking well. “It’s not like I kept my taste in music a secret from you when we got married. It’s not like —”
“Oh no, you’re right! You didn’t have any secrets when we got married, did you? You were totally honest and look how well it’s worked out.” I interrupted with a wave of my hands. “I mean you told me you wanted to work in the finance industry… oh wait, you bailed on that, didn’t you? You told me I could go back to school once you finished your MBA, but no you decided against that, too —”
“I’m not doing this right now. Put the car in drive,” he snapped.
His tone pissed me off as much as the things I was saying to him did. I glared. “No. I think it’s about fucking time we take Dr. Kelly’s advice and talk this out.”
“Dr. Kelly is dead! Her advice means shit now!” he shouted as he folded his arms.
“Just because she tried to eat us doesn’t mean she was wrong,” I countered, even though I’d really been fighting her advice for months now… not that I was going to admit that to him or anything. “I mean, she made some very good points over the past few months about the —”
He looked past me and his eyes widened. “Drive, Sarah! Drive!!”
At first I figured he was just making that face to distract me from the argument because Dave isn’t about confrontation, but I turned to look over my shoulder anyway, if only to call his bluff.
Only for once it wasn’t a bluff. Rushing through the garage toward our car was the missing security guard, Mack. At first I was relieved. I was pretty sure he had a taser, which was better than anything Dave and I were packing (I think I had some gum, he might have had a pocketknife, but I wasn’t sure). We could just tell Mack what had happened, he could phone it in, we’d fill out some paperwork, and it would be fine.
Except the closer he got, the more I noticed he was lurching like something out of the “Thriller” video. His gray skin and bloody face were enough to show he had been stricken by whatever insanity had turned Dr. Kelly into a ravenous cannibal and her secretary and the Wonderful Wilsons into moaning monsters.
“Shit,” I muttered as I threw the car into reverse and pressed the pedal to the floor.
As the vehicle squealed backward, Mack seemed to recognize, even in his disturbed state, that he was losing a potential meal. He sprinted forward in that awful heaving way and lunged at the car.
I flinched as he grabbed the edge where the windshield met the hood and clung there, his gnashing teeth snapping against the glass and then lower, where he began to gnaw the hard metal of the hood. Even when a few of them snapped off, leaving bloody shards in his grey gums, he continued chewing, like he wanted to eat the car… or eat through it to get to us.
“Go!” Dave cried, snapping me out of my horrified interest in Mack’s dental health.
Somehow I managed to slam the car into drive and take off in a cloud of burning rubber toward the exit.
Mack was a big guy and it seemed like his weight was even more offset than it had been when he was normal, so as I careened around a corner and sped toward the gate to the outside streets, he slid.
His face was awful as it hit the front windshield, a twisted, pained mass of something inhuman. And yet I felt very little sympathy as I burst through the yellow gate arm and sent him flying off somewhere into the distance.
Slamming onto the city streets, both David and I sucked in deep breaths of relief. He pushed a button and got the stereo off the CD and back to the FM station. Just as we’d hoped, the emergency three-beep system was in effect, something instituted after 9-11 to give out info in an emergency.
Beep, beep, beep, then a pause before the facts we so desperately needed piped through the crappy speakers.
“Good afternoon,” came a flat, female voice that sounded like it had been fed plenty of Prozac. “Your attention, please. There has been a chemical or biological emergency. Please stay in your homes with the doors and windows locked until further instructions become available. Only call 911 in a true emergency.”
We held our collective breath but instead of elaborating, the system clicked back into three beeps and then the same message repeated. David hit the stereo power button hard enough that it snapped off and rolled under my seat. At least the annoying repetition ended.
“Great. One more thing broken,” I muttered. He opened his mouth to argue but I shook my head. “It’s the least of our problems.”
“They said biological or chemical,” he said as he rested his head back against the car seat and stared at nothing in particular. “I hope whatever’s causing this isn’t floating around in the air.”
