Neighbours

I wanted so badly last night to go online and document the noises outside my house. I couldn’t though, because I feared that whatever it was would hear me clicking and typing, or see the light from my computer screen through the blinds. It was about 2:30 a.m. and I was having the deepest sleep--the first good sleep I’d had in over two weeks. I started dreaming there was an infestation of giant rats living in the walls and the attic, but eventually real banging and scratching noises woke me up. In panic I instantly reached for my husband, then remembered he was still on his way home from the uranium mine up north.

It’s a 15 hour drive to the mine, and Joel stopped for the night and still has about five more hours of driving today. He should be home by 2:00 p.m. if all goes well. I’m relieved, because all of this zombie crap is making me nervous.

After I got over my initial shock of being startled from sleep, I quietly padded around the house listening, trying to identify the noise. As I was just going to carefully part the curtains in my kitchen to look out into the side of our lot, there was a sudden crash from the back yard. It made me jump really hard, and I had to slap my hand over my mouth to cover a shriek. I rushed to the back door and peeked through the slats in the blind. In the security light that had blinked on, I saw a figure standing in the flower bed, staring at the bird bath it had knocked over onto the stone walk (damn, I forgot to lock the back gate). The unsteady man then stomped around on the peonies and roses. He was the first infected I’d ever seen in real life.

I watched him tear a rose bush from the ground and shove the roses--thorny stems and all--into his mouth. The corners of his mouth were torn, but no blood dripped from them, just a pale watery substance. After about five minutes, he staggered back out of the yard into the back alley. I made sure all the doors and windows were locked, then shakily drank a glass of water and crawled back into bed.

After lying under the covers for a few minutes shivering, I realized I knew who had been in our yard. It was poor old Mr. Mennings, who used to live just down the block. He’d been living in the nursing home for the last few months. I’d heard the H1N1 flu had hit the home hard, and quite a few of the residents hadn’t made it. It’s one thing to see the undead on the news, not being anyone you know, but it’s another thing to see your neighbour’s reanimated corpse stumble around your yard. It took me a long time to get back to sleep last night.