Moonlight Mauling

A sleepless night playing video games may have saved the life of a college drop out, as she tries escaping her zombie infested neighborhood.

I first heard the screaming at about half past dead in my house. The only person awake was me, replaying old Sonic the Hedgehog games on my retro Genesis. I think my middle brother went first when one of the neighborhood kids crawled in the open window and started eating out his sleeping throat. Dad, of course, heard the commotion and bolted into the trailer in the yard to get our guns. Since, apparently, the whole house was surrounded, he didn’t make it far. Mom tried waking my oldest brother up, but he rolled over and asked for fifteen more minutes. A few unearthly screams, the sounds of a vicious struggle, a few moments of sobbing, and all was silent from downstairs.

 

I had turned off the TV at the first bit of screaming and had looked out the window in confused horror soon enough to see my father being rent limb from limb. I almost wish, sometimes, that I had slept through the whole thing. I think it would have been nice to go quietly in my sleep. I’d just fall asleep with a controller in my hand, dream of anthropomorphic animals saving the globe, and wake up dead. More or less. I’m probably romanticizing things. I’d probably have just fallen asleep and woken up screaming, with a ravenous sub human gnawing my intestines out while I was still using them. Either way, it’s a nice thought sometimes.

 

At the time, however, I was less concerned with how things might have gone and a touch more concerned with how I might stay alive. Its strange, now, to think of how many times my friends and I talked about how - of all the possible (apocalypses? ApocalypseI?) … ends of the world, the coolest to live through would be the Zombie apocalypse. Speaking from personal experience, I have since revised my opinion. However, a fortunate side effect of our internet based paranoia, we had all promised to prepare a zombie kit and to keep it handy. To this end, I had a backpack full of all my important papers, 3 days worth of MRE’s my paranoid father had smuggled home from the army, a pistol, ammo, three changes of clothing, and a baseball bat. It was the latter I was most grateful for at this moment.

 

The interesting thing about my house is that it is among the most fabulously white trash houses out there. There is the downstairs that came with the house, and the ‘upstairs’ that is little more than a half finished, reclaimed crawl space. The house itself is almost 90 years old, but in many ways is in poor repair. The bathroom is a home job done by us before we knew what we were doing, the living room has a hard wood floor covered in paint and epoxied to within an inch of its life, and the entire house somehow never quite manages to stay clean, no matter how OCD mom was about cleaning it every morning, and straightening before bed. There are rooms only partially painted in the house, and places where the dry wall isn’t even mudded. It is a well loved, comfortable house, if one can ignore the gigantadon spiders that appear any time it gets cold out.

 

Dad got bored one day and knocked a hole in the ceiling, decided there was enough room and added a floor. We only got dry wall up a year ago, and we still have yet to do any insulating or flooring. I’ve been working on making it nice up here since I dropped out of college. I had finally painted and carpeted the back portion that was serving as my bedroom. I had plans to finish the rest. At this juncture, though, I was pleased that I hadn’t finished, because I imagine Zombie gore is tough to clean out of carpet. Another fortunate fact about my upstairs is that there is exactly one entrance, and it is kind of cramped and tough to use. Home made stairs that I’d designed using my freshly learned geometry skills wound up being the single most awkward flight of stairs in the history of stairs. They were narrow with high steps that were several inches shorter that comfortable. Every person I’d invited to my lair since building them has complained. I consider them to be a marvel of 8^th grade engineering. I’d received extra credit for them.

 

Every loser who has ever played a first person shooter knows that the most easily defensible point in any game is the bottleneck. My stairs were by far the most bottled of any doorway in my home. I grabbed my bag, set my pistol beside me, and stood by the stairs to wait. My thought was to knock the block off of anything that tried clambering up the stairs at me. Anything I couldn’t immediately hit a home run with could be introduced to my 9mm.

 

Tense minutes ticked by and still, none of the monsters crawled up my stairs. I strained my hearing, every fiber of concentration split between my ears and my eyes. I could hear the burbling of the fish tank Mom had grudgingly allowed me to keep downstairs, and I could hear the ticking of the clocks scattered around the living room. Long moments passed. I idly marveled that the two clocks I knew were closest to the stairs were just a bit off sync with each other.

 

One of the clocks’ batteries were going dead, so when it sounded, it wasn’t the cheery chiming I was accustomed to - it was a more tragic (and at this time, more sinister) minor version at ¼ tempo. I heard shuffling feet approaching, a low, frustrated moan, then the startling crash of a wood and glass, battery operated clock hitting the far wall of the living room. There was a wet plopping sound, like a half rotted tomato being dropped into a bowl of ketchup. Even as I concentrated on not imagining, the pictures my mind painted to match the salty, earthen smell in the air were red and sluggishly dripping walls and furniture, and bodies that were no longer recognizably human. I held my breath and concentrated on not pissing myself. (So far so good, though I wouldn‘t try pretending there weren‘t a few touch and go moments there.)

 

You know those stories that mention people’s pounding hearts being so loud they were sure other people could hear them? You should have by now - it’s cliché for a reason. In stressful moments - like public speaking and skydiving - the heart accellerates, pupils dialate, and the fight or flight instinct kicks in. Most people fidget to releive the tension of heightened awareness. Most people, though, weren’t dealing with carnivorous man-beasts actively listening for signs of life. Fortunately for me, neither was I.

 

Perhaps they’d felt they gorged themselves enough already, or perhaps the sounds of my movements were shrouded by the struggling from all the people downstairs. Maybe they just thought I would taste icky. (Do Zombies think? They definitively are, therefore they must… but I don’t think Descartes thought this far ahead when he pondered existentialism, so I feel like I’m on shaky grounds here.) Either way, there was a moan from outside (I tried not to think too hard about which of my neighbors it must have been) and the shuffling of feet followed it out of the house.

 

It was a further half hour before I could relax my posture, lower my baseball bat to the ground, and tuck my pistol into my pants. Another five minutes passed as screams filtered in from down the street, tinny and muffled with distance, distorted by walls and slowly growing further away as the plague moved further down the street. Survival kit slung over my shoulders, ammo in the pocket of my sweatshirt, and baseball bat erect, I took step after agonizing step down the stairs. Every time the shoddy home construction would shift and creak, I was certain that one of the creatures I’d witnessed vivisecting my father would appear and do a greatest hits performance all over my spleen. By the time I reached the bottom step I would have been half grateful (only half, mind) to see something, anything coming at me with flesh in it’s teeth, if only so I didn’t have to deal with my imagination working over time. I was certain that the actual horror would be less fearsome than the horror I had concocted in my own mind.

 

Since my new life - less than an hour old - resembled something out of a B movie already, it was no surprise that walking through the newly redecorated downstairs of my house should too. Blood and gore sprayed over the walls like a CSI parody, and why does nobody ever mention that when you walk, the carpet makes little splashes under your feet? Even though I was wearing thick soled boots (think Goth/Raver, with red accents. I borrowed them from a friend. I was fairly certain she wouldn‘t want them back at this point, but I still tried avoiding the worst, just in case.) I would swear that I could still feel the warmth seeping up through the bottoms of my feet. It smelled like an outhouse: the acrid smell of urine combined with the deep, putrid smell of feces and the sweet copper smell of arterial blood. The air was cloying and thick, and I fought not to gag on it.

 

Like the internal battle against food poisoning (and that of a weak stomach against Two Girls One Cup) I was destined for failure, but I did rather well until I recognized suddenly, and viscerally what the tomato-esque noise was from earlier. I like to think it was the thought of my mother’s disgust that kept me from vomiting on her when I found half of her face and a chunk of her hair nowhere near the rest of her skull. She was always disgusted by the very concept of it, and it seemed that the least I could do was to turn my head to the side while I suddenly and violently rejected everything I had ever eaten in my entire life. Eyes watering and certain that my weakness had attracted every unmentionable in the nation, I slammed by back against the wall and waited, panting and shaking for something to jump out at me. The sound of gunshots had joined the screaming from outside, but inside the house all was silent. When I could finally blink the moisture from my eyes enough to see, and my breath was no longer coming in wet, sobbing gasps, I started moving again, very carefully not looking at the tangled clump on the floor.

 

A few steps further brought me into the living room proper, where the remains of my brother lay steaming half on the couch and half on the floor. He liked sleeping on the couch. A friend of mine had gotten rid of it, and I replaced ours with it while the folks were out. Mom had been irate, Dad hadn’t noticed, and my brother decided that it was by far the most comfortable place in the house to rest. We used to joke that it would take a pry bar to get him off of it. Now, it would take an industrial sized bath of Clorox bleach and a power sprayer. And probably an exorcist.

 

From the living room into the kitchen, past the bathroom, and into my eldest brother’s room. One quick glance inside to the remains of two bodies (most of the sight has been fortuitously removed from my memory by shock) told me all I needed to know about what happened in there, and since I’d already seen the gruesome fate of my father…

I skulked my way back to the living room very carefully not thinking about anything but the next step to survival, I eased myself into my parent’s room. In direct contrast to the rest of the house, the room was pristine. The bed rumpled, but otherwise untouched, the TV on blue screen (Mom had been watching Pollyanna for the 10 billionth time, I’m sure), and the only dissaray was on my father’s side of the bed, where he’d left his rumpled day clothes. Inside Mom’s jewelry box was the key to the gun safe. I assumed Dad tried using his key, rather than the spare and was rewarded with the odd, round little key that looked more like it would open a freezer than the small armory my father kept.

