Allison Hewitt Is Trapped (3 page)

“Phil should go,” Ted points out, nodding and placing his open palm on the tabletop. It’s meant as a solemn gesture but Ted doesn’t have the kind of adult authority to pull it off convincingly, especially with his silly cracked lens.

“Yes, Phil should go but he’s indisposed at the moment,” I say. Without planning it, all of us turn to glance at his office. Through the window only the top of his dark head was visible. “So I’ll need someone else to volunteer. I’m sure one of you can swing a baseball bat well enough.”

“I guess. I did judo for six years,” Ted says, shrugging his bony shoulders. He was skinny before, but a few days of nothing but diet cola and rationed snack food has made him absolutely skeletal. Sparrows have meatier frames, and with his fluffy black hair he’s looking more and more like a bespectacled scarecrow.

“Congratulations,” I tell him, “you’ve just volunteered yourself.”

Ted rolls his eyes but gets up anyway. I get the feeling he wanted to go but didn’t want to look too eager. Holly makes a grab for his wrist, her big amber eyes filling up with tears. We’re all emotional these days but Holly’s demeanor turns on a dime. One minute she’ll be whistling show tunes to try and keep us optimistic and the next she’s bawling into Ted’s arms.

“He’ll be fine,” I say, grabbing Ted by the other arm and giving a tug. “I checked the monitor this morning, there’s fewer out there than ever.”

I don’t say the obvious thing, the thing I know she’s thinking: zombies, there are zombies out there.

“I really don’t think this is a good idea,” Matt says, getting slowly to his feet. His beard has come in shaggy and uneven and he looks like a retired lumberjack in his faded plaid shirt and ill-fitting jeans. He’s using his assistant manager voice, the one with the snide sarcastic bite.

“What’s the alternative?” I ask.

“Yeah, what’s
your
brilliant solution?” Ted asks. I like Ted more every minute.

“I don’t have one,” Matt replies, “but I think we should all just stay here. We don’t know anything about those things. We don’t know how it spreads. It might be something in the air.”

Matt, unfortunately, is a conspiracy theorist. This is not the appropriate time for him to regale us with his interpretation of which government is responsible for the infected. But he’s going there, I can feel it. I mentally recall our heated discussions of the pyramids and the Aztecs and decide that this is a conversation that must be avoided at all costs. He’s glaring at me now over the top of his glasses. He has what we employees affectionately call a “death stare,” which means that he has a shifty, deeply unnerving gaze that says he not only knows that you did, in fact, do something wrong, but that he will rain down furious punishment for said infraction.

“I appreciate the concern, Matt, but we have to eat.”

“Don’t go out there with your mouth and nose uncovered,” he says, unbuttoning his shirt, revealing a stained white T beneath. “It’s a bioweapon, it’s probably in the air.” He hands the shirt to Ted and when Ted won’t take it, Matt comes over and begins wrapping it around the kid’s face, squishing Ted’s broken glasses into his eyes.

“Well, considering the vents in here aren’t sealed we’re all pretty much fucked already then,” I say. I’m hoping Janette will say something, that she’ll make Matt sit down, make him shut up. But she just sits there staring up at him, her expression blank and frozen, her dirty blond hair hanging limp around her hunched shoulders.

Ted, putting his expensive biochemistry degree to work, weighs in with, “Shit, man, it’s not a bioweapon. No one on earth has the technology for this kind of bullshit.”

“Oh, is that your
expert
opinion?” Matt asks and I know he’s prodding.

Holly stands up then, going to stand beside Ted in solidarity. “He would know!” she shouts. She takes the shirt off Ted’s face and fixes his glasses.

“Wow, okay, let’s keep it down,” I say. “We don’t know what gets them excited and since Ted and I are going out there, we need it as clear as possible.”

“Fine, whatever!” Matt says. “I’m just stating for the record that I think this idea sucks.”

“I’ll keep that in mind when we get back and ration the food.”

It only takes us a minute or two to get ready. At Matt’s continued urging we agree to cover our noses and mouths; it’s really not a half-bad idea since we might have to defend ourselves. The last thing I want is their goo flying all over my face and Matt is, admittedly, correct in pointing out that we don’t exactly know how the infection spreads. I get the feeling Matt is angry and frustrated, but—like always—he’s all simmer and no boil.

