When a second shock jarred both of us from our daze I managed a quip. “Honey,” I remarked casually, “you’ll never guess what Nobel Laureate author’s risen from the grave and is outside right now trying to kill us!” The window exploded and Renee shrieked. Arms thrust into the room, flesh hanging off them, angry claws tearing and clutching at the impedimenta on the table. Only when the blinds and curtains were ripped down did it occur to me how trapped we were. As I was watching the gray Leviathan mosh at the window, I felt the door jolt and shudder like that of one about to buckle and snap, and I looked about the motel room for some remedy to our crisis. Renee threw a lamp at them.
“What are these things?” Renee yelled. But I wasn’t really listening to her. Grabbing a couch pillow and discovering it was as ineffective as one might have predicted, and the corduroy fabric clenched in my fist, the full weight of goose feathers hammering a zombie limb, I saw Faulkner among the others pushing his head through the window, his gray skin hanging off his face, his crepuscular eyes lolling about in his head like a broken puppet’s, baring his granite teeth. The zombies filled the room, filled us, with a hoarse unearthly squall of unalloyed terror.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Renee shouted.
A hand wedged itself in the door, a striated spear of flesh and bone, its fingers ripping at the fabric on my shirt. “I can’t hold them!”
Across the room Renee yelled: “Where did these guys come from?”
“How should I know?” I said. I had a pretty good idea. She had a floor lamp in her hands now, gripped like a bo staff, warding off the zombies.
“Is it because you stole that change?” she said. I didn’t say anything. The attempts at the door were increasingly, horrifically powerful. “Or the brick. That’s it. Where is it?” I told her.
“I told you not to take it,” Renee said.
“I can’t hold this door any longer,” I said. “Get in the bathroom.” She rushed to my suitcase. Faulkner and the other zombies tried to pile through the window, elbowing each other for primacy. Renee threw my clothes over her shoulders and produced the brick in question and turned towards our uninvited guests with a startling defiance. She presented it like a talisman. There was the chaos of the tempest outside, the piercing groans of the invaders, and a Taco Bell commercial. Faulkner tumbled through the window and over the desk along with an angry black man in a greasy gas station attendant’s uniform. For a moment I thought once they saw the brick they would take it and shuffle out, back to their graves.
I relaxed at the door.
“Take it,” Renee said.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t help myself.” I went to stand beside Renee. “Can you really blame me?”
The door opened slowly and a few dark figures stepped across the threshold.
Faulkner turned and looked at me. He took the brick from Renee and considered it, then he again looked at her. Striking, he did soundlessly; the plummeting brick cracked skull and sent blood spraying, but it was noiseless; I felt myself absorbed into a surreal tableau one might see in an art museum. Now I could hear only the sound of Renee hitting the floor with a noise like a sack of potatoes being dropped, and her murmuring This is your fault. She kept repeating it as I dragged her into the bathroom with tears in my eyes. “This is your fault!” she said again, louder, as I propped her up against the wall, watching as I locked the door. “Your fault!” she rasped, the words concussing me with each damning syllable until she groggily turned her head and new streamlets of blood ran down her face. “This is your fault. This is your fault.”
If you've read this through to the end, thank you! I hope you liked it. The story was based on a true story.
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