“Mama!” I called out.
Mama stopped working on the other knot and stared at the man in the bed. His eyes had rolled up. The whites looked grey. Mama slowly got up from the bed and stood next to me. We stared at papa’s body as it lay there. He was dead. We both knew it. We watched his corpse, in hopes that he would not rise. After a minute, we started to believe that papa was not going to reanimate. But just as we started to breathe a sigh of relief, I noticed that his head jerked slightly.
“Oh, no... Pedro...” Mama said, her voice full of sorrow and anguish. Almost as if in response to hearing his name, papa’s head jerked forward. His eyes were wide open. He instantly struggled to get up. One arm had been freed and the other was partially free.
Mama and I panicked. We ran out of the door and down the hall. That’s when the unthinkable happened. Mama slipped on the water I had spilled in the hallway. I could hear a snapping sound as she went down. Mama made a high-pitched shrieking noise like I had never heard before.
She was clutching her ankle. I ran back to her and tugged on her arm. “Mama get up! We have to get out of here!” I could hear papa struggling against his bonds.
Mama wasn’t getting up. She kept grabbing at her ankle and was so overwhelmed by the pain that she couldn’t see or hear anything else.
“MAMA!” I yelled right into her face. “MAMA!” Finally, she snapped out of it and looked at me. “Mama, we have to go. Now.” I said, as calmly and forcefully as I could.
She nodded and tried to move. As she tried to draw her legs in, she suddenly yelped in pain though.
“Maria! Something’s wrong with my ankle!” Sure enough, her foot was sitting at an odd angle. Just then we heard a loud tear from papa’s room.
We looked at each other in pure terror, as more tearing sounds followed. I tried to drag mama down the hall, and she half helped by kicking out with her good leg. The progress was painstakingly slow though. We were about two-thirds of the way to the kitchen, when our worst fears were realized. Papa stepped into the hallway.
His turned his head and focused on us, his bottom jaw was hanging low. He took two awkward steps into the hallway and started snapping his jaw. His arms extended out towards us, and his fingers curled into claws.
Mama shook one of my arms loose and looked up at me. “Maria.” Her voice was completely calm and in control. “Maria, you need to run. Go. Now!” papa’s body took a couple more steps and was only about eight feet away from us. We knew that there was no way to escape. Mama dislodged my other arm and started waving and yelling.
“Maria go now! Please! RUN! RUN NOW MARIA!”
I took an involuntary step backward at the ferocious power in mama’s voice. Then another as the thing that was papa lurched quickly forward and fell on top of her.
Mama fought the zombie off with fists and slaps. The zombie ignored these and tried to get its mouth in proximity to mama’s throat. It also flailed with fists, some of these landing on mama. All this time mama kept yelling at me to get out.
I turned and ran though the kitchen to the back door. A high-pitched keening sound chased me out the door. Blinded by tears, I launched myself off the top step and ran around the side of the house. I didn’t notice the small wheelbarrow that was standing around the corner and tripped over it. I barely got my hands up in time as I hit the fence with a loud bang and slid to the ground. The sounds of violence and screaming disoriented me as I slowly picked myself up.
Still a bit stunned, I took a couple of small steps, and stopped. I could sense that I was being watched. As I looked up at the house, I saw Jose standing in the window just above me.
For just a second, we stared at each other through the glass in silence.
“Jose...” I mumbled. He looked so scary with his mouth hanging wide open like that.
Jose started hitting the window in his efforts to get to me. It was so violent that it stunned me. It wasn’t until the glass started to crack that I snapped out of it.
MARIA SHUDDERED AND almost knocked over the glass of water. Christine reached over and held Maria’s hand. Maria squeezed Christine’s hand, as she remembered the terrible vision.
“It was so shocking to see hermanito – my little baby brother – with the eyes and mouth like that!” She gasped in shock as she remembered. “To see him banging on that window so violently. He really wanted to hurt me!”
Maria was silent for a long moment before she started talking again.
“But Jose was dead. I knew it at that moment. He was gone. So was papa. And mama.”
She drew a few short involuntary breaths as she was close to crying. Then steeled herself and continued. “I backed away from him until I hit the fence. I didn’t want to look at him anymore, so I turned away and ran out through the side gate, through
