TALES FROM THE DEAD: SURVIVING THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE

The early morning sun peeked through her window as the incessant alarm on her phone began to blare. Ada cracked open her eyes and groaned a quiet protest.

“Another day,” she thought to herself.

As Ada picked up her phone to turn off the alarm and get a few more blissful minutes of sleep, an emergency alarm started to ring. Confused, she opened her eyes a little more.

An emergency message popped up:

“WARNING! DUE TO RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE THROUGHOUT THE BAY AREA, ALL LOCAL PUBLIC TRANSIT IS SHUT DOWN UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.”

Ada’s heartbeat started to pick up speed. “Random acts of violence?” she thought. “What is going on? Why can’t I . . . ” it was at that moment that she could hear something in the distance.

“It sounds almost like bottle rockets going off,” she thought, “and . . . screaming? Why are people screaming?” Ada was about three full seconds into pondering the events of the last minute when the emergency alarm went off again.

This time Ada jumped about a foot in the air. The emergency message read:

“WARNING! DUE TO INCREASED VIOLENCE, THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA HAS ISSUED A STATE OF EMERGENCY. ALAMEDA COUNTY HAS ISSUED A QUARANTINE AND STAY AT HOME ORDER. EVERYONE IS REQUIRED TO REMAIN IN THEIR HOMES UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

ANYONE OUT OF THEIR HOME DURING THIS TIME MAY BE SHOT ON SIGHT.

THE SAME QUARANTINE AND STAY AT HOME ORDER HAS BEEN ISSUED THROUGHOUT THE 9 COUNTIES IN THE BAY AREA, ANYONE OUT OF THEIR HOMES MAY BE SHOT ON SIGHT.

ALL HOMELESS INDIVIDUALS MUST IDENTIFY THEMSELVES AS SUCH TO LAW ENFORCEMENT AND WILL BE RELOCATED.”

By the time she finished reading the second message, Ada realized she was shaking. “This must be a prank,” she thought to herself, “please, let this be a prank.”

It was at this moment that the odd news stories from the past few days started to add up.

Starting about five days prior, local and national news organizations reported individuals acting aggressively. In little clips here and there, viewers were told “If you see someone acting aggressively, report it local law enforcement.” But it sounded so small and vague that Ada dismissed these warnings immediately.

Then came the video clips online. People and children looking absolutely deranged and incensed, with red, blood-shot eyes, would walk towards random people, just about anyone who was near them. The deranged individuals wouldn’t listen to directions to stop. They just kept approaching.

A few videos included the deranged people biting strangers--even family. Ada recalled one tragic video where a small child, must have been about six or seven, was being cradled by his mother. He was crying, with a large open wound on his forearm. His mother was crying too and rocking him back and forth while petting his head. The child’s cries began to get weaker and quieter until all you could hear was the mother. Then, shrieks of horror as the little boy sunk his teeth into his mother’s jugular.

Ada wished she hadn’t watched the full video, but at that time, she had hoped it was a sick joke.

In the last twenty-four hours, news reporters told the public to stay inside and to avoid the red-eyed people. They said it so casually like it was just another story. Ada remembered thinking “the deranged people couldn’t be that big of a problem if the news was being so casual.”

Everyone said these were random, stand-alone occurrences. None of these videos or reports were in Oakland, or even California for that matter. The government didn’t issue a warning, the borders didn’t close. Airplanes were still flying all over the world.

An image flashed across Ada’s mind of the conversation she had with a few of her work friends around the water cooler just yesterday. Her pal Greg in accounting said, “what’d y’all think about these weird stories?” Padmal in sales replied, “It's really starting to freak me out, I don’t know if I should just take some vacation days to check in on my family.” Ada, now trembling with fear and regret, recalled saying “I think it’ll all blow over. Most places haven’t really reported anything. It is weird, but it’s not here.”

Ada’s eyes widened as Padmal’s words “check in on my family” reverberated through her head. “Most of my family is on the east coast,” Ada thought, “but my baby brother lives in San Francisco. I need to talk to him.”

Within seconds, Ada dialed her brother, William—Liam for short. As the receiver began to ring, Ada pleaded to herself “please be ok, please be ok.” With the sound of her heart pounding in her ears, images of her childhood with Liam and her then older sister, now post-op trans brother, Trent passed through her mind. Memories of them playing in the park, fighting over the TV, annoying each other, inventing their own games like Quiz-Tag, all of it played through Ada’s mind like a movie of her life. The colors and sounds so vivid as if it all just happened.