I tell Ted to make sure his mouth is covered and I put on a pair of sunglasses from the break room. We look ridiculous, Ted with Matt’s flannel shirt wrapped around his head, his cracked brown glasses peering out, and me with Holly’s studded black sweatshirt wrapped in the same way.

Hollianted cling together before we leave. It should be a romantic moment, and it might have been, but Ted looks so outrageously stupid that it can’t be taken seriously. This is the new face of romance, I think, giving his shoulder a gentle squeeze of encouragement. He peels himself off and we remind Matt to stay by the door and listen for our knock, which he agrees to do, lording over the sacred keys with his furious grimace. Matt’s keeping the keys in case anything happens to us, the discussion of which plunged Holly into another wail of agony.

Ted takes up Phil’s bat and I grab the ax and we’re ready to go. We’ve each got four empty plastic bags to fill with loot. I feel like a boxer waiting in the corner of the ring: I want to go, want to start, but half of me wants to stay behind and cower.

Two steps out of the door and I see her.

Lefty
.

Sorry, old girl, I’m not going for a limb this time.

Ted and I have come up with a vague strategy: go for the head—barring that, the chest. I’m not entirely confident Ted has a strong enough arm to really do much damage, but he acquits himself admirably with Lefty, slamming her in the chest while I take a sloppy swing that connects with her neck. Her windpipe collapses with that same, weird hollow feeling. It doesn’t even feel like I’m hurting a person—no human is that soft, that destructible.

Lefty’s decaying, oozing head stares up at me from the ground while her body crumples into a headless heap. She’s still wearing that damn T-shirt, the one with the dancing daisy and the words “World’s Best Mom” in little kid’s handwriting scribbled underneath. I know I should keep moving but I can’t help looking at her eyes. There’s no person there, no identity, just a startling hunger that persists even after I’ve lopped off her head. Ted pulls on my sleeve, the end of his bat coated in a black sludge. He nods to our right, to the short staircase leading up to the cash registers and the coolers.

Our destination.

I glance out the windows on our left. Most of the glass is gone and what remains is just a jagged barrier along the bottom edge. There’s a pile of shards on the floor just inside the store and I can make out the letters
BRO
and
ODY
from the shattered sign. Outside, the street is almost completely obscured by a haze of thick, ashen smoke. The smell, even through the head wrap, is indescribable. I can’t help but imagine a graveyard, a cemetery with all its graves and tombs opened up at once and the decay and death thrown into the wide-open air. It chokes and stings.

Ted and I bound up the stairs and immediately two more zombies come at us. One is Mr. Masterson, the dementia-ridden golden oldie who lives above the shop. He’s got his baseball cap and tan Windbreaker on but it’s stained black and gray down the middle, and part of his lung is trying to escape through the gaping hole in his chest. He sees us—or smells us, or whatever it is these things do—and lurches toward Ted, groaning as if Ted is the most desirable piece of ass he’s ever seen. I intercept him with a blow to the legs. He’s tall and this gets him on my level, a perfect position to go for the head. Ted’s now somewhere else, taking care of the monster teetering around behind the counter.

Mr. Masterson is laid out and I jump over his squirming, headless corpse to the cooler in front of the counters. It’s mostly intact but a few bottles of water are missing. I’m amazed the thing hasn’t been pillaged altogether. I go for the water first and then the diet soda and the juice. There are some sports drinks in there too so I grab those and the monstrous vegan cookies that are, thank God, still in their wrappers. Ted is having trouble with the zombie behind the counter so I go to help him. Together it’s not a problem, and soon Ted is going for the upright cooler behind the counter where we keep the extra bottles.

“Water first, moron!” I shout through the muffling of the head wrap. He was reaching for a Mountain Dew.

While Ted fills up his bags, I go back out around the front of the counter where there’s junk food. I reach blindly for whatever I can get, shoveling candy bars and gum and chips into a new plastic bag. Once the display is empty I turn to help Ted. Out of the corner of my eye I see something, something I can’t resist. It’s stupid, I know it is, but like one of Pavlov’s dogs drooling over the mere tinkling of a bell, it can’t be helped.

