Its chaos pure and simple as Helga sneaks and hides her way through Hillwood. She ignores the screams and cries of the dying, while keeping an eye out for the walking dead. A particular loud, familiar, scream reaches her, and she freezes after diving under a car. The scream is so loud that it attracts their attention and she hates herself for feeling grateful as the dead move towards the sound of Curly screaming.
She's sneaking and sliding towards the boarding house because she doesn't know where else to go. Phoebe was off visiting relatives in Japan with her family when the dead began to rise and she prays with all her heart that Phoebe is safe from this living horror. As for her own family, Olga eyes vacant and mouth dripping with blood, Big Bob screaming as Olga chews into his flesh, and others have broken into the house and Miriam is screaming for her run as she trips and one takes a chunk out of her leg, Helga can never forget and wants desperately to wake up from this nightmare.
She feels as if she's going to throw up when she hides behind a wall to avoid Stinky and Sid, both shambling, glazed eyed and dead but walking, and a part of her idly wonders what happened to Harold. She ends having to run because Sid turns dead his stare in her direction and begins slowly, yet terrifyingly, walk towards her. She can hear them behind her as she begins to run and after three minutes, but feels like forever, loses them. But she can't breathe and relax because she can't let her ground down and she's moving with purpose.
Everything seems to pass in blurs as she keeps moving towards the boarding house. Yet to her ever lasting horror she keep catches glimpses of the carnage and devastation around her. Dead familiar faces on the ground (Eugene, Sheena, Wolfgang, and the Mayor). Dead familiar faces walking and searching for flesh to devour (Torvald, Peapod Kid, Edmund, and Mr. Simmons).
After what seems like forever she jumps up the fire escape and feels a hand grabbing her leg and a moan of hunger. She struggles and with a violent kick is able to escape but she doesn't dare look back. She continues forward to the roof of the boarding house because she can hear someone (Arnold her heart prays) up there. She feels herself moving faster as she hears a thud, as if someone tripped or was pushed down atop of the roof of the boarding house. Meanwhile the zombie that Jamie-O has become desperately reaches with his hands for a prey that has eluded his grasp.
She reaches the roof and with a leap lands atop of it and instantly freezes as she stares at Gerald's body. His face is frozen with horror, tears forever frozen, and there's a figure tearing and eating his neck. A figure that reacts to the sound she made and the zombie lifts its head from its dead meal to gaze at a living morsel and Helga freezes. She freezes in disbelief, shock, horror, and finally breaks because looking back, slowly rising from Gerald's body, is Arnold.
Arnold with a noticeable bite mark on his left arm, who looks pale as death, whose is mouth filled with blood and who still has a piece of Gerald's flesh in his teeth. All she can do is begin shaking as she laughs because the truth has broken her mind. Her laughter is laced with insanity because for all the horror that she has witnessed, she believed that Arnold would survive and would have a plan to get help everyone. She believed that Arnold, her guiding light, would survive. She believed that Arnold would always be there with a smile and helping hand.
Footsteps echo like thunder in Helga's ears as Arnold begins to shamble towards her. Arnold, with eyes filled with hunger, slowly shambles his way towards her and Helga doesn't move because she already feels dead. Seeing Olga twisted into a zombie was horrifying, hearing her parents scream as they yell RUN HELGA was heartbreaking, but seeing Arnold decayed and hungering for flesh was absolutely soul crashing.
A scream pierces the air, Helga knows no more, and the zombie that was once Arnold Shortman feeds.
Author's Note: To be honest I have no idea where this came from but it demanded to be written. So why not share it?