End of the World Afterparty: Part Twelve

For End of the World Afterparty: Part One, click here. 

For End of the World Afterparty: Part Eleven, click here. 

 

Content Warning: Graphic violence

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I woke up in complete darkness to the smell of death. It was unmistakable, worse than the occasional whiff of rot you might get driving by roadkill on a hot day with your windows down, so thick that it made the air dense and unbreathable. I didn’t waste time trying to convince myself that this was anything but the worst possible scenario. 

There was no light, not even the vaguest ambient illumination from some distant window, and the heat was so bad it was starting to make my head spin. I could feel my confusion rolling in like fog, and I knew that if Jason didn’t get me first, dehydration would. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had anything to drink—or the last time I’d needed to pee, for that matter. 

I felt disconnected from my body, weak and loose-limbed and impossibly heavy, but I managed to drag myself to my knees, grateful that at least now, with my shoulder back in joint, the pain had subsided to a dull roar. That was one less thing to worry about. 

“Okay, Singh,” I told myself, and my voice sounded raspy and alien, “let’s work the problem.” 

Easier said than done. Spots of color danced around my vision, my eyes attempting to mimic sight. Even your own body gaslights you sometimes. 

Or, and this was a fun thought, maybe it wasn’t dark, and I’d actually gone blind. What if the double concussion had caused brain damage, and its full effects had finally caught up with me? Maybe Jason had done something while I was out, poured acid over my eyes or ripped them from their sockets, and it didn’t hurt because I was in shock. I actually had to touch my face to verify that they were still there. They were. I knew what was really happening, anyway. Panic was a wave cresting the horizon of my mind, and I could either ride it, or go under. 

The dark pressed in close around me, seeming to constrict further by the moment as I crawled on all fours, feeling the floor like Velma looking for her glasses. It was impossible not to imagine endless threats lying in wait, each one worse than the one before. Rat traps, arranged in a circle around me. Serrated knives all pointed in my direction. Exposed electrical wiring. A pit of sharpened stakes. An open trap door, with a twenty foot drop into a room full of rabid animals. I knew none of these thoughts were rational, but it didn’t matter; the stark nature of my blindness made them real and vivid. 

If I could just find a weapon, preferably something I could wield one-handed, I might have a chance. A baseball bat. A sock full of nickels. An old, rusty garden spade. Anything was better than nothing, I reasoned. 

Beneath my probing fingers, the floor proved rough and splintery, like particle board or maybe unfinished plywood, something you wouldn’t use in just any old room. So if I had to guess, this was an attic. That would explain the stifling heat, as well. Knowing where I was didn’t exactly help, but it gave me something to hold onto, a frame of reference. 

I realized vaguely that I wasn’t wearing any shoes, that he must have taken them away to make escape more difficult. Bastard. 

All at once, I heard the sharp crack of a gunshot, and I felt the world begin to slide sideways around me. Instinctively I knew that it meant Alana was gone and that Jason would be coming for me next. Fear tried to paralyze my limbs as I listened in the darkness for any sign of his approach. The only thing I could hear was the ringing in my ears and the steady thudding of my tell-tale heart, which sounded like footsteps pounding up the stairs when I focused too closely. 

So far my search for a weapon had turned up nothing, not even a piece of lint or a dead beetle, but suddenly my hand brushed against something smooth and hard. I drew myself closer, listening to the hiss of my breath between my clenched teeth as I traced my fingers around the outline of the object. Whatever it was, the smell was worse than ever around it, and I felt my gorge rising. Some sort of glass case, I reasoned, maybe a fish tank, and for a moment I let myself pretend that the putrid stench was nothing more sinister than the sorry remains of Jason’s abandoned pets, though I knew better, of course I did. 

And then I heard the sound of approaching footsteps—for real this time, unmistakable in the pitch black—and the rise and fall of Jason’s voice as he hummed something indistinct. Slowly I eased myself to a crouch. It was difficult to get my bearings in the darkness, and I didn’t trust my balance enough to stand, not when I could trip over some unseen obstacle and end up worse off than before. But I told myself the moment there was enough light to see by, I’d take off sprinting like a track star and be past him before he even knew what was coming. It was a slim hope, but it was all I had left to cling to, so I held it in a death grip. It was that or go insane. 

