Medora: A Zombie Novel

Ellen had forgotten to let in the damn cat again, Keith thought. Like most damn cats, when left outside, it was scratching at the front door. It was a heavy tap and then a long drawn out scratch across the wooden surface. The sound bounced up the stairs and around the corner into the master bedroom. The swiping sound continued for several minutes, perforated by small moments of silence. During the intermittent pauses, he hoped in vain that the cat had given up, only to be disturbed awake again every few minutes. Somewhere between the sweaty frustrations of the sleepless night, the scratching sound assimilated into a dream about trains and he dozed off.

“Hey, wake up.”
Ellen’s voice was echoing from the tiled bathroom.

“What?” He rattled awake.

“Wake up,” she replied with a drawn out, melodic cadence.

“Okay, okay, I’m already awake.” He coughed.

At six a.m., his eyes were open and a streak of sunlight made a stark contrast of light on the grey ceiling. The sun began to invade the room, peering in above the blinds, forming a running pattern of slits of golden light across the bed. He placed his feet on the floor and felt the warm fur of the damn cat.

“Hey,
Hon, you forgot to let the cat back in last night?”

“What?” She came into the bedroom with a red toothbrush sticking out of her foaming lips. “No, Bub slept with us last night, he wasn’t even out. He curled up right next to me all night
. It was really cute.”

Keith
replied in inaudible mutters as his mind brought up the autopilot menu for the morning. A small secretarial part of his brain began to list the typical order of events for the morning: shower, shave, orange juice, and maybe some cream cheese on toast.

In
the kitchen, annoyed at his wife’s insistence of turning on the morning local TV news, Keith attempted to read an excruciating email from work. She came up from behind him and put her fingers on the knot of his tie. “Please don’t wear this tie. Paisleys are so ugly. I’m going to get you another tie and you’re going to put that one in the garbage.”

“Alright, but not that purple one though.”

The news blared in the background and through his mind’s morning haze, he heard the word “spree” and quickly paid attention, “…apparently the woman wouldn’t stop for a basic traffic stop and police pursued her for several miles until the woman crashed into the side of a local pizzeria. The woman got out of the vehicle with a firearm and began firing towards the policeman. The woman was killed by return fire from the police.”

Ellen
came back in with a gray tie and started to remove the apparent paisley debacle from his collar. “Did you see there was a shooting last night? It was right around where Dave lives, just down the street from him.”

“
Yeah, some lady on drugs, I saw it.” She removed the tie, and as promised, tossed it into the white kitchen garbage.

“Hey
,” Keith said in annoyance, “do you really have to throw it away?”

She started to wrap the new tie around his
neck. “Yeah, I never want to see you in that thing again. Now tie it, I have to get Jayne ready for school.”

Keith always met Tuesday morning with dread because on Tuesday morning, he had the Tuesday morning meeting and at the Tuesday morning meeting they talked about all the things that they talked
about last Tuesday morning meeting and then resolve to do nothing until the next Tuesday morning meeting.

A coffee smell filled the
air in the kitchen and his eyes were still readjusting from sleep. He finished with the tie and walked down to their unfinished basement where he picked up his half-smoked pack of cigarettes and a lighter from one of the bare support beams beneath the stairs. Ellen knew he smoked, he knew that she knew that he smoked and they came to an unspoken rule that he would smoke in secret. It worked. He slipped them into his jacket pocket as he walked back upstairs.

He yelled up to the second floor, “
Hey, Ellen, Dave’s going to be here any minute. Is Jayne going to make her bus?”

“Yeah, come say good bye to your daughter!” she yelled.

Glancing at his watch, he walked up the stairs two steps at a time. “Okay, okay, where is my little baby? Where is she?” He walked around the corner of Jayne’s room and saw her blonde pigtails hanging in front of her face as she bent over, trying to tie her shoes.

“
Hi, Dad, can you tie my shoe? I got one of them but the other one is bad.”

“Let me see what I can do
.” He kneeled down and puckered his lips out while bringing his index finger to them. “The damage to the shoe might be beyond repair.” He knelt closer to the tip of her foot and put his ear to it.

“Daddy?
What are you doing?”

Ellen turned, putting books in Jayne’s backpack. “
Hey, Keith, can you go over after work to Dave’s and pick up that molding sample that his girlfriend was keeping for us. She said she was going to bring them over this weekend, but I need them tomorrow before the carpet guys come. I really don’t want to entertain Dave and his flavor of the month this weekend, because that girl bugs me.”

“
Yeah, she does kind of suck. She said she was going to take all of us to the Nicks game like a month ago and then she didn’t mention it ever again. She lies a lot, so she probably won’t even have the moldings, but I’ll stop by anyway.” He finished with the shoe.

“
Yeah, she sucks,” Jayne repeated.

Ellen was about to berate Keith for his word usage but then just said, “
Yeah, she really does suck.” She grabbed a bright pink backpack and handed it to Jayne. “Okay, I’m going to take you to the bus stop now, so give Daddy a kiss and a hug.”

“Bye, Dad.” Keith bent down to let his six-year-old kiss him on the cheek.

“Bye, I’ll see you tonight.”

After Ellen and Jayne left, Keith
gulped down some coffee and waited for Dave, thinking that the bastard would make him late again. Dave’s forte was being late, even that one time, when Keith broke his arm in junior high. He remembered that Dave was supposed to go run to tell his mom but had stopped off at the gas station first for a Flintstone’s push pop.