On the second ring, Liam’s phone went to voicemail. Liam’s voice message in his laid-back, happy tone said “If you’re hearing this message, it means I couldn’t get to the phone. If you’re my parents, leave a message. To everyone else: this is the 21st century. Text me.” Normally Ada would roll her eyes and leave a sarcastic message about his voice mail greeting, but today she was too scared to be playful. At the beep Ada said in a frantic tone “Call me when you get this so I know you’re ok.”

Ada didn’t want to leave anything to chance, so she sent Liam a text stating “Call me ASAP!!”

Without missing a beat, Ada proceeded to call Trent who lives in Los Angeles. Trent is the reliable one, so Ada knew she would really have reason to worry if he didn’t answer.

The receiver got through about half a ring before Trent answered with a sleepy “Hello?” Ada smiled and burst out into tears, relieved that he answered and just now realizing it was 5:45 in the morning.

“Have you seen the news?” Ada asked, with a shaky voice. Trent replied “Well I don’t usually get up for another hour, Ada. What’s up? Did something happen? Are you ok?”

Ada took Trent’s response as a sign that things were probably ok by him. She took a deep breath and went on to describe the quarantine orders and the scary noises she could hear in the distance.

After she was done, Trent said “That’s insane! But you’re safe, right?” Something about talking to Trent always relaxed Ada, he has this calm, cool, and assured tone about him that was everything she needed. “Yeah, I’m safe bro, don’t worry about me,” she replied.

Ada changed topics, “But I haven’t heard from Liam. I know he usually sleeps off his hangover until noon, so maybe he is ok too. I just hate not knowing.” As she said this, Trent turned on his TV to the news. All Ada heard was an audible gasp and then he said “Ada, it’s here too. Whatever this thing is, it’s in LA. I think we sh-….” Then the line went dead and there was a loud BANG and explosion sound outside Ada’s apartment.

A mere half-second later, Ada’s tiny studio apartment and everything in it shook violently, like there had been a strong earthquake. The movement only lasted for a second, and afterward, Ada could hear every car alarm on the block go off. The noise was deafening.

Ada opened up her blinds and looked out of her fourth-story window to find a large airplane had crashed into a building about a block and a half away. Pieces of the plane and building were scattered everywhere, some larger pieces had crashed into other buildings and cars nearby. Ada could see a wing sticking out of the building across the street. The smell of smoke was in the air.

To her horror, there were about ten of those deranged, red-eyed humanoid beasts walking east, past her building, and towards the accident. One of them walked north, towards a car with its alarm blaring. Ada could see the car was empty, and something, a gut feeling, maybe, told her this was odd.

As she squinted and strained her eyes, Ada could see a few people trying to climb out of the wreckage amongst the flames and smoke of the wreck. The building below had caught fire and the three or four stories that survived from the formerly 12 story building had people hanging out of them. People were sticking their arms and torsos out of their windows, probably waiving for help. “I’ve got to help these people, I can’t just stand here and watch this happen,” she thought.

Then a blood-curdling scream pierced through the noise on the street. It had come from Ada’s apartment hallway. Ada turned around to face the direction of the sound. Just as her hand was about to grab her front door handle, Ada’s shirt got caught on a hallway nail. The same nail that she had hammered into the wall last night and hung her favorite childhood photo on. The one where Trent, Ada, and Liam were sitting on the couch in their Halloween costumes after trick-or-treating. Their faces happy and stained from the candy they had eaten.

Heart pounding with adrenalin, Ada looked down to find the frame and shattered glass all over the hallway floor. And…blood? Ada’s stomach curdled at the sight of blood, mostly from the surprise of its existence on her floor. Then the pain sunk in…Ada lifted her left foot, and then her right, there was glass imbedded in the bottom of both of her feet.

Ada began to laugh in almost a desperate, sarcastic kind of way. “What next, god?! Locusts?!” she screamed at her ceiling. She knew she was being dramatic, but maybe that was ok, since the world seemed to be falling apart right before her.

She hobbled to the bathroom and carefully maneuvered to avoid embedding more glass in her feet. Ada grabbed her tweezers, antibiotic ointment, gauze, and tape and put the lid of the toilet seat down to sit down and get a good look at her feet.

As she pulled tiny shards of glass from the ball of her foot, Ada would occasionally cuss and gripe about it with the occasional “fuck” here and an audible “ow” there. Some places were less painful than others. Ada worked her way up from the least painful and scary to the bloodiest. Her right foot got the worst of it. As she got to the final piece on her right foot that was lodged in between her big toe and index toe, Ada screamed “OW! FUCK! OW!”