I nodded but didn’t answer because the thought of what David said made my skin crawl and my blood grow cold. Watching someone we knew turn into a raving lunatic willing to kill and eat another person was bad enough, but what would it be like to know it was happening to you?
“Okay, we need a game plan,” I said as I moved up the freeway ramp going north toward our apartment. “What do we do now?”
David stared at the stereo display, dark now after his tantrum. “We go home.”
I glanced at him, able to do it while driving because for the first time in five years there wasn’t any traffic to pay attention to during my merge.
“Go home?”
He nodded as he stared past me toward the cityscape, rising up beautifully with the sparkling waters of the Puget Sound behind it. It looked so peaceful. What a lie.
“That’s what they say to do and I think it’s our best option,” he said. His voice sounded like he was numb. I was, too. “Actually, I think that’s our only option for the moment.”
I stared at him for a moment and then I nodded. “Okay, home it is.”
We drove in silence, our normally forty-minute drive made short by the lack of people on the street. Okay, that wasn’t true. There were people on the street, but they were no longer driving or human. A few straggling… things like Dr. Kelly and Mack roamed the edge of the highway. Crashed cars littered the side of the street. In the median, we watched as two creatures gnawed on the legs of a highway patrol officer. Eventually David closed his eyes and I kept mine straight ahead on the road.
We’d seen enough, I guess.
Our apartment, just north of what they called the “U-District,” was shitty. The cost of living in Seattle is fucking ridiculous and since David hadn’t been working, at least in a traditional sense, we couldn’t really afford something better.
Our neighborhood was dingy, old, and had its share of homeless druggies and girls who turned tricks in the alleys. But we did have the security of an underground garage, although after our last garage adventure… well, I don’t think either of us felt safe as I rolled the window down and reached out to enter the code that sprung the gate open.
I snatched my hand back in and hit the window control in rapid succession so that it rolled up, then we moved into the gloomy garage. I parked in our assigned space and we glanced at each other before we each unlocked our doors and stepped out into the cool air of the underground facility.
A car alarm screamed in the distance. Normally I’d ignore it or just be annoyed by it, but today I looked toward the sound with a shiver. Car alarms took on a new meaning for a long time after the outbreak. I mean, something had to have set them off, right? But that day, in the misty dark of the industrial LED lights, I didn’t see anything moving.
“Sarah, look,” David said. He was motioning toward the elevator and his face was long and pale and sick.
I moved around the car toward him and instantly saw what he did. Another vehicle was smashed against the back wall nearby, its front end caved in and coolant fluid dripping into a greenish pool on the concrete floor.
“Isn’t that Jack and Amanda’s car?” I whispered, thinking about our next door neighbors.
They were about our age, and while I wouldn’t call them friends we were cordial and had copies of each other’s keys just in case we got locked out or needed someone to grab the mail during a vacation.
Sometimes the guys got together to play Xbox or something, normally when I worked late since I didn’t care for Jack and his loud, obnoxious personality. He was a burper and farter… and he thought it was hilarious. Yeah, super classy guy.
“It looks like it,” Dave said as he reached back and took my hand. “Come on.”
After he pushed the ‘up’ button, the elevator seemed to take forever, but finally it opened with a ding that echoed in the garage. David peeked inside first and then pulled me in behind him. As I reached for the third floor button I noticed blood smeared across the number. With a little groan, I pulled my hand inside my sleeve before I pushed it.
Dave shook his head with a nervous laugh. “You’ve got it all over you now, I don’t know how covering your hand can help at this point.”
“Me neither, but I’d rather not rub it all over me regardless,” I said as I leaned back against the metal wall and folded my arms.
“Too late,” he said, motioning behind me.
I straightened up and turned to see I’d leaned right into a large smear of black sludge like the kind the people around us were vomiting when they were… infected or whatever was happening to them.
“God. God!!” I said.
Okay, I whined it. Whatever, cut me some slack. All I wanted was a shower and to wake up from this disgusting dream and have everything just be normal again.
