I Zombie I

by Jack Wallen

  But what was inside those doors? Could there be hundreds of moaners waiting to check in or out? After carefully making my way to the front door, I peered in through the glass. Seeing no movement, I gently cracked open the door. I heard nothing.

  To be honest, it wasn’t getting into the lobby of the hotel that worried me. Getting into Susan’s room on the tenth floor would be the issue. Susan had said the floor was “full of them,” and by “them,” I was sure she meant only one thing, and there was no way I would make it out of a tenth floor full of moaners alive, not with only my bare hands. But then, this is Germany. Munich to be exact. So there was bound to be a weapon or twelve around somewhere.

  The front desk was the obvious place to start my search for weaponry. I scrambled around the desk to rummage for anything that would help me in my quest. When that bore no fruit, I went behind the scenes to an office. Again, nothing.

  It wasn’t until I made my way into the kitchen that I found something resembling a weapon. Said weapon was a fairly substantial carving knife. Not that I was any sort of expert on cutlery, but it was a pretty safe bet that my particular knife was of the meat-cleaver species. How fitting, seeing as how I was about to cleave some meat.

  Of course, wielding a knife meant getting up close and personal with the moaners. This was looking none too promising. What I needed was a gun, or a baseball bat, or a shovel―anything to give me the advantage of distance. But I didn’t have time for an all-out search of the first floor. I had to get to Susan and get there fast.

  Out of the kitchen and back into the lobby, I found the elevators without problem. And of course, the elevators didn’t work. Stairs, on the other hand, always worked.

  “I hate stairs,” I said through choking, heavy breaths while taking them two at a time.

  Thankfully the tenth floor arrived just as my life was about to drain out of my quivering body. How was I going to survive this nightmare if I couldn’t climb ten flights of stairs? With a shaking finger, I sent Susan a text to let her know I was near. Her response? ‘Don’t die.’

  That gave me pause. Dear Susan could have at least chimed in with something a bit more positive. Instead of ‘good luck’ or ‘can’t wait to meet you,’ I received a rallying cry of ‘don’t die.’ Thank you for the vote of confidence there, sweet cheeks. Remind me not to kiss you when we meet.

  I was obviously losing focus. Stalling had always been one of my strong suits. I had to open that door in front of me and face down a floor full of moaners with nothing more than a knife. Who thought of this plan, anyway?

  Before doing anything, I knew it would be best to listen to see what was behind door number ten. I grabbed the door handle and gently placed my ear against the cold metal of the door.

  Nothing. That could be good. That could also be bad. Shit.

  The knob on the door was cold. Not the cold of winter’s touch or too much air conditioning, but the cold that says ‘You will probably find a floor full of the undead on the other side of this door, so you might want to consider turning back now.’ The cold of the handle snaked its way up my arm and onto my neck, making the hairs stand at attention. I took in a deep breath, preparing myself for the fight at hand.

  I turned the door knob expecting Hell to reach its sulfuric arm out and pull me into oblivion. When that didn’t happen, I opened the door enough to squeeze through. The dim, red cast of the hallway emergency lighting made it challenging to see anything. At least my phone had a strong backlight. Even with the addition of my phone’s light, trying to find a room number on the wall was next to impossible. I could hardly see anything because the walls were covered with brown smudges. This had to be the nastiest Marriott in all of hotel-dom. I told myself that to keep from thinking about what the smudges probably were.

  I squinted to focus my glare through the dark haze. Then, something odd happened. The whole floor began pulsing, or at least it looked like it was pulsing. The walls seemed to have a heartbeat. I rubbed my eyes with the heel of my palms, hoping the illusion was brought on by sweat or tears. When I pulled my hands away, a horrible, sharp pain struck my eyes. The pain felt like someone had my head in a vise, and my eyeballs were ready to explode out of my fucking skull.

  The pain lasted only seconds, but it nearly dropped me to my knees. When I opened my eyes again, I could finally see the numbers on the walls. The nearest sign pointed the way to rooms 1000 through 1012.