The light flicked on, a sudden brightness so harsh, my stinging eyes squeezed shut as Jason’s footsteps echoed heavily on the creaky floorboards. “Look who’s awake,” he said, and I could hear the laughter in his voice. “Oh, and I see you’ve met my mom.” 

I forced my eyes open and realized that the thing I crouched over was, in fact, a fish tank. 

But there were no fish inside. 

It was a head, wrapped in cling film and so heavily decomposed that I wouldn’t have recognized her if he hadn’t told me. 

Babbling wordlessly, I fell backwards on my ass and scooted across the floor as my mind tried to reject the evidence of my own eyes. For a moment I could see my head inside that tank instead of hers, mouth gaping open in a rictus of terror, no one to hear my eternal, silent scream. With every panicked breath I took, the rotten stench forced itself further and further into my lungs. 

“Yeah, sorry about the smell. She’s a little past her prime. But focus on the bright side—she’s not going to complain about me bringing girls home anymore.” 

I looked up to see him standing over me, hands on his hips. 

“So how do you want this to go, Singh? Because I’ll give you options. I’m a reasonable guy.” 

I struggled to my feet and shrank back, but I only made it a few steps before the sloped ceiling cut off my retreat. Around me, the attic seemed to stretch forever in both directions, shadows pooling at the far ends where the light from the single, naked bulb didn’t reach. It was strangely bare for an attic. But there were more dark shapes, square and distinct in the middle of the floor—a whole row of fish tanks, arranged like museum display cases; I had to force myself not to look more closely at their contents. 

“Doing this right here would be a little weird with my mom watching, but if you’re into that, then you’re into that. Who am I to judge?” He shrugged. “Or we can be patient, because we’re not animals, and we can go to the basement and have ourselves a drink, relax a little, get to know each other first. What do you say?” 

“You killed her,” I whispered, and I couldn’t keep the tremor out of my voice no matter how hard I tried. 

“Alana was dying. All I did was speed up the process.” He stepped closer, never losing that smirk. 

“You know I’m not talking about her,” I whispered. “You killed your own mom. Why did you kill your mom?” Dimly, I sensed that the harsh, gasping sound was my own labored breathing, that the darkness creeping in around the corners of my vision was going to be a problem for me. I hadn’t forgotten my plan to run past him; it was just that I suddenly couldn’t get my legs to work, and all the blood seemed to be draining from my head. 

“Oh, she fell down the stairs. But I don’t feel like talking about her right now.” Lightning quick, he reached out and grabbed my chin, forcing me to look at him. “So tell me your choice before I decide for you.” 

“Basement,” I stammered as I tried to remember the layout of the house, what my best chance of escape might be. All I could think was that, at the very least, there were weapons in the basement, guns galore if I could get my hands on them. 

“After you.” He stepped aside and held an arm out, indicating the rickety ladder across the attic. It took everything in my power to walk past him and make my way to the trap door, with his breath warm on my neck, his chest so close to my back I could practically feel his heart beating. 

If I climbed down the ladder fast enough, maybe I could kick it aside before he reached the floor. It might not injure him, but it could buy me precious seconds. My palms were so slick with nervous sweat, they slid off the rungs as I descended, slowing my progress. By the time I got to the bottom, he was directly above me, so I gave the ladder a good shove. It did nothing but jar my shoulder cruelly; he was too heavy, and I couldn’t seem to muster any strength. 

I took off running anyway, even though I knew it wouldn’t matter, and I made it all of ten feet down the hall before he caught a fistful of my tank top and yanked me back. “Uh uh uh,” he whispered in my ear, wrapping an arm around my waist. “That was a nice try, but you’re going to have to do a lot better than that. You think this is my first rodeo?” 

He laughed as I fell still, my heart pounding so hard I could feel it vibrating in the bottoms of my feet. How many women? I wanted to ask. How many women have you done this to? 

He had a camera in his hand now. I couldn’t be sure if he’d had it the whole time, or if he’d just grabbed it from somewhere. “This is going to be a different sort of video,” he said, making sure to hold the camera so we were both in frame. “I wanted to introduce you all to my new girlfriend, Singh. Come on Singh, say hi to the fans.” 

