I stand paralyzed in grotesque horror as the mushed human face slowly slides down the windowpane, it’s look piercing strait into my soul with the one glaring eye – as if I was to blame – to finally settle into the decorator ferns and disappear, leaving only a long bloody smear for a trail. The cacophony that breaks out within the diner is quickly matched by the sounds of anarchy breaking in the diner from without. Car alarms, women screaming, men screaming, the like. And now gunfire. Everyone in the diner ducks for cover, and whatever few children there are within the room start to cry. Like good citizens, most everyone pulls out their cell phones and simultaneously dial 911. I brace myself behind the edge of our table, peeking over the edge to observe the goings-on outside. Suddenly I notice Kate still slumped across the table, out cold. I shake her a few more times, trying to rouse her, calling her name, then with one hand pull her torso and head off the table top to at least get her vitals out of the direct line of fire. She falls limply off the chair and sprawls on the floor with a dull splat, I only distractedly try to slow her in her fall, for I am transfixed with what I can see through the red-streaked glass.
A group of adolescents, abandoning backpacks and purses, running in open panic. One falls, unheeded by the others, and is quickly pounced upon by a dark, mangled shape. A lot of elaborate grabbing and tearing motions, with the pinned victim vainly attempting to ward off the attack with raised hands and legs. Much screaming and thrashing. An armed police officer rushes in with sidearm drawn, shouts a few unheeded words, and opens fire on the assailant, only to be struck from behind by two more misshapen silhouettes, one of which fastens onto his jugular with its surprisingly white teeth while the other one hangs onto his firing arm, and he quickly goes down. Even further in the background, mostly obscured by the mayhem, a long, unbroken line of ragged bodies slowly advances, pushing the crowds unfortunate enough to be out and about today in our general direction. People mangling and being mangled in every visible direction. The rising sound of sirens from all sides announce the gravity and reality of whatever this is that is happening.
A screaming Meg slams against the glass door, scrambles to pull it open, and rushes in, followed closely by Stu, who dives headlong in between the closing doors. Immediately, Meg throws herself back against the doors, using her weight to pin them shut.
“Stu! What’s going on?” I shout above the multitude of shouting. Stu jumps up from the ground and grabs a heavy barstool.
“I can only assume we’re being invaded!” He shouts while wedging the door with the stool, relieving Meg, who trembles with tears and sobs into Stu’s arms. With only that moment to refocus, they rush together to get more bracing.
“Invaded? By whom?” I demand incredulously, lending a hand.
“The Koreans?” Somebody shouts from behind the counter.
“The Russians?” From someone else.
“The Taliban?” From back in the kitchen.
An ancient, toothless veteran on oxygen tubes gruffly shouts from his wheelchair, “Is it the Germans?”
Stu pauses and gives the old man a double-take, then turns back to me with uncertainty written all over his face, “It . . . it’s . . .”
“What? What is it? Who is it?” I demand, shaking him with fists clenched into his shirt shoulders. The veteran mutters coarse curses at the Germans.
“It’s regular people.” Stu says quietly, “Americans. They all look like they’ve been . . . decomposing . . . kind of like they’re . . .” he pauses with a bewildered expression.
“Kind of like what?” I press, levelly.
“Zombies.” He whispers. Looking out through the window.
I couldn’t help it. I guffawed. And loudly.
“Sorry,” I recompose myself, “What do you mean, ‘zombies’?”
Stu spreads his arms wide, shaking off my death grip on his polo shirt and shouts, pacing to and fro, “That’s just what they look like! Every Hollywood depiction of Zombies! Appearance and behavior! Look, you’re the one who asked, and that’s my answer. How about you go out there and find out for yourself?” Pointing to the window.
“How about not?” I replied dryly, piling another chair against the door.
Meg, still shaken and trembling from a healthy dose of adrenalin, looses her footing and curls up on the floor in a corner. Stu immediately crouches down and wraps his arms around her protectively. She looks up to the door with traumatized eyes, tries to speak with nothing but air escaping her throat. A few gasps later she finally manages, “They were eating people,” with a wobbly voice. It was all she could say. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.
“Oh, well then. Zombies it is.” I reply, quietly.
Instantly, a large weight is thrown against the front door, shaking the wedged stools and chairs violently. We all look up, startled, to see another seeping and scabby human face devoid of any human thought processes gaping at us through the glass with mangled and broken teeth. Again it slams against the doors, trying to get in. Simultaneously, Stu, myself, and at least three other stocky gentlemen from the diner throw our weight against the stack to support it. Four more beat, burned, and/or bruised apparitions join in with the first laying siege to our fortress gate. Two others stumble around the corner and begin to mindlessly throw themselves against the windowpanes. Thick reinforced glass thank god!
