Disappear
I never did enjoy horror movies. I never saw the appeal of all those blood and guts and gore and for what? So we can play guess who’s going to die next? Put bets on how creative their demise is? Give me a nice romcom any day and keep your torture porn, thank you very much.
Maybe if I had been a fan, I’d have been better prepared. A virus, they said. Spread through bodily fluid, they said. Seems to be activated by adrenaline, they said, so whatever you do, stay calm and don’t panic.
You try not panicking when Mrs Harrison from down the road is trying to eat your face.
It’s all very well and good to yell at the screen “shoot her! Shoot her!” when it’s a film, but everyone knows that zombies don’t exist in real life, and when your neighbour looks at you funny, suddenly starts running at you full pelt, your automatic response isn’t to grab a knife or bash her brains out with a rock. It’s to freeze. And zen Buddhist meditation to slow your heartrate while you’re trying to keep her teeth from ripping into your throat and simultaneously fending off her fingers trying to scratch your eyes out? Something tells me the government didn’t think that one through.
The only reason I’m still alive right now is luck. It’s sheer fluke that I happened to be visiting a friend living in a high rise when the news came on. We barricaded ourselves in, blocked up the stairs, just as the sirens started, heralding the screaming. Oh, the screaming. A persistent soundtrack to the surreal reality we found ourselves acting out.
You’d think we’d be safe until the army came, wouldn’t you? I mean, we were snug behind our doors, we had the TV reassuring us; all we needed to do was put our feet up and enjoy a nice cup of tea while the army cleared a path to the door. Shame life is never as simple in practise.
Don’t believe the hype. We found that one out to our cost. There’s the woman, blithely smiling on TV, telling us all to stay where we are and keeping us updated on the areas which have been secured when she listed our street. Lying bitch. We heard the tanks come and we heard gunshot. We also heard the screaming when the zombies overran them. You can’t outnumber the dead or whatever it is they are. That’s when we knew we were alone and our food supplies weren’t going to last forever.
By alone, I don’t mean the other poor saps who were trapped in the building with us. We’d sneak out on to the balconies and compare notes with each other in those moments when the zombies were off marauding elsewhere. There was even a bit of resource sharing in the early days, before we realised we were going to have to fend for ourselves and had a very stark choice between starvation or being eaten.
It was Gabby’s idea to make a break for it. We could see an abandoned army truck just up the road and she reckoned that we could commandeer it, use it to get out of Dodge. Personally I didn’t see it would do us any more good than it had the heavily armed soldiers, but we were down to our last chocolate Hobnob and it made sense to at least try while we still had some energy. Although I did jokingly suggest that if we waited until we were faint from hunger, we could lurch down the road and the zombies wouldn’t realise we weren’t one of them.
The irony.
We suggested that the others join us. Most of them still thought it was best to wait for the army to come. You know, that other army that hadn’t already been turned into sushi. But the couple living above Gabby and the loner from the next staircase said they’d come with us, figured there was a certain safety in numbers.
Mrs Harrison was waiting for us at the foot of the stairs. I thought she’d changed her mind at first, until I saw the look in her eyes, her milky white eyes clouded by decay. That’s one of the effects of the virus, you know. It attacks the eyeballs, eats them from within, so that eventually the zombies end up running blind. You’d think it would give us an advantage, that we could just tiptoe past them, but another effect is an elevated sense of smell. The bastards don’t need to see you. They can just sniff you out.
She screamed and launched herself at me. Before I’d even had time to think, I was on my back, fending her off. Even though I was fighting for my life, I couldn’t bring myself to really try and hurt her. In my mind, she was still the sweet little old lady who’d let me pet her house cat while she was walking it only a few days previously. Lucky for me Gareth didn’t have my qualms and we left her battered body behind as we raced to the truck.
The keys were still in the ignition and Gareth gunned the engine as Gabby checked me over. I’ll never forget the look on her face when she rolled up my sleeve and revealed the bite on my arm. We’d been best friends since we were six, but in that moment, I knew she’d drop me in a heartbeat if that meant saving her own skin and I couldn’t blame her. Last thing I’d want to do is take the risk of infecting my friends. She screamed at Gareth to stop the car, but I told her to wait, let me off at a more strategic place so I could act as a distraction, lead the zombies away. If I was going to die, I was going to do it on my terms, dammit, and my terms were that my friends would get a chance to live another day.
A strange calm arose from within. I’ve never been particularly spiritual, but if I were, I’d almost describe it as God letting me know that He was with me, that I was doing the right thing and I wouldn’t be alone. Gabby bandaged up my arm, which was throbbing like hell, and gave me a knife she’d taken from the kitchen. Maybe I’d be able to overcome my squeamishness enough to take out a zombie or three.
Gareth spotted a good place to pull over safely and they let me off. I stood and watched my last link to humanity drive into the distance. I might be still walking, but to all intents and purposes, I was dead to mankind, whatever remained of it. For some reason, the knowledge that I was irredeemably doomed was comforting, as though nothing I did would ever matter, so why worry?
Turns out the bitch newsreader wasn’t lying about everything. Staying calm does slow the progress of the virus. Although my arm was sore, the rest of me was fine. The familiar screams coming from behind warned me that there was a good chance I’d be eaten before I’d succumb to zombiedom.
And then something strange happened. The mob of zombies running towards me suddenly stopped short as they got closer, sniffing the air. They knew that something was here, but they didn’t seem to be able to pinpoint what or where. At first, I couldn’t believe my luck and although it might have been foolhardy, I went up to one of them and waved my hand right in front of its face. It sniffed at it, followed the scent up to my face, grabbed my shoulders to steady me while it inhaled a good noseful of my skin and then let me go, even though it must have known that I was human. Apparently, if you’re infected, you’re dead to them too. They only like fresh meat and the virus… taints it.
I laughed, then, a bittersweet laugh at everything I’d lost. I could have stayed with my friends, if only we knew, but they’d never take the risk that I’d suddenly turn on them. The army would probably welcome me with open arms, but then they’d cut me open, use me to study the virus in its under developed state. And the zombies smell as strange to me as I do to them.
So that leaves me in some weird no man’s land. I can go wherever I like, take whatever I want, but I have to be on constant alert for humans - my own people. And all the while, I need to maintain a continuous state of relaxation. You have no idea how hard that is when you know that any breath could be your last as a fully functioning person. I might wake up tomorrow as one of them and the thought terrifies me.
All that’s left to do is what the bitch newsreader advised me to do - stay calm and don't panic.