The Week of the Dead (2 page)

With this, she jumped forward and looked around and then met Danny who was getting dressed in haste. “Goddamn it!” he said as he pointed at the bathroom. She wasn’t fully awoken yet, so she had no idea what was happening. The loud groan from above sure got her attention. She sprung out of bed and threw on some yoga pants, shoes with no socks, and an unbuttoned dress shirt over her shoulders. Danny unlocked the front door. When he pulled the door, he forgot the chain lock. As the chain forced the door to stop, the groan from upstairs was heard again. Only this time, the ceiling of Tricia’s apartment came crashing down from the bathroom. Whatever the cheap building material was made of, it was certainly flammable, and Danny saw something else in the rubble too. It looked like a skeleton.

Suddenly, a hand came through the cracked door and caught Tricia on the arm. She screamed as she saw the blood-covered hand that came through the door and latched on to her wrist. Danny tried to force the fingers loose, but he actually broke one of them off. He screamed, Tricia screamed. They began bumping against the door. They didn’t know what was on the other side of it, but behind them, most of Tricia’s apartment was catching on fire. They bumped the door together. The hand that was still attached to her was broken off with the final thrust of the door. Tricia shook the appendage off and began wiping her hands on her clothes. “What was that?” Tricia shouted. “Shit!” Danny didn’t care what came out of her mouth; he wanted to not be burned alive. “Fire escape!” Danny shouted as Tricia watched her television explode. Danny threw something through the window.

Tricia was complaining that he threw something important to her out the window, but he didn’t care. He didn’t want to hear it when he brought her out of her burning apartment and onto the fire escape. Danny kept pacing down the staircase, while Tricia stopped to gape. She watched as her city looked like it had been struck by an earthquake. There were people all over the street; there were fires; and there was destruction as far as she could see without her glasses or contacts. The Archway still stood in the distance. She was broken out of her gaze as something rolled down the fire escape and landed on top of her. It was the guy from 7G. She didn’t know his name, but she remembered his face as he was lying on top of her. She recognized his face, but not his expression. She remembered his face in a bored ecstasy; this new expression was one of terror and fear.

7G quickly got off her and began sprinting down the staircase. She watched him for two flights of stairs before she looked back up to see what he was so afraid of. She watched as a bloody corpse crashed through the window he had closed behind him a few floors above. A pebble of glass caught her on the forehead. She put a hand on top of her small gash as whatever came through the window got back up and snarled through the grates of the fire escape. Tricia screamed as she got to her feet and jumped down flights of stairs at a time. She made it to ground level as Danny came up, trying to get his cell phone to connect. The streets were filled with crashed cars, shambling bodies, human or otherwise, and bloodstains. Pools of blood covered the asphalt, turning it a darker shade of black.

Unexpected Guests

Chapter 4

Monday 0845 EST

Philadelphia

M
r. Harrison recapped the bottle of pills and stuffed them and the letter into his pocket as he walked to the door. When he opened the door slightly to see if something was happening, he looked across the hall to find Phil standing in his doorway with a wooden baseball bat. Being a fan of all sports, Phil littered his apartment building with memorabilia. As Mr. Harrison opened the door wider, he could see his neighbor standing in a defensive position with his baseball bat cocked in his hands tightly like a barbarian swinging an axe at the heads of invaders. There was a scream from down the corridor. “Psst, Phil! Did you hear that?” he whispered across the hall.

Phil spoke in a quiet voice so he wouldn’t wake his son. His son could sleep through a tornado, but somehow Phil thought he couldn’t talk louder than a whisper. “Yeah, I don’t like it. I’ve got a funny feeling about it.”

“Who do you think it was?” asked Mr. Harrison.

“I don’t know. But this is a quiet place, and this stuff doesn’t usually happen here,” Phil responded as he choked his hands around the bat in an uneasy fashion.

“Hey, call the cops. Let them deal with it,” Phil said as his eyes darted back to his son’s little foot sticking off the sofa.

“OK,” said Mr. Harrison as he left the door open and walked to his phone by his recliner. “Hello…Hello…Hello!” Mr. Harrison shouted into the phone.

“Shut it, old man, you’re going to alert whoever the hell that was!” Phil loudly whispered.

“The line is dead. No one picked up.”