This isn’t real, I told myself. None of this is happening. They say that truth is stranger than fiction, but this was pushing the limit. Maybe I was holed up in a bunker somewhere, years into the apocalypse, and these were my fever dreams as I finally slipped loose from the moorings of my sanity. That would make more sense. 

“She’s shy,” he told the camera, squeezing me tighter. “Isn’t it cute?” He seemed impossibly strong, as if he’d been absorbing all the energy I’d lost along the way. Were my doctor to tell me I’d shrunk by inches, I’d believe her—I felt myself turning into a husk. 

As he guided me toward the basement staircase, he narrated a brief, inaccurate rundown of our time at his garage, emphasizing both his supposed heroics and my own inability to save myself. “There were others at first,” he said, pausing in the doorway to pull an eerily convincing sad face. “We started out with more in our ranks, but tragedy after tragedy struck, and now it’s just the two of us. I don’t know how many of you are still out there, how many will see this vlog when it’s posted, if there will even be internet left by the time it’s finished. But I hope that you’re staying strong. We’ll rebuild this world together, better than it was before.” 

Then he signed off and set the camera on an old shelf recessed into the unfinished wall at the top of the basement stairs, next to several cans of paint and a rusty measuring tape. 

At the last moment I remembered the heavy metal beam that he’d used to block the door before; he’d need both hands to lift it in place. While he was distracted, I could sprint down the stairs, grab a gun, and then shoot him. After that, I would have all the time in the world to figure out how to get out of that basement. 

But he must have read my mind, because instead of grabbing the beam from where it leaned against the wall, he ducked down and threw me over his shoulder, using my moment of confusion to lower the beam into place. I punched him as hard as I could in the back, hitting with everything that I had. 

“Wow, deep tissue massage, that feels good,” he said as he carried me down the staircase. “Relax Singh, you’re wearing yourself out for nothing. You weigh what, a buck twenty? Buck thirty? I probably have a hundred pounds on you. If you want to play rough, that’s fine—I like it rough. But remember, I can play a lot rougher than you.” 

As if to prove his point, he flipped me off his shoulder onto the couch, then flexed and kissed his bicep. “Unless the power goes out, we won’t need to go back upstairs for a long time. So settle in and make yourself comfortable. This is your home now.” 

All I could think, as he turned his back and made his way to the shelves of liquor, is that I was lucky he hadn’t noticed when I snagged the gun from his waistband. 

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I waited until I was sure Jason was distracted by the alcohol selection before I pulled the gun out from under me and clicked off the safety. When I racked the slide, the unmistakable sound seemed to echo through the basement, but he didn’t react, and I let myself hope for half a second that he remained oblivious. 

My hands were trembling as I trained the gun on him. If I missed the first shot, I couldn’t assume there’d be time for another. Deep breath in, fire on the exhale, I told myself. The bullet is an extension of your arm. 

I pulled the trigger. 

Nothing happened. 

I racked the slide and pulled the trigger again. Again. Again. 

“Keep trying,” Jason said, never turning to look at me as he poured several fingers of bourbon into a crystal tumbler. “Eventually, it has to work.” 

Half blind with desperation, I threw the pistol to the side and set my sights on the gun rack and the shelve of ammunition underneath. Surely he hadn’t forgotten it was there; surely he couldn’t be that careless, and me that lucky. 

I slid off the couch, gritting my teeth as every check engine light in my body came on. Once the black spots in my vision had finally cleared, I padded over to the rack, even though I knew that it was probably another trap and Jason was probably waiting for me to do exactly this. I couldn’t not do it; I couldn’t accept defeat until I’d at least tried. There were no other options. 

The mesh doors were pulled closed over the rack, but there was no lock by the flimsy metal handles, no sign that I couldn’t just open them and grab a weapon, help myself to the ammunition, go nuts. A glance over my shoulder told me he was still standing with his back turned, already pouring himself a second glass. 

Think, Singh, think, my brain screamed at me. Something’s not right. If he wants you to do this, then it’s a trap. 