  I tapped out another message to Susan.

  Jacob> Almost there.

  I hoped my message would give her enough warning to come out and meet me halfway.

  Susan> oh no.

  Jacob> What’s wrong?

  No reply.

  Nothing.

  Jacob> Susan?

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Susan> they r in the room. am hiding under bed now.

  Good girl. She was thinking clearly, not panicking. Speaking of panicking, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t hit full-on panic mode myself. Common sense was strongly dictating I abandon this hell and find my way back to the States. Oh God, wouldn’t that be nice. Back home in a nice hot bath, followed by tea, a good French film, and finally my own bed.

  Unfortunately, I seriously doubted I would find a plane out of Munich at the moment. Either the airport was shut down like everything else, or it would be so overcrowded with escapees I’d never find my way to a ticket counter.

  Goddamn, what is going on?

  1011. Finally. The door had been forced open. I cautiously crossed the threshold and eased my way into the room. Before I could even call out Susan’s name, I was blindsided by a moaner. The beast managed to knock me down, which jarred the knife out of my hand. Scrambling back out into the hall, I got lucky and my fingers found the knife as I awkwardly moved backward. The moaner followed me out into the hall, swinging both hands out almost as if to embrace me. I backed up toward the wall and found myself being crushed by a fairly powerful set of arms. The wind was slowly being forced out of my lungs.

  When the moaner wrapped me in his arms, I was able to keep one arm free; luckily, that free arm included the hand wielding the butcher knife. With every ounce of strength and agility I possessed, I began whacking on the back of the beast’s neck. Blood, or some other fluid, was pouring down over my hand, making my grip treacherously slick.

  I lost count of the whacks, but eventually my captor released me and fell to the floor in a crumpled heap. Whether or not the thing was dead, I had no clue; nor did I have time to inspect his state. I still had a rescue to attempt.

  Just as I started to step back over the threshold, a scream rang out, quickly followed by another moan.

  “Hey!” I ran in, screaming at the top of my lungs to get the thing’s attention.

  What the hell? First off, the next moaner looked like a teenage girl. As if this nightmare wasn’t bad enough, now I had to take down a young girl. Second, after I yelled, the damn thing looked at me and then went right back to the bed. Susan’s second scream flew out from under the bed.

  “Come on, you son of a bitch!” I knew there was no choice―it was kill or be killed. I swung my mighty cleaver at the monster and struck it in the back. The cleaver stuck in the meat, causing me to have to give the knife a good yank to retrieve it. I swung down again, this time digging deep into the fleshy part of the moaner’s arm. The arm was cut nearly halfway through, yet the beast continued as if nothing had happened.

  Like a madman, I dropped blow after blow down on the moaner. Gore was splattering me and the floor, making it hard to stand and even harder to keep a grip on my weapon. I finally managed to land the first of many blows to the moaner’s neck. I assumed, since the method had worked on the first moaner, it would work on the second. It took about ten swift hacks until the head splintered off and dropped to the floor; the body quickly followed.

  I wiped the blood and gore from my face, and called out, “It’s Jacob. Susan? Are you okay?”

  Susan continued s
creaming from beneath the bed.

  “Susan, are you there? Susan, it’s Jacob. Everything’s okay. They’re all gone. Are you okay?”

  I was met with a short silence. Eventually a tiny, frightened voice greeted me from below. “What were those things?”

  “I call them moaners.” I looked under the bed as I spoke.

  Okay, first off, I wanted to instantly lock myself away in jail for having thoughts of sweeping the maiden off her feet and quickly making hot love to her following her rescue. Susan was nothing more than a young girl of maybe ten or twelve years old. So much for being the hero. Second, I’d seriously ripped the hell out of one of them with nothing more than a cleaver. It wasn’t until I’d lopped the head completely off that the thing stopped coming at me. That was going to seriously fuck with my mental capacity as soon as I had a moment to process everything.