“Well, fuck! Hang on, let me try.” Phil walked away to get his house phone. At the same time around the corner from their hall, a red face appeared. A man of normal height, wearing a postal-office uniform, or what used to be a uniform, came in full view of Mr. Harrison, who was standing in the hallway. Mr. Harrison glanced out of the corner of his eye, to find the postal-office worker trudging near him. “Hey, buddy, are you all right?” Mr. Harrison asked in an alarmed tone.

The postal worker said nothing. He just gazed at Harrison with bloodshot eyes and dragging his left leg behind him. The postal man released a grown as if he was in pain, which caught Harrison’s attention. “Oh my goodness! Are you all right?” exclaimed Harrison. There was no response from the slow-limping postal worker. Harrison then noticed the face of the man. Phil thought that some of the bastard children in his building were playing a joke on them, until Harrison noticed something sticking out of the postman’s back that looked as if something was attached to the man’s back that was causing him such pain. As the postal worker came closer to Mr. Harrison, he extended his arms and opened his mouth as if to speak, but what Harrison saw was an open mouth filled with razor-sharp, blood-soaked teeth. He stood there, frightened as the postal worker came closer and closer; slowly but surely, Harrison realized that this was not a joke.

As Harrison backed into his apartment, he caught the attention of Phil, who was still dialing 911, and the postal worker leaped on top of Mr. Harrison. The postal worker had enough force to knock Mr. Harrison onto the kitchen tile floor of his apartment. With both hands pressed against the postman’s face, Mr. Harrison released a “Help!” from his lungs that were being pressed in between the floor and the body of a blood-soaked stranger. Whatever this was, Mr. Harrison didn’t want it around him. With all his might, he pressed the jaw of his attacker closed. All the strength a seventy-year-old man could muster, a man who was about to kill himself because he didn’t want to be alone, was now in the death grip of a psycho. The more Harrison pressed against the chin, the more he noticed that the thing sticking out of its back was the handle of a kitchen knife.

With all the commotion, Phil ran in, baseball bat still in hand. “What the fuck is this!” he said as he blindly swung the bat at the uniformed man. The bat cracked against the postman’s spine—one, two, three, four. It was unyielding. On the fifth swing, Phil caught the bat on the back of the attacker’s skull. With the
clack
of the baseball bat, the postman’s body fell limp and began to seizure on top of Mr. Harrison. “Holy fuck! Holy fuck! What the fuck!” He took a few deep breathes.

“Harrison, are you all right?” Phil said as he pushed the twitching body off his old neighbor.

Harrison lay on the cold tile floor of his apartment looking up at Phil, who was pointing the baseball bat at the twitching thing on the floor. “Hell no, I’m not all right! What the hell is going on?” Harrison stood up to see the twitching body of the postal man trying to slither like a snake in fury. “That isn’t human!” Harrison explained as he slowly stood up, pulling the kitchen knife out of the violently trembling body that soaked his carpet with blood.

“What the hell do we do? Did you call the cops?” Harrison expelled from his fatigued body.

“No, I couldn’t get through. Harrison, are you bleeding?”

Harrison looked down, bewildered at the amount of blood on his freshly pressed button-down shirt and tie. “I…I don’t think so,” Harrison explained, still pumping with adrenaline from his encounter. “What do we do now?”

“Lock him in here until we know what to do. Harrison, come to my place, and wash all that shit off,” Phil said as he gave the man on the floor another good connection of the baseball bat to the back.

Time for Work

Chapter 5

Monday 0700 CST

Memphis

D
evin was dressed in a denim one-piece jumpsuit with safety glasses and earphones. He clocked in at his stationary time stamp. Of all the things he hated, it was this damn time stamp. Even though Devin had worked at this junkyard for a while, he never got used to the sound of the time stamp. He would put his timecard in and wait, and then, with a nudge of his thumb,
slam
! The stamper would come down with a monstrous vibration. As for every morning, he made his rounds through the office turning on lights and making the coffee.

The pavilion was where Devin and his coworkers—Frank, a dwarf with anger issues, and Gary, a former alcoholic trying to straighten out his life—stripped vehicles for parts, took the car to the crusher, and sold the steel for profit. In the office, there was Robert, the owner, and his daughter, Erica, his bookkeeper. Robert inherited the junkyard from his dad. He never wanted much out of life, just a family and a stable job. He was glad to work alongside his daughter. Erica, a nineteen-year-old college student, was good with math and liked the simple life just as well. She stood about five and a half feet tall, had long red hair, and a pale skin with freckles. She always wore sundresses and flats to work. She was comfortable around grease monkeys and their sailor language.

