Zomtropolis Page 4

  I was in a regular T-shirt and jeans that night. She wore jeans, too, and an oversized white sweatshirt from the high school she went to.

  When she turned toward me after testing the water, she smiled, brown eyes glowing, both of us scared and excited.

  We didn’t really plan this per se, but more so came up with the idea while watching television in her living room, ignoring what was on and instead focusing on each other. One didn’t even have to tell the other that we were going to take the next step. We both just kind of knew. I looked her, she looked at me, and we both nodded at the same time.

  The shower part was her idea. Thought it might smooth any awkwardness that might come later.

  She was right because as we slowly undressed and stole glances at the other as each piece of clothing was taken away, it felt almost natural, as if her and I had done this a hundred times before.

  Once we were naked, we immediately held each other as if an indirect effort to conceal ourselves from the others’ eyes.

  We went into the shower, kissing most of the time, talking at others, then went to her bedroom, each wrapped in a towel. When we got to her bed, we pulled the covers back together then, as a game, counted to three and ripped our towels away.

  All that followed changed our relationship.

  Changed my life.

  Changed hers.

  Changed everything.

  * * *

  I need to stop. I know you might be disappointed that I didn’t get into detail about what happened in the bedroom or anything that happened many times after that, but to be honest, all physical pleasure aside, sex wasn’t about the pleasure for us anyway. Yes, it was there, but the connecting, the falling deep into someone else, the revelation of that private side of them that was only reserved for one other was the cornerstone of our physical relationship.

  It was about love.

  Making love.

  Making it real.

  Making it last.

  And it did last.

  Sure, things ended badly, but the love part never did. At least on my end. That’s why I can’t begin to describe to you what it was like killing Selena because, I think, by having done that, I killed myself, too, the part that understood what it was doing despite the desperate survival instinct that took over, despite the rage and need for revenge for her ripping my heart out and ruining my life.

  It was that love that was my watershed.

  It was her death that was my watershed, too.

  It was—

  Um…okay. There’s a knock at my door or at least what sounded like one.

  Hang on.

  …

  …

  I dropped my bat on my foot.

  I’m telling you now in case something happens.

  I looked through the peephole.

  It was Selena.

  ·18: Selena

  I’m not ready for this.

  Selena’s supposed to be dead, and not just dead, but undead.

  I would know.

  I killed her.

  Yet there she was, human, on the other side of my door. Through the fisheye lens of the peephole, there doesn’t seem to be a mark on her face. I can’t see the rest of her body, only a dark blur beneath the neck. I hope the rest of her is all right but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if I’ve finally lost it and all this is an illusion, some kind of wishful thinking that is manifesting before my eyes.

  I can scarcely breathe. A dead weight is on my toe. I kick it away and hear my baseball bat roll awkwardly to the side, one of the pieces of glass glued to it breaking as it moves across the floor.

  Hand shaking, one eye still glued to the peephole, I slowly unlocked the door, felt my way up the doorframe to the chain, unhooked it.

  She stood there on the other side, brown eyes wide and uncertain, a million thoughts clearly racing behind them.

  Something moves in the peephole, small, delicate, flesh-toned.

  Knock, knock.

  Then again, only louder.

  “Yeah,” I said, but my voice is only a whisper.

  Any strength I had within was gone and I found myself on the floor, a sharp pain racing up my tailbone and into my lower back.

  “Marty?” I hear through the door. “Is that you? Please, let it be.”

  For the longest time I would have given anything to hear her call my name again and now that it’s finally happening, I wish she was gone.

  Like I said, I’m not ready for this.

  Heart speeding, pulsing in my throat and thumping through every vein in my body, I braced myself against the door and, using it for leverage, slowly pull myself up.

  “I’m here,” I said. Same thing. My voice was a whisper.

  Fingers trembling, I turned the door knob and pulled, the door weighing a thousand pounds and then some. It took two hands to pry it open.

  Still leaning against it, I took in the sight before me. My heart was empty, hollow, void of feeling and life.

  Selena stood a couple feet from the door, barefoot, wearing nothing but a grubby garbage bag, which hung on her like a dress from the dark.

  “You’re alive,” I rasped.

  “Marty, I need to come in,” she said.

  We stood there in silence, my mind void of thought. This was Selena, the girl from long ago and the one who changed everything for me. She was here, alive, at my door in a world of zombies.

  “Then who’d I kill?”

  I barely mouthed the words but she must have heard them because she said, “Who’d you kill?”

  I killed you, I thought. I beat your brains out and unloaded on you all my hate and pain and— “Come in.”

  I moved from the door and she stepped into my apartment.

  Crnch.

  Selena shrieked, dropped to the floor and cradled her foot. I knelt down beside her.

  She had stepped on that piece of glass that had broken off the bat.

  * * *

  There was only one way to handle this: pretend she wasn’t her and clean her up. After that, I could figure things out. If living in a world filled with the undead had taught me anything, it was that sometimes you had to stop feeling, stop caring, stop being what it meant to be human and just go through the motions. Survival was like that whether physical or otherwise.

