Mistakes I Made During the Zombie Apocalypse (13 page)

• • •

“I miss that warmth.”

It was nice, wasn’t it?

“Much nicer than this,” Ian says through chattering teeth. Another night has come in the closet. The cold air bites at him like the teeth of the dead might if they find him.

You can take a break, go to sleep.

“No, the story isn’t over yet.”

• • •

Nightmares of the apocalypse are frightening, but fever dreams of the apocalypse are far worse. In the height of his febrility, Ian saw his mother. Even though she was still undead, she bustled about his bedroom as she had in life, tending to her sick son. When she was alive she would stay at his side until he was diagnosed, treated, and cured of whatever ailed him. To her, a bug bite that wouldn’t stop itching was as serious as pneumonia. Ian’s sick mind envisioned her equally devoted in her undeath. She brought him chicken noodle soup, but pus dripped into the bowl from wounds on her face. She felt his forehead, but the cold flesh of her dead hand shocked him and he tore away from it. The cough syrup she forced him to gulp looked and tasted suspiciously like blood. It was when she came into his room with a rag and bucket to wash him, its thin metal handle cutting into her wrist and its warm water causing the skin to slough off of her hands, that he finally broke free from the nightmare.

Ian cried out from beneath his sweat-soaked sheets. He frantically searched the room for a sign of his mother, anxious to keep her from cleaning him and determined to avoid drinking any more of the bloody cough syrup. He began to sob out of fear and sadness. Part of him wanted to see his mother, alive or undead.

“Mom?” The tears fell freely down his face, joining the beads of sweat there.

Grant, who was asleep in Ian’s parents’ bedroom down the hall, heard his crying and came back to his friend’s side. “She’s gone, Ian.”

“So, she was here?” Again, but this time hopefully, he sought any recent sign of his mother. There on the nightstand, an uneaten bowl of soup sat cold. A wrung out rag hung sadly over the back of a chair to dry. But there was no proof. Instead he saw a note she’d written in fifth grade wishing him good luck on a presentation, a picture they’d taken together at the science center downtown when he was thirteen, and last year, her hands made the very quilt he lay under. These memories were much too old. She hadn’t been in his room in a long time.

“You were imagining things. You’re still really sick.”

“I didn’t get to say goodbye. She was here and then she was just…gone.”

“You did the next best thing to saying goodbye. You tried to find her and you did. Now, take two of these and stop crying like a baby.” He threw a plastic bottle of Tylenol at Ian.

“I want my mom, Goddammit!” He turned away from Grant dramatically, sending the Tylenol bottle rolling off onto the floor.

Grant couldn’t understand what it was like to miss a mother. He picked up the bottle, removed two white pills, and shoved them in Ian’s face. “Take them or I’ll put you outside with the wolves. I’m sick of your whining and you need to get better. We have places to go and zombies to see.”

“I don’t want to see more zombies,” Ian said.

“Just take the freaking pills already!” Grant left the room, unwilling to argue with Ian any further.

Ian grudgingly did as he asked and to his surprise, the little pills helped immensely. By that night he could sit up and keep down soup. The nightmares of his undead mother took a while longer to leave him.

“So, what kind of food do we need to find?”

“No more snack food. We need breakfast, lunch and dinner. We need meat and vegetables.”

A word about meat in the apocalypse: no one was eating it fresh besides the zombies. There were no more Big Macs, no more steak dinners or barbecue. Other than canned Vienna sausages, beef jerky, dehydrated meals, smoked salmon, and tinned sardines (if you were lucky enough to find any of this stuff), the only opportunity to consume was wild animals and they were near impossible to catch.

• • •

Didn’t Grant have a beef jerky bag in his pack?

“It’s empty. Grant ate it all a long time ago.”

Did you check the bottom of the bag? There are always those little pieces left over.

Ian crawls out of the closet in the dark and makes his way back to the pile of Grant’s things. He finds the jerky bag and dumps the tiny, but flavorful nuggets into his mouth. Back in the closet he cares not that the dehydrated meat is stuck between his teeth. He falls asleep happily enough with the taste of beef in his mouth and dreams of savoring a burger, and though it pains him when he wakes up…

“I’m thankful I didn’t dream of my mother.”

