iian Shirt
a Zombies Are People Too! tale
Short Story by Stacy Kingsley
Copyright 2014 by SNvH
I don’t want to fight anymore. While it hasn’t been that long, it feels like I’ve spent a lifetime fighting. I don’t know why anyone would want to keep living like this. The overpowering smell of death permeates the air and no matter what we do we can never escape it. I don’t even know if, in another month, we will remember what fresh air smells like.
Chaos, it’s chaos in here right now. Something is going on outside of the walls and everyone is panicking, but I just don’t care anymore, I can’t, I really don’t have any reason to.
When I was married, when I had a wife and kid, I could have cared. I would have had a reason to live. I had a great life, I was so lucky, but now I have nothing, all that was taken from me.
I used to be the school bus driver for this school, this prison, carting chuckling children safely from sidewalks to school. There were times I reveled in their laughter and stupid “knock, knock” jokes, but now all I see when I look at children are potential monsters. Children are sneaky little bastards too, they can sneak up on you, take a quick bite and it’s all over, no second chances, your life is over because you thought you could help. That’s what happened to my wife. At the time it was understandable, only because it was our son who killed her.
My wife, Rita, she was a beauty. A perfect specimen of a woman, high cheekbones, long blond hair usually worn in a ponytail which still reached the middle of her back, rich brown eyes surrounded with long dark lashes, and kind, she was so kind. She was the one who had wanted to get married, so as soon as gay marriage was legal in our state I proposed. The ring was perfect for her delicate finger, a deep red ruby surrounded by flawless diamonds set in platinum. It was a great moment for me when she said yes, not that I had any doubt.
After we were married things moved along quickly. We moved in together, I had been living in a small studio apartment, all I could afford on a school bus driver’s salary. Rita’s house was beautiful, a vast three bedroom with a chef’s kitchen. Rita loved to cook; in fact she was known for her cooking. Cheesecake was my downfall and Rita’s was the best. Knowing I will never taste her cheesecake again, that in itself is a reason to give up on this life and move to the next, if there is a next. I know I’m not going to let myself become one of those things, not like Rita did, or Alex.
We were only married for three months when Rita suggested we have a baby. Honestly I knew it was coming, I knew she wanted one. I was fine with it, as long as it was part of her, not me. See, my family had a history of mental illness and if we were going to have a kid I wanted him or her to be perfect like Rita. So Rita was the one who got inseminated, and I was the one who helped her through morning sickness, cravings for pickles and peanut butter, swollen ankles and feet, and eventually the birth of our son, Alex.
I’d like to be able to say Alex was the perfect baby, but he wasn’t. Alex struggled through colic, one respiratory infection after another, ear infections, and an almost life ending bout of chicken pox. We thought we were going to lose him, and Rita, I almost lost her. Long days and even longer nights caused us to argue. I missed her. I missed her warmth in our bed, but she felt her place was at the hospital with Alex. I tried to understand but I resented him for being such a sick baby, eventually, I resented him for being born.
I touched my sunburnt face, rubbing my hands over peeling skin and wondering why I hadn’t cared enough to save Rita or Alex. I hadn’t even tried. I ran my trembling left hand through my short hair. In the past I kept my hair long because Rita liked to run her fingers through it when she was going to sleep, said it calmed her, it had been something she used to do when she was younger and slept with her older sister, Rachel. I cut it all off when I lost her, shaved it all off, it was a little more than an inch long now.
I absently touched my wedding ring, twisting it round and round my finger, thinking of the family I had lost. Everyone had lost someone, not everyone chose to continue without them. I shouldn’t have. I now knew I couldn’t live without Rita, or Alex.
Even though he had been a sickly baby I still loved him, he was a part of Rita and he looked like her. He had the same blond hair and the same brown eyes, I often felt as if he was able to look into my soul and see something good in me, even though I didn’t always love him like I should. Alex was our baby, he gave Rita something to live for, we were the only family she had left. Her parents had died in a car crash when she was a teenager, her sister, Rachel, had been shot to death in front of her, a jealous ex-boyfriend who then turned the gun on himself after killing Rachel.
Rita needed me to be there for her because after her sister had been murdered she had no one to depend on, and she was broken in ways no one could fix. I used to find her sitting in Alex’s room crying over his sleeping body. She made promises to us that she would never leave us, and in the end it was Alex she couldn’t leave. Me? She had no problem leaving me.
No one knows when the first dead person reanimated, the military tried to figure it out, but they couldn’t agree and things just got worse. I’m pretty sure somewhere out there the first of the dead is laughing at those of us still living, laughing and waiting for us to turn. Rita, Alex and I sealed ourselves up in our little house on the hill, pretending the outside world didn’t exist, pretending we were on a deserted island.