“What about the back door?” Someone shouts.
“Good idea!” Someone else shouts and dashes out through the kitchen, followed by two others.
Meanwhile, the single-action gunfire from without has suddenly been joined by rapid burst fire. Anyone not able to assist with holding the doors has fled to the inner rooms of the restaurant. The crying children have been shushed for the most part, so the only remaining constant background noise to accompany the gunfire is the sound of messy chewing and gulping just outside, neatly framed with the rhythmic beating at the door and windows.
“This cannot be happening!” I insist.
THUMP.
“I agree,” agreed Stu, still catching his breath, “you’re right. There’s no way! What do we do?”
THUMP.
“Hold these doors closed no matter!”
THUMP.
“Right,” Stu laughs an empty laugh, “what else?”
THUMP.
“How many of them are there?” A rotund gentleman leaning back into the pile demands.
THUMP.
“A bazillion.” Stu returns flatly, “How should I know?”
THUMP.
“Listen you cocky piece of–!”
“What matters is that we keep our heads and not eat each other!” I shout at both of them, “At least, I for one don’t want to be eaten today, ask me next week.”
THUMP.
SCREAM!!
“That came from the kitchen!”
“What’s happening?”
More screaming as people flock back from the dining area in a panic. Someone shouted, “How did they get in?”
“Now what? Stu go see what you can do! We seem to be holding this for the moment.” I motioned to the kitchen door, “Meg, see if you can drag Kate back behind the – MEG!” She snaps out of despondency, “See if you can get Kate behind the bar and wake her up. We might have to make a run for it.”
“I got bad knees! I can’t run!” The large fellow contributed. Ignore.
THUMP.
A chord struck upon my soul. . . ever so faintly. . . a ping. . .
Some loud clangings and rustlings, thumpings and bone-snappings through the kitchen doors, men, women, and children still streaming back into the dining area and finding cover, one of whom, a lady in middle years with bloody gouges covering half her face and neck, down to a deeply torn blouse, is dragged trough the doorway by an older man. From the kitchen, I can hear Stu shout, “SOMEONE GET THAT BACK DOOR CLOSED, NOW!!” Without thought, I release my weight from the stack and dive over the bar counter, rolling through the doorway to the back. My peripheral vision can just make out a two-on-one, mastered by Stu against the pair of blood-whores he battles. I pause not to aid, or to even look aside, for within my view ahead is the wide open doorway, and through it at least a dozen more monstrosities rushing to best me to the entrance. As I rush forward, silence falls upon the world, and all is reduced to slow-motion as inch by inch I fly forward. Slowly, I pick up a cast-iron frying pan while passing a countertop and, with low pitched battle roar, spittle a-flying, hurl it with full might through the opening and into the face of the leading damnation, sending him sprawling backward with a half-crumpled face, colliding into a few of the others, and, with what little remaining force I possess, leap feet-forwards and kick the heavy steel door. The excess centrifugal force from the kick continues to spin me around to slam backwards into the door, wedging it closed tight around the forearm of the first of them that almost got through. A heavy thump at the instant of the closure says I may have debrained at the same time that I disarmed. The hand jutting out at a perfect square angle from the door twitches a few times, then stills.
A deep breath. A moment. The peripheral noises slowly return, including heavy pounding at the other side of the door at which I sit, and my reverie is broken. In an instant, I reach up to latch the deadbolt. I cry out as the hand reaches over to grab my arm. Incredible inhuman strength bears down on my wrist, crushing capillaries and wrenching muscles, forcing me away from the latch and down towards the ground as the pounding continues, nearly unwedging the door. Unable to free myself from the grip, I raise my foot and strike at the arm at the point it exits the door. Once. Twice. Three times before it finally snaps off at the origin and spins off into the roughly stacked cardboard boxes. Instantly I latch the door and scoot back to see if it will hold against the onslaught. Like a typical utility doorway, constructed of heavy steel reinforcement, frame and all, it would take a bazooka to blow through it.
Ping! . . .
Oh yes. . . Murphy is at large! Despite the foreboding, I am satisfied the door will hold without supervision, as that all the combined might on the opposite side cannot even make the door to visibly shake. One step in turning to return to the front, and I am buried in an ocean of pain originating from my left shin where leg in midair struck door edge with all-thundering force. A quick stoop afforded to ensure the bone was sound, and then a hastened gimp-hopping back to the front in rhythm with sharp gasps of breath.
