Too late, she couldn’t go back to the shed now; she didn’t have the nerve to go past them again. So, she continued on, edging herself against the side of the house towards the front yard, gathering the courage to check out the street.
There’s my car!
The strangest thing, the plane crash survivors—creepers were everywhere, scattered around her car. Only,
they
weren't staggering around. No.
They
seemed to be asleep, asleep in the oddest positions. It looked as if
they
had all been zapped by a Cosmic-Taser gun and had just flopped instantaneously to the ground in whatever contorted state
they
had been in at the moment of being zapped.
Could she do it? Could she sneak to the car without waking the creepers?
What if the car didn’t start? Did I leave it running? It could be out of gas . . .
“Just go. NOW!” The voice inside her head warned. Her shin throbbed from last night’s accident with the tricycle; she impatiently shrugged the pain away and crept lightly to the car while her heart threatened to jump out of her throat.
Scarlett tiptoed to the car, carefully stepping over several charred-mangled bodies, and she found herself holding her breath at the foul stench wafting in the air, like the smell of a decaying animal left under the house to rot, the smell of death. She counted the steps. The car was only three feet away, but it was surrounded by creepers, writhing about on the pavement in an apparent restless, sleep-like state.
They were waking up—right now. And she was standing in the middle of them. And all she had to do was take one more step and open the car door. But her body went numb. Petrified. A series of thoughts flashed through her head: What if the door’s locked? What if the car didn’t start? Should she run back to the shed?
No. They will find me this time.
The words came to her from out of the blue.
She swallowed hard and reached for the door handle. One more step . . . her foot was stuck; she couldn’t reach the handle by an inch. Scarlett gasped as a gnarly hand latched onto her lavender, kitten-heel pump, scraping her ankle with his knobby-bloodstained fingers.
Just one more step
, one more step before he
really
wakes up. With half-closed eyes, he lethargically put her lavender pump in his mouth like a sleepy toddler seeking the comfort of a pacifier. She didn’t yank her foot back, afraid of waking him while she balanced herself on one foot, trying to decide on her best move. If she fell, she’d land on at least two or three of the disfigured bodies writhing about on the pavement below her.
She tried to release her foot from the pump, but her feet were sweaty, and her sockless foot stuck to the fake-leather sole with the tenacity of Gorilla Glue. Suddenly
it
let out an unbearable moan and lurched up from the ground unexpectedly only to collapse back down on its back, claiming her shoe in the process. Scarlett could not stifle her scream; it just came out.
Suddenly
they
all woke up at once, but
they
seemed to find it difficult to get to their feet like
they
were drunk—very drunk, and
they
twisted about the pavement trying to stand up on their floundering legs like a herd of newborn fawns from Hades. And even though her foot was now free of her hapless shoe, she still couldn’t move, paralyzed by fear. The horror of the whole scene had her lips quivering uncontrollably, and all she could do was gape at the creeper gnawing at her lavender shoe.
Finally, Scarlett gathered her wits and was able to reach the car door handle. Unlocked! She jumped inside, one shoe less. The creeper ripped the lavender pump from its mouth and swayed about next to the open car door ogling the shoe, then her and then the shoe again as if it couldn’t believe that its incredible good luck had just turned into incredible bad luck.
Scarlett froze again, afraid to look at him—it. Afraid to move. Her throat felt like a lump of coal. She couldn’t even swallow. A gurgling growl snapped her back to reality, and she slammed the car door.
There, on the front seat, where she had left them, were the keys. Even her purse was there, untouched. Everything was OK until she started the car.
They
quickly surrounded the car like an overzealous mob of paparazzi. But it no longer mattered. She slammed the pedal to the metal. She was gone.
