beneath the sheets, it didn’t take long before I heard the long slow rhythm of my baby’s deep sleep breathing kick in as she clung to her mother’s back. I thought about waking Jenna to make
It was the last good sleep I would have.
* * *
“Daddy,” Kara said, pushing tiny hands against my shoulder. “Daddy, I’m hungry and mommy won’t get up.”
I blinked heavy lids open and squinted against the glare. The sun was fully up in the sky and the room glowed with the searchlight of morning. Kara sat in the middle of the bed in her Candykids nightgown, dark hair tousled, but eyes bright as the sun.
“Daddy?” she said again.
I rolled over and hugged her, and then prodded Jenna. Nothing happened.
I pushed against her back again, and then pressed my head to her side. She was breathing.
“She won’t wake up, Daddy. I’m scared.”
“Let her sleep,” I said, slipping out of the bed and grabbing Kara in my arms. “Let’s go have some cereal and let her sleep.”
I tried to sound boisterous as I said it, but inside, my heart was dissolving like ice on the beach. I knew why Jenna wouldn’t get up. A chill went through me as I thought about it. God, we’d slept right next to her. But I knew if I moved her hair aside, I’d find the shell of a Luna Roach attached to her neck.
I choked back a tear as I reached for a box of breakfast cereal in the cabinet and Kara settled herself on a chair at the kitchen table.
Jenna was not going to be waking up. Kara would probably never have her mom make her breakfast again.
* * *
The TV was playing snow. Snow on almost every channel. There was one local access channel still broadcasting, with a wide-eyed, disheveled man screaming into the microphone. “They’ve come back,” he kept saying. “They’ve come back and there’s only one way to stop them: aim for the head. It’s the roaches, you’ve got to smash the roaches…”
As I watched him babble, the door behind him opened, and a stream of people entered the studio. They surrounded the man, who leapt up on a chair and grabbed a microphone stand, holding it out like a cattle prod. Then he began swinging it wildly, like a bat, again and again until he finally connected with someone. The stand hit a woman right in the back of the head, right where the Luna Roaches loved to fasten. The woman went down. But then so did the man. There were hands all over him suddenly, and a buzzing sound slowly filled the room. I heard him scream just before a hand covered the lens of the camera, and then that station turned to snow, too.
There were still cable stations playing old sitcoms, but none of the local networks were broadcasting. The same with radio. At last I understood what they meant now by corporate “canned” radio. Only the FM channel programmed by someone a thousand miles away on the left coast still played the latest singles from U2 and Green Day. And I knew it was because they had programmed the schedule days before. Nobody was working the boards right now.
For the first time since I’d seen the news story about Paul Hughes, I truly panicked. I felt the ice in my belly, and struggled not to fall to my knees and tremble like a baby
Except that I couldn’t.
Not even close.
In the other room, Kara’s mom was turning into some kind of a zombie in her sleep, and outside, the world was awash with buzzing, swarming death.
There was no way out.
“Daddy, can I have more milk?”
Blinking back tears, I opened the refrigerator, and pulled out a carton. I wouldn’t look at the missing person picture on its side. Soon, we might all be missing.
* * *
“We’re just going to take a little ride,” I said, as I buckled Kara into the seatbelt.
“But what about mommy?” She quailed.
“Mommy needs her sleep. We’ll bring her back some dinner later.”
It killed me to lie, but I had to get her out of here. I had to get Kara out of the city.
As we pulled out of the garage, I saw the door from the house open, and Jenna stepped out onto the concrete behind us. Thank god Kara was buckled in and couldn’t look in the rear view mirror. Her mother looked ghastly.
Her eyes were vacant.
I hit the gas and squealed out onto the street. I don’t know where I thought we were going to go. Somehow it seemed like this was a local problem; if we could just get out of the city and into the country, everything would be normal again.
We never left the neighborhood.
I pulled out on Highland and turned on to Norfolk to get out of the subdivision…but just before I reached the main road, the way was blocked.
They moved slow, but they were moving. And they were moving inward, a barricade of bodies 10 and 20 deep. They strode towards us, honing in. When one turned, all of the others followed, as if driven by a single mind. When I looked in the rearview mirror, I saw they were behind us as well. Surrounded.
I stopped the car to think. The bodies didn’t stop. They came forward, slowly, inexorably. Their eyes were dark, and unblinking. I could see the tan shadow of Luna Roaches trembling on the necks of some of them as they stepped forward, one shambling shoe at a time.
“Daddy,” Kara said. “They’re getting closer.”
Her hand gripped my shirtsleeve and my heart crawled into my throat. I had to do something…but what? I had no idea. I could try to plow the car through a phalanx of still seemingly human bodies but I had no faith that I would get that far. If we left the car, we were doomed for sure. The mob stretched as far as I could see, in every direction. Were we the only regular humans left in the neighborhood?
“Daddy,” Kara repeated. “They want to come in.”
The first one had finally reached the car. He was an older man, I’d guess 65 or 70. His hair was white as salt on his head and his lips thin as parchment. He leaned his pale, too-slack face into Kara’s window and leered, teeth exposed and rotten.
The pounding began then. And from all around us a hum began to wail.
First the old man began to smack his head against her window. And then from the back window an answering echo, as one of the other Luna Roach automatons began to slap slack fists against the glass. An answering thud joined from my side of the car. One old woman threw her body onto the hood of the car and tried to claw her way up to the windshield. When a gnarled finger grasped at the windshield wiper, I turned the control to full and watched the steel and rubber arm bat her tentative grasp away again and again.
But nothing was going to keep them away for long. Kara held on to my arm tighter and tighter as the car began to shake.
“Daddy, what are we going to do?”
The metal of the passenger door suddenly creaked and squealed. The golf pin of a door lock snapped, the plastic vanished to the floor.
“I don’t know what to do,” I finally admitted, as the door wrenched open and six arms reached through the breach towards my baby girl.