Such a jackass sometimes, Keith thought as Dave’s horn honked from the driveway. Keith walked out the front door and turned to lock it. In the middle of the door, there were two series of scratches spaced by a few inches with wood splinters
jutting out. It looked like claw marks with a little blood in the grooves. One of the windowpanes in the door was also cracked. He locked it and ran to Dave’s car.

“
Hey, man.” Keith climbed in the seat and put on a seatbelt.

“What is with your neighbor?” Dave asked, looking behind his shoulder.

“What, who?” Keith looked around through the windows.

“He still has that stupid Santa Claus dummy hanging on the side of the chimney.”

Keith looked out across his driveway and saw a long skinny Santa Claus hanging onto the top of his neighbor’s chimney with its legs dangling down the brick.

“Oh,
right, I know the Jacksons. The husband Hank or something is the biggest prick you'll ever meet. I swear he's just doing it to spite all of us.”

“I mean
it's July, how tacky can you be?”

“
Yeah, I know… Hey, I think someone tried to break into my house last night.”

“Really?
No way.”

“Yeah, there
is a bunch of scratches on the door and someone cracked the window.”

“You have a
gun, don’t you?”

“Uh,
yeah, but I forgot the combo to the lock. It’s not like I would ever use it anyway. I think they hurt themselves and left, but there’s some blood on the door.” He put his hand into his jacket. “I’m going to call Ellen real quick.”

He flipped open his phone and got Ellen on her cell. “Hey, did you see the front door when you left? It looks like someone tried to break in last night…
Yeah, well I heard some scratching last night, but I just thought it was Bub… No, don’t call the cops, because they aren’t going to do anything. Just lock up when you get back to the house. Okay, bye.”

“That’s weird
.” Dave exhaled loudly. “So do you know when you’re going to get your car back?”

“Um, they said Thursday, so just two more days of this. Thanks for all the rides. Let me take you and what’s-her-face for lunch today.” Keith produced
his cigarettes from his pocket.

“No, not today
. She came over last night and she was sick or drunk or something. I know that she’s kind of crazy to begin with but she was acting all delirious or something. Hey, gimme one of those.” Dave rolled down the windows.

Keith
lit two cigarettes in his mouth and handed one to Dave who hesitantly took the cigarette. “Don’t, don’t light my cigarette in your mouth.”

“What?”

“It’s a little too intimate for me, almost like you’re trying to seduce me.”

Keith laughed, “If I were trying to seduce
you, I would have just showed a little more cleavage.”

Dave gave out a little laugh and drew in a deep breath from the cigarette. He gently patted his head to see how dry his hair was from the excessive amount of gel he had put in it.

“Yeah, so all of the sudden, she comes over last night and doesn’t even say anything. She just sits on my couch and stares. Then I try to sit down next to her and she just freaked out and started yelling. Then she apologized and said she felt weird and then left. I called her this morning and she didn’t answer, so I don’t know what’s up with her.”

“I’ve always thought she was a little off. Did she leave some wooden moldings at your house for Ellen?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“That’s what I thought.’’ They pulled o
nto the freeway ramp from Kearny, New Jersey and headed towards Manhattan. There was a car on the shoulder of the road with the back up lights on.

“What is
that guy doing?” Keith looked into the car as they passed and there was a man and a woman yelling and grabbing at each other. “Did you see that? There was a couple fighting in that car, and it looked like the woman punched him right in the face!”

“
Seriously?” Dave looked behind his shoulder for a look but there was a semi now blocking the view to the car. “Ah, I missed it. Married people.” Dave smiled and looked at Keith.

Keith flicked his cigarette out the window and rolled it up. “Hey, I saw on the news that there was a shooting just a few blocks from your house last night
. Did you see that?”

“What? No, I haven’t heard anything.”

“Some lady wouldn’t pull over and just started shooting at the cops. I think they shot and killed her.”

“It doesn’t really surprise me
, since there’s a lot of drug trafficking around there.”

As usual, there
was dense traffic on the freeway, but the cars were flowing without congestion. The sunrise shone through the windshield into their faces as they simultaneously flipped down the sun visors. After driving for a while, the downtown silhouette was getting bigger and they pulled off onto their exit. They stopped at a crosswalk for a crowd of people who were exiting the subway.

The mornings
brought out the masses of commuters into the city. Swarms of people crowded into coffee shops, newsstands and elevators. The subway in the summer filled with sweating bodies from end to end, weighing the train down with wheels screeching an ear-piercing scream at all the stops. All traffic intersection teemed with people waiting to cross and the sidewalks filled with throngs of strange faces that couldn’t be differentiated; just one massive entity of flesh, hair, and shouting conversations.

Dave parked the car at their company garage and they got out. The July sun weighed down on
them, especially in their suits.

“I’m going to burn up here.” Dave took off his jacket and gently laid it over his arm like a waiter with a cloth napkin over his arm presenting wine to some diners.

Keith gathered his briefcase and jacket from the back of the car and they made their way to the crosswalk. There seemed to be more pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk than cars in the streets. Stopping behind a crowd at the crosswalk, they waited for the light. People started collecting behind them and Keith began to feel as if he was in the middle of a concert mosh pit, waiting for the band to show up on stage. Dave’s hair glistened in the sun from the gel and it now looked like a hardened helmet of blond hair. He patted it with his hand and his whole head of hair shook with the movement.

“What do you think of this tie?” Keith lifted up the gray tie for Dave to see.

Dave looked down, squinting, “Ugly.”

“Ellen literally threw my favorite tie in the garbage this morning.”

“The one with the paisleys?”

“Yeah.”

“That tie was ugly too, and you wore it too much.” Dave looked back up at the crosswalk light. “You got anymore cigarettes?”