Just to the left and around the cash registers is the rest of the store and, more importantly, hundreds of bookshelves filled with books. The nights of unbridled tedium come tearing out of my subconscious. My focus is gone, I can’t concentrate.
I need to get the books.

I set down the full bags. That’s my first mistake. With a quick glance in Ted’s direction I can see that he’s still busy with the cooler, so I jog over to the nearest bookcase and begin shoving books under my left arm, squeezing them against my side. It doesn’t matter what books they are, I just need them all. Dante, de Laclos, Austen, and Dickens—all of them are in my arms and the weight of them, the feel of the new, glossy covers on my fingers is beautiful.

Then I hear a sound, a terrible, hoarse sound from just to my left and I acknowledge then that I’ve made a stupid mistake. There are three more of them, bigger than Mr. Masterson, and they’ve somehow managed to stop groaning long enough to surprise me.

Oh fuck,
I think, feeling the sweat pop out all over my face and neck. I can’t find the ax. I’ve left it out of reach. It’s back by Ted with the bags of food.

And everything was going so well.

I throw the nearest thing, a monster copy of Whitman’s collected works, and it hits a zombie square in the face. It doesn’t stop it but it sure as hell slows it down. The tragedy of it is, I can’t keep all the books in my arms, an unforgivable oversight. I scramble back toward the cash registers and the food, panting like an idiot underneath the sweatshirt around my face. The other two zombies are slow, hungry maybe, and it’s made them sluggish. It’s hot as all hell in there and the sweat is pooling at my temples and dripping down my neck, joining the perspiration on my collarbone and the deafening thunder of my pulse.

“What the
fuck
!” Ted screams, yanking me forward by the front of my shirt. I grab the ax and my share of the food bags. We break into a sprint, going back down the stairs. He’s just barely managing to carry the heavy, full bags and the bat but we get down the stairs safely. Neither of us bother to dispatch the monster shuffling toward us from the broken windows, we’re too close, too near to safety. Ted pounds on the door with the bat and I can hear him whimpering inside his head wrap.

“Where are they? Where are they?” I’m shouting. I don’t know why I’m shouting since Ted is right there in front of me, his black hair trembling above the face wrap. The door isn’t opening, I can’t hear anything inside. I glance over my shoulder and the zombies are right on top of us, grunting and staring and if there was any humor in their eyes, then they’re laughing at Ted and me, who are flailing like idiots against the locked door. That door,
that fucking door
, the door that kept us safe.

I drop all the shit in my arms and pick up the ax and swing and swing, blindly, feverishly. There’s blood and gray, smelly globs flying in every direction. I don’t know if I’m chopping up one or two or three of them but it doesn’t matter, I just keep swinging until I hear the sweetest sound in the world: a thump and a click and the door opening for us, just for us. I turn and kick the bags inside. I kick until someone grabs me by the arm and pulls me inside.

The door shuts and I’m home, safe,
alive
.

COMMENTS

Isaac says:

September 20, 2009 at 2:24 pm

If you heard sirens in the area, it’s possible that a police car or a different emergency services vehicle has been abandoned nearby. And if you guys are brave / foolhardy enough you could strike out a couple of blocks. Ambulances carry medical supplies—you haven’t mentioned them so far in your blog, so I assume you haven’t got any, and sooner or later someone is going to get hurt. Firefighters’ jackets would be okay for makeshift armor; thick clothing protects from bites. And of course the police have guns, so any officers who didn’t make it could have pistols or better with them. I know it sounds cold, taking stuff from the dead, but this is life and death.

Also, I doubt the virus (or whatever) is airborne; you would definitely have caught it from such close proximity to the infected. An exchange of fluids (like a speck of blood landing in your mouth or eyes) is probably what you should watch for. The depressing thing is, it seems despite the zombies, humans are still their own worst enemies.

Allison says:

September 20, 2009 at 5:37 pm

Thanks, Isaac. I’d tell you to be safe but it sounds like you’re more prepared than we are. We’ve got a few first aid kits but nothing substantial. We would strike out but I don’t know how the others would feel about it. Ted might go along but I’m sure Matt would come up with some reason for us to stay inside.

September 21, 2009—The Botany of Desire

And now, with absolutely no ado,
5 Things I Would Literally Prostitute Myself For
: