Chapter 1: The Outbreak
When I was in high school, there were slow, lazy days when I fervently hoped for the apocalypse. I had a long time later to reflect on how stupid I was.
I had a good life. My parents were loving and kind, and we lived well. They ran a small mom and pop grocery store near the center of the little suburb where I grew up, and we lived in the two floors above the store. I had everything I needed and many of the things I wanted.
But life was so BORING. School was a slow torture every day, sitting behind an uncomfortable desk learning about past participles. I wasn't a bad student, but I couldn't stand having to be in school all day. And the city about 45 minutes from where we lived seemed fun, but nothing very exciting happened in our little commuter town. I desperately hoped for something, ANYTHING that would break me out of my crushingly dull routine.
Beware what you wish for.
As late winter started to give way to spring, IT happened. It started somewhere far away, in another country. I remember people on the news saying it wouldn't make it to the United States, and then that it wouldn't make it to our area. We were probably safe. It wasn't like in the movies at all, it took MONTHS. A few cases in the U.S., a few police reports in the nearby city, and then weeks and weeks after it started there was an old man who owned a store on our street and got taken to the hospital.
I remember most the truly absurd moments. Two High school baseball teams thought it would be safe to play a game with some extra security precautions. By the end of the night, they had lost half of one team. I also remember some middle aged woman weaving around someone staggering through the street, pulling up to our store, and asking to buy some milk. I guess everyone thought the police and the hospitals and the military would be able to handle it. But those were all made of people who had lives and families just like everyone else.
The most absurd moment was my parents leaving. Just before it got really bad, when there were still highway patrol cars keeping the roads open, my parents decided to go get my mother's parents and bring them back. I was so anxious, I remember my heart pounding and my palms sweating, I wanted to go with my parents so badly. But my dad had decided someone needed to stay and watch the store.
I remember his speech just before they left. "You're a man now, you're 18... it's time to start taking responsibility and supporting your family... we'll be back in two days."
Famous last words.
The first four weeks after my parents left were a blur. I never left the shop, holed up in the living room on the second floor with all the shop windows and front door boarded up. Remarkably, the power went off twice, but it eventually came back on both times. I never understood how we still had power, because within days the tv stations had stopped transmitting and eventually even the radio went silent except for a repeating, "This is a message from the emergency broadcasting system..." message. Yet somehow, even the street lights stayed on at night. And for those first few months, water kept flowing through our taps.
I had plenty of provisions in the store. I spent most of my days nervously watching out the window. The aimless, growling bodies shuffled by regularly, at least two or three an hour. They never ran and never stopped, just kept their slow shuffle, rarely ever in groups. I saw one catch a mangy, thin cat early in the outbreak. The zombie happily and ravenously ate the cat while the poor animal screamed.
It was remarkable how much pop culture had prepared us all for this moment, and how completely inadequate society was in responding to the outbreak. At night I slept in a makeshift fort made of furniture that I had built in one corner of the living room.
Chapter 2: Sally the Zombie
Everything changed for me about four weeks into the pandemic. I had already lost track of the days of the week, and don't know how long I would have continued doing nothing but sheltering in my house day after day, if not for this most random and chance of sightings.
I spotted Sally shuffling down the street. There was no mistaking who it was, the buxom blonde queen of my high school, or the fact that she was a zombie. She was wearing a loose, white blouse that had been torn away over one shoulder, exposing her white bra and overflowing cups beneath. She also had on pink shorts that appeared to be torn near the bottom on her left side, and the loose sandals she was wearing looked filthy.
I could see that the tall, disheveled blonde was a couple of minutes away from shuffling right in front of my store, and no one (or thing) else was within sight. I could never explain later what made me do it, maybe the same boredom that had made me wish for the end of the world, but I felt like I was running on instinct rather than thought as I sprinted down the stairs towards our front door.
I remember whispering softly to myself over and over, "What are you doing? What are you doing?" as I loosened the bolts holding the heavy wooden board over the front door, and then slowly sliding back the iron grate while I held the rough, heavy burlap sack in my hands. The sweat trickling down the back of my neck had nothing to do with the temperature as I waited for what felt like an eternity for Sally to stumble past the entrance to our store.
When I threw the sack over her head and dragged my classmate into the shop, her reaction was immediate. Like a cornered animal, she snarled and fought back against me, but I had her in a good grip from behind, her arms mostly pinned at her sides. I was tall and skinny at the time, just over six feet with a wiry frame. As I hauled the young blonde back into my family's dry goods store room, I first remarked to myself on how Sally's skin felt like it was on fire, like she had just baked in the sun for eight hours. Then I expressed my thankfulness that, even though zombie movies had led me to fear a zombie's strength, Sally felt weak with my arms wrapped around her.
As I hauled Sally into the store room, she kicked weakly. It was like her mind was awake and enraged but her body had almost no energy. It was much easier than I had expected to secure Sally's wrists with the soft but strong nylon rope we had, her ankles with bungee cord, and her waist with rubber tie downs. When I removed the sack from over her head, she snapped at me, but I had every part of her double bound with two sets of bonds. She could move a little around the room, but she was anchored by my ropes to the iron loops on the floor and in the walls.
After checking that no one on the street had seen us, and carefully re-securing the metal grate and wooden board covering our glass door, I spent hours studying Sally. She had fallen so far from the prom queen and object of every boy's fantasies that I had known in high school. She existed in a different social stratosphere from me. We had five classes together in four years, and I wasn't sure if she knew my name. She was the head cheerleader, dating the football team's senior quarterback when she was a sophomore. She swam and played tennis. She was THE girl at my school. She was about 5'7" and built like a centerfold. Flowing blonde hair down past her shoulders, thin waist and shapely shoulders from her swimming, long, shapely legs, toned stomach, all capped off by large D cup breasts. She was so pretty, a sweet smile with full lips and sparkling white teeth, high cheek bones and deep blue eyes.
The thing in front of me was like a distorted shadow of Sally. She had Sally's face and body but she looked half starved, hair a dirty, tangled mess behind her head, covered in filth. The most striking change was Sally's blue eyes. They were hollow and dead, like a shark or a wax figure, all faded pupils and empty hunger.
Sally snapped at me so much, staring at me in the doorway of the storage room, that I started to worry for her teeth. There was no thought behind those blue eyes, just gnawing hunger. I got a raw steak out of our meat freezer and tossed it to Sally, who grabbed it out of the air and started chewing on the frozen meat immediately.