Page 3 of Dyana
“Oh my God. Oh my God.”
Finally, I turned to my friend. Amy was headed toward a complete spiral meltdown. “Hey!” I said as I rushed to her and wrapped my arms around her. “It’s going to be ok. We’re ok.” I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince more, her or me. I pulled her over to her bed, and we huddled together as the zombie outside continued to slam against our door.
Eventually, the slamming stopped, and the lack of sound spurred me into motion. “We can’t stay here,” I said. I started pulling clothes out of my dresser and stuffing them into a bag. “I have to get home to my family. You’re coming with me. Once there, we can figure out how to get you home to yours.” Amywatched me move around the room as I packed, but didn’t move to pack her things. “Come on, Amy. You need to pack. We can’t bring everything, so only grab the important stuff.”
“How are we getting to your car, Dyana?” she asked, her voice becoming shrill as she spoke. “How the fuck do you expect us to get through all of them!?”
I stopped what I was doing, knelt in front of her, and grabbed her hands. “We’re going to fight, Amy. We don’t have a choice.”
“Yes, we do! We can stay here where it’s safe and wait for someone to rescue us,” she argued.
“We don’t know how long that will take or if anyone will come, Amy. We have to save ourselves. Come on.” I stood and pulled her to her feet. “Start packing.”
“How? How are we supposed to fight them? You saw that guy. How do we fight that?” Amy asked. Although she was still verbally opposed to my plan, I was relieved to see her start packing a bag as well.
She posed a good question. How were we supposed to fight them? If they were indeed zombies, and the rules the movies taught us held true, damage to the brain would kill them. Which was great, but we were in a girl’s dorm room. It wasn’t like we had a ton of weapons lying around. I searched the room for anything that would be useful to us. A thought occurred to me, and I ran to the closet and pulled out my softball gear. Very briefly, I thought I wanted to play softball until halfway through training, when I realized that I despised running more than anything else on the planet. Unfortunately, I had already purchased all the gear, but thanks to my power or procrastination, I hadn’t sold it yet.
I yanked the two aluminum bats from the bag and held them up. “We’ll use these!”
Amy eyed them doubtfully. “I’m not sure they will be as effective as you think.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
Amy looked around our dorm and then sighed. “No.”
“Then we’re using the bats. Just swing as hard as you can at their heads.” I set the bats by the door and finished packing. When we had everything, we each took a bat, and I stuck my car keys in my front pocket to get to them quickly. “Ready?” I asked Amy.
“No,” she said as she nodded her head.
“Stick together and stay quiet. We’ll go down and straight to the parking lot,” I reminded her as I looked through the peephole. The area around our door looked clear, but that didn’t mean our neighbor wasn’t still lurking. I opened the door as silently as possible and peeked out. He had made his way to the other end of the hall, so I gestured for Amy to follow me, and we crept toward the stairwell.
I didn’t know what we would find on the first floor, so I prepared for the worst. Compared to earlier, everything seemed quiet. It was so quiet that I was sure my heart thundering in my chest could be heard by anyone or anything within hearing distance. When we reached the midway landing, I paused and looked at Amy to make sure that she was ready. She closed her eyes, and then, after a few short seconds, she opened them and nodded.
We went down the rest of the steps and entered the lounge. There was blood everywhere, but that wasn’t the most concerning thing. It was the groups of zombies feeding on the bodies strewn about. The silver lining to our situation was that the zombies were so focused on their feast that they hadn’t noticed us yet. I grabbed Amy’s hand and pulled her behind me toward the front door, which hung off its hinges.
Just before we reached the door, Amy slipped in a pool of blood and screeched. The yum yum sounds of happy, eating zombies ceased, and for several seconds, the world was voidof all sound as they all turned toward us. I had what felt like an out-of-body experience looking at all my dormmates I had grown to know over the past year. My eyes caught on Ernie, and tears threatened to fall. I had assumed his fate, but witnessing it in person was devastating. I met his dead eyes, and it almost looked like he tilted his head in recognition before snarling, blood and flesh dripping from his open mouth.
“Run!” I yelled, pulling Amy to her feet and dragging her through the door behind me. It was better outside only because we weren’t in an enclosed space. I quickly pulled her into the clump of shrubbery across from our building. Hidden from view, I held my breath to see if anyone saw us. When we weren’t attacked, I focused on Amy, shaking like a leaf in hurricane winds. I put my hands on her shoulders and made exaggerated breathing movements to get her to match my breaths and calm down.
Amy opened her mouth as her eyes widened from whatever she saw over my shoulder. Quickly, I covered her mouth to keep her from speaking and slowly turned my head to peek over my shoulder. Ernie was back. It seemed he was just as persistent in death as in life. He stood over us for a while as he sniffed the air and turned this way and that, erratically, like he knew we were there but couldn’t figure out how he couldn’t see us. When another group of living, breathing students poured from the dormitory, Ernie’s attention was pulled from us, and I used the distraction to pull Amy out of the bushes and away from the screaming people and the growling horde of zombies surrounding them.
The parking lot where my car was parked was halfway across campus. Most of the time, it’s faster to go through campus, but there was also a walking path through the woods that we could take to get there. Given the circumstances, the path less traveled seemed the wisest choice. Trusting Amy to follow me, I let go ofher hand and led the way. I spotted a zombie in our path and pulled back the bat as I approached it. When I was close enough, I swung the bat as hard as I could, and I wanted to cheer when I heard the satisfying crack of my bat connecting with its head. The zombie went down; I wasn’t sure whether I killed him or not.
The start of the walking path was about fifteen feet away when I heard Amy scream. Again. I turned to see her fall to the ground. I was pretty sure she tripped on air. I was also confident that she lied when she told me she was a surfer. There was no way someone this clumsy had the balance required to surf. My annoyance with her quickly evaporated when I saw the zombie approaching her.
“Amy!” I yelled, pointing.
She managed to roll to her back and lifted the bat just as the zombie reached her and attacked. Using the bat, she managed to hold the zombie at arm’s length, but I knew she couldn’t hold him off forever. I ran back to her and swung the bat as hard as possible at the zombie’s face. Fluids... exploded... on impact in the most disgusting way possible. I guess the face is juicier than the side of the head. Good to know.
Amy scrambled to her feet, and we booked it for the trees as more zombies moved toward us, attracted to the noise we made during the scuffle. I forced myself to slow down when we reached the path. It was uneven, with roots sticking out of the ground, and the last thing we needed was for Amy to fall again. As I had hoped, the walking path was deserted, and we uneventfully made it to the other side. My SUV was parked a few spots into the second row. I could see it from the edge of the trees where we crouched to observe the parking lot and figure out what we were dealing with.
The parking lot seemed quiet, eerily so. I held my finger to my lips to remind Amy to stay silent and then jerked my headtoward my car. It was a straight line to the car, so I was surprised when I tossed my bag into the backseat and climbed into the driver’s seat, not to see Amy in the passenger seat. Where the fuck did she go? With a sigh, I reached for the handle to find her, but she came running through the cars in the row ahead of me and got in the car.
“Where the hell did you go, and why are you wearing a hoodie now?” I asked as I started the car and peeled out of my parking spot.
“Jeremy was sitting in his car, so I went to check on him,” Amy explained, tears streaming down her face. Jeremy was Amy’s ex, and while they had recently broken up, Amy always expected them to get back together. I didn’t need to ask if he was ok.
“And the hoodie?”
