Young Writers Society

Deep in the heart of the American suburbs, retreating from the sprawl of Los Angeles, sits a small boy of ten. He clutches a teddy bear to his naked white chest, a brown fluffy one with pearly black eyes and sticky out ears. During the happy times, during the sad times, and even during these times it had retained its title as the boy’s favourite. Its inanimate eyes are plastic – without life, but they will always give the boy comfort. Staring into them, getting lost in them, it drags the boy away from this pitiful excuse of a world, wrought with so many troubles, and transports him to the furthest reaches of his young, vivid imagination. It brings him to places he could only dream of, and better than that. These places used to be fun, excitement spurring places; they were populated by multi-coloured candy statues and strange, friendly creatures. But the boy’s idea of perfection has changed and now the places are serene, filled with the sweet silence – the peace – he so longs for in reality.

He clutches his teddy even tighter against his chest and sobs into the top of its head. Spots mark the ground beneath him – the graves of fallen tears, and he adds to them generously. Now a noise makes itself heard outside the closet. It is a deep sound, a moan of sorts, and it emanates ultimate despair. The boy tries not to panic. The noise could be anything... could be anything. Sweat marks his face in streaky lines so that he resembles a sad water colour painting. The sweat is extremely bitter and it stings his eyes like shampoo. The noise might have come from some sort of animal crawling its way along the floor, a rat wounded by one of the traps the boy’s father had set so long ago. But what if it was the monsters again? The monsters with their sharp, yellow teeth like stalactites, fitted loose in mouths like brain-ridden caves. The monsters with their decaying flesh, bloody sores appearing all over their bodies. The monsters with their jagged, untrimmed nails fit for the job of tearing people apart, killing anything that might cross their path. The boy shivers, half with the cold and half with the fear, and his naked back brushes against the clothes hanging from hooks behind him. He wishes he could simply burst out of the closet and run downstairs to hug his mother and father. But a wave of fear hits him each time he thinks about it, his mother and father are no longer who they were.

But the boy had enough, and his teddy too for that matter. Even at ten he could understand the fact that he couldn’t simply stay in the closet. He would run out of air, or he would starve to death, any number of things might happen to him but none of them good. He closes his eyes and breathes deeply. He’d been fine, locked in his room, until his parents had started to claw at the door. It had started weakly, perhaps the humanity had been fighting back at that stage, but eventually it had grown into fierce attacks. The scraping had evolved into loud thumps, accompanied by the sound of splintering wood and nightmarish, glee-infested growls. That’s when the boy had run for dear life and dove into his closet, swinging it shut and locking it behind him as fast as his chubby fingers would allow him to. That was a week ago.

Now the closet reeked of urine and other things foul, its darkness was no longer a promise of safety but a surrounding force of malevolence. Shadows hissed at him, nightmares both haunted him and awoke him on the few occasions he had managed to fall into a slumber. Life was hell and it didn’t seem to be getting much better. So now he eases forward, closer to the door, and reaches up for the lock with a shaky hand. One might mistake him for a victim of Parkinson’s as his fingers fumble for the bolt. His breath is almost as shaky, and he struggles to stay calm. Finally, the bolt is slid back. The boy’s heart stops, or does it? It feels like it does. But no, he can hear its thumping loud, clear and ever so young. He clutches his chest, looking for its rise and fall, and when he finds it he smiles triumphantly. He feels proud for opening the door; now all he needs to do is step out and escape the house. The hardest part though, is the first step. His timid hand aches to push the door outward, to hear its satisfying creak and see the familiarity of his room once more. But he feels even more scared than he had when he’d slid the bolt back, even more scared than he had when the helicopters flew by, guns mounted to their sides, and announced something about “quarantined”, “evacuation” and “scheduled for termination”.

And although his heart and his head are both overwhelmed by cowardice, that hand knows what to do – and as the boy’s fingertips touch the wood of the door he sucks in a breath. Did it creak? He didn’t hear it creak. He pushes it a small bit further, and still he didn’t hear it creak. Now it is fully open, letting in the mass of darkness beyond. The lights in his room have been turned off, along with every light in the area, and the boy stumbles into the dark. His heart is in his mouth; maybe his parents had left the house. Maybe he could leave safely. He gets up on shaky legs and breathes slowly. He wipes the sea of sweat from his young, unwrinkled forehead. Finally, he sets for the door. His legs are striding fast, fuelled by the knowledge that outside could mean safety. ‘Maybe,’ the boy thinks, ‘my neighbours will help me.’

The lights all over the house are gone but it doesn’t faze the boy, this place has been his home for ten years and if he didn’t know his way around it he’d be ashamed of himself. He walks past his parents’ room and rushes down the stairs. So far, sees nothing with cause to worry about. In fact when he reaches the kitchen he feels relieved, almost safe. The beating of his heart has reduced from the noise of a drum to the noise of a robin’s wings; it is soft – at rest. This only makes it jump all the more violently when he feels the hand. He is at the door as the rotten, dead skin touches him. It is soft at first, delicate, and as well as petrifying the boy to a state of paralysis it strangely soothes him. It is his father’s, to be sure. The boy smiles uncertainly, his father’s flesh is cold but it may yet be living. That thought changes when long nails sink deep into unmarked flesh, and the boy lurches forward. He feels his body moving through the darkness in a trance, and it doesn’t even hurt when he bursts through the front door and rolls out onto the concrete steps at its foot.

The boy doesn’t notice the full moon bearing down on him, lovely and bright, a bulb for the world when it gets too dark. He doesn’t notice the houses around him, windows boarded up, cars left from driveways. All he sees are the monsters, mindless, staggering about and moaning as if in pain. The eyes have a strange orange tint in them and to the boy it looks terribly sinister. He’d heard of a sickness, but this was no sickness. This was an evil. Now their eyes settle on him, and as he lies on the blood-stained concrete steps dead bodies jump towards him. It’s as if they’ve gained new life from the sight of someone who has it. Their bodies are fast, machines made specifically for killing, and the boy can do nothing but watch, wide-eyed and weeping. Urine runs down his legs, warm against his freezing flesh. His back is painted with numerous scrapes from the concrete and it stings, but not as much as his mother’s claws slashing his plump young cheek. Blood flies into the night sky, and as tens of zombies clamber for the boy’s life, his parents included, his vision focuses on something else. There is something in the sky, something big and round and shaped like a whale.

It is like a shadow against the moon, black on white, and it falls gracefully towards the Earth, towards the boy. And then it hits, as flesh is stripped in a mess of growls and pain-filled screams – it hits. There is silence for but a moment and the boy can’t breathe, and then a blinding light, a rushing sound like a tidal wave. Then with one final stinging pain across his whole body, the boy’s pain ends.