Especially since it’s time to talk about her a lot more.

“It was a horrible mistake. I should have done it sooner. But it was too late when…”

…I TRIED TO SAY GOODBYE

Grant’s mother was mostly absent, drugged out when she was present, and generally a lousy mom, whereas Ian’s mother was caring, attentive, and always had time for Ian if he needed it. Because of this healthy relationship with his mother, Ian wanted her to know that he was still alive. Because of the love he felt for her, he needed to know that she was alive. So, against everything he knew to be safe and against Grant’s wishes, he went to the hospital to find her.

They entered the cemetery first, located across the street, in eerily convenient proximity to the hospital. Being mostly empty of the undead, it was a welcome respite. There, in the silent space of a mausoleum, Ian planned his foray into the medical building.

“I’m not sure you’ll make it inside,” Grant said as he lazily traced the engraved lines of a plaque on the wall with his dirty fingers. “It’s one of the worst places to go.”

Ignoring Grant’s lack of faith, Ian dug through his memories of the entrances, hallways, reception areas, and rooms he’d seen so many times before. “She works on the second floor.”

He drew a map on a scrap of paper of what he thought was the best route. The emergency room entrance wasn’t an option. It was ground zero for the apocalypse. He also nixed the idea of using the main entrance as he imagined needing to pry the doors open. A first floor window around the back of the hospital would have to do.

“That’s a lot of running,” Grant commented, surveying Ian’s poorly drawn path.

“Grant, I need to do this! Please stop saying negative stuff.” Ian folded the map, but didn’t pack it away. He would need to refer to it as he kept the dead off of his heels. “You’re giving me doubts.”

• • •

Ian reaches around in the dim closet for his backpack. He still has the map, folded in a side pocket and though he cannot see the lines, he finds comfort in touching the paper.

You kept it.

“I don’t have anything else to remind me of my mom.”

Do you really want to remember her like that? She was disgusting.

“Stop it! She couldn’t help it! And you’re fucking giving shit away again!”

Fine, back to the story.

• • •

The boys set out across the rest of the cemetery, cutting through the grass and over shallow grave markers. Several of Ian’s relatives were buried there, but it never crossed his mind to pay his respects. He only imagined their skeletons, struggling in their coffins, somehow brought back to this world like the rest of the dead. At the north end of the block, they could see one of the hospital’s parking lots, the parking attendant’s shack, and the winding driveway that led beyond both and into the complex itself.

Bodies, moving and non-moving, dotted the landscape. The dead were everywhere.

“Hah! Zombie butt!” Grant laughed as he pointed to an undead man in nothing but a loosely tied hospital gown.

Ian smiled. It was a funny sight.

They approached the parking attendant’s shack. No blood, no weapons either. On one side of the seat was a bag of unopened beef jerky.

Grant nearly drooled. “I’ll be in here,” he said.

“You aren’t coming?” Ian asked. “The hospital is big. I’ll need your help.”

“I can’t, Ian. I hate hospitals,” Grant said as he slid open the shack’s door. It wasn’t a lie. He’d spent time in the ER with his father and mother, dealing with trauma from a motorcycle accident and an overdose, respectively.

“Fine.” Ian took a deep breath and exhaled as he sprinted toward the back of the hospital. Only two zombies hung around at the far end of the rear parking lot.
Get inside
, he reminded himself. He hugged the building and walked through the untrimmed grass beneath the first floor windows.

Thunk.
A dead woman threw herself against the glass of her hospital room. She bit at the window, leaving saliva and several teeth there. Thin plastic tubes still ran from her arm to bags that hung on a pole behind her. As Ian continued down the building, she followed him along the wall until she reached the corner of her room. The window of the room next door was cracked open. He pressed his face to the pane and looked inside, half fearing another biter would spring up and gnaw at the idea of his flesh. From what he could see, the room was empty. He opened it halfway and climbed into the room. There wasn’t much he could use as a weapon, but Ian did find an unopened bottle of water that he threw in his pack. He glanced into the hallway and was surprised to see it empty. The hospital was full of the dead; they were just somewhere else at that moment.

