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Authors: Kelly M. Hudson

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BOOK: The Turning: A Tale of the Living Dead
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Jeff staggered from the door and
helped Jenny to her feet.  He pointed at the shotgun.

“We should go into your bedroom
for a while, at least until they think we’re gone,” he said.

Jenny nodded, wiping away her
tears and the snot from her nose.  She got the gun and looked at Jeff.  She
held the gun out to him, an offering.

“You can take it,”
she said.  “I don’t want it anymore.”
Jeff shook his head, a shadow crossing his face. 

“I haven’t shot
one of those since I was a kid.” 

He went down the
hallway and she followed, casting a glance behind her at the front door,
cradling the shotgun like a baby.

 

They lay in bed, not saying a
word, for a long time.  Jeff held Jenny and every now and then they shifted and
she held him. 

“Do you think they hear us?” Jenny
said.

Jeff thought a moment.  “I don’t
know.  Maybe.  But I don’t think that’s all of it.”

“What do you mean?”

He propped his head up on his
elbow, his face inches from hers.  Outside, the sun had dipped and it was
twilight.  Jenny had left her shades open and the fading light of the day was
trickling in, pushing back the darkness of the apartment in a losing battle. 
All quiet, except for the occasional moan from the bathroom.

“I think some of them, maybe most
of them, hear and see still, but I don’t think  it’s their primary sense,” he
said.

“What is?  Can they smell us?”

“I don’t know,” he said.  “I think
maybe they can sense our heat.” 

“Like heat-seeking missiles?” 

Jeff smiled.  “Yeah.  Like that. 
When I went to the door to look out, Steve was beating his head against it,
like he knew we were in here.”
Jenny closed her eyes, a pained expression knitting her face.  “I shouldn't
have thrown him out,” she said.

“You did the right thing,” Jeff
said.

They didn't say anything for a few
minutes before Jeff finally spoke again.

“Maybe he just remembered being in
here, but the thing was, the other zombies were out there like they had nothing
better to do than stand around and look dumb.  But after I was at the door a
couple of seconds, they came straight for me.  There was no way they heard me
or saw me or knew I was there.  So they must have sensed my body heat somehow.”
“This is all so crazy,” Jenny said.

“And if they can sense our body
heat, that would explain a lot of other things, too,” he said.

“Like what?”

Like why they stop eating the
bodies of the animals and people they kill, he thought.  When the corpse grew
cold they lost interest and moved on to the next warm body.  But he wasn’t
going to say that; it would only upset her more.

“Like why we can hide in here
without really being bothered.  I bet if we wait until morning, those zombies
out there will be gone.”

“Except for Steve,” she said.  Her
body shivered.  “I think when they know you’re here, they won’t go away until
they get you.”
“Hey,” Jeff said softly.  “It’s going to be okay.”

Jenny buried her head into him
again.  She was shaking all over.

“No, it won’t.”
He slipped his arms around her.  He was shaking, too. 

“Shh,” he whispered.  He pet the
top of her head, running his hand through her long hair. 

She didn’t stop shaking and
neither did he, until they both fell asleep about the same time.

 

3

 

When he woke up, it was morning,
the fresh sunlight streaming in through the open shades and nearly blinded
him.  Jeff looked at the clock on the stand and saw it was seven.  They had
slept over twelve hours, straight.

Jenny stirred.  Her eyes fluttered
open and she looked at him, bleary and still so tired.

“What time is it?” she said.  He
told her and she sighed.  “I want to sleep more.”

Jeff rubbed her arm.  “Go ahead,”
he said.  “I’ll make some breakfast.”
He slid to the edge of the bed when her arm shot out and grabbed his elbow. 

“Stay with me until I fall asleep
again,” she said.

Jeff snuggled up next to her and
scratched her back softly until she was snoring, then he got up and went into
the living room.  When he got there, he heard Steve still beating his head
against the door and the others clawing at it. 

He hung his head.  They weren’t
going to go away, not now that they knew he and Jenny were in there.

Reluctantly, Jeff walked to the
door and looked out the peephole.  Yes, they were still there, but there were
four others, now, and his presence at the door excited them.  Their scraping
and thumping, which had been on automatic—like they were robots, repeating the
same pattern over and over—suddenly picked up pace and ferocity as he got
closer to them. 

They knew he was there.  And they
wanted in.

He stumbled back and ran into
Jenny, who’d slipped up behind him, and screamed.  Jenny moved around him and
looked out the peephole, saw what he had, and stepped away.  She looked at him,
worried.

“What are we going to do?” she
said.

He went back to the door and
looked out.  “I think we’re okay.  There’s only room for them to go two, maybe
three deep, before they’re pushed up against the rail.  So I don’t think they
can get any leverage to push the door in.  And as long as they don’t figure out
about the window, we should be fine.”
Jenny’s eyes flicked to the boarded-up window.  “We should reinforce that.”
“Yeah.  And I think maybe we should stay out of the living room as much as
possible, to keep from stirring them up.  Maybe if they don’t sense us for a
while, they’ll go away,” Jeff said.