  And if that weren’t enough, I had had to fight off, and kill, a younger female moaner. Having that blood on my hands would certainly fuck me up for life. If I ever got back to the States, the first thing to do would be to call my therapist and book a year’s worth of sessions.

  I wanted to scream and get fucked up for a while, but I couldn’t. I could only see myself with a young girl I might have to baby-sit. Could this get any worse?

  God, I shouldn’t ask that question.

  “Did you kill them?” Susan’s eyes were bloodshot, and her face was ruddy from crying. The little girl was exhausted, and from the looks of it, she was alone.

  “Yes, these are dead.” I spoke softly, hoping to calm the girl down.

  “What do you mean these?” She caught on immediately.

  And here it comes. How could I possibly tell a teenage girl, or pre-teen, I still wasn’t sure, that the city was filled with brain-eating…. God, I really didn’t want to say it out loud―undead.

  “What do you mean? Tell me!” Susan insisted.

  “I mean, this one and the one in the hall are not the only ones.”

  Susan’s eyes doubled in size. She retreated further under the bed. My heart was aching for this young girl. I had to do something to ease her fear.

  “Susan, I’m here. You’re safe now.” So I told a small, white lie.

  Susan bit her lip as tears streamed down her cheeks. “No. We’re not safe. No one is safe from those things. Not me, not you, no one.” Her voice was choked with sobbing.

  I could just leave. There was a whole world of nightmares outside. The last thing I needed was to drag yet another nightmare into the void. I had no idea how to care for and comfort someone this young. This was crazy. Did I mention this was crazy?

  “Can you really protect me?” Susan peeked out from under the bed.

  I didn’t have children, and I had plenty of reasons for not wanting them. But when a child looked at you with a face that defined innocence, no matter how jaded you were, something inside of you would click. A switch is flipped, and you go from zero to family in sixty seconds.

  Before my mind could register the thought, my mouth flew open. “Yes, I can protect you.”

  Another lie.

  Susan finally crawled out from under the bed. Her attention immediately went to the bodies lying on the floor. She pointed a shaking finger toward one of female bodies. “That was my sister.”

  I so desperately wanted the irony of the moment to flee, but I knew it didn’t work that way. Life didn’t generally work that way. Irony was not one of the things life did well, at least not my life.

  “I’m really sorry. It was the only way.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  Susan put her hand on mine. “I know.” That was all she said before she pulled her hand away.

  It was a very surreal moment. The girl had been attacked by a group of moaners, one of which was her sister, and she was comforting me as if she were the adult?

  “We should get out of here. We do not want to be trapped inside this hotel,” I said. Susan began rummaging around the room. “What are you doing?”

  “If we’re leaving, I’m taking some things with me.” Susan grabbed a backpack and started stuffing it full of various items. I watched over her to make sure she was at least being intelligent about her packing. She packed like a real survivor. “How did all of this happen?” Susan didn’t even pause to look at me as she asked the question.

  “My guess is it had something to do with what was being unveiled today.” That was pretty much all I knew.

  “You mean the Generator?”

  “How do you know about the Quantum Fusion Generator?”

  “My dad invented it. He’s been working on it forever.” Susan zipped up her pack in time to complete her sentence and turn to look at me.

  “Wait, your father is Doctor Lindsay Godwin? Does that mean you could take me to the location of the unveiling? I can’t seem to get my bearings in this city,” I confessed, embarrassed.

  “Sure.” Susan said matter-of-factly. “I’ve already been there like a thousand times. Come on.”

  We left the room without a single goodbye to her fallen family. It struck me as odd that Susan was able to leave her dead sister behind without so much as a tear. I didn’t mention the sister in case it caused Susan to remember the death of her family and lose it before we could leave. Maybe she was in survivor mode. I was guessing it would come back to haunt us both eventually.

  Before we reached the bottom floor, I warned Susan that were would most likely be quite a few moaners outside of the hotel.

  “Zombies!” Susan blurted as we reached the last set of stairs. “I think it’s pretty obvious the things are zombies.”

