The Perfect House for Floods and Zombies: Chapter Three

It chewed through my lower gut, fingers gripping my heart - cold and paralysing. Fear. Fear devoured me whole.

Outside the gate, the animated corpse, so terribly mangled, licked my blood from its lips.

I was frozen where I knelt on the driveway, half in shadow, and this was fortunate. As endless seconds passed, I understood that it could not see me clearly, and it had perhaps heard me or even smelled me. It crawled forwards towards the gate and pushed torn fingers between the wrought iron. I almost lost my nerve then, in addition to the contents of my bowels, but it was using the gate to stand. Climbing stiffly upright, the strain of standing up forced a pocket of fluid to spill from beneath its matted shirt and splash to the floor. I gagged as a new wave of stench pooled in my nostrils. As the monstrous thing finished straightening up, I saw with alarm that the latch on the unbolted gate had been shaken from its groove, and as the corpse staggered away, the gate began to swing slowly open.

It is the grand tradition of all such situations that objects will always behave in the least convenient way possible. If you need to get up for an interview, your alarm clock will stop working. Whilst ironing a shirt for the same interview, the iron will have blocked steam jets and leave dirty marks on the cotton. And finally, running to the car, iron-marked shirt-tails flapping, the car feels duty-bound not to start. And so, in the tradition of all such situations, I found myself kneeling before a mass of undead flesh-eaters as a gate began to screech open loudly, like a call to dinner.

In a flash I leapt from my knees, slipped behind the gate post and stuck my hand out to stop the gate from opening further. Then, praying that my hand was not going to become hors d'oeuvres, I slowly... so slowly...pressed the gate back to the closed position. A few squeaks and whines made me sweat, but I succeeded, quickly latched the gate and slid the bolts across. Darting back into the shadows, I saw a few of the lumbering horrors turn towards the gate, but I was hidden so they turned away again. Flooded with relief, I edged carefully back to the office door, sticking to the shadows.

Naturally, the next thirty minutes were spent rushing around the house like a paranoid loon, locking doors and windows and peering through curtains to check for smelly visitors in the front and back gardens. However, I soon realised that the hedges, walls, gates and slopes made the house quite safe from them - for now.

But my relief was short-lived. Far above me, I heard a door creak open, and the sound of heavy footfall on creaking floorboards. Someone was in the house! Grabbing the nearest vaguely offensive object I could lay my hands on - which turned out to be my bleachy spray - I moved the the silence of the hallway. Peering up the stairs, I saw that there was light on the second floor landing. Trembling, I climbed the stairs carefully, vigilant for any movement. At the top of the stairs, I peeked around the corner onto the small corridor, spray at the ready. The door at the end was the guest bathroom, and a bright bar of light glowed from beneath the door. Shadows flitted across this bar of light, indicating that something was moving on the other side. I jumped as the toilet flushed.

Do the undead still need to pee? Would they think to flush the toilet afterwards? I hoped above all that they don't sprinkle on the seats. That's why I won't use public toilets. I'd rather rupture internally than seek relief in those places, which often reek worse than the corpses outside. In any case, I was thankful I had my bleachy spray in case I had to clean the toilet seat. Suddenly I wanted into that bathroom, because no-one, not even a reanimated, supernatural cadaver leaves splashes of urine on my toilet seats!

Then the door was unlocking, so I positioned myself in front of it, spray bottle aimed at eye-height. Make my day.

There was a pregnant pause... And I think it must have been triplets, because it felt like forever. It did not occur to me at the time that the person on the other side of the door might have realised I was there.

Then the door flew open, and a hideous vision emerged from the white of the bathroom. Long, lank hair... yellow teeth revealed from beneath thin, wrinkled lips... Skin mottled and grey and the reddest eyes. I shrieked loudly, and it shrieked back, shielding its face from the stream of bleachy spray I had just squirted from the bottle.

The man (for he was indeed a man) remained curled over, whimpering and trembling and begging to be left alone. I put the bottle down on the stained carpet, and raised my hands peaceably. Slowly, he unwrapped his bird-like limbs and regarded me with the watery, bulging redness he called eyeballs.

