Dan looks blankly at him from across the room. “I know.”
“It’s just … don’t get tempted to … you know … touch her or anything. Okay?”
Dan sends him a pale smile. “Don’t worry.”
“Right. I’ll be back soon. Hang tight.”
He runs to the ladder, steps up and stops for a moment to listen. Somewhere up there, he can hear footsteps running and a man’s voice shouting, but it seems to come from farther away, probably in another room. Now that the zombie child is no longer right above him, he doesn’t need to break down the hatch—he can simply reach his arm up through the hole and grope his way to the lock. He finds it, pulls it, and there’s a loud click. Finally, he can push open the hatch.
Thomas sticks his head up into a room which appears very bright to Thomas’s eyes, although there is only one window, and it’s covered by red drapes. It’s a bedroom with a single bed. More family photos on the walls. The door to the living room is open. He can’t see or hear anything from in there. In fact, the house has suddenly fallen completely silent.
He climbs up and closes the hatch behind him. As he strides to the door, something sharp jabs at his heel.
“Ouch, goddamnit!”
He lifts his foot and sees a piece of broken glass protruding from the sole of his sneaker. He carefully wrenches it free and throws it aside. He pulls off his shoe and checks the damage. Only a small cut in his heel. It’s bleeding a little, but nothing severe. As he pulls his shoe back on, he finally notices the broken glass strewn all over the wooden floor. There’s also something which might once have been flowers, but now have been trampled to a mush. Almost all of the pieces of glass are sticky with something dark, and he can make out small, dark footprints all over the room. He reconstructs to himself how there must have been a glass vase with flowers standing on the night table. The zombie child then knocked the glass vase to the floor, breaking it, and then proceeded to wander around in her restless search for something to eat, for what looks like several hours, maybe even days, stepping on the shards, ripping her feet to bloody shreds.
Good thing for her she can’t feel anything.
Thomas goes to the door and peers into the living room. It’s a chaotic mess like he remembers it, with tipped-over chairs and stuff knocked to the floor. He also smells something sweet and metallic.
Whoever came went and opened the door to the bedroom, letting the zombie kid out right into his own arms.
Thomas makes his way through the room, noticing the bloody footprints on the carpet. A sound reaches him, makes him stop dead in his tracks. It’s a wet smacking noise. Like a child eating Bolognese for the first time and making a mess of it.
It’s coming from the kitchen.
Thomas looks around for a weapon. He didn’t think to bring the pipe. Instead, he grabs a big, pink crystal rock from a shelf. It feels satisfyingly heavy in his hand, giving him the courage to go on towards the opening to the kitchen. A dreadful sight meets him.
In the middle of the kitchen, sprawled out on the vinyl floor, is a grown man. His skin is dark and he’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt. The colors of his clothes are hard to discern, as they’re completely soaked with blood.
His stomach is open. It reminds Thomas of something he saw in a medical documentary about open heart surgery. Something is hanging out of the side of the crater. It looks like a piece of raw sausage with the filling sucked out of it. The rest of the content of the poor man’s stomach is mercifully hidden from view by the girl who’s sitting on her knees, feasting away. With one hand, she digs eagerly into the man’s intestines, transporting them to her mouth and chewing loudly. The other arm, which is broken, hangs limply by her side.
Apparently, this one-armed system isn’t working fast enough to satisfy the girl’s appetite, because suddenly she bends over and simply buries her face in the guy’s stomach.
Thomas breathes firmly through his nose—which immediately proves a mistake, as it only intensifies the smell of blood and meat. He knows he needs to move on. That he’s still in a hurry. That the guy on the floor might only be minutes from waking up, and then he’ll have two zombies to deal with.
So, he slips through the kitchen as close to the wall as possible. His eyes are fixed on the girl, and that’s why he doesn’t notice the bottle of olive oil lying on the floor. He accidentally kicks it, and it rolls across the floor, hitting the table leg with a loud Clank!
Thomas freezes, raising the stone, ready to throw it at the zombie girl.
But she doesn’t react at all to the noise; not even a flinch. She just keeps eating.
Thomas breathes a sigh of relief. He hurries on. Makes it out of the kitchen and into a hallway. There are a couple of closed doors. At the end is the scullery. He reminds himself about the fact that he can’t know for sure if anyone else is in the house—living or dead. So, he keeps the crystal stone held high, ready to strike at anyone trying to surprise him.
He makes it through the hallway with no one doing so, and he finds the front door open wide. Before leaving the house, he throws himself at the scullery sink, turning on the faucet and drinking greedily in big, loud gulps until his belly feels like it’s ready to burst. Immediately, he feels better.
Then, he steps out of the house into the bright daylight. The sun is still up, but it has lost some of its power. He hasn’t got a watch, but
