He looks back at the raft. He really doesn’t want to get back on that thing. This kayak rental is probably the best bet he’s ever going to get for finding something suitable for water transportation. He knows there’s got to be something useable there, somewhere.
Haroon decides his best bet would be to go inside of the shop. Nothing lasts long when its exposed to the elements like this. He walks shotgun-first toward the shop. As the door swings open, Haroon jumps at the sight of a crazed man’s face. The man’s mouth wide open and snarling. Haroon raises the shotgun, but stops himself from firing. The man isn’t a zombie. It is just a life-sized poster of an extreme sports kayaker howling at the top of his lungs as he goes down some wild rapids.
Haroon goes around the advertisement to examine the merchandise. There are some kayaks inside, but not many. Most of them were on display out by the river. He goes to them one at a time, but none of them seem very strong. Just the light from the windows was enough to wear them down. In the storage room, where no light could possibly shine, he finds one last kayak. This one is pink and made for children. He pounds his fist on it. The plastic is still sturdy and seems like it will stay together, at least for as long as he’ll need it. He decides to give it a try. Hopefully, his legs will fit inside.
As he drags the pink boat and paddles outside, he runs into three large undead truckers examining his driftwood raft outside, as if they can smell him on it. When they look back at him, Haroon feels almost embarrassed to be carrying the pink kayak. But once the zombies stagger toward him, he runs for the water and dives kayak-first into the river.
Lying across the top, balancing himself with one leg in the water, he paddles out into the middle of the river. The zombies follow him. He squeezes into the opening, but he can’t get his legs all the way in. Bending his knees and hunkering forward, he paddles the miniature kayak downstream, away from the splashing corpses of ex-truckers.
Although uncomfortable, the boat is a huge improvement over the driftwood. He can actually control his direction and move several times faster. When zombies hop into the water with him, he easily gets around them and cruises by. He doesn’t fire another round of the shotgun until he gets to the edge of the evacuation zone and goes ashore.
Haroon started visiting Nemy on a regular basis. He came to really enjoy visiting her. It was all he had to look forward to every day. Terry had found out about his visits and warned him against it, he said that she’s dangerous and not like other humans. He also warned what Dr. Chan would do if he ever caught him in there with her. But Haroon didn’t care. He thought it was worth the risk.
The more he visited with her the less she seemed like a genetically-enhanced monster and the more she seemed human. While she at first seemed emotionless and cold-hearted, Haroon began to understand that she did have feelings. She just expressed them in very subtle ways. She never smiled or laughed, but when she expressed joy she did it by narrowing her eyes. When she expressed sadness she widened her eyes. At first, he was scared whenever she narrowed her eyes. Every time he appeared for a visit, her eyes narrowed and he thought she was angry, didn’t want him there, and would attack if he came near. But later on, whenever he saw her narrowing her eyes it warmed his heart.
Certain things about Nemy confused Haroon. For instance, she didn’t seem to have an ounce of curiosity in her body. She rarely asked him questions about himself and had no interest in learning about the world outside her cell.
“Have you ever even been outside?” he asked.
She cocked her head, confused by what he means by outside.
“Don’t you want to see the sunlight? The rest of the world?”
She just narrowed her eyes at him, but had no idea what he was talking about. Although she wasn’t incredibly interested in hearing about Haroon’s life or the outside world, she loved hearing him speak, no matter what they spoke about. She loved having him around.
One day, Haroon sang her a song. The Itsy Bitsy Spider. She had never heard a song before. It didn’t interest her in the least.
“Have you ever tried singing before?”
She didn’t understand singing.
“Try it,” he said, and sang the lyrics slowly so she would pick it up.
She said the words, but she didn’t sing them. When he gave up trying to teach her, she seemed happy about it. She scooted closer to him on the bed and put her finger in his belly button.
Touch was very important to Nemy. It seemed as if she was desperate for it, craved it. But she touched him in odd ways. Instead of holding hands, Nemy put her finger in Haroon’s belly button. Instead of giving him a hug, she pressed her ear against his. He was not sure why she did these things, but he came to accept it.
The first time she put her finger in his belly button, he felt very awkward. He already felt uneasy being around her while she was nude, because he found her increasingly more attractive every time they were together, but it was even more uncomfortable to have her naked body pressed against him while she held her finger in his belly button. Whenever she did it, she just squinted her eyes at him and said absolutely nothing. He learned to deal with it because he understood its her way of showing affection. But her sharp black fingernails often hurt him, and occasionally drew blood. Whenever he couldn’t take the pain, he decided it was time to go.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” Haroon would say.
And Nemy’s eyes would widen as he collected his shoe and left her alone in the cell.
Haroon goes through a parking lot into the evacuation zone. According to the map, the helicopter will pick up the first survivor who gets to the roof of the hospital. With the building just at the end of the lot, all he has to do is get up the stairs and he’d be home-free. If that’s what he wanted to do. But he decides to vow to himself right now that he will not take the helicopter. He will wait for others to come. Nemy will make it there, he knows she will. He’s not leaving without her.