The door opened and like in the garage, Dave stepped out first. He looked around and then motioned me into the hall behind him as he dug for his house keys in his front pocket. With a few half-jogging steps, we reached our door. He let us in and immediately flipped the deadbolt behind him.
With a sigh of relief, both of us looked around our seven-hundred-square-foot apartment. I’d never loved the piece of shit more. Every problem we’d ever had with the place was forgotten in that instant and I wanted to get down on my knees and kiss the floor.
“You know what this is, right?” Dave said, his voice happily keeping me from making out with the linoleum square in front of our door.
I looked at him. “What?”
“Zombies.”
He nodded as I stared at him with what I’m sure was an incredulous expression. He actually looked serious.
“You need to lay off the movies, dude,” I snapped as I shook my head. “Zombies? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“No it isn’t!” He actually sounded offended that I’d doubt his brilliant deduction. “It makes sense. Or at least as much as anything can based on what happened to us today.”
“David —” I drew his name out with frustrated annoyance.
He moved toward me with a frown. “Fuck, Sarah, our therapist tried to eat us. So did about ten other people since then. We saw things I never thought I’d see in my life. What else could it be but zombies?”
I stared. Apparently the stress of the day had broken my husband’s brain or something. At the time I just couldn’t accept that the stuff of cheesy movies was real.
“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” I said, grabbing for the remote to turn on the television.
On the screen scenes of smoky downtown streets greeted us. I sighed in relief. At least it looked like the television was going to give us more information than the radio emergency broadcast had on the way home.
“Will you watch?” I asked as I tossed Dave the clicker. “I have to pee and I want to get out of these bloody clothes. Then you can change and I’ll watch.”
He grunted, his displeasure with my dismissal of his theory obvious as he took a seat on the couch. I gritted my teeth at the blood he smeared on the cushions when he flopped back, but decided against starting anything. I was too grimy and gross and uncomfortable for it. I’d just have to put Resolve on the cushions and scrub them while he changed later.
I walked to the bathroom and closed the door behind me. It was a cramped space so I edged in, dropped my slacks, and sat down on the toilet, only to sink into the water. With a yelp, I got back up and dragged a towel from the rack.
David had left the seat up… again.
I rubbed the water off my ass as I muttered a whole lot of choice names about the doofus out in the living room. As I turned to hang the towel back on the rack, I caught my reflection in the mirror behind me. With a groan, I leaned closer to the mirror to examine myself.
My hair, which is normally a light brown, was caked with blood so that it had a ruddy hue. To be honest, it wasn’t a bad color for me. If we ever had money again, I figured maybe I’d dye it a similar shade.
The state of my outfit pissed me off more. My once-white shirt was smeared with sludge and dirt and brains. It was totally ruined. There was no way I was going to get dried blood out of white linen even if I pre-soaked from now to the end of time.
“Damn it,” I muttered as I started to unbutton the blouse, but as I got to the second button, I froze. From behind the shower curtain came a faint but undeniable scraping noise.
I swallowed. Once again, the scraping echoed in the tiny room. There was definitely something behind the curtain. I prayed it was a cat that had gotten through the window. Or an opossum. A rat.
Anything but what I thought it was.
I grabbed for the closest thing there was to a weapon in the room: a hard-backed copy of one of the Dr. Phil love books. I’d given it to David when we started therapy months ago. It had sat on the back of the toilet tank ever since. I don’t think he’d cracked it, which annoyed the hell out of me, but it was pretty heavy and had sharp corners, so I held it up as I grasped the edge of the shower curtain and threw it back.
Standing in the tub, staring at the tiled back wall as he swayed gently back and forth, was our neighbor, Jack. That’s the guy whose car we’d seen in the garage earlier. He turned with sort of a sluggish boredom toward me and I suppressed a squeal of surprise.
Whatever biological or chemical thing had been released on our city had obviously affected him, too. His body, already hefty from eating too much junk food and playing too many video games, now leaned at a weird angle and his soft gray skin looked clammy.