What do they say? Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me thrice, I’m a complete moron, and my mom probably dropped me on my head as a child.  

But fear makes you stupid, remember that. I felt stupid. And reckless. I was a power line fallen across the roadway, spitting sparks. From some great remove, I watched myself, helpless to stop the sequence of events—panic used me like a marionette. 

It’s wild how I feel like I have to defend my actions to you, a hypothetical person who was never there, someone who I will never hear shouting at their TV screen that I’m an idiot. Congratulations, apparently your opinion matters to me. 

On some level, I guess I thought the biggest danger was that the moment Jason heard me sliding the mesh doors aside, he’d come running and tackle me before I had time to load a weapon, that he was toying with me the way a cat toys with its prey because it’s more fun that way. Dimly, I remember noticing a keypad on the wall next to the rack and wondering for half a moment what purpose it served, but I failed to assign any significance to its presence, and I didn’t have time to decipher its mystery, anyway. Checking over my shoulder one last time to make sure the coast was clear, I grabbed the door handles. 

When I came to on the floor, Jason was crouched over me, his face a blurry, indistinct shape, slowly coming into focus. “50,000 volts running through that thing,” he said. “No children are going to accidentally shoot themselves on my watch.” 

Groaning, I tried and failed to push myself into a sitting position. I felt like someone had installed a pacemaker in my chest and set it to dubstep. 

“Oh Singh,” he said, shaking his head, “all that hope leaving your eyes—your face is an open book. You’ve got to stop giving the plot away.” He glanced around like he was worried someone might overhear and then leaned close to stage whisper, “Be careful, there could be creeps around who get off on that sort of thing.” 

Drop a girl smack dab in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, and it turns out the worst monsters are still the humans. 

I choked on a sob, trying desperately to fight the despair turning my limbs to lead. My body felt so terribly heavy, I half expected to sink through the floor and into the earth below. 

“Come on, Singh.” He held out a hand. “You look like you could use a drink. Let me help you up.” 

When I ignored him, he stood and crossed the room, returning a few moments later with the bottle of bourbon, which he set down beside my head. It clinked heavily on the concrete floor. 

“Bourbon, 140 proof,” he clarified. “Might be a little too much for you to handle. See, for me, I can manage that just fine, could probably get away with drinking that whole bottle, because muscle absorbs alcohol, so I don’t get drunk very easily.” He pinched my bicep so hard it hurt, insult to injury. “You, on the other hand, don’t have a lot of muscle. But maybe you’d prefer to be drunk for this next part. I hear it hurts the first time.” 

Though I wasn’t sure how he knew, he was still right: I’d never had sex. Along the way, several boyfriends had pressured me, but I just wasn’t interested. If anything, I was repulsed. The whole concept seems far too personal and unsanitary; I still skip the love scenes in movies and TV like I’m some kind of child; to me, it ruins the romance; I don’t even like kissing. So the thought of Jason forcing himself on me made me want to crawl out of my skin and find a new body to wear. But I guessed that if I couldn’t kill him, the next best thing would be to get so drunk it didn’t matter what happened. Always better to be out of the house when the burglars break in. 

As I stared listlessly at the bottle, trying to work up the courage to grab it and drink, I began to consider its heft, how much damage it might do when colliding with a human skull. I tried to keep my eyes vague and defeated to hide this frail resurgence of hope, this fragile slip of a plan, because he seemed to have the almost uncanny ability to know my thoughts before they even occurred to me. 

“Go on, drink, I’m not waiting all day,” he said, nudging me with his toe. I kept my face blank as I tried to think through the sequence of events, to choreograph every step ahead of time, how I would get close enough to hit him, how I would make sure he was too distracted to see it coming. How hard do you have to hit someone to kill them? Would I have the necessary strength? I felt the familiar paralysis of fear trying to settle back into my limbs, but the thought of giving up made me sick; I couldn’t quit, not after fighting this hard for this long; I’d never forgive myself if I let this chance pass me by. 

