9-19-09

Location: Brooks & Peabody Bookstore 

When I sit and watch the monitors there’s an infected creature I recognize. I recognize her for three reasons:

1) Her name is Susan. Because she was – is – a regular. She bought six copies of The Shack. Six. I shit you not.

2) She was in the Christian section when it all started. The floor to ceiling window behind her imploded, sending shards of glass the size of stalactites crashing onto the floor. I watched her try to run toward me, through Biography and Home & Garden. She didn’t get very far. A gnarled, gray thing came in the window and caught up to her. It draped itself over her neck and they fell to the floor.

3) Susan should have been dead. You don’t lose that much blood, that much of your neck and walk it off. But she just sort of shrugged off the decaying person on her back, and got to her feet. It was without a doubt the most unsettling thing I’ve ever seen. 

Susan came at me, not fast, but my brain was taking too long to compute what I had just seen. Then there was a little flash of red in the corner of my vision. It was the ax. There was a hard little hammer hanging down next to the glass case – “Break in case of emergency”. Hell, I thought, this certainly ranks.  I swung, hard, a big, overhead swing that came down at her shoulder. Susan sort of grunted as if she had dropped her purse or tripped a little.

I didn’t stop.  I kept hold of the ax and sprinted to the front of the store where Phil was ushering Matt, Janette and Hollianted to toward the break room. Phil had a bat.  He swung the bat wildly as he caught sight of me, beckoning me with a bloody hand; I never thought I’d be so happy to see that pudgy bastard waving me over.

Now I see Susan on the monitor from time to time. We don’t call her Susan anymore, we call her Lefty.

Tomorrow I’ll have to confront Lefty again. We’re running out of food. We'll have to leave the safety of the door: we don't have a choice.