Emma Shortt: Waking Up Dead

Jackson nodded and slowly, carefully, put her backpack on.

Another noise from upstairs, this one sounding suspiciously like something was walking. Jackson’s heart raced as she imagined one of them already inside the building. And where there was one there were three or four more. They traveled in packs, never alone. Food or not, it simply wasn’t worth the risk to hang around.

“Now,” she hissed.

Tye kicked the shutters through, and maybe it was the rot, or perhaps just the force of his muscles, but they exploded outward, shards of wood going everywhere, light filling the gloomy kitchen. A rattling groan sounded from upstairs, and where before the zombie had been stalking—trying to find a way inside, maybe not even sure there was a meal close by—now it bashed against something, the ceiling, one of the doors? Jackson and Tye did not wait to find out. They burst into the garden—as overgrown as the front lawn—and veered right, toward the alleyway that ran the length of the house.

Horror movie waiting to happen …

The words echoed in Jackson’s mind as her feet pounded the ground, and she gripped Mandy so tight the bones in her hand should have ached. Should have, but didn’t. Adrenaline was flooding her system, her heart was racing in her chest, and everything came into sharp focus…including the four zombies that were heading straight for them.

Luke Granger could hear them pounding on the ceiling of his underground bunker. The noise was constant and unrelenting, edging its way into his consciousness, pulling him from a nap that had been far too brief.

He lifted his head from his arms, glanced around the empty room, then reached for his—now cold—mug of coffee, downing the remains in one long swallow. The taste was vile, but then instant beans with powdered milk was never gonna win any medals, was it?

He scowled into the empty mug, remembering the hot lava java he used to drink, before shouting, “Give it a fucking rest.”

They pounded again.

Jesus Christ. What the hell was wrong with them? You’d think that after weeks and weeks of trying to get through the thick metal they’d realize they couldn’t. But no, they had to interrupt what little sleep he could get. He looked up and sent the ceiling the foulest glare he could muster. “I’m going to kill every last fucking one of you when I come out there.”

They pounded some more.

“Every single one,” he hissed, straightening in his chair and giving himself a shake. A sharp pain shot through his shoulder from the movement and he rotated the muscles, cursing himself as he did so for falling asleep at his desk again. The papers he’d been trying to read through before he’d nodded off were now scrunched up, and his headphones were dangling from the desk.

Luke picked them up, pushed back his chair, and stood. The ceiling was maybe three feet above him, and he walked across the room until he was directly underneath the spot they were busy bashing away at. He visualized the building above in his mind and suspected they were in the basement gym. Abruptly a meme he’d once seen filled his mind and Luke frowned. The picture had been of a house, and surrounding it were a few dozen treadmills. Zombies ran on the treadmills, arms outstretched, while a triumphant group of people looked on from inside the house. The caption had said, zombie defense mechanism .

If only it were that easy.

Luke sighed and stomped back over to his desk. The coffee mug was balancing precariously on the papers, and he righted it before sitting back down. The headphone cord was tangled from where it had fallen, and the jack was half out of the socket. Luke plugged it back in, then gave the cord a sharp tug. Damn thing constantly curled in on itself.

The zombies increased their pounding.

How many were up there, Luke wondered? Five. Ten. Twenty? He had no way of knowing and really, in the end, it made no difference. For all his threats, Luke had no intention of opening the trapdoor and entering the house. That many against just him? He’d probably get eaten and then he’d be…well dead, and wouldn’t that be a kick in the shitter?

Ignoring that depressing thought, he closed his eyes, lifted his headphones, and put them on. The heavy padding muffled the noise of the zombie party slightly, and he sighed in satisfaction.

It would be so easy to fall back asleep…to try and go eight hours straight without thinking about them. He could indulge in one of his little fantasies, the one that featured the battered old villa his family owned in Barra de Potosi, down in Mexico. He could almost see it in his mind. The red-tiled roof, the faded brown shutters, the scrubby brush. The sun would be beating down on it, making everything bake.

“You’d hate that wouldn’t you?” he said, trying his best to ignore the pangs that remembering the old house made him feel. “The heat. Slows you fuckers down. Easy pickings.”

The zombies pounded harder, hard enough for him to hear even through the headphones, almost as if they were answering him. But then it wasn’t like anyone else was going to respond to his ramblings. There wasn’t anyone else but him. Hadn’t been for quite some time.

Luke sighed and leaned forward to switch the radio equipment on. A shiver of pain shot through him and, almost automatically, he reached under his shirt to rub the still-red wound by his rib cage. It itched constantly, which he guessed was a good thing. Surely it meant it was healing. And healing was essential in his lonely world. He couldn’t afford to be slow, because those fuckers could run! Damn, could they run, as evidenced by the finally closed hole in his stomach where some dead bastard had dug its finger in and poked around. Not to mention the bite marks down his arms, and the particularly attractive one on his ass. His chest gave a nasty sort of ache as he remembered the kid clamping on his left butt cheek and sinking her teeth in. It ached a little more as he remembered slicing the point of his ax through her head…

The headphones crackled once the equipment was on, and Luke settled himself in the chair. He picked up a sheaf of the crumpled papers, his hand nudging his laptop as he did so. Laptop. Tablet. Phone. He wasn’t even sure why he kept them—wasn’t like they were much good to him now. Still…he frowned…no point thinking about that.

He turned the radio dial to find the first of the frequencies on his long, long list, his heart fluttering as a hissing sound came through over the airwaves.

He almost laughed.

How many nights had he sat in this exact same position fiddling with the radio, hoping against hope? Too many. But he had to try. What else was there?

The pounding grew dimmer as the minutes ticked by, as if they were putting less effort in, and Luke sighed with relief. Despite the fact that the zombies could not get into the basement bunker, he hated knowing they were close by. Hated the thought of them grunting and slathering on the other side of the metal.

Hated them full stop.

He flipped to the next frequency, letting his mind drift a little, imagining a lazy day on the bay, doing a little bit of fishing, drinking whiskey, eating a few olives. The last mouthful of olives he’d eaten had been out of a jar he’d found in a condo by Evergreen Park. He was sure they’d been bad. Certainly he’d suffered for a few days after eating them. Yes, a day on the beach, without a zombie in sight. He wouldn’t even need to take his ax, never mind a gun. He imagined the sun shining down on him, basking in the silence… the silence … He bolted upright and cursed.

The pounding had stopped completely. He couldn’t even hear muffled footsteps now. Sure, he wanted them to shut up, but wanting it was not enough to make it reality. They could still smell him in the sprawling mansion above, even though it had been a good month since he’d been up there, and they wouldn’t stop until they gave him the steak-and-sauce treatment. No, only one thing would drag them away.