“Not interested?” he asked. “Or do you need help?” There was a hungry look on his face that told me if I didn’t do something very soon, it wouldn’t matter anymore. But my legs felt rubbery, and I didn’t trust myself to be able to stand. If my nascent plan was going to work, it required perfect timing, and I still couldn’t anticipate how I was going to pull it off, not with my mind spinning in circles like a hamster wheel. I felt the perverse need to pull out my phone and consult Google. 

When I turned my head away from the bourbon and stared at him with empty eyes, he nodded and knelt, knees on either side of my hips. “All right, that’s fine with me. Let’s just get down to business,” he said, fumbling with his belt buckle. His hands were shaky with excitement. 

It was something about that image—the calluses on his knuckles, the thin line of a scar tracing itself beside a vein—that brought the solution to my problems into sudden, startling clarity. 

“Kiss me first,” I said, afraid that the wobble in my voice was going to give me away. Everything in me revolted at the idea, but I needed him closer if this was going to work. 

His hands grew still as his smile widened. “Well damn, Singh, you don’t have to tell me twice. Shit.” Groaning, he leaned over me and gripped my jaw tightly, still trying to tug his zipper down with his other hand. 

His lips were hot and slimy against mine like something half-decomposed, and I tried not to gag as I slid my fingers around the neck of the bourbon bottle. When his tongue forced itself way into my mouth, I summoned all the strength in my body, all the rage and hopelessness and desperation, and I bit down hard, swinging the heavy bottle toward his head at the same time. 

The impact jarred my wrist so roughly it almost ripped the bottle from my hand. As he reared back, blood pouring from his mouth, he looked dazed, but probably he would have recovered before I could take another swing at him if he hadn’t swayed drunkenly into the electrified doors of Chekhov’s gun rack. All the air left his body in a terrible groan, and he sounded more like a zombie than even the zombies did, but somehow he still didn’t lose consciousness. As he dragged himself away from the doors, muscles dancing and jerking, I climbed to my knees and swung the bottle at his temple with everything in my body, like I was a baseball player going for a home run. 

This time the bottle broke, showering me with bourbon as the flying shards glittered in the fluorescent lighting like jewels. There was still a fair bit of glass attached to the neck of the bottle, jagged and promising. It had a solid heft to it, which is what gave me the idea that a double concussion wasn’t enough for Jason. Wasn’t nearly enough. 

He tried to stand but immediately sank to his knees, his entire body heaving with every breath he took, his one good eye seeming to look through me as he opened and closed his mouth like a fish out of water. I must have fractured an orbital bone, because his other eye had turned inward so far the iris was no longer visible, only the white and a tangle of blood-shot capillaries on display.  

Looking back at the footage from the hidden camera he’d set up, expecting a different kind of action, I see how helpless and defeated he appeared in that moment, his body language almost childlike, and I start to feel bad for him; I start to feel like I did something evil. It’s difficult to witness someone in that much distress and remember that they deserve it; at least it is for me; Jason wouldn’t have had the same problem. 

In the moment, I felt no such remorse. He needed to die; there was absolutely no other way around it. I had to be certain he could never hurt me again. 

I pulled myself toward him, my entire body electric with rage. “Can you hear me, Jason?” I asked. “You don’t look like you’re feeling so good. Maybe that bourbon might be too much for you after all.” 

His good eye rolled wildly in its socket. It was impossible to tell if he’d heard me and was trying to respond, or if he was having a seizure. His shoulders jerked and spasmed; all that muscle, and still there was nothing he could do to stop me. 

I closed the space between us, clutching the bottle neck so tightly my knuckles turned pale. “I want you to know that you deserve this,” I whispered, pushing his fingers away as they groped weakly for my neck. I put a hand on his chest, felt the unsteady skipping of his heartbeat, the cool, sticky sweat that told me he was already going into shock. “You know, if this wasn’t what you wanted, why were you wearing this shirt? Sounds to me like you were asking for it.” 

He said something then, a slurred, mushy sound that could have been, “You bitch,” or it could have been nothing at all. Some distant portion of his brain must have recognized what I was planning to do because he tried to scoot backwards, but this time, I was too quick for him. I climbed onto his lap and slid my free hand around the back of his neck, like some sort of unholy embrace, anything to keep him from getting away. And that’s when I stabbed him. The jagged bottle neck sliced easily through his “Equal Rights, Equal Fights” shirt, and then through his skin, and then, with a little extra work, his abdominal wall as well. 

