Zombie Pink (26 page)

"What the hell are you talking about?" Andrea asked
.

Andrea noticed that the mosquito bite on Patty's face had expanded to the size of a walnut.

"You're sprouting a tail!" Patty giggled.

Andrea sighed and shrugged her shoulders.

"Too much to drink," Drew whispered, rolling her eyes.

"Stop scratching that mosquito bite!" Andrea told
Patty. "It's turning into a volcano
!"

"Don't wanna!" Patty replied, digging her nails into the angry red lump.

“What the hell’s going on up there,” Drew asked, worriedly looking towards the stairs while chewing on a piece of hair.

“I don’t think I want to know,” Andrea said. “But maybe this was a really bad idea.”

Oh fuck
! Andrea thought.
How many times have actors spoken those very words in horror movies?
And how many times have they been right? Just about every single time
!

Suddenly, Andrea and Drew heard clumping and stumbling noises upstairs, along with an unfamiliar highly agitated
voice.

"Holy shit, they're in the house!" Drew exclaimed.
"They're coming down here!"

"Well...that was the plan, remember?" Andrea said.

"YOU GUYS...MY BRAIN IS BUZZING!" Patty called out; oblivious, as usual.

Only, it didn't
sound like Patty’s voice, at all. It sound
ed like some sort of cartoon voice.

"Shhhh!" Drew said
. "God! Patty, you can turn on the lights now!"

"BAT POO!" Patty shouted in a shrill voice, not making any move to comply.

"
You mean guano?
How many beers did you have, anyway?" Drew demanded, angrily marching over and flipping on the light switch.

Suddenly, the erratic footsteps were
clumping and trudging down the basement stairs. Drew back
ed
up. Patty scoot
ed away from her post on the stairwell and did an impromptu twirl in the middle of the gray
tiled floor.

Briefly, Andrea wondered how her
parents would have handled all this if they'd been home.
She had to admit, they certainly picked the perfect weekend to go away.

"Here they come...." Drew said with foreboding, as though she expected Lisa to appear with the Grim Reaper in tow...
.

"Shit!" Andrea replied, standing over by the computer, not knowing quite what to expect.

"I think something is really wrong with me!" were the first words the girls heard coming out of the sick woman's mouth when she reached
the bottom step. "I taste blood!"

"Yea, honey. We can see that!" Lisa replie
d, in her typical
snarky voice. "What the hell happened to you? It looks like something tried to eat you alive. Or maybe
you
tried to eat something while it was still alive?"

When the woman didn't respond, Lisa said
, "Sorry! Bad joke!"

Naturally, Lisa didn't really sound sorry
. Lisa
never sounded sorry about anything.

"Lisa!" Andrea warned.

Suddenly, Andrea knew what happened.

"It was the Nelson's Rottweiler over on Heathcliff Avenue, wasn't it?" she blurted out
. "I don't trust that dog! I hate the way they just let him run free sometimes. I've seen that dog go after people
.
I won't even walk past that house
. I was thinking of getting some pepper spray...
"

The girls all stared at
the woman. The angry pink and purple rash
was running wild all over her skin in random patterns, looking far worse up close.

And her eyes! They
were a bright angry red right in the middle with a weird milky white color surrounding the red like a bad watercolor painting, harboring an odd lumpy texture like someone had rubbed cottage cheese into them.

They all waited for the woman to respond. But she was just standing there
, mute, resembling a deer caught in the headlights.

A very sick deer...

Lisa produced her smart phone and snapped a picture of the woman.

"Lisa, really!" Drew chastised her friend.

"Please, no pictures!" the woman cried, her wide reddish-
white lumpy eyes looking shell-shocked. “I wasn't attacked by a dog. I was attacked by some....homeless woman. I was just walking up the street, and she came at me with this...demented expression and started... biting me. Just ripping into my skin! I've never felt pain like that before in my entire life!

I mean, can you even imagine, something eating you alive? And I
couldn't fight her off! She had this super human strength......I still feel like I'm in shock.

I mean, I still can't believe this even happened. It seems like a nightmare! And now, I mean yea...there's the pain...but something else is wrong..."

"Did you say a homeless woman?" Lisa asked
. "I saw a homeless woman today. Over behind Maybelline’s.
What did she look like?
"

"Let her sit down!" Andrea
cut in. "Geez!"

Andrea let out a huge breath of relieved air.
As weird and strange and terrible as all this was, at least it had nothing to do with her fantasizing about this woman's husband
.

Lisa led the woman over to the sheet-
covered couch. Then
Andrea ran upstairs to get the poor woman
a can of cold seltzer water and something for the blood.

Something....but what?
Andrea wondered, looking around the kitchen.

I don’t think we have a first aid kit, even though I read somewhere that every family should have one
, she thought.
Are we supposed to apply a tourniquet?
What the hell is a tourniquet, anyway
?

Andrea's thoughts formed a panicky jumble in her brain.

A homeless woman attacked her? That is so weird.

A woman attacking another woman? How? With a weapon?

No, she said the woman bit her.

Bit her? Like a zombie?
Like a dog with rabies?

That is just too weird
.

Andrea ended up grabbing two old dish towels that had
some holes in them.
She felt bad about one of the dish towels because it had
a cute picture of a little blue bird on it.

