Zombie Story - section

Roger awoke to a very strange sound coming from outside.  Annoyingly wondering what it was, he glanced at the alarm clock beside the bed.  It was 5:40 in the morning, meaning he'd only gotten a few hours of sleep before waking.  The noise persisted, and though Roger tried to ignore it and go back to sleep, he found that he couldn't.  He angrily sat up in bed.  Scooting his feet into a pair of slippers, he hastily threw on a robe and exited the room.  Damn raccoons, he thought as he descended the stairs.

The noise became louder, and Roger slowed his pace.  It no longer sounded like raccoons foraging for trash, but someone rummaging loudly through his back yard and making noises.  The thought of an intruder pacing his property at the ungodly hour of six AM frightened him, but it was more annoying than anything, and he continued his path to the main level of the house.

Once in the kitchen, the sound became clearer.  Someone was apparently digging in his back yard, and they were not being quiet about it.  He could hear dirt being flung onto the frosted-over ground and someone—evidently a man—mumbling.  Whomever was doing the shoveling was breathing heavily, obviously over-exerting himself in the early morning chill.  Roger crept to the kitchen window and gently pulled aside a ripple in the yellowish curtains to see what this mystery digger was doing.

Roger tried to remain strong as he watched his father claw his way out of his grave.  At first, only the tips of Major Newark’s fingers – which were yellowed and overgrown with cracked, dead fingernails – poked through the soft earth.  But the moment his father’s mossy class ring surfaced, a ring that had once been meticulously shined and strategically used to place bruises on his young son’s arms, Roger howled.

The Major’s decaying arms soon popped out, thrashing about wildly, and dug into the deep-rooted tufts of grave grass near his headstone.  Using the grass for leverage, Major Newark awkwardly pulled his body up from the crumbling dirt until his head was exposed.  It was a ghastly sight.  Grayed and leathery skin now pulled at his face and neck, wrapping tightly around the cheekbones and forehead like plastic wrap over a rotted ham.  His eyes, once black and piercing, were now a putrid color and rolled around incessantly in their sockets. 

His father’s torso started to wiggle from the ground, still clad in the olive green military uniform he had been buried in.  Parts of it, anyway.  Most of the jacket had since been eaten away by insects and deterioration, and the material that wasn’t destroyed by ten years in the grave had turned black with mold and thin like cheesecloth.  Large, greenish chunks of the Major’s flaking belly flesh were seen through the worm-eaten holes and his medals had long ago begun to tarnish and rust. 

The Major had been trying so badly to escape from his earthen resting place that he hadn’t noticed Roger.  In mid-thrash with his head flung wildly in the air, teeth gnashing, Major Newark caught a glimpse of his son.  He lowered his head as a dog would, his decaying forehead pursing and rotten teeth showing.  He lunged at Roger – torso still half in the ground – and a putrid gurgling sound came from his throat.  Roger jumped back and a terrified squelch escaped his lips.

“Stop it!” Roger screamed.  “You’re dead!  You’re dead!”

The more noise his son made, the harder Major Newark tried to free himself.  Now his rotting garments were being torn by twigs and wood splinters on the ground, and he struggled to remove his legs from the mounds of dirt they were stuck in.  Roger knew it was only a matter of time before his father escaped, so he forced himself out of the temporary paralysis fear had put him in and scrambled to his feet.  He began running blindly, snapping his head back only a few times to see how close he was to being eaten.  Each time he did, more of Sal Newark’s body was exposed, or at least what was left of it.

Roger realized halfway through the field that he had no idea where he was going.  He was in the middle of nowhere, it was getting dark, and he had nothing to protect himself with.  Jesus, he thought.  Even a butter knife could be useful right now.  Roger was against weapons, probably because his father had always kept such an arsenal at the house.  He now found himself wishing he could retrieve something from the old house on Walnut, and it was then that he remembered something that gave him a little hope, though not much and in a crazy way.

His father had been buried with his favorite pistol, a military-issued Colt 1911.