  I always hated “otherwise.”

  Selena was now sitting my cough, me kneeling before her, her foot in my lap. I ignored how good it felt to hold her heel in my hand and suppressed the memory of the time I kissed every inch of her body, starting with her feet. I gently removed the piece of glass with a pair of tweezers then pressed hard against the wound with a cloth. She winced. I told her it was going to be okay. A moment later she reached down and her hands replaced mine. Again I had to fight the resurgence of memory when her soft hands trailed against my own.

  I stood, took several steps back, and began pacing.

  It was silent for a long time and I wasn’t sure if it was because she was too busy attending to her foot or if it was because silence was what happened every time you ran into an ex.

  But this wasn’t “running in.” She had come here intentionally.

  “Everybody’s dead,” she said.

  I stopped pacing. “I know.”

  “Except me and you.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I do.”

  “No, you can’t,” I said firmly.

  “The city’s empty, Marty.”

  “Some might be indoors, like us. Besides” —I strolled over to my window and looked down onto the street— “they’re out there.”

  “I know. I saw a million of them on the way over here.” I turned to face her. She glanced up from her foot. “I don’t even know how I made it here without them touching me.”

  “Where we you?”

  “Home.”

  The last thing that I wanted was to come across as a creepy ex-boyfriend even though I was
one hundred percent certain that was how she viewed me and she was only here because she had nowhere else to go and it was better to be with someone than no one at all, but I had to tell her. “Selena, I was just at your place.”

  Her eyes went wide.

  “Yeah, for real. I was there. I came to see you. I had to see you.” The last bit obviously made her uncomfortable because after I said it she immediately went back to tending to her foot.

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “Regardless, I was there. There were zombies in your apartment. You weren’t. I checked the whole place, so unless you were hiding somewhere over there that I don’t know about and didn’t bother even peeking to see what the commotion was about, you need to tell me where you’ve been and why only now you decided to come see me.”

  She looked up from her foot but not at me. “Okay, I’ll tell you. Just listen and believe whatever you want. I was home. I heard the dead, the groans, the biting of flesh. I don’t remember you being there or seeing you and it may just be shock right now so I’m forgetting something, but I remembering walking and walking.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “Wait.” She glanced down at the garbage bag covering her. “Oh no.” She sniffled. She glanced up at me, tears dripping down her cheeks. “I have lost something or something happened or…”

  I came over to her, sat beside her and put a hand on her shoulder. She pulled away.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “No, it’s just that I was walking and I don’t know for how long then I looked down on myself and…and I wasn’t wearing anything. Nothing. I—” She paused and took a deep breath. “I don’t know how I lost my clothes or if one of those things tore them off or what, but anyway I found this” —she touched the garbage bag— “put it on and realized I was close to your place.” She turned away and shame coated her voice. “I didn’t want to come.”

  I took a deep breath. “I understand.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You need to get cleaned up. I’ll give you something to wear. We’ll take it slow and figure things out. Just know that we’re safe for now, okay?”

  “Thanks,” she whispered.

  I left the room and headed to my bedroom. Once inside, I leaned against the wall. She didn’t want to come here and only did out of desperation.

  I wished I knew what happened to her.

  19: Now, With Selena Here

  Selena’s sleeping on my couch as I type this. I gave her a pair of underwear, socks, brown sweatpants and a green sweatshirt. They should keep her warm enough and provide some sense of security. I had wanted to rest, too, but I’m afraid that if I fall asleep, I’ll awake later and she’ll be gone.

  I can’t let that happen despite what I did to her—to that zombie—earlier. I don’t know who that creature was back in her apartment, but obviously it wasn’t her.

  The things I said.

  The thing I did.

  I’m pathetic.

  The main question is: what now? What does this mean, her and I reconnecting? I can’t make too much of it. Not with the city the way it is. So far as I know, we’re safe here. I got some water, some food, clothing, the basics. Eventually that stuff is going to run out and we’re going to have to get more if we want to survive. Before, I didn’t really care all that much about survival. The original plan was to hang out as much as I could and then if one of those monsters devoured me or I simply died of starvation or dehydration, I was fine with it.

  Now, with Selena here, suddenly everything’s changed.

  Selena’s good at that: changing things.

  I’m going to wait for her to wake up. When she does, the first thing we need to do is get some stuff settled. I’ll remind her that our survival is at stake.

  Let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into an argument.

  Let’s just hope she doesn’t storm out of here and get herself killed.

  ·20: Selena’s Dream

  Selena awoke screaming. I was in the next room about to write you something else, but instead was jolted from the first few sentences by Selena’s shrieks and her kicking at the couch. I ran into the room. She was on her back, arms flailing, legs coming down on the worn couch cushions heels first. I’ve seen her sleep before. Back when we were dating, she told me about the occasional nightmare, but not once did she talk about freaking out like she was doing on my couch just now.

  Her eyes were closed.

