This Isn't Spring Break Anymore

Zoie vaults over her neighbors fence, entering their empty backyard, her vision darts towards a sliding glass door pairing with a cemented porch, along with history of an encounter, exhibiting decals of blood on its material.

The blood splatter pairing with seeable hand smudges and maroon hand prints adds a sense of abandonment of her formal reality.

With an empathetic sigh, she continues her pace through the backyard.

She does a bunny hop to prevail herself forward, and over the fence, her hand stabilizing for a smooth leap - making it into another backyard, when she lands, Zoie can see broken glass littered across the ground.

While keeping her momentum forward, she examines the scene, “All this happened while I was asleep ″ Zoie mumbles with a smudge of anger as she envisions their encounter in her head.

Tearing her gaze from the scene and her imagination, she climbs over the fence, expressing soft grunts, indicating her decrease in stamina.

Groans basks her right side, concomitantly with her arrival to the ground.

Her nerves send a waving shock throughout her entire body, rippling her figure with an abrasive sensation.

The groans alter into an aggressive howl, her muscle reaction causes her to snap her view towards the emission. Zoie’s eyes dilated, seeing a sheeted covered corpse twisted up in clothing lines.

She takes a step back, her eyes absorbed into the indentations on the white sheet, imprinting the corpse’s moving mouth pairing with its eye sockets.

Zoie takes her stride to the side, avoiding the enveloped, jaw snapping zombie, the corpse flailing its figure concerting it’s howls from the emitting sound of her footsteps.

Her breath in a captivated hold as she meets the wooden fence with her back, with a slow paced turn, Zoie hurdles over it, continuing her route towards the last known location of her phone - lot 105.

Denting the route, Zoie guides herself until she’s met with a glimpsing figure in the second story window of lot 103.

Was that living? She questions the retreating glimpse.

With caution, Zoie grips the fence’s top, her thin muscles flexing as she pulls herself up.

Her body flinches, responding to a sudden piercing sound - her best judgment of the deafening sound came from a handgun.

What may seem like a second, a boy with black hair comes out of the backdoor, answering her previous question that resided in her head, her eye’s peering at him as he collapses on the grassy ground, his knees sporting his weight.

The boy cries into his hands, simultaneously when Zoie gently lets go of the top, stabilizing herself on the ground below.

She continues to peek at him from the cracks of the fence, not knowing whether to sneak around and go to the main backyard alleyway or to wait for her until the boy eventually leaves.

Zoie would want to reach out to help, but since the world has changed and that she has a bandage around her neck, there’s an itching voice telling her not too for her own safety.

The boy, seemingly in the same years as Zoie and Shane, continues to let out his overflowing emotion of his loss.

Zoie sits there, listening to the mournful cries of the teenager, her expression reflecting his void spiriting inside him.

In a response towards the cries of pain, her heart skips a beat as Zoie could hear the emerging scowls of approaching corpses.

The black-hair teenager continues to bawl on the ground, unaware of the approaching threat.

Her mind flashes an image, telling her body to dip around the corner to the alleyway and hide when her eyes reflect a glancing corpse, its howls osculate from lot 101 to 103 from its advances.

To her delight, another joins the fray. Seeing not one, but two pacing corpses sends her spine to shiver.

Zoie’s mind goes into override as the boy finally releases he has unwanted company, he shouts as terror grips him.

Accompanying his fearful cries is the looming dead of the corpses shriek, notifying that lots that it’s about to have dinner.

While tucked into the alleyway, hiding behind the brown window fence, an ambivalence arises, whether she should risk her safety from exposing it to the corpses amongst the boy noticing the wound, or to bolt away.

Her knees shake, knowing things could go majorly wrong within a split second, her chest aches from the decision unfolding in the world around her.

Zoie peeks between the cracks again, seeing that the corpses goaled an attack on the boy, he cries as he struggles against the howling undead.