Round the corner I limp just in time to see the final blow delivered to the cranial base of the second Raggedy Andy, who now lies lifeless in the center of the kitchen aisle. The first is partially stuffed headfirst through the waitresses’ ordering window, hanging limply. Stu raises from his judo-crouch, blood streaming from a gash in his head accompanied with generalized bruising. Cracked and bleeding lip.
“Not sure who looks worse, you of the zombies.” I kid.
“Don’t be a hater!” He wipes off his mouth onto his sleeve, breathing deeply, “You get the door bolted?”
A heavy concussion rocks the ground, rattling whatever dishes remain in the cabinets, spilling some.
I nod in reply to his question, “I sure hope that’s the Calvary!”
“No joke!” He agreed, “Let’s see how those lumps are holding up in the front.”
The door holds for the moment, despite the repetitive thumpings from without. The minions at the windows have been joined by several others, although they have given up their attempts against the glass, content now merely to glare at us living folk within the diner with gnarled, empty grins.
THUMP.
Someone from the crowd asks, “Any chance to get away out the back door?”
THUMP.
“No chance,” I respond, “We’re surrounded, but apparently secure for the moment. They’ll need something a lot bigger to get through to us.”
PIIIING!!
I slowly turn aside and lower my voice to speak so that only Stu can hear, “Brace yourself.”
“For what?” He mutters in return.
“I don’t know, but I think we’re about to…”
. . . Thump?
The sudden silence at the door is deafening.
So sudden, so silent that we all look in unison to the door.
A solitary grizzly figure approximately a hundred yards across the courtyard dragging behind him something heavy.
“That’s not a…” Stu ventures.
The figure crouches down onto one knee, lifting a large dull-colored metal tube.
“It couldn’t be a…” I speak, transfixed.
He raises the tube alongside his head, resting it on his right shoulder and braces it with his left arm.
“I think it is a…!” We both say in synchronism, alarmed.
Fire and smoke explodes from the back of the tube, propelling a projectile straight in line with the doorway.
“EVERYBODY DOWWWWWWWNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!” Stu and I dive for cover behind the bar counter, sheltering respectively Meg and Kate, who still sleeps soundly, lying on her back. In the instant that passes before impact, all my senses are suddenly heightened, and I am keenly aware of the few things that I can see, think, or hear.
I see the face of Kate, so blissfully sleeping with a goose egg on her forehead, where she limply struck the tabletop during her demonstration. See how she smiles! She is so beautiful lying there, innocent and oblivious to what has been happening for the last twenty minutes or so. Perfect skin stretched like a canvas across a perfect frame. Her head is craned limply back exposing her long graceful neck. I soak in the curves of her neck musculature flowing like a river around the island lump of her throat up to the sharp point of her chin. A thin golden necklace rides along the waves, hanging whithersoever it may as its owner lies helplessly in my arms.
I think about how practically total strangers we two are, yet here at the point of certain explosive fiery burning death and dismemberment, I am strangely content to share this final moment with this mysterious and fascinating creature. To see Stu and Meg beside us, how they embrace each other like longing lovers about to be torn apart by the Queen’s Guard, forever to be separated, and I think: how quick is man to bind and become bound one to another! What an emotionally dependent being is man! Add a vial of perilous circumstances with a measure of survivalism, and the bitterest of foes will become united forever against a common enemy. How much more then, can complete and total strangers become lifetime soul mates upon an instant with such a shared history?
Kate’s eyes flutter and dart, slowly opening to reveal her twain hazels, softly unfocused on the ceiling. Snapping into focus, to see my face down so near to hers, she at first looks surprised, then simply content. Slightly quizzical. Hearing the old veteran offer one final eloquent curse at the Germans, and not thinking of consequences at the moment, I pull Kate up the remaining few inches to my face and kiss her hard. She surprised, resists for a split second before the rocket detonates on the front door. With a deafening roar in my ears to match the one in my heart, the shattered glass shards fly and fall like killer snowflakes throughout the room, and Kate pulls me in violently against her body. All other noises drowned out by the blast, I can feel rather than hear her screaming into my lips as the blunt force of the explosion propels the heavier objects from the front of the room against the heavy wooden paneling of the bar behind which we lay. The last I see is a swift rushing of debris as it tears through the seams between the panels. The one directly protecting us suddenly breaks free, and instantly everything goes black.