Sometimes, without her father knowing, she would go into the junkyard and drink beer with Frank and Devin. Since Robert had given Devin a job when he desperately needed it, Devin always treated Erica like a little sister, defending her from asshole customers, giving her a ride home when her car had problems. One time, a young man came into the shop and started screaming at Erica. It was her boyfriend at the time; he grabbed her around the wrists and was yelling at her because she wouldn’t give him money. Little did he know that Devin was standing behind him armed with a tire iron.

Devin was a man of morals, and one of his morals was not to harm a woman, physically or emotionally. By the time the young man had enough sense to turn around, Devin was whacking him in the back of the leg with his tire iron. When the kid dropped to his knees, Devin bent down and whispered something into his ear. Ever since then, Devin had become Erica’s protector in Robert’s eyes.

At ten o’clock every morning, Robert arrived at the junkyard; Erica arrived a few minutes later in her 1981 VW beetle. Robert was dressed in an old, dirty collared shirt and khakis. He always wanted the customers to think that he had a hand in retrieving their parts from the yard. Erica, without a doubt, arrived in a blue, horizontally streaked sundress with zebra-print flat shoes, earrings that dangled, and her long red hair tied in a ponytail. As Erica entered the office, she saw her dad sitting at his open desk with a bandage on his right hand. “Dad, did you get into a fight?” Erica said, as she put her heavy purse down in a chair.

“No, it’s nothing,” he explained.

“You can’t just tell me that it’s ‘nothing,’ Dad. Now, what happened?” she expelled with her demanding eyes and folded arms.

“I went to the bar last night on Riverside. Had a couple of drinks. When I came outside, there was some hobo. He was walking slowly toward me. I noticed that he was bleeding pretty badly. I thought he was looking for some help, so when I got to him, I asked him if he was OK, and he just moaned at me. When I went for my cell phone, he grabbed my hand, and he…he just bite me,” he said with questioning eyes. “Since I had a couple of Black Label straights in me, I…I panicked and punched him in the face a few times and went home.”

No News

Chapter 6

Monday 0900 EST

Philadelphia

M
r. Harrison stood in the shower, as the warm water ran down his naked body; he couldn’t help but recall what had just happened. There he was about to end all his sufferings and then being attacked by a man in a postal uniform with a face covered with blood and eyes as red as fire. Thanks to Phil, Mr. Harrison survived the ordeal. Armed with the paring knife that was stuck in the postal man’s back, Harrison and Phil locked the postman in Harrison’s apartment, and they flew across the hall to Phil’s apartment.

When Harrison got out of the shower, Phil had laid some fresh clothes on the master bed to Harrison to change into. His nice suit and his late wife’s favorite tie were soaked in blood from the close contact Harrison had with the postman. The clothes laid out were a pair of jogging pants, a plain white shirt, and one of Phil’s Redwing hockey jerseys. As Harrison was getting dressed, he peered out the bedroom door, to find Phil, with his phone in hand, and his son, Paul, glued to the television. At this instant, Harrison, now fully dressed, walked out to them and saw what they were looking at. It was a news broadcaster, who he himself looked like he had just gotten out of bed and forced himself in front of a television camera.

On the television, there were reports of strange people coming out of rivers and oceans, with bloodshot eyes and many rows of teeth, attacking people left and right. Those who were attacked rose from the dead and began to feed on the living. The newscaster then went to a video posted from a hospital of people standing in line, who had strange bite marks on them everywhere from hands, feet, necks, and thighs. Then suddenly the person holding the camera fell to the ground. The camera maneuvered to the left and the right, but all that was seen was the camera man lying on the ground as four or five sickly looking people began to eat him. The newscaster then came back on the screen and informed the people to stay inside and lock themselves away from the world. Then the newscaster also informed them that the only way to stop the strange people was to remove the head or sever the brain stem. As he was talking, they showed a diagram of a normal human’s anatomy, with highlighted areas of the head, brain, and brain stem, which was located at the base of the skull. He then said that the military was nowhere to be found.