Authors: Noel Merczel
New flesh! She was so hungry. Flesh...sweet.....good...
just like the spaghetti, only better...
Daniella started shuffling towards the new delicious sweet meat, all thoughts of her previous life gone.
She shuffled past the discarded hammer, not even seeing it there in the freshly mown lawn.
She needed to take a bite.....just one bite....
CHAPTER TWENTY
Roger
was in a state of shock. He
tried 9-1-1 again, but the call still didn't go
through.
Who ever heard of 9-1-1 not working
?
What the hell was the point of an emergency system if it didn't work
?
And what the hell happened to his wife
?
He needed something to drink. His mouth felt so dry.
He was rushing back to his house. He didn't know what else to do. He
would
try calling the local police from there.
His wife was
attacked! Yea, she'd been acting like a crazy neurotic bitch lately. But that didn't matter. She was still his wife
, dammit!
Or at least...she was.
As Roger raced down the dark street, his fevered brain flashed on the mug Mimi gave
him for Christmas. The mug bore the words, I'LL ALWAYS LOVE YOU BABY written in big block letters, along with a picture of a dog wearing heart-shaped glasses.
Thunder rumbled
in the distance. Then
Roger heard what sounded like a rifle a few blocks over. Sounded like a 22...
Jesus Christ! Pandemonium
!
He felt
like he was trapped inside of a horror movie...
Granted, it would make a damn good movie....
God, he was so thirsty....
A word came to Roger, but it seemed way too preposterous a word to even to think..
Okay...the word was "zombie," dammit!
Zombie
!
There. He admitted it.
But he didn't believe in that crap. Oh sure, it was great for
movies
.....or that really popular show, Dead Heads. But this was the real world.
Unless...
Roger flew into his house and did a quick check, just in case anyone had broken in.
Unless this was some band of crazies dressing up as zombies, since zombies were so damn popular lately (just like vampires had been
five years ago) and then going out and committing murders.
Anything was possible, and that made a lot more sense than believing this was an honest-to-God zombie outbreak, as in dead people coming back to life; their only purpose being to eat people's brains....
But that didn't explain what happened after his wife had been attacked...
Roger grabbed an Arizona iced tea out of the refrigerator and flopped down on the new chocolate brown sofa he and Mimi had recently purchased...well, really he purchased, since Mimi didn't seem to care which sofa they bought.
She was too busy staring at her reflection in a mirror in the store.
He needed a moment to digest what had happened...the horror he had just witnessed..
.
He flipped open the tab and took a huge swig of the cold sweet liquid.
Ahhh...that was good.....he needed more...more...
Roger closed his eyes, sunk back into the couch, and imagined he was at the beach...his absolute favorite place to be.
He had gone on vacation in Nantucket as a kid, and he could still hear the sound of the surf pounding in his head...the calming sight of the lighthouse at night shining a beacon of warmth for weary sailors to follow...so peaceful...so relaxing...
Oh God he wanted to escape this madness! He just wanted to escape...
Then he opened his eyes and faced, not the blue of the water stretching out endlessly into the horizon, but rather the turkey feather stretched out on the mantle; a trophy from last season's hunt.
And then there was the wedding picture... Mimi's head bowed down as usual, with a forgotten blush of love on her cheeks...
What the hell happened to her
?
Okay, so Roger knew he was a hot dude...better than average looking...which meant he could get a hot woman, as his friends would say...a hot woman like...oh, who was hot these days? Jennifer Lawrence...Emma Thompson.
But was it his damn fault he was so damn hot
?
And yea...he know that society demanded a lot of women these days, causing a whole crap-load of insecurity in someone like Mimi who didn't measure up to the media's standards of what an attractive woman should look like...
But he didn't care about that shit. He'd had enough of so-called hot women when he was dating. They were all super narcissistic and incredibly materialistic with an attitude that proclaimed,
What can you do for me
?
Most of them hated the outdoors, preferring the surroundings of Forever 21 with their choke-hold on Roger wielding the credit card.
Like his girlfriend before Mimi
. Maryland was her name.
Maryland, like the state.
Maryland had everything going for her; long thick dark hair, a cute round angelic face with big velvet brown eyes...and a penchant for
public nudity.
Sure Maryland liked the outdoors... but only for sexual purposes!
She would go to the park with Roger wearing a super short dress with no panties underneath...then she'd sit on top of a picnic table, sitting in such a way that she would be slightly exposed...but only slightly....just a sliver of space left between her legs that would drive men crazy - men who would try, surreptitiously, to peek up her dress to see what was there...
Roger recalled old men who had been sitting on nearby benches reading the paper catching site of Maryland's curvy smooth legs gleaming in the sun
...her tiny short dress riding dangerously high on her perfectly rounded thighs.
Sometimes the old men would pretend they hadn't seen, only to keep sneaking glances in Maryland's direction in what they thought was an unobtrusive way. But Roger always caught them.
And Maryland would laugh and slowly spread her legs just a little bit wider, giving the old men a naughty peek at her naked v area, shaved smooth as a baby’s butt.