When Scarlett finally found her way out of the
Nightmare on Elm Street
community, she decided to take a chance and drop by Maggie’s house. She had been avoiding Maggie since the un-wedding, for Maggie had always warned her that Kevin had not been “Mr. Right.” The strange thing was, every time Scarlett got her bearings straight and headed towards Maggie’s subdivision, the road was blocked so she would try an alternate route only to find the road blocked off again. She felt like a lab rat trapped in a maze of blocked streets and abandoned vehicles.
Occasionally, Scarlett came upon a pedestrian and would immediately slow down. And every time, she saw that same awkward gait, the bloodstained-tattered clothing—it was a
dead
giveaway. And, whenever she happened to see a group of them
shuffling about, she immediately flipped a u-ey and headed in another direction.
She had been forced to take so many detours that she lost her bearings, and it seemed like all the detours and roadblocks lead her directly to Berry Street. She’d start off heading east but somehow always ended back to Berry Street, so she drove down Berry Street. She passed long, wavy, lines of yellow school buses on both sides of the street. The buses sat empty: lifeless. After she drove past the buses, she could not believe her eyes. Roseville High School was nothing but a charred ruin.
What the—?
Actually, it looked more like the school had been bombed; it had that Syrian war-ravaged look, giving her an even more desolate feeling of hopelessness. “What’s happening?” she shrieked in a state of panic.
Last night in the shed, Scarlett had thought that perhaps these horribly injured people were the survivors of the plane crash. But that didn’t explain her irrational fear. Also, there were just too many of them rambling all over Roseville, not just near the crash site.
What sort of event would cause Roseville to evacuate?
“Unless, we’re at war . . .” She nodded, “That’s it. That has to be it. War?” She was momentarily relieved that something finally seemed logical, yet the thought of war terrified her.
Scarlett reluctantly gave up her attempt to visit Maggie and finally, after two hours, reached the safety of her own home. She paced about the living room and then on impulse decided to visit her paranoid-hermit neighbor. The man who had chained his courtyard gate.
Now
she knew why he had behaved in such a manner; he must have thought she was one of them:
a creeper
. Hopefully, he could fill-in the blanks and explain what was going on here.
“Oops,” she ran back to the garage to retrieve the baseball bat, better to be prepared, she thought. Upon reaching the sidewalk to his building, she noticed an abandoned shopping cart overflowing with all kinds of items, mainly food. A few feet beyond that was a stuffed rucksack.
Did he just leave all of this
?
Why would he do such a thing
? Surprisingly, his courtyard gate stood wide open; the huge chain was crumpled in a pile on the concrete: useless.
Once inside the secluded courtyard, to her horror, she saw a bloody body lying face down on the porch. The body appeared to be a woman wearing a blood-soaked skirt and no shirt. Scarlett quickly averted her eyes, afraid of what else she might see.
“OH, SHIT!” Blood was everywhere, and it was still moist. Scarlett gagged and attempted to scuff-off the sticky blood from the bottom of her Sketchers. The front door was open, and to her astonishment, a rifle stood in the doorway as if someone had completely forgotten about it. She couldn’t help but think that was odd, extremely odd, especially for this particular neighbor who had seemed so obsessed with security.
Scarlett rationalized: Obviously he recently had an encounter with one of them, a creeper, which had resulted in a bloody battle, and it looked like he had shot it in the head from what she could tell. Perhaps in his shock, he just left the gun.
She poked her head inside his condo and impatiently knocked on the open door. “Hellloooo, it’s your neighbor,” she felt her throat go hoarse. “Sorry to barge in, I really need to talk to you,” she pleaded. No answer. She stepped into the entryway and shouted a panic-y “Hellooo?” again.
Scarlett let herself in, thinking he could be injured and may need help. The condo had the same floorplan as hers as she dared to snoop about the living room. The place was a wreck, with blood just about everywhere. She realized that perhaps it was not the smartest thing to enter a stranger’s home, uninvited. However, she had to find out what was going on
right this very minute,
and she tiptoed from the living room to the kitchen and dining room. He wasn’t here.