“Okay,” Jenny said.  She went into
the kitchen and Jeff followed.  He watched as she fished a hammer and some
nails from the cabinet underneath the sink.

“I can take the door off to the
bathroom and we can nail that up,” he said.  “And I can take apart some of the
cabinets, use their doors to reinforce everything.”
“Aren't you helpful?” she said with a sly smile.

“I used to work construction,” he
said.

Jeff shook his head.  “Hell, no. 
They had me too busy to do that.  I was driving the forklift, moving stuff,
sweating my ass off.”

“I guess it's a good thing for me
you ended up here,” she said.  She turned and opened the fridge, pulling out
some food to cook.

Jeff smiled and went down the
hallway.  He stopped in front of the closed bathroom door, the smile dripping
from his face.  This was all nice and cozy, him and the pretty girl.  But the
truth was, her dead boyfriend was in there, and a whole host of zombies were
outside.

He opened the door, the sound of
Bill’s hair scraping against the back of the tub filling his ears.  He pushed
the curtain back and Bill was still there, still with the sock in his mouth,
still unable to move anything but his head.  Jeff stared at him a long time,
looking into his glassy eyes.  There was no life there, no spark. 

Jenny slid beside him.

“I can’t stand him being here,”
she said.  “But I can’t let him go.”

He pointed at Bill’s eyes. 
“There’s nothing there.  Nothing.  It’s empty and black.”
Jenny rested her head against his arm.

“I listened on the radio, before
they stopped broadcasting,” she said.  “And all those talk show people were
on.  You know the ones, the conservative guys.  And they were all saying it was
God’s judgment.  That God was punishing us because of the liberals, and the
gays, and the abortionists.” 

“Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know what to believe
anymore,” she said.  She gripped him tighter.

Jeff stared down into Bill’s
lifeless eyes one last time.

“Me, neither.”

 

He removed the door and they
nailed it over the boards on the window.  It attracted the zombies, of course,
and after all the hammering was done, Jeff and Jenny could hear their
fingernails scraping against the glass. 

Jeff looked out the door and then
at Jenny.

“There’s probably five more now,”
he said.  He looked back at her.  “We need to come up with an escape plan,
incase they get in here.”

Jenny chewed her bottom lip. 
“We’ll think on it,” she said.  “Right now, I want to eat.”
Jeff smiled, his stomach growling.  He watched her for a moment as she got
some hamburger meat out of the fridge, wondering for a second how long the
electricity would last.  Mostly, though, he stared at her, the way her body
moved, the way her fingers molded the meat into patties, the curve of her hips
and weight of her breasts.  He’d never seen anyone so beautiful in his life.

“I’m going to go look out back,”
he said, breaking his own spell.  “See if I can come up with something.”
She nodded and he left her there, the zombies outside scratching on the glass
and moaning with their own brand of hunger.

Jeff stopped at the closed
bathroom door.  There was still the matter of Bill.  He had to go.  Jeff knew
he’d have to do it, that Jenny would never do anything on her own.  If this was
to be done, it had to be done by him.

He looked through Jenny’s closet
and found a set of white sheets that looked a little old and worn.  He carried
the sheet into the bathroom and gazed down at Bill, looking up at him.  Jeff
averted his gaze.  Even though to him, Bill was just a thing, it still bothered
him what he was going to do

Jeff popped the sheet open and let
it unfurl to the floor.  He wanted to do this and do it quickly.  He bent over
Bill and shoved one edge of the sheet as far under the corpse as possible.  He
pushed the material until he’d worked it all the way through to the other
side.  The whole time, Bill moaned into his sock but still couldn’t move.  His
flesh felt weird to the touch, kind of soft and fatty, like it was a
marshmallow over an open campfire, just about to turn gooey.  Jeff had to shut
his mouth to hold the vomit back.  And the stench!  When he got under the body
and separated it from the bottom of the tub, the worst smell he’d ever sniffed
smashed his nose and this time he did vomit, bile and stomach acid burning the
back of his throat.  He turned to the side and let loose into the toilet. 

Jeff ran some cold water in the
sink and splashed his face.  He rinsed out his mouth and looked down at Bill
and shook his head.

“Sorry about this,” he said.  Bill
didn’t seem to notice.   Jeff folded the rest of the sheet over top of Bill and
tucked it under him.  He lifted the dead body by the shoulders—its face now
covered by the sheet—and kept wrapping the sheet over until it was nearly done
at the top.  Then he bent to the legs and did the same thing, gathering the
rest of the material and wrapping it until it was tight.  That left the area
around the stomach a little loose, but that was alright. 

Sweating, Jeff stepped from the
bathtub.  Bill was there, under the sheet, like a rag-tag mummy.  Now came the
hard part.