One time, she
instructed Roger to sit next to her on top of a picnic table. There was some old codger at the next picnic table, pretending to read
a book called Winning the Loser's game..
.
Maryland told Roger to lick his finger and rub her down there. So he had.
The old man lifted his book up and peeked underneath as Maryland came to a rip-roaring orgasm whereby she spread her legs wide giving the geriatric peeping tom the view of a life-time, her bare naked swollen parts displayed in broad daylight, for all the world to see
.
Roger had fingered his kinky ex-girlfriend a few more times in public – hell, he was a guy and Maryland was sexy as hell – but he was always worried they were going to be arrested for indecent public exposure.
There was this one park, Rock Valley, where they would regularly have sex at dusk with people all around. They would pick an out of the way picnic table, or do it right in the backseat of his car with the windows wide open.
At the Lake Michigan beach in Chicago, they brought each other to orgasm underneath a beach towel surrounded by families with little children enjoying the nice breeze on a hot day. After the thrill of the orgasm wore off, though, Roger felt sick.
What if, God forbid, a little kid had seen something
?
And that was the end of Maryland.
But Mimi was different.
Roger met Mimi at a mushroom-picking hike in the Shady Oaks community. She had been there with
her sister.
Roger was blown away by how genuine Mimi was...sexually, very shy...and also, very
"real."
Not a manipulative, shallow or materialistic bone in her body.
After staggering off the rollercoaster ride of being with a narcissistic exhibitionist like Maryland, that was very appealing to Roger.
Mimi
hadn't asked for anything from him. Not one lace-trimmed push-up bra
...not a single piece of overpriced
costume jewelry from the mall.
And she always wore underwear out in public.
With Mimi,
it was definitely underwear - plain old white Joe Boxer underwear - not panties.
Roger had to teach Mimi everything about sex. She hadn't known a damn thing, which was incredibly unusual in this
day and age for a woman in her twenties. Very refreshing, actually. He had been touched by her
guilelessness.
And now...she barely let him touch her.
So he resorted to fantasizing about that cute girl who was always out watering the flowers...the one he passed on his nightly jog. A girl who, ironically, resembled Maryland – at least physically.
She had what Roger liked to call, Anime eyes. Impossibly big brown eyes that almost
looked photoshopped, they were so big.
Once when the girl bent over, Roger caught a glimpse of soft white cotton panties with little flowers on them. At least she wore panties
... unlike Maryland.
Whenever Roger thought of that girl he thought of flowers
, softness, and innocence. A
nd ironically....sex.
Roger started to get hard...
"Oh shit..." he groaned.
He hated himself for becoming aroused because it was
so damn perverted. After all, he didn't even know how old the damn girl was...not to mention the fact he was a married man.
Also, not to mention the fact that his
wife
had just been attacked by someone acting like a damn zombie, which in turn, caused his wife to act like a damn zombie and try to attack him!
"Stop!" he ordered his dick
. "Damn it! Back to reality!"
Roger took another huge swig of iced tea.
As much as he wanted to escape this horrific reality he found himself in, day dreaming was not going to make it go away.
Roger sat up.
Now that he had re-hydrated
, he could think a little better.
He'd only caught a few episodes of the wildly popular show Dead Heads, but Roger thought the make-up on the woman who attacked his wife far surpassed that of the "Deadies” on the
show, despite the fact the show had actually won awards for costumes and make-up.
And the way this fake zombie woman attacked his wife and started...eating her....
literally eating her ear
! It's like,
what the fuck
?
The damage this woman had done in such a short time...all the blood...God!
Plus the sheer super human strength of the woman rendering him completely helpless... and Roger knew he was no slouch in the strength department. None of this was logical. None of it made any sense. He’d tried everything; punching her...kicking her...pulling her hair...
nothing worked
.
But come on! Roger was too smart to believe in zombies. Sure they were great for movies or TV shows. But they just weren't logical...the whole concept of someone coming back to life just to eat other people...it was actually really dumb when you thought about it...
If they're dead, how would their digestion process work?
Why the hell didn’t they ever go to the bathroom?
After the zombie-like woman loped off a few yards and busied herself with eating Mimi's ear, his wife lay
on the ground, not breathing. Roger had felt her wrist. There had been no pulse...
With a rising sense of panic, Roger had rushed to the door of the house and at first, just
tried to open it. The door was locked, of course. He had screamed and shouted,
pounding on the door frantically, and then he
tried the doorbell.
Roger had slammed his hand on the doorbell over and over... rang the thing about a dozen times... screamed some more; afterwhich, resorting to
banging the hell out of the door, all to no avail. Nobody responded.
He knew they were in that house
. He'd seen the light go off and the curtain move, damn it
.
What kind of people wouldn't want to help someone in that kind of situation?
Unless they thought he, Roger, was part of it... like it was all some kind of trick to get them to come outside.
Everyone watched too many damn horror movies and therefore, didn't trust anyone. That was the damn problem
!
Wait a minute
, Roger thought....
Maybe the people in the house were in on it, too.
But the most confusing element of the macabre scene was when he turned around and saw that Mimi was standing up.