The hall led him through several wards. Ian was becoming used to the gore and grossness of the infected, but there he saw the evil of the living and it was unbearable to witness. In an area for terminal patients, ampoules of potassium chloride had been emptied into syringes and those syringes emptied into them as they were going to die anyway. In the difficult existence of the apocalypse, the slowly dying were burdens, baggage that couldn’t be carried or walked out.
Did my mother have a hand in this?
He wondered. It was an impossible thought, but she was known among the staff as someone who made “the hard decisions”.

In the Infant Ward, bloody prints covered the window that allowed observation of the newborn room. Inside, Ian could see what the dead had been seeking. Several infants, dead from starvation and reanimated, squirmed in the incubators. Desperate cries, cries that a bottle wouldn’t end, crawled from their small chests. Their rotting stomachs were hungry for something else.

• • •

“They’d barely known life. They’d spent more time undead, than alive.”

Now that’s something to be thankful for, in your case. Isn’t it?

“No, not at all. I’d swap spots in a second to not know this suffering.”

And there were others in the room?

• • •

A family, the mother still clutching her tiny child, sat dead in a corner. The male, whom Ian could only assume was the father, loosely held a handgun. A bullet to the brain for the whole clan, recently two made three. Ian was happy then that Grant hadn’t come. He would want to grab the gun, but the door was blocked from the inside and they couldn’t risk the noise of breaking in. It wasn’t the reason Ian was there anyway and a room full of zombie infants, wiggling and chomping their toothless mouths, was a nightmare he didn’t want to hold onto.

He continued down the long corridor, using empty laundry bins and food carts stacked with trays of rotting food as cover. In the stairwell, he sat for a moment. There would be more corpses on the second floor, especially with the Intensive Care Unit taking up most of that level. His mother would not have left her post as an ICU nurse. She had to be up there. His cell phone, which he stubbornly still carried, didn’t work, so he couldn’t call or text her. Even if it did work, he couldn’t risk ringing her up and attracting zombies to her location. The generator still pumped power to the second floor of the building, which meant that the intercom might work, if he managed to locate it. The risk with this of course was inviting the dead to come to him. Still, it was safer than searching the entire second floor, room by room.

At the stairwell door to the second floor, Ian peered through the square window at another empty hall in front of him. It was unsettling, but he felt thankful for his luck. He pulled open the door and walked straight to the nurses’ station without trouble of any kind.

He took the phone in his hand, examined it and his thoughts, unsure of whether he was ready for the answer he might receive, and pressed the button labeled Intercom.

“Mom?” His voice boomed in the emptiness. He felt stupid for using precious airtime on three letters that could mean so much to many. Should he say her name so she knew he meant her? Or his?

“This is Ian.” Again, he felt idiotic.

Footfalls and moans echoed from around a corner. They were coming. He recradled the phone, crouched low behind the desk, and waited. Fortunately, or unfortunately, Ian had a good view of a circular security mirror that hung near the nurses’ station. It afforded him a reflection of the approaching chaos.

• • •

“I don’t want to tell this part.”

You don’t have that choice. It could be the key to getting better. You can’t leave out a word.

“She was right there, right in front.”

• • •

He saw her.

She had found him, but the reunion was not as he imagined. Drawn by his voice, but not
his
voice, only a sound above other sounds, she walked with two other corpses, a patient and a janitor, at the front of the pack. His mother’s hair was stringy and caked with blood. She shuffled like a woman forty years her senior. Urine and feces stained her white pants.

“Mom,” Ian called as he began to cry.

• • •

No one should have to see a parent like that.

“Ha,” Ian scoffs, “ya think?”

How did it make you feel?

“Like a part of me had died.”

Like it later felt to lose Grant?

“No, a million times worse. Like I didn’t have a right to exist anymore.”