“He’s going to get in! He’s gonna get in, Velvet! Stop him!”
I didn’t know how to stop him. I was still in my pajamas, my breath sour, my eyes crusty. I thought maybe I was dreaming until Opal’s fingernails cut into the skin of my hand.
I thought of a weapon, grabbing a knife or trying to find something else. “Upstairs, Opal, run! Mom and Dad’s room!”
We ran, reaching the foot of the stairs just as Craig finally broke through it. We went up the stairs on hands and feet, pushing ourselves. I slammed the door to my parents’ room at the top of the hall. I locked the door. We could hear Craig downstairs, screaming. He wasn’t saying any words, just screaming. Loud, sharp bursts of noise. Opal clamped her hands over her ears.
I tried to shove the dresser in front of the door, but my parents’ TV was too big and heavy. It was really old, still had a VCR built into it, and was twice the size of the big flat-screen downstairs. I shoved, I pushed, but the dresser didn’t move.
I didn’t think about pushing the TV off. It would’ve broken, and my mom and dad would be angry. How did I know that it wasn’t just Craig who’d gone insane? How did I know that somewhere out there in the street, my dad was doing the same thing to someone else’s daughters while my mom was trying to get home to us, unable to because the roads had all been blocked?
There were windows in there, but nothing close to the ground. My mind raced through all the scenarios my parents had ever put us through. They trusted me here, alone with Opal. They were counting on me, and so was she.
Fire? The fire ladder was at the end of the hall. I’d run through flames before I’d run out in front of Craig, who by then was pounding up the stairs.
Tornado? We were supposed to hide in the basement, in the closet beneath the stairs. Wrong choice for this situation.
It felt like years before I got it, though it could only have been a few seconds. My dad had a golf club under the bed. Once I’d asked him what it was for, and he’d told me, “It’s for when the serial killer comes in the middle of the night. Or the zombies.” I’d never appreciated my dad’s sense of humor or his preparedness so much as I did right then.
“Get the club,” he’d said matter-of-factly over pizza and cards one night while my mom was out at the movies with some friends. We were going over all the emergency procedures we should use if my parents weren’t home. “But you won’t use it unless you have to. While whoever’s there is pounding on the door, you take Opal and run into the bathroom. Get into the cubbyhole. Pull it shut behind you; that will buy you some time. You’ll have to pull up the board on the floor, but I left it loose, just in case.”
“Oh, Dad.” I was laughing, but Opal was all ears.
“And then what, Daddy?”
“Then you push out the panel in the garage ceiling just below it. You can jump down into the garage from there. Get out of the house. And then just run. If it’s dark, hide in the woods.”
“Will a serial killer still be able to find us, Daddy?”
My dad had looked solemn, though there was a twinkle in his eyes to make all of this less scary. “Not if you’re very quiet and it’s dark. And if it’s daytime, you just run as fast as you can across the street to Garry and Hope’s house.”
“But, Dad, what if it’s a zombie?”
“Then,” my dad had said, “there will be more than one, and you need to be extra careful to figure out if they’re the slow kind or the fast kind.”
“You watch too many scary movies, Dad,” I’d told him.
Turns out, my dad wasn’t the only one. His plan worked, by the way. It got me and Opal out of the house just fine. In our pajamas, we ran across the street to Garry and Hope’s house. He greeted us at the door with a shotgun and urged us inside. On the news, reports of all kinds of crazy things were coming in.
“I’ve never been a religious man,” Garry had said, “but if you girls haven’t taken Jesus as your Lord and Savior, I think maybe you’d better think about it.”
“We’re already Catholic,” Opal had told him.
It’s funny what stands out in memories. That made me laugh at the time, what she said, mostly because Garry looked like she’d told him she’d stepped in dog crap and wiped her feet on his living room sofa. What difference did Jesus make just then? Still, it was his wife who shushed him and brought us cold cans of soda to drink while Garry went around to all the windows and boarded them up.
Craig didn’t come across the street. I don’t know what happened to him. We never saw him again. I do know, though, what happened to my dad.
We watched the local news team filming a riot in downtown Lebanon. The street by my dad’s office. I caught a glimpse of red hair in the crowd, which was surging like some vicious, wild sea into a storefront, bodies crashing like waves into the glass windows. It might have been anyone, could have been anyone. But I knew it was him.
Stores had been broken into—and the people who were trying to run away with whatever they could carry, armfuls of clothes and iPods and watches, they weren’t Contaminated. Connies don’t care about stuff like that. The people who were looting the stores weren’t sick, just greedy and awful.
“What we seem to have here,” said the wild-eyed local police chief, “is a genuine zombie outbreak!”
He sounded more excited than worried. In the background, Connies staggered around, their clothes sometimes ripped, their bodies bruised and bleeding because nothing seemed to faze them. They’d walk into a brick wall, fall down, and get back up again with bone showing through the cuts on their heads. That was why everyone assumed they were the walking undead, just like in the movies. That’s why the police gunned them down without warning, or ran them over with their cars. That’s why they tossed them by the dozens into the back of trucks and drove them to fields outside of town, where they dug giant ditches and poured the bodies in, covered them with concrete, and pushed dirt over them. They didn’t burn them because they feared “airborne contagion,” but nobody seemed to think about what an undead corpse virus might do to the environment, encased in concrete in a farmer’s field.
People are really, really stupid.
Eventually they’ll make memorials out of those ditches, the ones filled with concrete and bodies. Nothing too fancy. There’s supposed to be money coming, sometime, for that. But for now they built metal rail fences around them and planted flowers on top. Plaques without names on them. Nobody’s really sure who’s in there, and while there’s been a lot of noise about digging them up, nobody’s managed to get the authority to do it yet.
It seems people don’t like the fact their loved ones were dumped in ditches, even if they did try to bite off their faces.
We never got official documentation saying my dad was one of those people killed in the first wave, the one that stretched on through those awful summer months and turned parts of the world into a George A. Romero movie. He never came home. My mom was finally able to get to us the day after Craig slammed himself into the glass door. She took us home from Garry and Hope’s house. She told us not to worry. She told us everything would be okay, and I don’t think she was lying. She didn’t know any better.
My mom was lucky. By the time she fell sick, they’d figured out what was causing the disease. They weren’t automatically killing all the Connies, just capturing them to deal with them the best they could.
We never saw my dad again.
SEVEN
NOW THAT I’M GOING TO GET MY MOM, I SEE them everywhere. Neutralized Connies, with their collars. Regular lobotomies make people calm, but the collars do more than that. Blank faces, slack jaws, dead eyes. There’s one in the grocery store, shuffling along behind a grim-faced woman who must be his wife, their cart stacked high with jars of baby food and adult diapers. One at the post office where I go to pick up the assistance check, standing in front of the display of free shipping boxes and waiting patiently while the man with her buys stamps. It’s not that suddenly there are so many of them, but that I didn’t notice them before.