  I called her name.

  She kept screaming, kept kicking.

  I called her name again. Nothing. Just hysterics-while-sleeping.

  I thought about going over to her and putting a hand on her shoulder and giving her a little shake. I didn’t. Didn’t want her to lash out at me and besides, I figured, if she was flipping out this bad on her own, what was a little shake by me going to do? It was kind of like watching an epileptic having a seizure: the most you could do was wait it out and make sure they didn’t hurt themselves in the process.

  Finally, after several long minutes, her screaming and flailing ceased. She opened her eyes, sat up abruptly, face shiny with sweat, and tried to catch her breath.

  I waited a few moments before saying anything. “You okay?”

  Still panting, she looked at me. “I saw them, Marty. I saw them. So real. So flippin’—” She coughed. It was a deep cough, one loaded with phlegm. She winced as she tried to stifle another one.

  “I’ll get you some water,” I said and hit the kitchen. When I came back and handed her the glass—water jugs are still around, for those wondering; water doesn’t suddenly disappear when the world goes down; don’t trust the movies—she held it for a while before taking a sip. Once done, she set the glass down on the coffee table and kept looking around the living room as if expecting a zombie to jump out at her at any moment.

  “We’re safe here,” I said. “We’re up high. Everything’s locked. It’s okay.”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “Well, it is. The dream, Marty. So real. Vivid. Every face. Every sound. Every smell. Never had smell in a dream before.”

  Come to think of it, she had a point. I don’t remember ever smelling anything in my dreams either.

  “Want to talk about it?” I asked.

  Back when she and I were together, we were real good at confiding secrets, talking all night and overloading each other with information. It seemed she remembered that because a calm came over her face and the way she looked at me indicated she trusted me to spill her guts.

  I sat beside her and listened.

  “I was in a hallway,” she said. “Dark. The walls were silver. I knew that because there was the occasional bit of light that seeped into the hallway from the rooms that ran off it and it illuminated the wall enough to see they were silver. You know, tinfoil-like, but not crinkled. The floors were silver, too. Same with the ceilings. I remember thinking in the dream that I wanted to find a light switch so I could see the light shimmer off the walls. It’d be like being inside a diamond.

  “So that’s what I did: looked for a light switch.

  “The air smelled like lemon cleaner, but also like compost. Real weird combination. As I went down the hallway, I heard footsteps behind me. I stopped, turned around and far away at the opposite end was a human-like shadow. I could tell by its posture that it was female and that it was dead.

  “It started moving toward me.”

  She took a deep breath. I already felt my heartbeat double with apprehension.

  “I turned and picked up my pace,” Selena said. “The undead woman’s footsteps got closer together and I didn’t have to look back to know it was stumbling toward me with everything it had. I tried running, but no matter how hard I dug in, I still couldn’t get past going at a walking pace.

  “Moans filled the hallway. Low, hollow moans that at first didn’t sound like it would come from the undead. Then groans started and the growls. That one coming up at me from behind wasn’t alone. The hallway I was in just kept going. Silver walls all looking the same, no sense of distance or goal at t
he end.

  “I glanced over my shoulder. A pack of female zombies were, like, twenty feet behind, if that. Their grubby hands were already reaching out for me. Dark hair, their mouths open, all naked. What was bizarre was their pale skin didn’t appear all that decayed, from what I could see. Didn’t matter, though. That gray was disgusting. So lifeless, so wan and empty of blood. Makes me shudder just thinking about it. I could smell them, like cooking oil left on the stove hours too long after a deep fry.

  “My thighs burned. I kept running anyway until it was like my legs were filled with sand and every step forward was like lugging tree stumps for feet.

  “The undead moaned and growled.

  “Dead hands grabbed my shoulders and pulled me back. I fell and hit the floor. I remember looking at the silver ceiling beyond their dead faces, the silver reflecting the scene below. There were over a dozen of them now, all naked and dead and crowding over me trying to get a piece. A pair of hands reached down and tugged at my clothes. I wore a hospital gown. They tore that off then sharp dirty fingernails poked their way into my skin, through the flesh and in between the bones of my ribcage. They just kept digging. Soon they were in far enough they were able to curl the ends of their fingers around those bones and they started to pull.

  “I howled, but not from pain. I just howled because I thought that was what I was supposed to do.

  “Blood sprayed everywhere. Bones snapped. They pulled my ribs away from my body, my flesh hanging off the bones like tattered rags. The undead women brought the bones to their lips and sucked the meat off before chewing on the bones themselves.

  “I glanced at my chest and saw nothing but a wet, black bowl spurting blood and bubbling over with internal organs. They ripped my lungs from my body. I stopped breathing. My stomach, guts, liver, kidneys—everything—they tore free and brought the red and dripping chunks of meat to their mouths. Blood dripped from their faces and splashed onto my own. I wanted to scream but, again, I couldn’t breathe. All I could do was scream inside my head. I tried kicking and using my arms to push them away but I couldn’t move.