  “How do you know that?” I couldn’t wait to hear her reply.

  “Hello? Haven’t you seen Night of the Living Dead?” Susan seamlessly dropped into I’m a teenage girl and way smarter than you mode.

  “Yeah, and every other Romero film. But that’s fiction, Susan. It’s not real.” I was starting to feel like a parent. “And until one of those things introduces itself to me as a zombie, I’m sticking with the moaner label.”

  I had to admit that moaner had a certain quaintness to it. It sounded more like it came out of an indie film that had you convinced the monster was really a metaphor for today’s apathetic, lazy youth rather than a literal monster. Of course, the possibility of a metaphor would be completely lost on a member of the group it would apply to. I didn’t really care. Tomato/tomahto. Zombie/moaner. Whatever served to get us through the nightmare was fine with me.

  Susan just shook her head. “You sound like a writer.”

  I wasn’t sure if I should take that as an insult or not. Before I could decide, Susan made a break for the stairwell door.

  “Wait! Not until I check things out first.” It was probably a useless gesture, but I had to satisfy my paranoia before blowing through a door completely unaware. The last thing we needed was to barge in on a floor full of living death. Even though I came through the same room on my way in, nothing seemed to be as it should be. I trusted no one and nothing.

  I was fairly confident I heard nothing. Of course, that could be on account of either an overly thick and nearly soundproof door or my poor hearing. Nevertheless, I heard nothing, so we acted according to our intel.

  The door swung open without so much as a creak. To my relief, there were still no brain-eating guests at the Marriott-of-Doom. There were, however, some tell-tale signs of moaner activity that I had missed on my way in. I counted at least seven people on the floor with their skulls cracked open and their most precious of organs scooped out. Making matters worse, my eye was at its twitchy best. I felt as if my eye socket was playing tug of war with the wound on my cheek. It didn’t hurt as much as it annoyed. I had to get my mind off the twitch, or I was going to lose it quick.

  “So, if that was your sister, where’s the rest of your family?” I hated to broach the subject of parents to a newly-orphaned teenage girl, but the question had to be answered in case I needed to get her somewhere fast.

  “You’r
e kidding, right?” Susan stopped midstride to glare at me. I was expecting World War Teen to break out. “The only family I have left is my father. And he’s…remember what he just did?” Her tone was becoming angry.

  “Since my dad invented the Generator, don’t you think he’d be with it?” Susan punctuated her last phrase with an I can’t believe you’re an adult exclamation point. “Follow me,” Susan said, as she began to make her way across the lobby of the hotel.

  Before she could get very far, she noticed the bodies with the hollowed-out skulls. A sharp screech escaped her mouth, and she darted toward the front door of the hotel.

  I managed to reach her before she could step outside, and I grabbed her arm with just enough behind the grip to make sure she stopped. “Hold on a second. I can’t protect you from anything when you’re running on ahead of me as if we were shopping at the mall. You can’t just take off like that. I’m going to warn you, it’s not pretty out there. You think what just scared you into bolting was bad, multiply that by a thousand, and that’s what’s waiting out there.”

  Susan turned to me with swollen eyes. “But how am I supposed to lead you to my father if I’m behind you?”

  It was obvious she was in the middle of a mental and emotional war. I wanted to wrap my arms around her and let her know it would be okay. But, to be honest, I didn’t know if it was going to be okay. My own personal doubt didn’t need to infect a young child who was incapable of confronting such fear, so I had to lie as often as I could so the girl could keep as much reason as she was capable of employing.

  “I tell you what, you walk right beside me, tell me where to go, and we’ll get there. Deal?” It was probably just as well to have her beside me, anyway. Behind me, I couldn’t know for sure what was happening from moment to moment.

  Susan hesitated as if she were weighing the pros and cons. “Susan, this really isn’t open for debate. It’s a nightmare outside of these walls, and my guts are telling me you don’t have a whole lot of experience with nightmares.”