 

I’d like to be able to say, at this point, that I was operating on more than adrenaline and my intimate knowledge of gore films. I’d like to be able to say that I was fully aware of my actions and had planned for this contingency. The kit seems indicative of this, at least. However, in all honesty, I had no idea what I was doing. When preparing for a Zombie apocalypse, most people aren’t actually ready for the undead scourge to burst into their home and to eat their family while they sleep. Most people are joking about their zombie plan - laughingly discussing the relative merits of the baseball bat, versus the axe, versus the good old semi-automatic while they fragg some noobs in Halo. They talk about building fortresses, or digging shelters, or stockpiling food. They don’t talk about what it might be like walking through their home in the middle of the night trying not to slide too much on the kitchen tiles made slippery with the blood of an entire family. They don’t talk about the sudden, paralyzing fear that some open wound - no matter how small - might have escaped notice and become exposed to whatever it was that just turned your neighborhood kids into flesh eating monsters.

 

They also don’t talk about how it is to swallow your rising gorge as you stumble over an unintentional trip line made of your brother’s large intestine. Even knowing that Mom probably won’t mind if I take her new SUV out for a spin doesn’t really make up for it.

At this point, though I will freely admit to not running on all cylinders, though I’ve had a bit of time to collect myself. It is impossible to maintain such blindingly high levels of adrenaline for so long, and I was already starting to feel my thoughts clear and my head throb as my heart rate slowed. I was trying to think of what to do - not just for the next few minutes but for the next few hours, days… years were beyond me at this point, but I knew that living in the moment wasn’t the best survival plan. Supplies were first and foremost on my mind. Guns and ammo, my bat, food and water, clothing, purse, cell phone, laptop (listed in order of importance, though mere hours ago I’d probably have listed them in reverse). A handful of hair raising steps outside revealed several things to me: the fenced dog yard made slick with gore and chunky with my father‘s remains, and that not all of the plague had wandered off in search of fresher prey.

 

I had a moment of blind panic as the creature lunged at me and I slammed my pistol up, fumbled for a moment with the safety and unloaded an entire clip into it’s face. Momentarily deafened, it took a few moments for the visceral aching of my throat to register and inform me that I was screaming bloody murder. The creature lay on the ground, black blood seeping from the rugged stump that had previously been it’s head. It’s stomach was swollen with what I could only assume to be the entrails of my recently deceased father and only partially covered by a paisley dress. A small, hysterical part of me marveled that I wouldn’t be caught dead in that outfit. I held in my manic, wholly innapropriate laughter, knowing that I wouldn’t stop if I ever got started. The entire world was painted in shades of blue, white and purple under the moon, and I couldn’t help but throw up a thanks that I was spared the horror of full color. I also couldn’t help but attempt to throw up in a far less metaphorical way, though the experience was rendered somewhat less effective by my already empty stomach.

 

A sudden renewal in the moaning and shuffling that I’d relegated into back ground noise revised my previous plan of surreptitiously loading my mother’s SUV with supplies before skipping town. I figured, at this point, that speedy retreat was the better part of valor and scurried out of the fenced yard (the gate was hanging off it’s hinge partially in a way that I’d never imagined chain link to be capable of) and into the driver’s seat. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and slammed shut the door, praying for my father to have been the last to drive even harder than I’d prayed after getting caught making out with my girlfriend in the empty altar room at church after service.

 

For the first time that night since losing my last continue in the Chemical Plant stage of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Lady Luck smiled on me. The key was in the ignition. There was a bump and a distinct crunch as I backed out of my driveway and over an unmentionable (just how fast did they move, anyway?!), but I didn’t even slow down as I kicked the car into drive, skidded around the corner, and down the street. A glance in my rear view mirror showed the sub humans sprinting in pursuit, but I had an 8^th of a tank and an increasing lead as I sped through and out of the ravaged neighborhood of my childhood. As I parked miles away on the hill near the old abandoned high school, I tried very hard not to think about what had just happened, and focused instead on what to do next.

 

I had no f*****g clue.

Author's Note

Constructive criticism GREATLY appreciated. This is written in one sitting without the benefit of a beta reader. Thanks for reading!

Reviews

[Edeline Wrigh]

I like the inclusion of references to modern life. It allows me to connect more to the situation - in fact, it makes it difficult for me to disconnect myself from the person's struggle. This is helped by the excellent job you've done "fleshing out" the character's life; the tidbits about the character's family strewn throughout the descriptions of the carnage create a vivid picture. Plus, the voice is comical without trivializing the situation.

As far as criticism goes, my biggest advice would be: revise for adverbs. There are a few places where they're unnecessary and/or repetitive. (The paragraph about food poisoning springs to mind.)

Overall, this is a strong piece. Well done.