Mistakes I Made During the Zombie Apocalypse Read Free Page B

come from?” Grant asked him from the first floor hallway. A delicate trail of crimson droplets led from room to room and Grant now had it on his feet. Ian stood on the stairs, staring down at him over the railing. He knew the answer to both parts of Grant’s question. The girl had closed the doors; the girl who was covered in bleeding wounds who he never found a moment to tell Grant about, she was the only one who could have.
    • • •
    Why did she close the doors?
    “I don’t know. She must have been trying to keep the heat in or the shadows-turned-monsters out. Maybe it was Keller’s idea?”
    You are transferring blame to someone else again. You know this is your fault. You didn’t do enough.
    “I called to him. I remember saying something!” Ian yells as he slams a fist against the closet door. It sends a shudder through the walls of the house and dust falls down from the ceiling.
    Calm down and tell them what you said.
    • • •
    “Come back to bed,” Ian whispered, choosing to ignore answering Grant’s questions. He needed to get Grant back upstairs before the girl woke up and he found out about her.
    “’Come to bed?’ That’s some Brokeback Mountain shit,” Grant said with a laugh.
    It was all Ian had. What else could he have said without giving away the girl?
    “That’s not what I meant,” he clarified.
    “Whatever you meant, I’m not coming. How the hell will I be able to fall asleep again when the floors are covered in blood? Someone’s in the house! Don’t you care?”
    Ian cared about many things still. He cared not to piss off his friend, he cared to find enough food each day, that he and Grant would get out of this hellhole of a house and find a better place to survive and he absolutely cared that he had finally lost his virginity. But it did not matter to him for Grant to follow a blood trail that would lead him to another of Ian’s poor decisions.
    • • •
    “Grant didn’t have to follow the blood,” Ian told the fleas that he hadn’t yet managed to crush with his overgrown fingernails. “He could have waited.”
    But the bloody girl couldn’t wait, could she? She introduced herself.
    “She came up behind him and even though it was dark, I knew something was different with her. Because he was tall, he towered over her, but the plague made her appear larger somehow and more frightening. I opened my mouth to warn him, but a floorboard creaked as she shifted her weight. He turned slowly until they were face to face.”
    • • •
    “Where the fuck did this bitch come from?” Grant asked Ian without taking his eyes off of her shadowy form. He was confused because the doors were closed and zombies didn’t turn doorknobs.
    A full moon cast a beam of light in through a window above the back door. The girl unintentionally moved into the glow. Grant asked again where the girl had come from. Ian, too scared to make more noise, cursed at himself in his head and didn’t answer.
    • • •
    You didn’t have to talk, you had other choices, but you got hung up on words.
    “What could I have done? Jumped the railing and landed on her back? Told Grant to run and try to distract her while we found weapons?” Ian argues with himself, throwing his hands up in the dark of the closet in a passionate defense of his inaction.
    Those are both very good options. The house is full of weapons, if you are looking for them.
    “Well, I know that now!”
    • • •
    Behind closed door number one there was a dull butcher knife in an old knife block on the kitchen counter. Its handle already stained with a bit of red, though it was dried tomato that had never been washed off. Behind double doors numbers two and three, a coat rack tucked into a corner by the front door. Either end would be effective, with multiple prongs. In fact it had been used as a weapon twice before. The previous homeowners were an unhappy couple and the woman found it the perfect tool to wail on her husband after