We live with monsters now.
It started off with one. Just one in the garage who got clever and found a way in. Now the door’s open, and who knows how many there are? Where did they come from? We didn’t have any of those Infected Dead outside for weeks and now we have a garage full of them…and it’s not just us. They’re like cockroaches these days. So many people have zombies that the Pickup Truck can’t get around to our house to take care of it.
I hate them. We have to live out of the upstairs because of them, and they stink the place up. I thought I was bored before, but last week I was able to be bored on three floors. Now we’re stuck up on one, trying to ignore the noises we hear below in the garage. At least they’re in the garage—they may be smarter, but they must not be very strong because they still haven’t got past any of our doors or windows. Houston boarded them up with another layer on top of the ones Dad had us put up and then he helped us to form walls within walls with our furniture. It was actually kinda fun, like building forts without having to worry about Mom making me put it all back. At least I was having fun. Everyone else was serious and silent.
Mom doesn’t stop me from looking out the windows anymore. I keep looking for my ghost, but I haven’t seen him since the Pickup Truck guys came to his house. Was that his body they took away? If a parasite took over my body I’d haunt the place until somebody took care of it too.
It’s more than a bit crowded since we sealed the top of the stairs. We moved up to the smallest floor in the house, and we moved up with almost all of our stuff. I’m driving everybody crazy ‘cause I’ve just gotta run, but there’s nowhere to run to and lots of stuff to run into. I can’t even use my jump rope—there’s not enough room for it to clear any of our gear. I used to run round and round the house and up and down the stairs until I didn’t feel jumpy anymore…I’m going to go crazy with all this stillness! All we do is schoolwork and play games on the Internet and eat food from a can and turn the TV up real loud so we don’t have to hear the scratching and dragging and bumping and shuffling noises that come from the garage.
Naked seems to have given up. She can’t see out the windows upstairs; they’re too tall. She’s got such a sensitive nose, I bet it hurts with all the dead body smell. She can’t pick out just one body now and bark at it—there are too many bodies around for barking to make sense. I feel bad for her ‘cause she seems sad and old from all of this. I know that she needs to run just like me, so I give her extra belly rubs to make her feel better.
I miss Dad even more when this stuff happens. He can’t get back now ‘cause the airport in Singapore is dealing with an “infestation.” I was on Skype yesterday telling him what it was like living with monsters and then I felt bad because I made him so upset and afraid for us that for the first time in my life, I saw him cry. Dad’s crying seemed to scare KC and Hou ‘cause they started to cry too. I couldn’t tell if Mom was crying—she was looking down and shielding her face with her fingers. Her shaking hands were holding her head up like it couldn’t hold itself no more ‘cause it was full of heavy thoughts.
Then the power went out and things got worse. There was nothing but the radio to listen to, and it was never loud enough to cover up all those zombie sounds. Soon, Mom wouldn’t even let me listen to the radio! I asked Houston about that and he said it was because the stuff on the radio was even worse than the stuff that used to be on TV, that they were now talking about mobs of infected people attacking TV and power stations and cell phone towers and stuff like that. He said there are even outbreaks in places they thought were totally safe. It didn’t matter after a while anyways; the hand crank on the radio broke off ‘cause Mom was using it too much after the batteries died. And if that wasn’t bad enough, things got even spookier once it got dark. For some reason, it sounded like there were more zombies around outside when the lights were out, making it feel like there was an army of the dead just outside our door.
I’m glad it’s fall and we’re not freezing or burning up here, but all we’ve got to do is read books in the daylight (yawn!) and play card games. It got even more boring still when we went through the rest of our batteries…we only used our flashlights for emergency use, so that took awhile. Mom’s phone battery eventually went out too, so we couldn’t talk to anyone anymore. I heard her on the phone crying and begging the government people for help right before her phone died out. I asked Mom what we were going to do now if we needed help, and she said we’d get on the roof and use the flares the government issued until someone came and got us.
One of my favorite ways to entertain myself was to wind up Houston and KC and then get them in trouble for yelling at me, but that doesn’t work anymore. Now they don’t react to anything I do. They’re as quiet as Mom. They stare out the window or into space. Sometimes KC pretends to read her book, but I can tell that she hasn’t turned a page for ages; she just sits there holding the book, staring at it like she’s looking into a tunnel. This makes things more humdrum and dreary than ever, ever before.
That’s why I was so excited when I saw the new people next door.