The Turning: A Tale of the Living Dead (3 page)

“What’s going on?” Jenny said
behind him.

The zombie lifted the bird and it
swung, pivoting on its broken limb, and snapped at the man’s throat.  The
zombie grabbed the seagull’s neck and shoved the body into its mouth.  It bit
down and bright red blood spurted into the air as it tore out the bird’s throat
and munched like it was eating a piece of fried chicken.

“What is it?” Jenny said, louder.

The zombie stopped chewing and
stared straight at the door and the peephole.  Jeff jerked his head back and
held his finger to his lips to keep Jenny quiet.  He turned and stuck his eye
to the hole looked out.  The zombie was there, a foot from the door, still
chewing and eating, as the bird dangled, twitching in its hands.

“They don't just eat people,” Jeff
said.  He took a step back and led Jenny into the kitchen.  He stuck his mouth
to her ear and told her what he’d seen and that he thought the zombie had heard
them.  They stayed quiet and huddled next to the open refrigerator door, both
too scared to even notice it was open. After a few minutes, Jeff crept to the door
and looked out again.

The zombie had drifted away,
dragging the corpse of the bird behind him.  It had gone down the walkway
towards the stairs in the far corner.

He sighed and turned to see Jenny
shut the refrigerator door.

“Why is all this happening?” he
said.

Jenny shrugged.  “The TV said it
was a terrorist attack.  Then it said it was a chemical spill.  And then it
wasn't on anymore.”

Jeff looked away.  There was no
rational explanation for any of this.  The dead had come back to life and ate
the living—human or otherwise.  There was no way it was some chemical or
radiation.  It had to be something else, something supernatural.  He didn't
believe in God, though, so that explanation made him queasy.  He decided there
was no way to really know.

They went back into the living
room and sat, watching the TV, turned on but turned down, showing nothing but a
shower of snow. 

“At least we still have
electricity,” Jenny said.

Both were lost in their own
thoughts for a time, processing all that had been happening around them the
last week.  Jeff mulled over the fall of society, how things had collapsed so
rapidly.  There was no more TV, no more radio, no more internet.  How could it
have happened, all inside of a week or so?  As much as he stretched his imagination,
he couldn't figure it.  Somewhere out there had to be more people, on military
bases or in the cities.   

Jenny leaned away from him. 

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. 
“We don’t know how long we’re going to be stuck here, right?”
He nodded.

“It could be a long time or
tomorrow,” she said.  “But I think we should ration the food, just to make
sure.  We could have two meals a day.  That should be enough, shouldn’t it?”

Jeff thought it over for a moment
and nodded.

“Also, I think I should cook up
all the meat that could go bad in the fridge, in case the electricity goes out”
she said. 
“That’s a good idea,” he said, his stomach suddenly growling like a hungry
lion.

“We eat that first, with the lunch
meat I have in there, and once that runs out, we’ll go to the soups,” she said.

“You have any frozen food?”

“A couple of pizzas,” she said.

He nodded.  ‘We should eat that,
too.”

Jenny rubbed his shoulder for a
moment and offered him a hopeful smile.

“It’s going to be okay,” she
said.  “We’ll make it through this.”

Jenny rose to go into the kitchen
when the front door jolted on its hinges.  Someone screamed on the other side
and this was followed by a rapid series of knocks and pounding. 
Jeff jumped from the chair and ran to the door.  Jenny was by his side in an
instant and they knocked heads trying to look out the peephole.  Rubbing his
ear, Jeff stepped back so Jenny could see.  Whoever it was outside kept hitting
the door with their fists, beating it like they could knock it down.

“It’s my neighbor,” Jenny said. 
“I think his name is Steve.”

“Should we let him in?”

Jenny thought about it for a
moment and then nodded.  Jeff removed the chair from under the knob and Jenny
opened the door. 

Steve bolted in, smashing against
Jeff and sending him crashing to the floor.  Jeff hit hard, the wind knocked
out of his lungs, and rolled around for a moment, trying to catch his breath. 
Steve slammed the door shut and laughed and slapped Jenny across the face. 
Jenny fell sprawling into the kitchen.  Steve stood over them.  He pulled a
pipe as long as his forearm from the back of his pants.  It was clotted with
dried blood and bits of hair and flesh.

