Zombies and Shit

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.