"What the hell are you doing in here?" I hissed, heart hammering like a psychotic D.I.Y. enthusiast.

"I live here!" The man whined. "I'm a lodger here."

"But Juan said he was the last, and he left three days ago. Then I moved in. I haven't seen or heard anyone in the house."

He relaxed and smiled.

"I got really stoned, yeh... a good trip. I crashed out."

"For three days?!"

"Did I say it was a good trip? It was a GREAT trip. Hey, I'm Rod, but my friends call me 'Red' because of my eyes. I think they're my friends - not entirely sure if they're real. And you,son?"

"Richard. Nan used to own this place. Now I own it. "

"Richard is it. Yes, your Nana used to talk about you all the time."

"Really." Red looked shifty.

"No. We didn't really ever speak much. We were mostly high. But I'm sure she loved you very much. Speaking of love - you haven't seen a lighter anywhere have you, Rick? I've lost mine. It's a bit of a nightmare."

I blinked.

"It's Richard," I said sternly, "and I think that your 'nightmare' is all relative... take a look outside."

I led him, protesting, downstairs to the enormous second-floor window and gestured for him to look outside.

Deformed and limbless figures stumbled about in the mist. A group of writhing bodies were gorging themselves on something at the corner of Hill Road. I did not look too closely. One of the creatures brushed past the front gate, so we could both clearly see the exposed organs behind broken ribs.

"That's flour on the drive, isn't it. This is Halloween. Aren't costumes amazing these days? You should clean up that flour before it gets trampled into the..."

He was interrupted as The Stressed Boyfriend came to the gate. Remember? The one who threatened me about the hedge? He shook the gate aggressively, peering into the windows. He saw me and Red and his face became a contracting sphincter of rage. He shouted something I couldn't clearly hear over Red's wheezing. I opened the window and leaned out.

"Oi! Freaky little shit! Get down here now."

I looked up and down the street. There seemed to be a lull in the shuffling undead. Stressed Boyfriend slammed his hands on the gate again.

"I swear if you don't come down here... You child molester."

I was shocked.

"Yeh... That's right. Spraying bleach in kids' faces when they're just having some harmless fun."

I'd forgotten his family lived just down the road. I hadn't recognised Teen Dracula as his son either. It's amazing how quickly kids grow... to be obnoxious.
It was then I saw the top of a head moving behind the hedge on the street outside. Heading along the path straight for Stressed Boyfriend. I knew it was a Stinker because white skull was showing through an enormous gap in its scalp.

"Look!" I called down to him, trying to be helpful. "Go... Quickly!"

"Are you threatening me you little shit? Because if you are, I'm going to come through these..arghhurghh!"

The last section of speech was, in this instance, caused by the Stinker leaping onto Stressed Boyfriend's neck. There was a fountain of blood, and like sharks, the other Stinkers smelled it from various foggy, smelly places. They descended upon the terrified man and tore into him. His agony locked him in a spasm to the gate, and unable to help, I closed the window on the poor soul's suffering.

Earlier in the week when he had been so aggressive as to threaten me about the hedge, I wanted to ask him: "What's eating you?' Now I knew the answer.
I looked at Red, and he turned to me eyes wide.

"Woh! That was awesome, man. How do they do it? Must be some of them street performers. That was damn amazing. It looked so real."

"It was real." I looked at him seriously...intently. He watched my features for signs of deception. It was like his brain needed reassuring that it was all a show; when there was no reassurance, he jollied himself through, surfing on the crest of blissful ignorance until he reached his next narcotic space flight.

Red scuttled back off to his room, leaving me standing with my mouth open, not knowing what to say to him. I felt very alone.

The scraping of metal on stone outside brought me to my senses. Peering through the curtains, I saw the stripped carcass of Stressed Boyfriend staring glassily through the gates, which were beginning to move inwards: the weight of the feasting ghouls pressed against it seemed to be making the gates bow under their combined weight. Soon the bolts and the catch would give, and the gardens would be filled with hungry, jagged-clawed Stinkers.

I watched desperately as the gates strained. It was then the electricity went out in the street and down in the town below. Loss of power. The beginning of the end.