Tanya opened her eyes. The pillow was still over her face, but she’d rolled onto her back. She could feel the dampness on the pillow’s case where her tears had soaked in.
“I must’ve fallen asleep,” she thought as she tossed the pillow to the floor.
She sat up in the bed and looked around, rubbing her eye with her palm. She looked at the clock, it had only been about an hour and half and she still felt tired. She looked around the room for any sign of what had woken her. Then she heard it again, the small tick of a pebble on glass. She crossed the room to her window and looked out. Michael was standing in the grass dangerously close to her mother’s tulips. She opened the window.
“What are you doing here? I thought I told you to call when you had a way to fix this. To fix us.”
“I know, but this is important. Can I come in?” he asked his agitation evident in his voice.
Tanya sighed audibly.
“Go to the front. I’ll unlock it.”
She closed the window and checked herself in the mirror. Her eyes were red and puffy from her tears. She tried her best to put on a smile and went down the stairs. She unlocked the front door and let Michael in. He grabbed the door from her hands, slammed it shut, and bolted it.
“What the hell, Michael? You’re scaring me.”
“Scaring you?” Michael said. “I’m the last thing you should be scared of right now.”
With that he ran to the window and looked out then pulled down the blind. He turned back to her.
“Are all the windows closed and locked?” he asked, moving quickly from fear to panic.
“I…” Tanya started, “I think so. Why?”
“We need to be sure,” he said and ran from window to window, locking them, and pulling blinds. “Stay there!” he yelled from some other part of the house.
“Michael, what’s going on? You’re really scaring me right now?”
At that moment she heard a thump at the front door. She jumped.
“Don’t open that door!” Michael called again and she heard him running down the hallway toward the stairs.
Tanya looked out the peephole in the front door, but didn’t see anyone. She heard another bang this one at a window and a muffled voice speaking, but she couldn’t understand what was being said.
“Is this your idea of a joke, Michael?” she asked as he appeared at the bottom of the stairs.
“What? A joke? Hell no!”
“Because if this is your way of showing that you can protect me I think it’s kind of sweet, but it’s also really freaky.”
He didn’t respond. Instead he took her hand and led her into the living room and turned on the television.
“It’s not on the national stations yet,” he said as he changed the channel from CNN to a local all news channel.
The woman speaking on the television had a frightened expression on her face and was speaking in serious tones.
“No one is sure what the object is yet, but people that have come into contact with it or any of the noxious fumes that it is putting off are turning into what can only be called zombies.”
Tanya turned to Michael and opened her mouth to speak, but words didn’t come out.
“I know this sounds crazy, but I saw the helicopters over the woods. My neighborhood seemed so eerily quiet that I went next door to talk to Mr. Jacobs to see if he knew anything, but he was dead. Well, he was and he wasn’t. It’s kind of hard to explain. Okay not really hard just unbelievable. It is just like in the movies except they’re not slow. Not at all. I had to haul ass to keep him from attacking me.”
Tanya had regained the ability to speak, but wasn’t even sure how to respond.
“What are we going to do? How far is the effect?”
“They don’t seem to have answers to that yet, but I thought we could drive to my grandparents’ camp. I have a full tank of gas and the MapQuest directions in my car. We have to leave now though.”
She was frozen in place. Not sure of what to do.
“What about school on Monday?”
“If this is anything like the movies I don’t think we’ll have to worry about school,” he said and held out the keys, shaking them in front of her face.
The sound of more banging at the outside of the house made her decision clear.
“Alright, let’s go. You drive,” she said and grabbed her purse from the couch. “Wait!”
Michael had had his hand on the doorknob ready to unlock the door and run. Tanya grabbed a couple of knives from the butcher-block knife holder by the stove. She handed one to Michael and kept one for herself. They threw open the door and ran down the steps toward Michael’s car, but it was already surrounded by the creatures. They’d dented the hood and one of the doors and a spider web crack filled the entire windshield.
“Look out!” Michael yelled, pushing her aside.