“You stupid fuckers,” Steve said. 
He walked back and forth, stalking around the by the door.  Every now and then
he waved the pipe, the open end whistling in the air.  He was six foot tall,
looked like he was about forty years old, had pepper hair and intense green
eyes.  He was a bit rumpled looking, like he worked out but age was catching up
too fast.  He wore a brown sweater and a pair of beige dress pants.  He had no
shoes and his toes were wet with fresh blood.  He tracked it onto the carpet by
the door as he paced, grumbling and mumbling. 

It was clear Steve was out of his
mind. 

Jeff raised his hand.  “Take it
easy, buddy,” he said.

Steve screamed and jumped on Jeff,
swinging the pipe wildly.  Jeff thrashed his legs, keeping Steve from pinning
him but not stopping the attack.  The pipe caught Jeff twice on his right shin
and each time he screeched with pain. 

“I’ll kill you!” Steve said. 
“I’ll kill you!”
The pipe swung around and thumped Jeff’s left shoulder.  A stinging pain ran
down his arm, exploding into his fingertips like firecrackers going off in his
hand, and then his arm went numb.  Steve stood over him and laughed and brought
the pipe back behind his head to swing it down and smash Jeff’s head.

Jeff heard a loud crack and Steve
slumped forward and fell against the TV.  Jenny stood where Steve had been, the
butt of her shotgun frozen in mid-air.  There was a tiny dollop of blood at the
tip of the butt and Jeff watched as it dripped, lazy, and splashed onto the
carpet. 

“You get out of here!” Jenny
yelled.  She turned the gun around and pointed it at Steve, who was still on the
floor, dazed, his eyes slightly crossed.  “Get up and get out!”

Steve had dropped his pipe and he
held his hands up, begging Jenny not to shoot him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.  He said it
again and again as Jenny waved the barrel in his face. 

“Just go,” Jeff croaked.  He still
couldn’t feel his arm but he felt the pain in his shin.  It throbbed so hard
and so intense he was afraid it was broken.

Steve grabbed his pipe and crawled
on all fours to the door.  Jenny reached over and opened it and he looked up at
her, his eyes clear and bright.

“Please don’t send me out there. 
Monsters are out there,” Steve said.

Jenny kicked him hard on his ass
and he fumbled forward and then crawled out quickly.  She slammed the door and
replaced the chair under the knob after locking it.

Steve started screaming outside
again, beating on the door.  Every sort of curse imaginable was flying from his
lips as he threatened to kill them both.

Jenny turned away and looked down
at Jeff.

“He was an accountant, if you can
believe that,” she said.  Jeff couldn’t read the expression on her face. 

“He came by sometimes and gave me
and Bill a bottle of wine and talked to us for a while,” Jenny said.  “He was a
bachelor and I think he was lonely.”

Jeff grimaced and sat up, listening
as Steve started beating the door with his pipe.

“He’s also a crazy asshole,” Jeff
said.

Jenny bent down and rubbed his
arm.  “Are you okay?” He looked at her and it was like she was back to her
normal self; whatever passed as normal these days, anyway.  She’d had that same
look in her eye with Steve as she had when he’d ended up on her porch and she’d
pulled the gun on him.  It was a cold stare and it held no mercy.  It was the
stare of someone who’d been hurt before, and hurt in a bad way.

“Yeah,” Jeff said.  He couldn’t
use his arm and his leg was burning with pain, but he was happy to be alive.

“You fuckers!” Steve yelled and
all of the sudden he started screaming. 

Jenny ran to the door and looked
outside.

“Oh, God!  There's four of those
things out there.  They have him surrounded.”

Jeff grabbed the chair by the
computer and pulled himself to his feet.  He limped over to the door and took a
look outside.

Steve was right in front of the
door, swinging his pipe around, cursing and spitting.  In front of him on the
narrow walkway was two zombies, one a woman that was missing her left eye and
had her right arm dangling by her side, gnawed on to the bone from the elbow
down, and the other was a boy who looked barely fifteen, who had on a skateboarding
helmet and elbow and knee pads soaked with blood; his throat was open and raw,
glistening and wet.  Behind Steve was another pair of them, both men, both fat
and wearing business suits.  One of the fat guys, the one in the lead, had his
shirt torn off and a great gouge of fat torn from his side.  It looked like
someone had taken a small shovel and dug out a hole, the flesh ragged and sharp
on the borders of the rips.  A tiny piece of intestine dangled from the hole
like a cut umbilical cord.

