Raspy sounds of hunger pushed from her rotted throat, washing over me with the smell of old blood and things long dead. I didn’t understand how breath still rattled in her lungs. How her vocal cords, exposed and moldy, were still capable of producing noise—a terrible wet, scraping that was so far from human. So far from her.
My mother had a sweet voice in life. Melodic. Powerful, when she wanted it to be. Her songs were one of my sharpest memories as a child. They were the soundtrack of my youth. Everyone used to say, “Bridgette could have made it big.” If she didn’t have four kids, two jobs, and a husband who cared more for drinking than working. Now she’ll never sing again.
For some reason, the thought struck me harder than the look of her gray, decomposing flesh and patchy hair; sporadic clumps of white strands, matted and darkened with bloody tissue.
Beside me, my daughter screamed, with all the gusto of a nine-year-old whose world had fallen apart. Her gaze darted from the horror inching toward us in the dining room to the real-time carnage of my boyfriend’s death happening in the kitchen, and she screamed louder.
I put a hand over her mouth, silencing the high-pitched dinner bell before it carried into the street and brought more of the undead in through the busted front door. “Shhh, Lila, please,” I whispered. “You know better.”
She nodded, tears streaming, and I removed my hand. Her shoulders shrugged in a fast, heavy breath. “Grandma…” It was all she could get out before burying her face in my leg.
I peeled Lila off me and shoved her toward the bathroom. “In there. Lock the door. Don’t open it for anyone but me. Go!”
Lila hurried off, messy, brown ponytail bouncing, as her short legs carried her down the hall and into the bathroom. The door closed. Locked. I imagined her hiding in the bathtub, curled up in a ball, clutching the dirty ladybug covered backpack she hadn’t put down since we left home. I raised the tire iron in my grip and vowed, as I had a hundred times, to do whatever was necessary to protect her. Lila was the only good thing I’d ever done in my life.
We shouldn’t have brought her here, I thought, watching my mother’s bloated jaw, snapping involuntarily, searching for a meal. My stare darted to the body in the kitchen, blood-soaked and twitching, as the mindless fiends bent over my boyfriend, devouring him alive.
It’s too much.
It’s all too much. No child should have to see what we’ve all become.
We should have gone to the country like Rusty wanted. There’s too many in the city. Coming home was a mistake.
The outbreak was too widespread for an old, wheelchair dependent woman with a bad hip to survive on her own. If I’d gotten here sooner…. But there were too many states between us, and with the roads clogged and gas scarce and wandering bands of the undead everywhere, the trip became painfully long. My mother couldn’t run, couldn’t fight. But I let wishes override common sense, and convinced myself she’d be here, barricaded in, alive and well. Maybe, with Mr. and Mrs. Hitchens next door. Or the Walker family on the corner. It was a close-knit neighborhood. Everyone looked after each other. Particularly her, after my father left.
Yet, in my heart I knew better.
I knew I’d find her stricken with the virus, holed up in the dusty rooms of the ramshackle house I grew up in. I knew what she’d look like, flesh disintegrating and mind gone. I knew what I’d have to do. I’d seen, and killed, enough of the ravaged these last four months to be prepared.
Except, I wasn’t.
Her sallow, blood-stained eyes (once a soft brown) locked on me, not with the love of a mother, but with the malice of a starving predator. Her bloated fingers, tips torn down to the nailbed, dug into the floor as she crawled toward me. She wouldn’t stop unless I stopped her.