Emma

Emma (chapter draft) Jim

It must have got in sometime during the night. The cool basement floor kept me chilled and my bones froze, but I slept deeper, longer than I have in days. My nerves, like splinters, sharp and painful, subsided briefly, a few hours maybe, until they awoke again, irritated and on edge with eerie echoing of the cracks and snaps coming from the wood floor above.

The house was otherwise quiet, stale and empty, mostly absent of the memories I made growing up here. I had been gone too long. The outbreak, disease or plague, whatever they called it before the world as I knew it stop calling it anything, stopped speaking, ceased breathing and rolled over and died at an alarming rate. A botched chemical test by the military, a mutated flu vaccine, judgement day...the cause seems to be irrelevant now, the only certainty is that they dead won’t stay dead.

Our most fascinating, self hating and loathing vision of ourselves has come true, ripping and tearing its way through reality, devouring its way through the living. No one wanted to call it was it was at first. The media made sure to not utter the ‘Z’ word, but we knew, everyone did, yet no one wanted to face what was so clearly right in front of us. The monstrous side of us that we had long ago created in our own image, a seething, grotesque side of humanity. Our zombie apocalypse has arrived.

The steps are slow. I can hear it move from the living room where I used to sit and watch The Little Mermaid on repeat. To the kitchen where John would make me half boiled eggs and butter and pepper my bread. My room where I used to hold tea parties with frogs and little bugs instead of girly dolls and princess outfits. This thing was invading my memories one stomp and step at a time.

John is my stepfather. The closest thing I’ve ever known to a real man. I adored him, but never showed it, never let him in, tortured him with teenaged angst and bad boys. I was a hand full, my mother and I trapped him in the middle and made his life a living hell. There’s only so much shit a man can take and mother and I gave it to him constantly. He started drinking heavily when I was sixteen. He wasn’t an angry drunk, just a solitary one. He would lock himself in the basement, play old records of Zeppelin and watch Civil War documentaries. When the basement stopped doing the trick, he just stopped coming home after class. He would find a bar, make himself a regular, until mother found out where he was, then he just found another one, rinse and repeat. Sometime before my eighteenth birthday he met someone, a woman that appreciated the good man that he was. Treated him they way he deserved, loved him the way he could love. But the guilt was too much for him to bare. The morning he told mother he was having an affair I felt my heart fall into my stomach. I was angry, hate swelled inside, I knew, but wouldn’t admit that this was my fault. Not in a, my parents are getting divorced and woe is me kind of way, but because it was my fault. I should have loved him when my mother wouldn’t. I left them both the day after graduation, vowing never to return. Four years later and I’ve returned to the house that offered me so much love and I’ve never felt more empty and alone. It’s been nine days now and all I can think about is John, out there somewhere as one of those things, carrying with him his anger towards mother and I, even in death devouring him.

The basement windows offers little insight into the world that exist beyond them. They are small and narrow and only give perspective on the front and rear of the house. In the back, a thicket of woods, mostly small saplings and brush sprawl out before dropping off into a ravine. Most of the leaves have fallen, turning the ground into an autumn brown. A house that wasn't there when I left sits on the other side of hill, unfamiliar and out of place.

The front yard was lush and green, John hadn’t mowed in weeks and the tall grass reduced my visibility of the front. Cars sat empty around the cul de sac as they were nine days ago. No belongings strapped to the roofs, no haste or urgency to leave.There didn’t seem to be a sense of panic at all. It was as if this was ground zero and death spread out from here.

The pavement has it’s own tale to tell. Sidewalks and steps stained with dried blood, smeared and sprayed. One the second day, I saw Mr. Clark, our neighbor across the street dragged off his porch and torn to bits by two teenagers. As a WWII vet, I can only imagine the death and carnage Mr. Clark had seen and experience, to persevere where so many others bled and died, to only meet an end as horrible as his. I watched in horror, helpless and catatonic as these things shred his flesh. They didn’t chew, they consumed chunks of muscle and ligaments in enormous swallows, throats bludging and stretching with no need for air. They paused only at distant screams and clatter, animals sniffing out there next prey.

I remembered one of the boys, Bobby, he lived a few house down. I baby sat him for a few years for extra cash, but mostly because I was crushing on his older brother. George drove an old Camaro and he made me feel funny and tingly inside. Poor Bobby was already a zombie then, pretty much anyway, a cocktail of antipsychotic and depression meds left him staring at anime, zoning out and wiping trails of drool from his chin. It was the easiest job I ever held.

The sound of sirens stopped about three days ago. Emergency broadcast system tones sang out for the first few days, followed by cliche static. Cell phone communication ceased within days at the emergence of the zombie panic. So many people reaching out to loved ones at once sent networks into a frenzy, crashing servers and disabling communication. When the power started failing and cell phone batteries lasting only a few days, our love and dependence on technology died, along our global connection.

