Characters in this story are over 18 years of age. Please, bring constructive criticism.
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Seven o'clock came, and I still couldn't sleep. Nikki was lying next to me, facing the opposite wall. I couldn't really tell if she was asleep despite her slow, even breathing. At least she had stopped sobbing. With the end of our lovemaking came a renewed calm, and my sister and I had turned from one another to sleep.
We had been trapped in the attic for nine days, most of which we spent looking for zombies out the slatted window. Zombies. There was simply no other word for them, and as we watched the street below, they continued shambling by in a slow and steady progression, though I don't think they were headed for the mall. We had sustained ourselves for five days on preserves before we dared to make a kitchen run.
Mom and Dad were dead. They had been eaten alive, my father screaming, "Run! Run! Get to the attic!" as the undead tore through the door. The house was loosely barricaded even at that point. We had been watching the news for three days as the outbreak spread, and so we had prepared the attic as a fallback shelter in case we lost the house. Now that shelter was our prison, and there was nothing Nikki and I could do but wait.
Wait for what? Well, that we didn't know. I was trying to be as rational about this as possible, but the only material I had to go on was
fictional
. Life imitates art and everything, but stuck in that attic with my sister, I couldn't be sure how much
Night of the Living Dead
mythology I could rely upon. And Nikki was not adjusting well. She didn't eat the first two nights, and didn't speak for the first four. She was never outside of four feet from me, and only at that range when one of us was using the rough "toilet" we had cordoned off in the corner. We slept together on an old mattress, lying in an old green sleeping bag. This was our pattern, and it continued unbroken for nine days. That night it happened.
We had readied the bed and lay down to sleep, facing the wall with the round slatted window. Nikki was lying in front of me, her petite frame nestled into me. There had never been any weirdness about it, even when I awoke several days with my erection pressed into her thighs, just below her ass. She never mentioned it, and so I never said anything. She was my sister, and "morning wood" was a normal bodily response to the unconscious urge to urinate. There was nothing funny about it. I had never even thought of Nikki that way.