The nervous shakes of her legs expands up the rest of her body, simulating a sense of rippling dullness pricking Zoie’s skin as time is running out for her to decide.

Her face grimaces, reflecting a sense of pain towards the decision, with the cries of the boy paired with dilating howls, a thud reaches her.

Zoie tears her expression to peep through the cracks, seeing that the boy fall on the ground concomitantly sending a cold paresthesia around her, sending her flashing back to the moment she got bit.

The moment of fear - the moment of dread as she felt the weight of the moving corpse crawling onto her.

Another cry pitches the air around, flashing her back into the dimmed reality, her decision held tightly within her mind as an imaginary time reaches its conclusion.

With a large inhale to mask the prying numbness, she vaults over the wooden fence, it groans as her weight presses down on it.

Quinsendantly having one of the bodies jerk its head towards the fastly approaching Zoie, her bat enlarges within its perspective, sending out a resounding crack as two forces collide.

A howling grunt escapes the corpse’s mouth as it scorpions, the dark haired teen possessed by shock as Zoie’s figure stands within his obscure sight.

The scorpioned corpse struggles to rebalance itself as the other zombie shrieks at its opposing attacker, its scolding complexion routes into Zoie’s bones, creating a cold rush of adrenaline spouting within her.

Zoie forms a scowl of her own, throttling the bat right into its creepy disgusting face.

Before the boy could react, Zoie’s rush possesses her, sending a flurry of swings to meet the corpse’s skull, her grunts tinged with shouts echoing across the lot as she relentlessly continues.

With bubbling overflowing of emotions, Zoie’s grunts transform into a series of cries.

She brings her teared pooled eyes to the other zombie, its struggling figure remained into the misshaped pose she brought it in.

Zoie’s chest quakes as the emotions overwhelm her, leaving the boy to stare widely in silence.

She brings her forearm up, swiping away her seeping tears, the gray hoodie sleeve collects a dark line from the tears as she brings it back down, guiding her vision to the boy.

Her expression changes as she watches his unchanged shocked expression.

Without thinking, she darts over lots 103’s fence, breaching her designated location.

Zoie’s emotions decrease the moment she enters the lot, she squeezes her eyes shut, attempting to graduate her flared nerves into relaxation.

“Hello?!” The teen whispered a shout, trying to reach Zoie.

On the other side of the fence, the boy watches its amber material, waiting for any sign of her.

He swiftly staggers upright, looking at the struggling zombie for a second before changing his sight back towards the fence.

“Whoever you are - Thank you…” he softly tells the amber wood.

Zoie lightly loosens her closed eyes, forcing herself to control her breathing.

A single gust of wind passes them, adding a cold occupant towards her drying tears.

The leaves of nearby trees chime as the wind greets them, draping an ending of the two’s contact; The boy adventurers back into the safety of his tempered home.

Her eyes softly open, staring down at the grassy backyard reflecting her gradual return.

In all of her life, she should never have to experience something like this.

This new reality that she’s in will shed and tear everything from its old rotting skin Zoie once knew.

It’ll force her with unimaginable struggles, as it revolves.

She glances her perspective through the grass, searching for her lost phone, bringing the recovery mission to an end.

However panic sets in as her search is unsuccessful, she swiftly gets up, pacing herself towards the middle of the backyard, repeating her search in order to find her phone.

Resulting in failure again, Zoie’s mind inflates, sending a claustrophobic pressure around her skull.

She looks everywhere within lots 105’s backyard, unable to find the phone, little does she know the residents of the lot hold her cellular device within their hands, grasping untapped information Zoie had dumped into the phone.

The black mirror of the phone reflects a boy her age - medium length blond hair and hazel eyes sporting rectangular glasses.

His reflection mimicked the boy’s growing smirk, eventually dissipating as he turned on her phone, displaying its history of eight miscalls and a couple of dozen text messages.

He swipes them away, as the four remaining pixels of red phones titling mom and dad.