The silence after was almost as loud as her screams. Then, Ada heard a dragging type of noise followed by loud banging on her front door. It was almost as if whatever or whoever was making the noise was throwing their entire body at the door.

With each thump on the door, the wood creaked and the frame shook. “It’s going to break in,” Ada thought to herself. Each second felt like minutes as Ada frantically thought about what to do. Images flipped through her mind of different escape options. Since she was on the fourth floor, she was pretty limited.

The thumps began to get louder and more repetitive. “There are multiple things banging on my door!” she thought. Ada began to hyperventilate, “How do I even stop these things?”

The wood on Ada’s door began to creak more. The center wood panel was beginning to give way to the incessant thumpers. Ada thought back to when she first found the apartment online, it was located a beautiful Victorian building rehabbed into multiple little studio apartments. She never thought that the aged and semi-cracked front door would ever do her harm. Naive as it may be Ada never considered a break-in scenario.

The thumps and bangs got louder, closer almost. In an instant, the center of the door began to break open in splinters and shards. Ada could finally see what was making all that noise.

She was chilled to the bone as she saw three of her neighbors now vicious, red-eyed humanoid monsters on the other side of her door. Ada’s eyes began to fill with tears as she could see front and center was the sweet, elderly Miss Wilson who lived down the hall and always gave out lemon drops. Ada loved Miss Wilson, she was her substitute California grandmother and neither woman ever missed their Sunday afternoon tea date together.

But this thing in front of Ada was not Miss Wilson, instead it was a growling, aggressive shell of a former friend. She could see the happy light in Miss Wilson’s eyes were gone. The thin, manicured, arthritic fingers that used to pat Ada every time she made Miss Wilson laugh were now covered in maroon blood. The face that Ada treasured so dearly was now splattered in blood and angry.

But as the retched stank of death wafted into the tiny apartment, Ada was brought back to the present moment. She could see behind Miss Wilson was Mr. Ding, her kind, middle-aged neighbor who owned a local café. Mr. Ding was a widower with one son who became a dentist last year. Ada remembered when Mr. Ding proudly showed her pictures of his son Eric at his dental graduation. “I wonder if Eric knows,” Ada thought.

Next to Mr. Ding was a man Ada hadn’t met before. Most of the skin on the right side of his face was gone and Ada could see the muscles move as he opened his mouth to growl.

The past few minutes as Ada had stared at the monsters and remembered her friends, the monsters continued to tear down her front door. With another creak and loud bang, the initial split and hole got much bigger, large enough for Miss Wilson to fall through.

Miss Wilson began to crawl towards Ada, and since the apartment was so small, it was only a moment or two before Miss Wilson was close to Ada. “What do I do?! What do I do?!” she thought to herself, with increasing panic.

Ada reached over to a side table for the hammer she had used the night before, fortunately she was always a bit messy. As her fingertips made contact with the handle, Miss Wilson pushed herself up just enough to sink her teeth deep into Ada’s arm.

Ada let out her own blood-curdling scream as Miss Wilson’s teeth scraped against one of the bones in Ada’s forearm. The scream attracted another monster, and in a few moments three red-eyed humanoids entered Ada’s apartment. Mr. Ding bit into Ada’s jugular and blood squirted across the room like a lawn sprinkler as Ada feebly tried to fight him off.

Ada fell to the ground and the other two monsters attacked Ada’s torso, taking their fill of her organs in the process.

As the life slipped away from Ada, her cell phone erupted with another emergency alert.

“WARNING! DUE TO UNCONTROLLABLE VIOLENCE IN THE CITY OF OAKLAND AND ALAMEDA COUNTY, RESIDENTS WHOSE HOMES ARE UNDER ATTACK ARE ENCOURAGED TO DEFEND THEMSELVES AGAINST THOSE IDENTIFIED AS ZOMBIES.

ZOMBIES HAVE RED EYES AND WILL ATTACK ON SIGHT WITH NO PROVOCATION.

RESIDENTS CAN STOP THE ATTACKS BY DAMAGING THE BRAIN OR BRAIN STEM OF THE ZOMBIE. ONLY DAMAGE TO THE BRAIN OR BRAIN STEM WILL STOP THE ZOMBIE FROM ATTACK.

THE QUARANTINE ORDER STILL REMAINS IN EFFECT AND RESIDENTS ARE REQUIRED TO REMAIN INSIDE AND IN THEIR HOMES.

ANYONE OUTSIDE OF THEIR HOMES MAY BE SHOT ON SIGHT.

ALL HOMELESS INDIVIDUALS MUST IDENTIFY THEMSELVES AS SUCH TO LAW ENFORCEMENT AND WILL BE RELOCATED.”