Over and over again he stepped on the undead’s head until it stopped trying to turn his friend into one of it’s own.
Dave dragged himself away from it’s now loosened grip and hugged his knees. Still on the floor, he looked at it and began to breathe heavily. A few tears rolled down his cheek.
“Jay, what was that? Did I just almost..”
“No! We killed it, you’re fine. We’re both fine!”, Jason yelled.
They couldn’t hide their fear anymore. The lives they had taken for granted and the safety they relied on was all but gone. Jason held in tears as hard as he could. He looked outside as he walked to close the door. He noticed three limping figures a few blocks away. They were drawn to the safety lamps of the house.
The irony was not lost on him.
He dragged the ghoul out by its legs into the middle of the street and quietly made his way back into the house and closed the door quietly and locked it.
Dave made sure to lock the other doors and draw the curtains.
Jason was in the kitchen, going through the cupboards. His eyes were red. Dave knew his friend. There was fear written all over his face.
“Hey man, now what?”, he asked quietly.
Jason put a can of kidney beans on the table and squeezed it hard with one hand.
“I don’t know man. I just, I don’t know.” Jason couldn’t hold it back anymore, he cried softly a little bit.
“Hey, Jay, thanks, man. If you weren’t there, I don’t know man, they would have taken me to one of those hospitals and you know.”
“No, we’re fine man, and that’s what counts. I wouldn’t let them do that to you.” He looked up and smiled, eyes still red, “you’re welcome though, dude.”
They both began to compose themselves and sat down on the couch. The steady tone was just background noise now, and it was also the only night in the house.
“We can’t stay here forever. We don’t have enough food and I saw a few of those things wandering around. Should we head to the evacuation site?”
“I don’t know, Jay. I’m kind of scared to go outside with those things. Maybe we should wait until the sun comes up first before thinking of anything.”
Jason got up and looked out the window. One of the limping figures was banging on a door several houses down. Dave came over to look. The ghoul seems to have caught some movement and walked over to the window of the house. It smacked the window a few times before it gave in. The crash echoed through Jason and Dave’s bodies and they watched the creature climb inside.
A woman screamed. She cried. The screams were nothing short of pure terror. She managed to run outside.
The friends watched her run for her life, screaming for help. She was barefoot and her feet were already bleeding from the running on the hard pavement.
“PLEASE! SOMEBODY!!” Her desperate cries fell on deaf ears.
The ghoul limped after her. She ran away from it. The friends were sure to keep a low profile. She banged on every door she passed.
“LET ME IN! PLEASE!! IT’S GOING TO KILL ME!” They couldn’t make out the last few words of her plea. They were drowned out in sobs.
“This isn’t good”, Jason said quietly.
“Do we let her in? We should help her.”
“No! Look how that thing is following her, if we let her in here, then we have to deal with that.”
“But.”
“But nothing, man, I don’t want to deal with that thing. Oh shit, look!”
Other ghouls that were invisible in the shadows made themselves known. The woman’s screams were a beacon to them.
“Oh shit man, I didn’t even see those earlier”, Jason said.
The woman gasped and ran back, she tripped and fell down, she tried to crawl away. Dave pointed at what it was. Three more of the undead were in front of her. They were mere feet away, arms extended and limping quickly to their meal. They even had their mouths open revealing missing tongues and teeth.
She was slowed down, she crawled back into the original beast, the one that had broken her window. He fell on top of her and began to claw at her face and torso.
She screamed for help in vain. She screamed for her life. The other monsters caught up and enjoyed their meal. Her screams turned into cries of pain. They chewed meat off of her legs, making them all but useless. One of the monsters tore off a chunk of her breast with it’s jaws. The original began to bite pieces off her face.
Her arms were flailing around as hard as they could. Eventually, they began to slow down and were merely twitching at this point. Her cries turned into gurgles and then became quiet.
The sound of the monsters feeding shook the friends.
This was real.
This was happening.
“So what happens now?”, Jason asked.
“I-I, cant, I can’t”, Dave couldn’t speak.
They looked out the window at the destroyed woman. There were still chunks of her remaining. She had one eye left and it was looking right at the window, right at them.
“Dave, could we have saved her?”
“No, man, you were right. We would have brought that one and it’s friends that we didn’t see.”
“I wish, I wish I listened to you. Maybe we could have done something, you know?”
“Jay, we can’t stay here much longer. We need to leave.”
Looking out the window again, the woman’s corpse began to make gurgling noises. Her arms moved and the friends watched her try to stand up. Her heavily chewed legs snapped under her weight and she fell to the ground. She began to crawl, dragging her body, looking for a meal of her own.
Other ghouls began to appear around the neighborhood. Her cries had alerted many, many more. It wouldn’t be long until the sun came up.
“Find directions for the evacuation site, Dave. Write down the place. We need to get out of here.”
Dave nodded and went to the TV to get the information.
“We can kill these things, right?”
A voice sounded off on the TV. The broadcast ended. It looked to be a press conference. An African American man in a white doctor’s robe, stained with dried blood, stood at a podium. He looked among the reporters who were all standing and shouting questions at him.
A young female reporter with messy, short blonde hair caught his attention.
“Doctor! What are these things?”
“We don’t know.”
A young man with black hair wearing a blue blazer asked.
“Doctor, we have received reports that these people are coming back after being pronounced dead. Is this true?”
“Yes.”
He quickly followed up.
“What is the cause of this?”
“We have had patients who after coming into contact with the infected, whether it be through bites or any other contact with the mucous membrane, or even killed by one of these…things, they become another.”
An older, seasoned reporter asked, with a hint of desperation in his voice,
“Is there a cure or-or treatment?”
“We don’t know.”
The older reporter quickly asked another.
“Is there a way to stop them? Will this illness pass?”
The doctor paused and took a deep breath. He knew what reactions were coming.
“You kill them. You destroy the brain, smash it, shoot it. Don’t try to talk to them. THEY ARE NOT HUMAN! THEY TOOK MY daughter.”
He grew silent and pensive.
“They took her away from me. She was one of them.”
The reporters grew angry. Some of them stood in their chairs holding their faces in their hands. Some of them visibly wept. Other shouted about ethics and inhumane treatment.
“Ethics?! ETHICS? You talk to me about mercy for these-these, ABOMINATIONS?”
The doctor grew angry.