She fell to the ground, scraping one knee and losing the knife in the process, but she looked up to see her boyfriend grappling with one of the blood thirsty creatures. He slashed several times with his knife, severing an arm before lopping off its head. The body continued to move around, flailing its one good arm like a chicken that is too dumb to realize that it’s dead, before finally crumpling to the lush green grass. More of them came from the back of the house and charged toward Michael.
“Run!” he said and then turned back to the monsters, sunlight glinting off the knife’s now bloody blade as he hacked at them.
She scrambled to her feet and tried for the knife before giving up and running back into the house. As she closed and locked the door behind her she heard him yell one more time.
“Find some place safe! I’ll come back for you!”
*****************************************************************************
Tanya wasn’t sure how long it was that she sat huddled in the farthest corner of the attic, but it had seemed like a very long time. Her arms and legs were still sore from her climb up. She could have used a chair, but that would risk giving away her hiding spot and she was afraid of what might happen if they found her up here. There were no windows so it was dark and no air conditioning so it was hot. Her mouth was bone dry and her skin was wet with sweat. She giggled deliriously at the irony of that. There had been many noises far below, but they had long since silenced and she was tempted to open the small plywood panel that covered the entrance to the attic.
“I can’t do that,” she said, comforted by the sound of her own voice. At least it was a sound and a friendly one. “If I do and they’re here they’ll know where I am.”
“But if I don’t,” she argued with herself. “I’ll never know when it’s safe and I may die up here.”
“He said that he’d come back for me,” she replied. “And that’s final.”
After another ten minutes or so curiosity had nearly gotten the better of her. She had crossed to the panel and was about to remove the heavy old television off from it when she heard a bang from underneath. It was hard enough to nearly topple the television and allow whomever it was access.
“See,” she said to herself. “That could be one of them.”
“Yes, it could, but it could be Michael. Did you think about that?”
Exasperated with herself she used the rest of her waning strength to move the dinosaur of a television aside and grasped the cast iron skillet she’d snagged on her way through the kitchen in one hand. She pulled the plywood aside and was horrified to see that it was indeed Michael looking up at her, but his eyes were cloudy and his face was a mask of drying blood. There was a nasty looking gash on one side of his head and his neck looked as if it had been ravaged by a wild animal. He reached up at her with one hand, but kept the other concealed behind his back.
“Tanya,” he said and started to pull the hand from its hiding spot.
Before he could get his hand, and the knife clear, she swung the pan which vibrated in her hand as it collided with his skull. He fell backward off the chair that he’d been standing on. He landed in a heap on the carpeted floor of the upstairs hallway. His shoes and jeans were covered in soil from the flower garden. Horrified at what she’d just had to do she stepped down onto the chair. She dropped to the floor beside what had once been her boyfriend. She rolled him over, but instead of the knife as she’d expected to find she saw the he had tulips clutched in his right hand.
“Oh, my God,” she said and began to cry again.
******************************************************************************
It had taken about a week for life to get back to normal in the small town of Westhaven, Maine just outside of Augusta. The National Guard had been activated from as far north as Presque Isle and as far south as Portland. The people who had not been changed by the mysterious device that had landed in the forest that Saturday were taken to shelters in Lewiston and Waterville. Those that had not been so lucky were rounded up. Most were killed, their bodies burned. A memorial would be set up in a local cemetery in honor of them, but many families still paid for a plot and a stone for their loved ones. Some were taken by scientists to be studied in hopes that insight could be gained into exactly what had transformed normal people into crazed creatures hungering for human flesh.
Tanya had chosen not to go to a shelter. She had instead managed to tie Michael up securely and drive his now battered Chevy Cobalt to his grandparents’ camp in Hodgdon, Maine. When they arrived there were no signs of his parents which indicated that they’d never made it out of Augusta before the occurrences of that awful April day.
******************************************************************************
Michael was sitting on the couch staring at the television. Tanya was never sure that he knew what he was watching, but he seemed less agitated when it was on. She came from the kitchen with a steaming bowl in her hand.
“Brains?” Michael asked as he reached for the bowl eyes lighting up.
“No. Chicken soup. It’s good for you,” Tanya responded, handing him the bowl.
He may be a monster, she thought, but he’s still my boyfriend. She sat down in a chair opposite the couch and grabbed the remote.
No comments:
Post a Comment