One of the bedrooms’ doors stood ajar. She opened the door ever so slowly until she saw him on the bed, his back towards her, apparently asleep. She figured that based on the amount of blood on the carpet and blankets that he must have been attacked by the dead creeper in his courtyard.
I thought those creepers were dangerous.
He seemed to be having trouble with his breathing. Since she couldn’t see him, she really couldn’t tell how badly injured he was. She decided to let him sleep.
I‘ll wait in the living room for a while. That way he can’t avoid me.
Ugh, I’m not sitting on that!
The couch cushions were soaked in blood. She decided it might be best to sit in the dining room (away from the blood), and wait for him to wake up.
“What’s this?” she whispered. She grabbed a flyer from the oak dining room table: FEMA MANDATORY EVACUATION. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. It listed high schools as temporary evacuation shelters, and it also listed Major Shelter Centers. The list included all the big sporting arenas, stadiums and concert auditoriums in the Sacramento metropolitan area and the San Francisco Bay Area as well. The nearest Major Shelter Center was the old Sacramento Kings’ arena in Natomas, in the Sacramento area.
She stared at the bloodied-fingerprinted flyer, speechless.
So there had been a major catastrophe . . . It happened when I was drugged-out on those flippin’ painkillers
. She tried thinking back, but those four to five to six days were all a blur. It started to make a bit of sense, as she recalled the sirens and the helicopters and the fact that the electricity had gone out. And poor old Miss Purlie, whatever had happened—it must have been too much for her to handle. “Oh, please let Cyndi and her family be all right.” And she couldn’t stop the flood of tears that followed.
A commotion in the bedroom startled her.
He’s awake
. “Uh, excuse me, dear Mr. Neighbor, I really need to talk to—” Scarlett screamed in midsentence. He stood before her, staring at her as a chunk of oozing flesh from his neck plopped onto the dining room tile. But that’s not what made her scream. He was one of
them—
now
.
His bulging eyes protruded from his eye sockets, and saliva dripped from two rows of snarling teeth. She looked into his eyes; she was too close, close enough to see into its black-soulless eyes. He seemed to be in as much shock with her appearance as she was with his.
“Uh, OK, sorry, I’ll just be on my way now. Uh, you might want to get that looked at,” she whimpered, staring at its flesh-torn neck in utter fear, knowing all too well that he—
it
did not understand a single word she said.
She edged her way backward towards the front door, one hand sliding against the wall and one hand gripping the bat so hard her fingers started to go numb.
It
didn’t seem to know what to do next.
It
just stood there ogling her, as if lusting her. The horrible gurgling sounds started. And, once again, she ran. She ran out the front door and directly to her safe home.
***
Now she had an idea of what Kevin had been referring to in his bizarre text messages. Had he been planning on taking her to one of the Major Shelter Centers? Had the government taken him to one of the shelters? And, what about Miss Purlie’s grandson? And why had Miss Purlie killed herself? She had lived a long, hard life and was used hard times and difficult situations. Why had she decided to call it “quits” now? Something horrible was happening . . .
It was time to leave Roseville. That night Scarlett packed two suitcases by candlelight. She even packed all the unperishable foods in bags and loaded the car, figuring food to be a valuable commodity during a crisis like this. She decided to wait until dawn and try to retrieve the neighbor’s rifle if it was still in the courtyard. She had an uncanny feeling that he—
it
would not need it any longer. She should probably check out the shopping cart and rucksack for supplies as well; she had a feeling
it
wouldn’t be needing that either.
Scarlett tossed in bed for what seemed like most of the night speculating on what type of event had occurred. It must be a disease, for the other day her neighbor had appeared to be healthy. After the encounter with the creeper, he had apparently become afflicted. But how did he wound his neck? The image of his flesh flopping onto the floor still haunted her like a gruesome afterimage burnt into her brain.
Whatever it is, it must be highly contagious.
And, if the disease was airborne, she was screwed.