Zombie Apocalypse Survivor: The Crawlspace Of Daryl Ingram



  Zombie Apocalypse Survivor: The Crawlspace of Daryl Ingram

  by Jason R. Thornton

  Copyright © 2010 JASON R. THORNTON

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are fictitious in every regard. Any similarities to actual events and persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used. Except for review purposes, the reproduction of this book in whole or part, electronically or mechanically, constitutes a copyright violation.

  Zombie Apocalypse Survivor: The Crawlspace of Daryl Ingram

  Copyright © 2010 JASON R. THORNTON

  I was dreaming. I have forgotten what the dream was about, but I remember the sound of pounding in my dream. It wasn’t the sound of a hammer pounding, but the sound of someone pounding on a deep kettle drum, a deep booming noise. It was still dark outside when I opened my eyes. I turned to look at the clock and it read 3:26 in blurry red letters.

  I heard the pounding again, the deep thump carrying me all the way from my dream state, to half awake, then to fully awake. The pounding was coming from the window, right next to my bed. I looked up and immediately shouted in fright. There, standing right outside of my bedroom window, was the dark shadowy figure of a man. He stopped his pounding on the window for a brief moment, as if to study me in my fright, and then began hammering on the window again. The pounding was much faster, much harder, than it had been in my dream only moments before. It resonated loudly, “Bong! Bong! Bong!” Strangely, I was irritated as I thought about how the cheap low-grade windows that had been installed when my home was built had always echoed with each and every outside noise. If the builders had installed quality windows, then it was possible that they would not have sounded like kettle drums as the dark figure outside continued to pound on them.

  Suddenly the window shattered and fragment of glass burst inwards. I sat up quickly in my bed and smelled the man outside. I nearly retched as the putrid stink of rotting flesh assailed my nose. The stench was so thick it had a presence of its own. The shadowy figure lunged forward toward the shattered opening in my window. His hand was already inside the opening and reaching for me as he lunged. I was frozen in fear, sitting upright in my bed with my legs still covered by the blankets. In perfect clarity, almost in slow motion to my racing mind, I watched as the stranger stepped forward, hands reaching deep inside, and struck his face against the cross member of my double paned window. He struck with a loud ‘crack’ that sounded nothing like the pounding from just moments before. He stumbled backwards and I saw his face for the first time in the yellow glow cast by my neighbor’s porch light.

  The skin on the man’s face was translucent, grey and lifeless. The white of his eyes had turned to a deep, dark and evil-looking blood-red color. Bits of flesh that were too dark to be his own covered his chin, his lips and his teeth. The flesh on his hands and arms hung loose, torn free in the act of smashing through my bedroom window.

  The man bellowed, a course and unnerving sound that reach into my chest and squeezed my heart with the fear it caused. He charged the window again. I shouted in fright once again. I rolled away from the window and crashed onto the floor on the opposite side of my bed in a pile of blankets and sheets. The man’s head once again struck against the cross member, just as hard as moments before, but this time he was lower and it knocked him downwards instead. He fell forward into my room through the shattered window, breaking more glass free as his chest and belly ground against over the lower frame.

  I tried to stand and run, but my feet were bound tightly in the twisted blankets. Instead, I dragged myself away from the bed as fast as I could and pulled myself into the nearest doorway, the bathroom. The man pulled himself the rest of the way through the broken window and stood up. I rolled away from the open doorway and into the bathroom closet to hide. That is when I realized that I was trapped.

  The man, the zombie, bellowed again and I heard the sound of the bed scraping across the floor as the man pushed against it mindlessly in his efforts to reach me. Frantically, I began to would look for anything in the closet that I could use to defend myself. I already knew that I did not have anything even remotely like a weapon in the bathroom closet, but I continued to look for anything that might prove useful. I was feeling along the floor when my fingers ran across carpeted seem of the crawlspace entry. Without thinking I began pulling at it. My fingers slipped several times on the short carpet fibers, before I finally managed to get a solid grip on the carpet and lift the trap door up. As it lifted upward, several items fell into the hole before me. I couldn’t tell what they were in the dark but I swung myself into the hole and followed after them.

  In the bedroom, the bed thudded against the wall nearest me. I lowered the trapdoor over my head and back into place.

  In the pitch black darkness beneath my home, I laid flat against the cold plastic sheeting that lined the crawlspace floor. I remained very still and as became as quiet as I could. I could hear my heart was thudding loudly in my ears and my breathing came in ragged pants. Hanging no more than two feet above my head was a thick blanket of fiberglass insulation. Below myself was a pile of detritus from the closet that had fallen into the crawlspace immediately before me.

  I listened to the footsteps of the dead man above me. They thudded from my bedroom and came to stop at the floor directly over my head. I listened as the floor creaked overhead as the weight of the zombie shifted. Time passed. Occasionally something would fall off of a shelf inside the closet above. It would make a loud thump as it landed on the floor.

  Then, for countless minutes there was an absolute silence as the dead man above stopped moving completely. I waited, my every thought focused on the being that I perceived directly overhead. Finally I heard a "creak". It was followed immediately by more creaks as my dead houseguest moved out of the bathroom and began wandering through the rest my home.

  My focus returned to the darkness of my surroundings. I crawled away from the trap door. I followed the cement edge of the home’s foundation, moving as far away from the crawl space entry as I could. In the corner furthest away from the crawlspace entry I stopped. Now very dusty and cold, I unwrapped the blankets from my feet and pulled them up over my head. Then I curled up into a tight ball.

  My wife took our children and left when she first heard about the zombies spreading across the country from the East Coast. I called her stupid for over-reacting to the zombie bull crap that they were pushing on the television news. I told her it was just another scheme cooked up by the wealthy politicians to get a reaction out of us, to cause another financial meltdown so they could grab more power and wealth for themselves and their band of cronies and sycophants. I joked that even if the zombie crisis was real, our local police force would brutalize the zombies and then illegally lock them up in prison for thirty years. She had a disgusted look on her face as she called me an idiot and walked out of the house with both the kids and the dog. She didn’t take any supplies with her, just got in her car and left, so I had plenty to eat. My only shallow complaint was that the milk was spoiled, which had spoiled before she left.

  After she left, my life didn’t change from the way that I had been living it. I had been laid off from work for several months and was collecting a weekly unemployment check. Instead of looking for work, I played video games all day long, every day. The only time I paid attention to my
wife was when I went to bed for six hours. I listened to and argued with the AM radio stations. I listened to both National Public Radio and the right-wing radio talk shows to stay informed, but after listening to both, I figured their zombie hysteria was nothing more than exact same bull crap and quit listening to either. I kept playing video games and tuned everything else out of my day to day life. In the end I was clueless about what was happening in the world when the zombies arrived. I hadn’t gone outside since she left and didn’t even know if the gates to my backyard had been left open.

  As it was, I was getting bored of playing video games. All the good players that ranked at my level on-line weren’t playing anymore. I had spent my last day replaying old single player games just to pass time. My wife was right, I was an idiot and she had been gone for only a week.

  For several uncountable hours I lay in the dark and listened to the creak of the floor as the zombie above me paced through the limited confines of my home. I hoped and prayed, yes I actually prayed, that the zombie would leave and I could go back upstairs to barricade my doors