Everything would have been perfect. Everything should have been perfect for a long time, but it wasn’t. We had plenty of food, plenty of water, plenty of life left in us, but what we didn’t have became painfully clear when Alex got sick again. I should have expected it but I didn’t, I thought that since we were in our own little safety net nothing would affect us, I was stupid and I was wrong.
Of course Rita worried about him, she always worried about him, and when he got sick the first thing she wanted to do was leave our safety net and go to the hospital. I knew we shouldn’t do that. She hadn’t seen the things I had. She refused to watch the news. I was the one kept up at night by the new horror stories emerging every day, until the day the television only played static. When she tried to leave I forced her into his bedroom, I forced her to look at him and I showed her the stories I had printed before the internet went down. Rita refused to see, refused to look and in the end she called me hateful and jealous. Eventually she locked herself in his bedroom and she refused to let me in, even to bring her food or water.
For days I sat outside of his door, listening to her coo at him and sing to him. We both cried, our sobs filling the quiet house with agony. At this time Alex was three, he had turned three only days before the dead made it impossible to go to the store. His birthday party had been cancelled and we celebrated with two small cakes, one chocolate with strawberry buttercream and the other lemon with white whipped cream icing. After letting him laugh with cake all over his face we bathed him and put him to bed, a day later he was coughing and a rattle had developed in his chest.
Alex was fine for about a week, not getting worse, not getting better. When the electricity became spotty we couldn’t keep his humidifier on. Rita panicked. She begged me to take him to the hospital. She yelled at me when I wouldn’t let her leave the house. She locked herself in the room when I told showed her what was going on in the world. For two weeks we lived like that, I didn’t know how she was surviving, I didn’t know what she ate or drank. At the time I thought maybe she survived on her love for him.
She was almost too sick to move when she finally let me in. Her beautiful hair was oily and disheveled and her face pale and sallow. Yet still she had never looked as beautiful to me as she did that day. I didn’t know when I walked into that room that I was walking into hell, I only knew my fami
ly was accepting me back into the fold.
Alex was no longer our beautiful little boy, now he was just another monster, a monster Rita couldn’t let go of. When he had died she hadn’t accepted it, she held him praying for his life to be brought back, and when it was she hadn’t been prepared to defend herself. She never thought she would have to defend herself from her own child, and that’s how I lost her.
Our beautiful baby boy was tied down to his bed, his jaw clenching and unclenching, his teeth snapping painfully together as he tried to bite anything that might sustain him. Blood was smeared over his tiny snarling face, and I knew, I knew.
I looked at my wife, my beautiful other half and the answers to all my questions were answered. She had tried breastfeeding him again. She hadn’t needed food or water because she was drinking from his bathroom and because she, my precious lover, had become sick herself.
The only reason she let me into that blood draped baby blue bedroom was to help her help him. She no longer cared about herself, and I promised things I knew were lies. Resting with her sweaty fever riddled head on her satin beige pillow I left her and went back to Alex’s room. I knew I had to end it, I just didn’t know how.
The only thing I could think of was to put a knife through his head. We didn’t own a gun, Rita had been scared of them ever since her sister died, and I understood. I always understood, but now it was time for her to understand.
When she woke up the next morning, eyes bleary with fever, body aching as the virus pulsed through her, she crawled to Alex’s room. Her piercing scream stabbed at me when she saw his bed empty. Rita accused me of evil things. All I did was release him. I had to. What kind of monster would I be if I left our child to starve and rot in the bed we bought to nurture him? No, I had to end it, and I buried his decapitated body in the backyard, near the yellow roses Rita had planted the day after we married.
After Alex’s death I lost her forever. Sitting in the cool bath I had made for her, she slit her wrists. I should have watched her better, I honestly didn’t think she had the strength to kill herself, I honestly thought she loved me enough to try to stay. It was stupid, I know, I had killed her child, I was nothing to her but a murderer.
I knew what was going to happen so I became the coward she thought I was and I left her, naked, dead and bloody, in that bathtub, and I walked.
I don’t know how I came to arrive at the school, all I know is I was checked out, examined from top to bottom like a piece of meat, and left to figure things out on my own.
Now’s my chance to make amends, they are coming and I can offer myself up to them, I should have offered myself to her, I would have been her first meal and we could have been together.
It’s loud.
People are screaming.
A young girl with green hair is pulling me. I don’t care anymore, and there is pain. My arm hurts, I think it’s broken.
She’s here again, the girl with the green hair. She’s talking to me but I can’t hear her. I don’t want to hear her.
I’m being pulled but I see my salvation, a monster with rotting skin and savage teeth. I pull away from the girl with the green hair and walk towards my angel of death.
After being pulled into her ravenous embrace I relax and close my eyes. Her teeth sink into my pliable skin. It hurts. I scream. I don’t want this.
I don’t want to die like this.
This is a mistake.
I don’t want this.
I don’t…