I stalk the footsteps like dracula from below, stopping when they stop, contemplating their next move, knowing not what to do if it should find me. My only hope is that its dead legs will carry it tumbling down the basement steps, crashing down and breaking a few limbs along the way, disabling it long enough so that I can smash John’s thirteen inch black and white tv into its brain. They stop somewhere near John’s office. My heart races, I can feel it beat against my chest and it feels like it might collapse a lung. Has it discovered my presence, smelled me? Do these things retain some sense of memory, awareness to former surroundings? Does everything die but the pestilence swimming around in the soft tissue of their head or does a resemblance of their former self still exist? The simple things, movies and books have prophesied but this is reality and we don’t have the luxury to know until we are one.

Just when I think I can’t stand the silence anymore, it moves. Passing through the dining room and down the hallway, past the kitchen and back into the living room where it must have entered. The creaking sound of the hardwood grows louder in my ears as it moves closer and closer to the front door. With one final snap, the house is quiet again and on the verge of hyperventilating I pause and raise my arms above my head to allow the stale basement air to fill my lungs once more.

I rush to the window, grabbing the concrete ledge and hoisting myself on my tiptoes. Scrawny, pale legs in orthopedic shoes descend the porch, one unstable step at a time. The lavender dress moves and flutters in the diseased fall breeze. As she reaches the sidewalk I catch the first glimpse of my stalker and my stomach turns. Mrs. Clark! She stops, confused she turns back towards the house and faces me now. She’s fine, she hasn’t turned. Delusional and suffering from dementia for as long as I can remember, she must have went looking for Mr. Clark and thought she was returning to her own house. John was notorious for locking himself out and always kept a spare key with the Clark’s. She simply let herself in and had been wandering around the house trying to figure out where she was.

I rush up the steps, making more noise than I’m aware of until I reach the top step. I round the kitchen corner and shuffle down the hallway, easing my way through the dining room. Even though the front door stands wide open the grey autumn sky makes the living room frightenly dim. I sidle up next to the door frame. Mrs. Clark stands right where she had, her back to me.

“Mrs. Clark,” I whisper in a raspy, cracking voice. I realise its the first time I’ve actually spoke in days. Silence atrophied my throat and vocal folds and I notice the pain for the first time.

“Mrs. Clark,” I try again and with a little more gust. She turns slowly and meets my gaze with a warm smile.

“Oh, Emma, is that you? You’ve grown so much.” Her sweet voice carried me back to when I played in their backyard or when she would bring over brownies when mother and John weren’t home and telling me that little girls needed them to keep them sweet.

“Have you seen my Herald? He went for a walk and hasn’t come back yet.” As she takes another step towards me I feel as if a hand grabs me by the throat. Behind her, in the middle of the street is Bobby, on all fours, devouring what looks like a black lab. His face covered in blood like war paint. I try to speak but nothing comes. I manage to put my finger to my lips to quiet her.

“What is it sweetheart?” She says with a calmness, as if consoling me. I motion for her to come towards me in haste. As she takes a step a high, beeping tone emerges from her left hand. It has been so long since I had heard such I sound I almost don’t recognize it. She holds a cordless phone, an antique by todays standards, a relic that an archaeologist might find some years to come, if they all weren’t zombies by now, and conclude it was an instrument used by the old and frail to communicate. She doesn’t seem to notice the tone and continues walking towards me. Bobby rears his head and snarls at the sound. He leaps to his feet with more enthusiasm and vigor than I had ever seen him do when he was alive. Like a cat, pouncing on a unsuspecting mouse, he has her by the neck and blood pours like a fountain, soaking her moon silver hair. Mrs. Clark stares at me, dizzy and dazed. She doesn’t scream or make a sound. It’s as if she doesn’t mind at all. She drops to her knees and then collapses to her side with her face buried in the think green grass.

The phone rings again, I didn’t even notice it had landed at the base of the steps. I rush to the bottom and reach for it and quickly hit the answer button. Bobby notices me and we meet in a gaze. Chunks of Mrs. Clarks dribble and drop on her now lavender shroud. I wonder if he recognizes me. He growls and hisses and swallows bits of that sweet old lady. Slowly I pick up the phone, his dead eyes watching my every move. As I take a step back, Bobby shrugs me off, I suppose realizing I am not an immediate threat to his meal and dives back, deep into Mrs. Clark.

I close the door slowly, locking it and bracing myself against the opposite wall. My head is spinning and all I can think about is the horror I just witnessed. My breathing is so loud is seems to echo off the walls. I don’t even notice the voice speaking from my hand. It sounds distant and hollow. I put the phone to my ear and exhale my fear.

“Hello,” I sigh.