When she came back down the basement stairs, Lisa was exclaiming
, "Yea, that's her! That's the same woman I saw behind Maybelline’s! I knew she looked suspicious. I mean, I thought she looked really creepy. Like...... evil, you know?
But I never would have guessed she goes around eating people. Is she that hungry? Why doesn't she go to a soup kitchen? Oh wait. I guess because they don't serve human ears at a soup kitchen
."

Andrea held out the can of seltzer water and the dish towels for the woman to take
.
The woman had to stretch her arm way out to reach the items, since Andrea didn't want to get too close.

Then the woman thanked Andrea, which made Andrea feel guilty, yet again, for fantasizing about her husband.

Suddenly, the woman screamed.

"
OH MY GOD!
WHAT'S ON MY HANDS?" she hollered.

No one knew how to answer.

"I don't know," Andrea admitted
. "Um...what's your name?"

"Mimi," the woman replied, still staring at her rash covered
hands. "Mimi Gladstone. I live right down this street.
Four forty-three
Lamplighter. What the hell is wrong with my hands? They weren't this way before! Oh my God! I've never seen anything like this!"

"It's just some kind of rash, like eczema..." Andrea responded, trying to sound like it was "no big deal," even though the rash looked grotesque; like no rash she had ever seen before in her life.

"Or maybe it's an injury,” Drew suggested
. “Like a bunch of bruises under your skin. Bruises can make your skin all different colors..."

"Oh my God!" the woman repeated for the third time
. "Is there something you're not telling me? Is that why you have those
surgical gloves on?"

"We need to report this and you need to get to a hospital before that shit gets infected!" Drew announced
, ignoring the woman's questions. "T
hat homeless woman, or whatever she is, needs to be arrested!
The only problem is, we can't get through to anywhere."

"You can't?" the woman asked
, studying her pinkish purple looking hands. "What about 9-1-1?"

"La-la-la-la!" Patty sang, spinning around in circles in the middle of the floor.

"Don't mind her," Drew told
Mimi. "9-1-1 isn't picking up. And neither is information. Andrea, do you guys have a phone book here? I can call my mom and ask for the number of the local police. Maybe we're supposed to just automatically know that number. Does anyone know it?"

No one answered.

"Should I call your husband?" Andrea finally asked Mimi.

Mimi thought about this for a moment before she agreed
. Then she g
ave Andrea her husband's cell number, and Andrea punched the number into her cell phone
.

Oh my God,
Andrea thought
. I'm ca
lling Mr. Sexy Jogger
!
Only, I can't think of him that way right now.

The phone rang a number of times, but HE...the woman's husband, did not pick up.

"I'll wait a few minutes and try again," Andrea informed the woman
. "Do you want me to try your home number?"

"Sure," Mimi replied.

Then she supplied Andrea
with her home number.

There was no answer there, either.

"Fuck!" Andrea swore, feeling frustrated.

Then she apologized to Mimi, realizing that some people are offended by swearing.

Andrea walked back over to the computer and sat
down at the desk. However, when
she tried to go online, she saw that stupid box with the load-up bar that said
Internet Explorer has stopped working.

"What the hell?" Andrea complained
. "I can’t get online!"

"Why are you guys dressed like surgeons?" Mimi asked, pressing a dish towel against her torn ear.

"Don't take offense," Andrea told her
. "But we didn't know if you were contagious or not."

"Contagious?" the woman asked in a incredulous voice
, laying down on the couch and wincing. "I was attacked! How would that make me contagious?"

"Well....Andrea said, feeling upset that she had obviously made the woman angry
. "You have that weird rash. It's all over your face too, you know. And ....um...what's wrong with your eyes? Can you see okay?"

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Mimi took
a few more swigs of the icy cold seltzer water.

"Show her your mirror, Patty!" Lisa commanded.

Patty stopped spinning in circles and stared at the ceiling.

"The pink leopards have all gone to heaven," she stated, in a solemn voice.

Lisa rolled her eyes and marched over to the desk, extracting a mirror from Patty's oversized Christian Dior tote bag
.
Then she brought the mirror over to Mimi and handed it over to the sickly woman.

Andrea was attempting to contact the woman's husband, once again.

Why won't he pick up
? she wondered.

"Don't freak!" Lisa warn
ed the woman about her reflection
. "It's pretty bad. Put it this way. I don't think you'll be applying for America's Next Top Model any time soon."

"God, Lisa!" Andrea sighed, the phone still ringing.

Mr. Sexy Jogger's phone wouldn't even go to voice mail so Andrea
couldn't leave a message.

Although...what sort of message would she leave that wouldn't sound absolutely insane?

Uh...sorry to bother you, but your wife is here in my basement looking like a crazed zombie..
..

"Just a little humor, babe," Lisa snapped. "You should try it sometime."

Mimi took a deep breath and looked
into the small mirror. Then she gasp
ed
in horror.

After that, she let out a blood curdling scream
.

"It's okay," Drew said, trying to calm the woman down
. "You'll get better..."

Andrea was just about to hang up when....HE ANSWERED THE PHONE!

Luckily, by that time, Mimi had
stopped screaming. Now she
was just laying
on the couch perfectly still, with a dish towel over her face.
It was the dishtowel with the little blue bird on it, which was now a little red bird since it was covered in blood.