Chapter 7

The walk home is so far, uneventful. Thank goodness. My muscles are already starting to tighten and i just know there's a bruise the size of mars waiting for me on my backside. Laying down to sleep should prove a feat. I reach the front lawn, and am not at all surprised that the corpse is gone. One of the lookey-loo neighbors probably saw the whole thing go down, and called 9111. 9111 got instated when the government realized that this whole walking dead thing was actually here to stay. 9111 is the clean up team. Cops, Firefighters, EMS - the whole serve and protect cocktail has special branches now that responds to deader attacks and messes. Their main function is to manage attacks and their aftermath. Once the myth about zombies creating more zombies by an infectious bite was debunked, it became paramount to make sure that an attack victim isn't a fatality. I don't know what the statistic is of a person becoming a zombie at death, but in my experience, my family isn't doing so well. Heck, with the exception of my father, most my immediates are bumbling around upstairs. I look to the second story and can see a shadow in front of one of the windows. I wonder who it is and do they recognize me? Up the sidewalk i go, vaguely interested in the clean-up job and the fact that there's so little matter left in the concrete. I disengage the multitude of locks, and I'm inside the house, safe and sound. I toss my fanny pack back on the coffee table in the living room, my gun follows it. The cleaning and sighting is going to have to wait until morning. I pause at the bottom of the stairs to listen to my house guests. Not a sound. Do zombies sleep? What are they doing up there? I'm not going to spend too much time thinking about it. I can feel myself starting to hit a wall. I need to shut down. I make my way into the bedroom, stripping off my clothes at the same time. I continue through the room and into the bathroom to take a shower. Vaguely i wonder what time it is as i turn the valves to get the water to temperature. As the stream starts spurting from the shower head, tendrils of steam and heat start to dance in the damp air. I pull back the curtain and get in, wincing slightly as the water hits my skin and pummels my back. I avoid glancing in the mirror that runs alongside the wall opposite the shower. I don't want to see what bruises are blooming just yet. Inside i rinse off, and as I reach for the soap sitting in the caddy hanging from the neck of the shower head, i feel an odd drip on the crown of my wet head. Instantly, i look up, and there's a water spot on the ceiling. The drywall is beginning to sag, and the paint is pregnant with water. A tiny droplet is balanced on the bottom of the expanding paint bubble and it sprinkles down and lands on my nose, washes down my cheek with the rest of the water. Shit. There's a leak upstairs. Which means I have to go amidst my dead family members and check things out.