Then, everything turns to chaos. Tipped over furniture, yells and screams, grabbing and pushing.
Jennie screaming: “She cut me! She cut me!”
Thomas tries to get to the front door, but is cut off, and suddenly they’re all cornered. A door behind them. Thomas yanks it open, revealing a dim staircase leading down to the basement. They have no other choice. They flee down into the darkness.
And now, here they are. In the dim, dusty heat. The zombie lady has followed them down the stairs and is now waiting on the other side of the door. Scraping and moaning, scraping and moaning.
Jennie gives off a tortured sound. She wipes her forehead. “Christ, I’m sweating buckets. I think I might have a fever. I really need to see a doctor.” She glances at the door. “Doesn’t she ever leave?”
Thomas just shakes his head.
“Well, she has to leave sometime,” Jennie persists. “Doesn’t she get sleepy or something?”
“Nope. She’ll keep at it until she rots.”
Jennie wrinkles her nose. “Don’t say stuff like that. The smell down here is bad enough.” She gets up and goes to the door. “Hello? Can you hear me? Could you please move away from the door? I need to get out. But please don’t try to hurt me, okay?”
The scraping noises grow louder, more eager. Like the zombie can sense Jennie standing right on the other side.
Thomas gets up. “Don’t open the door.”
Jennie rolls her eyes. “I’m not going to open the door as long as she’s out there. Do you think I’m a complete moron?”
“Actually, yeah, I do think that, since only a moron would try talking sense into a zombie.” He jabs himself with a finger in the temple. “She’s not a person anymore. She’s a walking corpse. How many times do I need to tell you? The only thing on her mind is fresh meat. She wants to—”
“Yeah, I know, she wants to eat us all alive,” Jennie sneers. “Right, whatever.” She goes back to the chair and slumps down. Then, she lights up. “Hey, what if we’re completely quiet?”
“You’re the only one still talking,” Thomas remarks as he sits back down.
Jennie pretends not to hear him. “Maybe she’ll forget about us if she can’t hear us. Maybe she’ll go back upstairs. You know, to look for someone else to … eat.”
The idea has actually crossed Thomas’s mind. “It depends on whether her senses are still working, or if she’s driven by instincts. Maybe she doesn’t need to hear us, maybe she can simply sense we’re here.” He looks at Dan. “What do you think?”
Dan blinks, obviously surprised to be asked for his opinion. “Well … I don’t know. I guess it’s worth a try.”
“Right,” Jennie says. “From now on, no one makes a sound.”
They all fall silent. All except for the zombie. It goes on scraping, moaning.
Tirelessly. Insatiable.
THREE
Half an hour passes by.
Dan looks briefly in a box of books before lying down on a blanket, curled up like a dog. Thomas is slumped over on his seat, almost nodding off despite the heat. His clothes are sticking damply to his skin, his mouth is dry. Both of the two narrow windows are open wide, but only a warm, lazy breeze seeps in.
Jennie is the first one to break the silence. “Right, it’s obviously not working,” she snaps. “She’s not going to leave.” She sighs. “I’m just … so … fucking … thirsty! Honestly, I’m going to die if I don’t get something to drink soon.”
We’re all going to die if we don’t get something to drink soon, Thomas thinks, wiping a dangling drop of sweat from his brow.
“Look,” Dan says, getting up. “I found this in one of the boxes.” He comes over, holding out an old photo album for the others to see.
“It must be her when she was young,” Jennie says, as Dan flips through the pages, pointing to a slim woman with long, blonde hair.
The photos tell a story of the woman going on a journey to somewhere warm and tropical. The locals are black.
“Where is it?” Jennie asks. “Africa or something?”
Dan slips out one of the photos and checks the backside. “Haiti, it says.”
The photos show a wedding. Not a traditional one in a church with a bride in a white dress. Instead, the woman is standing with her black husband under the open sky on a beach at sunset. All around them, the guests are dressed and painted in what seems to be the traditional local outfits.
“She married one of them,” Jennie says. “How sweet.”
Dan flips through the pages. Pictures of the woman and her husband in this house. A picture of the woman with a large, pregnant belly. A family photo: the woman, her husband, and a half-black boy. The woman’s hair grows silvery, her skin starts to wrinkle, and her son becomes a man. Him kissing a redhaired woman. The last of the photos shows a small, mulatto girl, smiling between her mom and dad.
As they reach the end of the album, the spell is broken, and Thomas gets to his feet. “Listen, I think I know how we can get out of here.”
Jennie gives off a tiny exclamation of excitement, and Dan straightens up.
“We can’t contact anyone outside. We can’t even hope for someone to come by. She lived alone out here, so it could be days before she has a visitor.”
“I thought of the mailman,” Dan interjects. “Don’t they usually come on the weekends too?”
“Maybe,” Thomas says. “But that wouldn’t make a difference. The mailbox is up by the road—I noticed it when we came. The mailman won’t come anywhere near the house.”
Dan bows his head.
Thomas nods towards the door. “It doesn’t seem like she … like it … is planning to give up anytime soon. Which means we need to find a way out ourselves, and the sooner, the better. If