“What’s happening?” Jenny said. 
She pushed against him to take a look, but Jeff held firm.

“You don’t want to see this.”
Steve screamed and spun in a circle, bashing in the side of the boy’s head,
just under the helmet, cracking the kid’s jaw and sending a fat wad of
congealed blood blowing out of his mouth.  It hit the side of the woman zombie
like a big hunk of gummy snot. 

“We should let him back in,” Jeff
said.  He reached down to unlock the door.

“No,” Jenny said.  He heard it in
her voice even if he didn’t see her eyes.  That coldness had returned. 

“He’s going to die,” Jeff said,
eye still glued to the peephole.

Outside, Steve cursed and swung
his pipe again, this time popping the woman zombie with a hard left, sending
her crashing into the boy zombie.  They fell into a writhing heap on the ground
and Steve had a window to get away, a slight shaft of daylight and freedom. 
But even as he tensed to run, one of the fat zombie’s grabbed his shoulders and
Steve spun and tripped and fell right on top of the boy zombie. 

“They’re going to get him,” Jeff
said.

Jenny stepped back from Jeff. He
turned the lock on the door and was about to open it when he heard the clacking
of the shotgun and felt the cold barrel pressed against the back of his neck.

“It’s too late for him,” Jenny
said. “Don’t make it too late for you.”

Jeff let go of the lock.

“Take it easy,” he said.

“Nothing against you,” she said. 
“But you open that door and they get in here.  I like you and me too much for
that.”

“I got it,” Jeff said. 

The barrel fell away from his
head.  Jeff realized this whole time, from the moment Steve started yelling to
the gun placed against his neck, he hadn’t breathed.  He let out his held air
and took in a deep gulp.  Everything was happening so fast and it was all out
of control. 

Steve screamed and Jeff pressed
his eye to the hole.  He jerked his head back and stumbled away, falling onto
the floor in shock. 

A scream that sounded like a cat
being strangled ripped through the air.

Jenny looked out the peephole and
pulled away, her face white. 

Steve kept screeching and Jeff
could only imagine what they were doing to him out there.  What he’d seen was
indication enough, but now his mind filled in the details.

He saw Steve’s stomach torn open
and his intestines yanked out even as the kid zombie, pinned underneath Steve’s
thrashing body, chewed on the poor man’s ear.  The woman zombie had hold of his
arm and was literally stripping a chunk of long, stringy skin from his
forearm.  The other two were busy pulling his guts out and stuffing them into
their mouths like starved wolves. 

Jenny dropped the shotgun next to
the desk and collapsed onto the floor next to Jeff.  Tears poured down her face
and she buried her head in his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “I’m so
sorry.”

Jeff stared at her, unmoving.  She
had done this to Steve, she had doomed him to being ripped apart by the living
dead.  Jeff should hate her, he should slap her, he should cuss her out, but he
did none of that.  Instead, he slipped his arm up around her and hugged her
tight.

“It’s okay,” he whispered.  His
own face was wet with tears and his breath hitched in his chest.  What kind of
world was this?  How could they hope to deal with this new reality, much less
survive?  The dead were walking.  The dead were killing.  The dead were eating
their victims.  And then those dead were getting up and killing and eating. 
He’d thought that things would be alright, that the authorities would get
control and that they’d all be rescued and things would go back to normal.

“It’s okay,” Jeff said again.  For
the first time that week, he didn’t believe a word he was saying.

They stayed like that for an
hour. 

Steve’s screams died off only to
be followed by a hollow thunking against the door.  After a half hour of it,
Jeff finally went to the door and looked out the peephole.

Steve was alive again, his body
torn in half from the ribs down, his right arm gone, and he was propping
himself up on his left hand and beating his head against the door.  The other
zombies, the kid and the woman and the fat ones, shuffled around in place,
watching Steve but not joining in.  After Jeff pressed up against the door for
a few seconds, looking out, they seemed to sense him and stumbled forward. 
They thumped against the door, the kid slipping in Steve’s still-wet and slimy
innards and falling down.  It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so
grotesque.