I felt giddy with power, possessed with an almost supernatural strength. As I hacked away at the muscle to create a wider opening, he screamed and gurgled, arching his back while his legs peddled uselessly, but he couldn’t buck me off him, not anymore. “Shhh, shhh, shhh, just let it happen,” I whispered in his ear, so close his stubble pricked my cheek. I threw the broken bottle aside, keeping an arm around his neck as I shoved my other hand into the open wound and grabbed a fistful of slick, hot viscera. “Might want to get drunk for this part,” I told him. “I hear it hurts the first time. But that’s okay—you like it rough, don’t you?” 

His face was pressed into the hollow of my collarbone—I could feel his labored breathing, the desperate movement of his mouth as he tried to scream or maybe bite me, I couldn’t tell. I drew the long, pulsing snake of his intestines up to his shoulder and around his neck, wound it once, twice. And then I drew the loop tight and pulled for all I was worth. 

He flailed uselessly as his own shit-filled guts choked the life out of him, and I found that it was harder than I’d thought to keep a good hold of them. They were slippery with blood and so stretchy they seemed to double in length as I tugged with my entire bodyweight, leaning back and back until I’d hauled him on top of me. Gradually his face turned purple and then blue, and his one good eye stopped rolling around in its socket and came to rest, staring through me into the great beyond.  

After checking his pulse, I slid out from under him and crawled across the blood-slicked floor to where I’d thrown the bottle neck. I could already picture him coming back to life, dragging himself to his feet to chase me through the house like Frankenstein’s monster the minute I let down my guard. I had to be certain. I had to be one hundred percent certain. 

When I slit his throat with the gore-coated glass, barely any blood leaked from the gaping smile. No arterial spray because his heart wasn’t beating anymore. Which meant I’d done it. I’d actually done it. 

I lowered myself to the ground beside him and lay there, just soaking it in while the adrenaline drained from my system and the trembling in my muscles subsided. How long that lasted, I don’t know. I watched the play of the light through the high windows, the moving shadows of zombie legs shuffling by, as time seemed to exhale around me. I felt filled with an impossible euphoria, an incredible buoyancy so powerful I expected to find myself floating. 

Hours or days later, who even knows, when I was finally confident enough to stand, I climbed to my feet and approached the liquor shelves. I was ready for that drink. 

POSTLUDE

Should I bore you with the minutiae of all that happened next? What’s left to say? Do you want to hear about how I struggled to clean myself in the cramped basement bathroom, how the diluted red of his blood dripped everywhere as I stood at the sink and scrubbed my arms, my hands, my face? I hardly remember most of the details from the initial days after I killed him. I moved as if in a dream. 

Getting rid of him hadn’t fixed my double concussion. My head hurt almost every waking moment, and my thoughts seemed to flow like molasses. I slept. I woke. Occasionally I remembered to eat. My vision fractured and returned to normal and then fractured again—a pendulum swing of vertigo that subsided so gradually I almost didn’t notice the shift.

Every few hours, I checked to make sure his corpse hadn’t somehow reanimated. I remembered the Singh in the garage, the one who was concerned with moving the dead zombie back outside, and I laughed. I didn’t want to let Jason out of my sight where he could get up to mischief unbeknownst to me, not even for a moment. He was dead as long as he remained in my line of sight, that was all I knew, and sometimes I wasn’t even sure about that. 

At some point I got ahold of myself enough to rifle through the duffel bags he’d brought with him from the garage, which is where I found hard drives with all the camera feeds, as well as the laptop I’ve been using to edit this whole mess into something coherent and insightful. When I climbed the stairs to scope out the steel beam, I found the camera he’d set there and went through that, too. 

Tackling this project gave me purpose, and even though I had to stop every few hours to take naps, I felt my strength beginning to return. I’d messaged my mom as soon as I found the laptop, knowing full well that she almost never checks her email, but one day I got a response from her letting me know that she was safe for the time being, that everyone in her apartment building had banded together to keep themselves alive. She was worried about me. She wanted to know where I’d been. 

