Alexis began to look under rocks for the key and I leaned heavily on the side of the house.
"Got it!" Alexis said after a few minutes of searching. As she moved to put the key in the lock though, the door opened with barely a touch. It had been open.
"Uh, is that normal?" I asked, my heart in my throat. A soft footstep sounded behind me but I was too physically drained to even turn around to investigate.
"No," Alexis mumbled, dazed. "She always leaves the door locked, and closed at least…Always." Then her eyes shifted to something just over my right shoulder and went wide. "Get inside, now."
Immediately, I scrambled for the door, feeling a cold hand brush against my back. A walker. That's what the footstep was. All of my thoughts were blurring together. Alexis pushed it over the side of the porch and slipped inside behind me. As soon as she cleared the threshold I slammed the clear sliding door shut, flipping the interior lock. Outside, the thing crawled to her feet. At least, it had been a her. Half of its face looked like it had been torn away, four claw marks carved into the blue-tinged skin, exposing white along the forehead. The injury that really drew my attention, however, was the wound on the midsection. Its shirt had been ripped away, revealing bloated and mangled innards. Some of the entrails were hanging out, dripping blood.
I had a flashback to last year's freshman biology class. We'd been dissecting some creature, a cat, I think. Our teacher had then explained to us in excruciating detail about a medieval execution technique where the diaphragm was cut open with hooks, causing the victim's organs to spill out. One girl had thrown up. The thing outside the door looked exactly like that. It banged its arms against the door, jarring its exposed insides. Its whole body was racked with the movement and I watched in horror as the contents its lower cavity sloshed out, landing on the wood patio with a wet splat. Blood and other things spattered the clear glass.
"I'm gonna be sick," I muttered, and I began dry heaving uncontrollably.
"Mom?" Alexis, slightly green in the face, called into the house from the bare kitchen. "Hello?"
"Did not you just see that? How is it still moving? It's freaking guts just fell out." I asked.
"Yeah," Alexis answered. She seemed too concerned about her mother to process. "Hellooo?!"
"Maybe she was out," I said, trying to calm her down as I turned from the window.
"She wouldn't leave," She said, still looking worried. "She would know. Somehow she would know to stay, to wait for me, right?"
I opened my mouth to respond and let out a gasp as I unconsciously moved my leg, causing it to hit the kitchen counter I was leaning against.
"Oh, your ankle," Alexis said, now distracted from her mother. "I forgot. I'll be right back, there are first aid supplies upstairs."
"You'll be fine," my brother reassured me. "It's just a broken arm. And you only broke it in one spot. When I broke my it was in three places, and I shattered my elbow."
"Of course Liam, one up me at the hospital. Not everything is about you, you know." I said as the doctor came in the door. He was a colleague of mom's.
"So how'd this happen, may I ask?" The man asked me.
"Bike accident. He cut me off, to be fair," I said, gesturing in Liam's direction.
"Well, the x-ray showed a pretty clean break. It'll just take a sec to do the cast," the doctor continued. "You son did a pretty good job setting the bone. I reckon Lisa showed you."
Liam nodded. "Where is our mom by the way? We called her and she said she'd meet us here." Liam said.
"She did? I heard she left. Got a phone call right before you two troublemakers came in. She seemed upset, signed out, something about a family emergency."
Liam tried calling Mom, unsuccessfully. As soon as the cast was set, we rushed home. As we pulled up to the house, I saw a police car in the driveway.
"Liam, what's going on?" I asked, beginning to feel light headed. A sick sensation crept into my stomach. "Could this be...could something have happened to Dad?"
"Stay here." Was all he said in reply. So I stayed in his precious car. The car he would normally never let me stay in alone. I watched through the spotless windows, which were spotless because I helped him clean them last week, as he jogged up to our front door. As he talked to the two sad looking officers in dress uniform. As he stumbled away from them leaning against the doorframe. As Mom stumbled into his arms, crying. I'd never seen her cry like this, not even at her parents' funeral. I felt like I was drifting away from my body, held down by this stupid cast. This wasn't happening.
"This isn't happening," Alexis mumbled as she ran down the stairs. "I'm in a nightmare. Why would I even dream about you, Liana? I have like two classes with you. I mean, this can't be real. "
"I wish this was a dream," I said, blinking away tears. Why was I thinking about that now? That had happened almost four years ago.
We both jumped as the dead person outside pounded on the door again. Oh my god, there was a dead person banging on the door.
"I'll deal with this, and then let's go upstairs to my room," Alexis told me and she started opening the first aid kit.
"Agreed."