For Cory
A Bang at the Door
It began with a tap in the night. Then there came a knock, and finally a bang at the front door of Kansas born and raised Miss Jennifer Crenshaw’s two-bedroom home, where the twenty-year-old God-fearing woman slept in between shifts at the neighboring city’s hospital. She was training to be a nurse. It was a miracle that the bleeding man, who continued to desperately knock on her door, chose her house to flee to. It was one of those things that couldn’t just be a coincidence.
For his intents and purposes, however, it was. In a frenzied state of mind, the man had hardly made it up Jennifer’s long and winding rural driveway without passing out from loss of blood, not being able to take the time to decide whose house to run to. Her home was simply the closest to his now wrecked Ford automobile.
Beating against the door with his scarlet, bloodied hands sapped what remaining strength the victimized man had. His vision was blurred by fatigue. In between blinks the man watched a warm, yellow glow emanate from the window next to the door as Jennifer turned her lights on. He heard the door open and a woman’s gasp as he fell to the ground.
“Zombies,” the man croaked as he fainted atop Jenny’s welcome mat. “Zom…bies.”
Jennifer had misinterpreted what he said out of shock and surprise that a bleeding man had come to knock on her door at three in the morning, she decided. It was not “zombies” he had said. Clearly he was a foreigner, speaking some language Jennifer did not know.
Brushing off his last exasperated exclamation, she pulled the heavy man into her house and laid him on the shag carpet of her living room. She then shut and locked the door. As a nurse in training, Jennifer knew first aid well. Her inexperience rendered her trust in the knowledge she attained falter, so instead of applying pressure to the massive wound in the man’s neck, she went to the phone to dial 911.
Jennifer cursed her shaking fingers as she punched the three numbers into her telephone. As the tone indicated that the number was ringing, Jennifer tried to come up with what to tell the emergency services. She was still in a state of surprise and hadn’t yet had time to gain her composure. It turned out that she wouldn’t have to - a pleasant recorded voice greeted Jennifer, saying, “We’re sorry, all lines are currently in use. In the event of a natural disaster, please seek out medical assistance from the nearest emergency station in your area…” Jennifer’s concentration on the message was lost when she heard the bleeding man on the carpet gurgle and cough out blood all over her brown shag floor.
She tossed the phone in the general direction of its base and kneeled over the wounded man. He was going to die on her floor. She knew it, just as she knew there was nothing she could do anymore. She grabbed a rag from the kitchen and pressed it against his gushing neck. The blood stopped, but not because of the pressure she applied to his wound. It stopped because there was nothing else for him to bleed. She pulled away the rag and stood up.
She turned away from the man’s body and shoved her face in her hands. She didn’t know what to do next. She tried to call her parents. No luck. The lines were busy. She turned on her television, hoping to get some idea of what might be going on. A test card pattern consumed the television screen as she flipped through the channels. She would have gone for the radio next, but as she went to flip it on, the power went out. She was now abandoned in her middle-of-nowhere house with nothing but a corpse to keep her company.
Without the electricity, it was pitch black. Jennifer went to the kitchen and felt around for the cabinet doors behind which her flashlight was kept. She found it and flicked it on. Turning around to reenter her living room, the frightened woman pointed her light at the spot on the floor where the man had died. She gasped and dropped her flashlight as she saw that the man was no longer there.
She felt a sharp pain in her neck as something behind her sank its teeth into her flesh. Falling to the ground in an avalanche of pain as her attacker’s weight pushed into her back, she turned around to see the man who had died begin to rip into her with his bloody mouth. She passed out, and then she died.
Then she got back up. Along with the man, she clambered over to her front door, not able to figure out that it was locked. The two of them tapped at the door.
The tap became a knock, and then a bang on the front door of the late Miss Jennifer Crenshaw’s rural Kansas two-bedroom home.