Jeff was no body-builder.  He
worked out occasionally at the gym, but most of his exercise came from jogging,
so he wasn’t yoked by any means, but he also wasn’t a coach potato.  It took
him a couple of tries to haul Bill up out of the tub completely, but when he
finally did, he threw him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and stumbled into
the hall and the bedroom.  He could feel Bill’s head, under the sheet, moving
around, his jaws snapping open and shut around the sock, trying to bit him
through the sheet.  Jeff managed to open the door to the porch without
dropping Bill and stagger out.  From this vantage point, he could see out over
the street that ran by the apartment complex and across to the small shopping
center just a block away.  The streets teemed with the living dead, stumbling
past the abandoned Kinko’s and Starbucks and Walgreen’s.  He took a look around
and wondered if maybe him and Jenny were the only living people around.   It
was late afternoon, the sun fading in the west and the sky the most brilliant
orange he’d seen in a long time.  The dead, oblivious to the beauty of the
sunset, groaned and shuffled, hundreds strong, teeming over the streets and in
and out of houses like drugged ants.

With a grunt and a heave, he
tossed Bill so he landed on the railing.  Jeff held him there for a moment,
catching his breath.  Bill’s head had poked free from his wrapping and the sock
had fallen from his mouth.  He looked at Jeff, moaning louder now.

Over the railing, Bill’s moans
were joined by others, gathering at the foot of the property, attracted by all
the commotion, a chorus of the dead singing its song of lust. 

“What are you doing?” Jenny asked
from behind him.

Startled, Jeff flinched, and when
he did, he shoved Bill’s body over the railing.  It fell and landed with a wet
smack.

Jenny screamed.  She ran to the
rail and looked over, Bill’s naked body on the ground, free of the sheet,
staring back up at her with his blank eyes.  

She whirled, her face red and
fierce and covered in tears. 

“What did you do?” she screamed. 
“What did you do?”
Jeff tried to speak but he couldn’t.  Jenny snarled and pummeled his chest
with balled-up fists, beating him back towards the bedroom, past the bed, and
into the hallway.  She kept shouting at him, “What did you do?” until he was
into the living room.  She turned and stormed into her room and slammed the
door shut, leaving Jeff alone, the dead outside, scratching on the door.

 

After a couple of hours, he gave
up.  She wouldn’t come from her room and she wouldn’t answer him.  She’d locked
the door and all he could hear was the sounds of her sobbing from inside.  So
he quit trying and went into the kitchen.

He chewed a couple of the
hamburger patties she’d cooked, not really hungry, but doing it to have
something to do.  Outside the door and the window, the dead were still there,
still clawing away, trying to get in. 

Jeff went to the door and looked
out, hoping their activity would take his mind off of what he’d done.  He’d
made a bad decision.  He’d hurt Jenny and he wished he could take it all back. 
But what was done was done and there was nothing he could do.  It was like with
his father and mother, when---

He pushed those thoughts away. 
This was not the time or place.

He watched as the zombie boy from
earlier was pushed back by the sheer numbers of the dead—now there were about twenty
of them out there—and into the railing.  The zombies squeezed in and the rail
broke, the zombie boy tumbling over the side followed by about six others. 
They fell into the courtyard, down to the pool and the lounge area.  He kept
watch for a few moments as the living dead shuffled around, some falling,
others staying on the walkway.  When he tired of this he shambled over to the
couch and lay down. 

He closed his eyes and sleep came
fast and hard and black.

 

He woke in the middle of the night
to the sound of Jenny scrubbing down the bathtub.  She was muttering to
herself, cursing him and cursing God and weeping.  The scent of bleach burned
his nose as Jeff cried, too.  He lay there for a long time, listening to her
and to the dead, still at the door, scrabbling away.

Eventually, he fell back asleep. 

 

When he opened his eyes again, it
was nearly noon and he’d slept a lot longer than he’d intended.  Jenny was
sitting by the couch, leaning against it, her arm propped up under her head as
she slept.  He stared at her for a moment, looking at her long black hair and
her soft face, still splotchy from crying so much.  She was so beautiful.  Jeff
wished that he hadn’t met her like this, in these circumstances.  He wished the
world hadn’t fallen into a crack of Hell itself.  He laid there and wished a
lot of things, and when none of them came true, he decided to listen to his
bladder and got up.

He was careful not to stir her. 
There was no telling how much sleep she’d gotten or hadn’t, so he slid over the
arm rest of the couch and softly walked to the bathroom.  She’d cleaned the
entire area, from floor to ceiling.  The chrome shined and the tiles on the
floor gleamed.  He almost didn’t want to step in for fear of spoiling it, but
there was no denying the call of nature.

Jeff did his business and pulled
the sweat pants back up to cover himself, pants that belonged to Bill.  He
thought about what he’d done again and wondered if it was the right thing to do

“Do you like it?” Jenny said.  She
was standing in the doorway, looking at him. 

He met her eyes but they were
neutral, neither judging him nor forgiving him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.  “I
shouldn’t have done that.  I should have asked you first.  I should have
waited.  I just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

Jenny’s eyes searched his.  He
could see now that she was still hurting and he felt as terrible as a person
could, but there was nothing he could do to take it back.  She reached over and
grabbed the bottom of his shirt and lifted it quickly over his head and yanked
it off.

“What are you doing?” he said.

She pushed him back until his
heels hit the side of the tub and then she dropped to her haunches and grabbed
his sweatpants.  With one smooth motion, they were down around his ankles and
he was standing, naked.  His hands flew to his groin to cover himself.

BOOK: The Turning: A Tale of the Living Dead
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