Inside the hospital, the place looks like a tornado hit. On Z-Day, the hospitals were hit the worst. Everyone took the infected victims of zombie bites to the hospital, then they turned and it was a bloodbath. Haroon can tell the struggle in this building must have been fierce.
He walks slowly, listening carefully to the walls. There aren’t any zombies he can see in the lobby, but he’s sure there has to be several of them hiding somewhere. He goes straight for the stairs and takes them to the top floor. This level leads to the roof. As his footsteps squeak through the cracked walls, something reacts to the sound. It’s a scratchy, gurgling sound. He keeps going. The roof access door is straight ahead. Trying to step softer, it’s no use. His shoes keep making nose.
The sound of hoarse whispers comes from a room on the right. With his gun pointed at it, he walks sideways to the door. This entrance is where they would bring in emergency patients by airlift. The door is electronic, so it won’t budge open. He tries to pry it open with the shotgun and his flashlight, but they don’t work. He’ll need to find something else.
The only room nearby is the one that was issuing the strange sounds. If there’s anything that can open the sliding doors to the roof, it will be in there. Hopefully, he thinks, it was just the wind coming through an open window.
Haroon moves forward, shotgun leading the way. As he opens the door, he hears another sound. A rumbling, whistling sound. He thinks that one has to have been the wind. It couldn’t have come from a human, not even a dead one. Before entering, he looks over at the sign beside the door and wipes the dust from its surface.
It reads: Maternity Ward.
When he looks into the room, he sees a cracked window. A breeze presses against it, causing a rumbling, whistling sound. The room is mostly a mess of overturned chairs and scattered medical equipment, with a mummified human leg on the floor and what looks to be a pile of dehydrated intestines by the sink. On the other side of the room, behind a broken window, there are two rows of hospital cribs.
Looking around the floor, he tries to find
a medical tool that might pry open the exit to the roof. Below an overturned chair, he spots some kind of medical tool that looks something like a monkey wrench covered in a film of ancient blood. He moves the chair with the barrel of his shot gun. The tool actually is a monkey wrench. He wonders why somebody might need a monkey wrench in a maternity ward.
As he walks back toward the door, the sound of a baby crying tweaks Haroon’s ears. A raspy, piercing baby cry. He turns around. The sound is coming from one of the cribs.
“No,” Haroon says. “Please, no.”
Three more baby cries issue from the cribs.
“Don’t tell me that’s for real.”
He steps toward the cribs. He doesn’t want to, but it’s too much for him to accept without seeing it with his own eyes. He’s never heard of the virus infecting infants before. It’s got to be something else.
When he gets to the first crib, all he sees is a pile of clothing inside, covered in shadows. But then he sees movement. He takes out his flashlight and shines it on the shapeless mound.
When the light hits the baby, a hole opens up in the brown flesh and bawls. Haroon doesn’t believe it’s really an undead infant. Even though it is crying, it is just a pile of fabric. His mind has to be playing tricks on him. But on closer inspection, he sees that it is an infant. Its arms and legs have molded into the sides of its body, its back fused to the mattress of the bed, its eyes and nose sunken into its hollow skull where half of its brain had been eaten out. It’s now just a blob of meat with a crying mouth.
Two more zombie infants begin to cry, and Haroon backs away. He runs out of the room, pries open the exit with the monkey wrench, then runs across the roof to the helicopter pad. He doesn’t care about the vow that he made to stay behind. He wants to get out of there. Right now. He isn’t even sure if his Nemy is in the contest at all. He can’t rely on the hope that he’ll find her. He’s going home.
Near the helicopter, there’s a large wooden plank with a red target spray-painted on it. He goes to that. Below it is a two-way radio and three words written above the target: “Call for rescue.”
“Hello?” Haroon says into the radio.
No reply.
“I’ve made it,” he said. “Am I the first one? Or am I too late?”
A camera ball floats down below his shoulder, filming his call.
“Hello?” he cries.
Then a voice comes on the other end. “Congratulations. You’re the first contestant to arrive safely. We’ll pick you up in ten minutes. Just hold on.”
“Ten minutes?” Haroon yells. “Pick me up now, damn it. I want to leave RIGHT NOW!”
But they do not respond. He punches the sign over and yells into the radio.
A figure steps across the roof toward him. When he turns around, his anger freezes on his face. The naked woman comes closer, holding a double-bladed S-shaped sword.
His eyes brightened. It was her. It was really her. She was really on the show as he thought. He tossed the radio over his shoulder and stepped toward her. He didn’t care about the helicopter anymore. He had her. As long as he had her, that’s all that mattered. Because he loved her more than anything in this world.
After two months of visits, Nemy and Haroon had fallen in love. They didn’t talk much when he came to visit her. They spent their time in bed together, making love, caressing each other’s bodies, kissing one another with ferocious passion. Until the day it all ended.
One night, he had not propped the door open with his shoe correctly. The door had closed and he was locked in. Haroon jumped out of bed and went to the glass.
“It’s outside,” Nemy said, pointing at his shoe on the other side.