Several times I sat and typed out the whole story until my vision went blurry, but I always deleted it and closed out of the page. What I ended up telling her was nothing more than the bare bones: I had been injured, but I was getting better, and soon I would come home. In the meantime, I was safe, so she didn’t have to worry about me. 

The sense of urgency is gone now, unless you count the fact that I still have to get myself to dispose of Jason’s body before I go insane. But I mean the zombies. While the apocalypse is far from over, according to the news, the tides have turned for the better. At some point the undead began organizing into massive herds, like the buffalo of yore, and they sweep, even now, in waves across the nation, seeking out California like they have a homing signal built into in their diseased brains (though I hear a significant number have diverted to Florida instead). That would explain why I’ve seen fewer and fewer feet passing by the basement windows of late. Every now and then, I wonder if I’m seeing actual humans now, but no matter how many times I consider calling out to them, I always end up waiting in silence until they’re gone. Couldn’t tell you why. 

Yesterday I realized I could just turn off the breaker to the gun cabinet, instead of worrying about the keypad, so when it’s time to leave, I’ll have all the weapons I need. The steel beam remains in place, but I found a tool kit, and eventually I’ll unscrew the brackets and get out that way; for now, I sleep easier at night knowing nothing can get in while it’s there, though I still wake to check on Jason periodically, just to make sure he hasn’t moved. So far, I’m pretty sure he hasn’t. 

I’ll give it a couple weeks more, let myself get back up to full strength. There’s no rush. When I’m ready, I’ll load up the G Wagon and drive out to Leesburg to reunite with my mom, and we’ll figure out where to go from there. 

This time Jason won’t be able to stop me. 

<End Recording>

 

ABOUT THIS BOOK

 

Back in 2019, my friend and I played a game together. Probably there’s some official version you can buy, but this is the way she taught me to set it up. Grab a bunch of scrap paper and take turns writing down types of people/professions, such as dentist or housewife. On another pile of scrap paper, write down attributes, such as “accidentally time travels every time they sneeze” or “has uncontrollable diarrhea” or “knows how to make delicious food but can only walk backwards.” To play, you draw one piece of paper from each pile until you have an assortment of characters and attributes: “a lawyer who believes daisies cause cancer,” “an electrician who likes licking doorknobs,” or “my mom, but only on Tuesdays.”

It’s up to you how many characters you want to create. Your goal is to come up with a scenario: you could be trying to survive twenty years in a bunker after a nuclear disaster, you could be scrambling to shore up your deep sea base before it implodes—your options are only limited by your imagination. Out of your people, you have to decide the five individuals you think will help you stay alive, weighing in the balance your pros and cons. 

The scenario my friend and I chose was surviving the night in a farmhouse during a zombie apocalypse. These were our characters: 

The president of the United States is a necrophiliac

A Bear Grylls-type character who has ten years of tactical and combat experience and believes that the zombie virus is caused by vaccines

A sign waver who is a time traveling assassin from the 1870’s

Captain America, who sneezes when he sees the color green

A popular, obnoxious Youtuber who can devise booby traps and catapults and develop weapons on the run but mansplains everything and won’t shut up about how great America is

An author who has killed at least five hundred people, but no one knows how

A refrigerator salesman (and part-time sheep thief) who thinks that the zombies are just normal humans in stage makeup

A farmer’s wife who gets really hangry and forgets how to talk to other people 

A muralist who throws cats at their enemies as distractions so they can escape

An army general who laughs uncontrollably when they get nervous or scared

Someone who writes and self-publishes erotica and is afraid of drowning on dry land

A Brazilian Jiujitsu teacher and black belt who believes they’re dying of the Spanish flu but they’re completely fine

A conspiracy theorist who definitely knows what they are doing because “this is just like the video games” 

A professional coaster designer who turns into a cat whenever they’re scared. 

My friend and I liked the characters so much, she told me I had to turn the set up into a book. It was a ridiculous, tongue-in-cheek creative writing challenge which I didn’t expect to turn into anything worthwhile, but about halfway through I started taking it somewhat seriously. And I have to say, I'm happy with the final result; I hope you are, too. 

 

Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth Brooks