He stared at me for what seemed like forever and then his mouth opened and he vomited sludge all over my green bathmat before he moved in my direction.
“Shit,” I groaned. “Why couldn’t you be a cat?”
I didn’t wait for him to answer that rhetorical question. I swung my book and hit him square in the forehead. His rotting skin split, covering Dr. Phil’s picture with a layer of gooey blood and chunks of flesh.
Jack blinked at me, almost like a confused gorilla in a zoo, and then continued to lurch toward me. Unfortunately… or I guess fortunately for me, he no longer had the wherewithal to step up and over the tub ledge. His legs caught on the smooth surface and he tottered off kilter and fell forward.
Out of pure instinct and a hefty dose of luck, I flattened against the back wall as his bulky body careened past me. His already shredded forehead hit the thin bottom seat of the toilet with a clang and he let out a whining groan.
I don’t know what came over me as I looked down at our fat, piece of shit of a neighbor lying half in my toilet, the offending seat Dave had left for me still flipped up overhead. I certainly didn’t think about what I was going to do, I just did it. Dropping down, I started slamming the toilet down against his skull.
“Put. The. Toilet. Seat. Down. David!” I accentuated each word with a crushing bang of the seat.
I didn’t stop until I heard Dave’s voice outside the door.
“Did you say my name?” he called from the hall, breaking me away from my furious spell and forcing me to stare down at the mess I’d made.
The toilet was cracked and covered in blood, along with brain matter, some loose flesh and I think part of an ear, although it was so mangled that I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to lean closer and look.
Poor Jack was most definitely dead, his red eyes now dark and no longer clouded by a desire to eat me. Or at least the one still in his skull. I’d crushed the other one sometime during my tirade.
I stared down at the seat again. I still really had to pee. I mean, bad. See, when I get nervous, I have to go and honestly, was there anything to make you more nervous than being attacked by flesh-eating, infected humans?
I’d been holding it since we killed Dr. Kelly and now my bladder screamed at me. The apartment was a one bed, one bath so if I wanted to go… this was it.
And at that point, I have to tell you, bodily functions were starting to win out over being disgusted or disturbed by dead people on my floor. With a grunt, I shoved Jack’s fat body out of the way. He hit the tile face down with a splat that sent droplets of all kinds of gross flying everywhere.
I flipped the upper toilet seat back into place. Although it wasn’t covered in as much blood as the rest of the toilet, I didn’t exactly want to sit on it, so I braced myself against the sink and the wall, sort of hanging over the seat as I took care of my business. I flushed, and to my surprise our toilet actually disposed of most of the body parts and blood without backing up. After a second courtesy flush, all evidence of the attack spun away to the sewer.
Well, except for the blood, brains, and body on my floor, of course.
With a grimace, I pulled my pants back up. In the small bathroom, Jack’s dead body blocked most of the floor. Gingerly I stepped up onto his squishy, out-of-shape ass and balanced there as I washed my hands with steaming hot water and probably half the bottle of liquid soap. When I was finally satisfied that I’d cleansed myself, or at least my hands, of all my sins, I went back into the hall.
Dave was standing in the living room now, leaning over the back of the worn easy chair as he watched the TV screen. The speakers were turned up so loud that I guessed he hadn’t heard my vicious clash in the bathroom.
At least I hoped he hadn’t heard me battling against our neighbor and just left me to it while he checked out the sports scores which were still oddly scrolling along the bottom of the screen on the highlighted runner.
Hey, the Mariners won.
“Babe,” I said, calling him by an endearment for the first time in so long I couldn’t remember when.
He turned toward me with an expression of surprise, although I wasn’t certain if it was because I called him babe or because I was covered in even more gore than I had been the last time he saw me moments before. I motioned toward the bathroom. He stepped closer and peered in at Dead Jack and then back toward me with wide eyes.
“I think you might be right after all,” I said with a nod. “Zombies.”