He rubbed at the tension building in his forehead.
“Come back to bed.” She pulled him to her and pressed their ears together.
Haroon shook her away.
“Do you know what this means?”
She didn’t.
“If I get caught in here I’m not going to be allowed to see you again.”
Her eyes widened.
Haroon banged on the glass, calling out for Terry. But he knew his friend wasn’t there. Terry was disgusted with hearing their lovemaking and started to clean up earlier, before Haroon got off work. Still, he kept banging on the glass until his fists were red.
“Stop,” Nemy said.
He kept banging.
“Stop.” She grabbed his fist. Her grip was so strong that resisting was like trying to bend steel. “We still have now. We should make the most of it.”
Then she wrapped her arm around him and kissed his neck. Tears flowed down his eyes. He wished he had the strength to pull his fist out of her fingers so he could punch the glass one more time, but she pulled his arm down around her body. He released his anger by kissing her with all the power he had in him. He grabbed her around the waist and picked her off the ground, taking her into the bed.
They made love with more passion than they ever had before, because they knew it would likely be their last chance. They tried to put a lifetime worth of lovemaking into a single night, and when all of Haroon’s energy was spent they lay together in each other’s arms. Haroon’s neck pressed against her smooth glistening cheek, Nemy’s finger tip snuggled inside of his belly button.
In the morning, Haroon awoke to a knocking on the glass door. When he looked up, there were a crowd of people gathered outside. A group of ten security guards and five doctors. The man in front was Dr. Chan, a hunched over Asian man with small eyes that sunk deep into their sockets. Haroon grabbed his clothes and put on his pants.
“I was wondering how Specimen #5 had become pregnant,” said Mr. Chan. “I was worried that she was able to reproduce asexually.”
Haroon paused when he heard that, then looked at Nemy. Her eyes narrowed at him.
“I’m sorry,” Haroon said, putting on his shirt. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Didn’t mean to what?” Chan asked. “Fuck my specimen?”
Haroon and Nemy stepped out of the bed and went to the door.
“It wasn’t my intention to mess with your work. I just—
“Get him out of there,” Chan told the security officers. “He’s under arrest for committing an act of high treason.”
“What?” Haroon cried. “High treason?”
Five of the men came into the cell. Haroon backed away. They surrounded him. The two in front grabbed him and pulled him out of the cell.
“No,” Nemy said to Chan.
“No?” asked Dr. Chan, concerned by the disobedient tone in her voice.
“Don’t take him from me,” she said, with wide eyes. “I love him.”
The doctor was not pleased with her statement. “You what?”
“I love him!” she cried.
Haroon looked back. It was the first time she ever put emotion into her voice. A tear was coming from one eye.
Then she jumped at the door and reached her arm through the crack before it closed. She grabbed one of the guards who was trying to take away her love.
“Bring him back!” she cried, then she ripped off the guard’s arm.
As she fell back with the severed arm in her fist, the cell door slammed shut and the glass sprayed with blood. The armless guard dropped to the ground, screaming.
“You’ll never see him again,” said Dr. Chan.
As they dragged Haroon away, he looked back at her eyes wider than they’d ever been. Tears flowed down her face.
“Come back!” she yelled at Haroon. “Come back to me!”
She tossed her bed at the glass and pulled the sink out of the wall.
“We’ll see each other again some day,” Haroon told her. “I promise.”
Nemy dropped to the ground, reaching in his direction with her arms.
“We’ll be together again,” he yelled, as they took him out of the lab and dragged him down the hall.
And he was right. They are together again.
“Nemy!” he cries.
> He runs to her.
He can’t stop smiling at the sight of her. They finally found each other. They finally can be together. He doesn’t think he even wants to go back to the island. He wants to find someplace else, where they can live alone together for the rest of their lives. Even if they barricade themselves in a building right here in this city, it would be like they were in her prison cell again. Together. Only he would be the one trapped in the cell and she would come and go, to get food and supplies. Then she can have her baby and they can all live together as one beautiful perfect family.
When he sees her face in the light of the low morning sun, she narrows her eyes at him. The same way she always does when she’s happy. Tears of joy flow down his eyes. He can’t wait to hold her again, make love to her again. He even can’t wait until she puts her finger in his belly button until it bleeds.
Something pushes him backward. He balances himself and looks down. A double-bladed sword is sticking through his chest. It is her sword. When he looks up at her, he sees her hand is raised. She had purposely thrown it at him.
“Nemy?” he says, as his blood gushes down his legs and he falls to the ground.
After Haroon had been escorted out of the lab, Dr. Chan looked down at his creation. She was on the ground, tears sprinkling onto her paper-white legs. He shook his head at the mess she had become.
“Have her memory wiped,” he said to the doctor next to him. “That asshole destroyed months of conditioning. We’re better off starting over from scratch.”
“What about the pregnancy?”
Dr. Chan thought about it as he wiped blood from his white tie.
“I’d like to dissect it,” said Dr. Chan, then he walked toward the exit. “Have an abortion arranged immediately.”
Zombies and Shit Page 21
