Trisha looked at her shaking hands. They had been shaking for days. It wasn't from lack of food or water, although that would become an issue pretty quickly, they just shook, probably from shock or nerves. With hands like this, she would never be able to defend herself out there. However, she had no choice, she had depleted the water and food.
Her eyes closed and she drifted into sleep like so many times before. Her hands shook, the repercussions of her mental state echoing through her, even while she slept.
BLAM! The sound of a gun firing woke her up. The sound of a gun firing? That meant there was someone nearby, someone living!
She gathered up her clothes and what little rations she had left into a duffel bag made by her oldest son, Michael. Michael, the one on the stairs leading up to the second floor. Michael's father shot him when he tried to attack Trisha. The orange bag was poorly made, but its value was priceless to Trisha.
Trisha reached up and with one trembling hand pulled the cord that turned on the overhead light in the basement. The fluorescent lights came to life with a hum filling the room with a dim white light. She avoided looking in the far corner of the basement, at the corpse of her husband.
Trisha sat down heavily on the floor. Beside her was the bloodied bat she had used to kill him. Her only weapon and only means of defense. It wouldn't do her much good now; her hands were incapable of doing much more than grasping the handles of her bag. She looked up at the basement door, trying to prepare herself for the horrors that lay beyond it. She felt like she did when she was a kid, not knowing what the real world held, the quiet solitude of the basement became her childhood bedroom.
Her eyes glazed as tears began to well up. She thought of all the people that she loved, that loved her, they were probably all dead now. They were either shambling around in state of unlife or a defiled corpse with the flesh stripped from their bones. Her husband lay on the cellar floor, his skull cracked open, leaking its gory contents onto the cold cellar concrete. Michael was still probably on the stairs, neck twisted at an unnatural angle, his vision taking in the ceiling above the stairs.
The upstairs was where the seat of her nightmares lay. Michael had crept into his sibling's bedrooms that night and killed them while they slept. Trisha and David didn't hear a thing while their two youngest children were messily devoured. They only woke up when Michael charged into their room, his breath reeking of blood and death, his unquenchable thirst for more flesh still unsated.
Michael and David fought savagely. David was a powerful man who exercised on a regular schedule. He was surprised when Michael bowled him over in a clumsy charge and even more surprised and frightened when Michael bit heavily into his arm. Trisha watched as the two men fought; she started screaming when she saw Michael pull his head back with a gob of flesh from David's arm clenched between his teeth. The fight ended when David managed to manhandle Michael into the hallway and throw him down the stairs.
Trisha stood at the top of the stairs and watched as Michael picked himself up. Michael looked up the stairs at his mother with no recognition in his eyes whatsoever. Nothing living was in his eyes. Michael started shambling back up the stairs, his eyes never leaving Trisha's. Trisha felt David's hand on her shoulder and saw his arm extend from behind her, the .357 pistol gripped in his hand. Her hands flew to her mouth and she whirled to look at David as the powerful weapon roared once.
A wet splash and the dead thump of a body hitting the floor were her only memories of the death of her firstborn. The body slid down a few stairs and lay at the bottom, a red blossom just left of the center of his forehead. Each step was painted with a crimson paintbrush, blood seeping into the tan carpeting, coloring it a disquieting shade of red.
The sound of the shot still ringing in her ears, Trisha first noticed the bloody footprints leading into and out of all of the children's rooms. She let out a sob and pushed David's shoulder, turning him towards the hallway with the open doors. The black mouth of each doorway promised grief beyond compare.
Trisha felt David's arm encircle her, whispering in her ear, they both walked towards the room of Andrew, only 6 years old. She could see his hand tremble ever so slightly as he reached in and turned on the light switch. Flashback visions of the scene made Trisha rock back and forth on the cold concrete of the basement floor. Sobbing with long harsh breaths, her minds eye continued to play the picture in vivid detail.
Gobbets of flesh covered the floor and the rocketship bedspread of young Andrew. His mouth was open in a scream. His throat and neck were torn asunder, spraying his pristine white pillow, leaving a bloody halo of death and gore surrounding his horrified face. His chest had claw marks across it, exposing the pale white of the bone below his tender skin.
Trisha turned into her husband's broad chest. She could hear his heart racing even through the ringing in her ears from the gunshot moments earlier. She cried, harder than she had ever cried before. David turned the light off.
Trisha felt herself being moved towards young Dana's room. Her crying and sobbing only increased as they crossed the few feet between the bedroom doors. Bloody footprints on the floor marked the passage of the monster between the rooms like a cannibalistic doctor making the rounds in a demented hospital for the damned.
"Snick." It was a small sound, but it heralded a sight that Trisha would never forget, one that would haunt her for the rest of her life. A scene that she would relive every night before she slept. What was left of Dana lay spread about the room. Michael had torn the young child limb from limb, dismembering her before she even had a chance to cry out. The baby blue walls were covered in gore. Bits of flesh and hair adorned the walls. There was even blood on the ceiling.
Trisha tried to look away, but as she did, she saw the face and skull of her four-year old daughter lying partially underneath the once beautiful bedroom set. Her eyes and mouth were closed, but the back of her head had been caved in and the contents spilled out beside the grotesque remainder. Veins, flesh, and tendons dangled from the neck spilling their vital fluids on the hardwood floor. A partially crushed vertebra peeked from beneath the spaghetti-like remainder of her daughter's neck. Even covered in blood, the white color of the bone shone through the color providing a stark contrast to the dark red of the rest of the room.
Trisha's vision started to go gray, and finally black as she fell to the floor, collapsing into the welcoming arms of oblivion. She woke in the basement with David. She had no idea what time it was or how much time had passed. She couldn't ask David either because he wouldn't talk. He wouldn't do anything except stare straight ahead for the next two days. He finally took some water on the second day but still remained in a catatonic state.
On the fourth day, Trisha woke up to the sound of her husband moaning. When she checked on him, he had fallen from the chair where he had been sitting. His body was convulsing and shaking. Backing away, she knew what happened next. The radio station that had managed to keep broadcasting until the day prior had prepared her for this.
When her husband stood up, his eyes glassed over and dried out from lack of bodily fluids, she had the bat in hand. She had two four-inch nails driven through the end making it a fairly effective weapon. Trisha cried as he stumbled towards her. She swung wildly when she thought he was in range. The bat connected with a small "spink-thud" sound.
One of the spikes penetrated David's temple; a single rivulet of blood ran down the side of his ashen face. His body convulsed on the end of the bat as Trisha let it go and backed against the wall shelving. A Mason jar toppled from the shelf and shattered on the floor while David shuddered and moaned.
A few moments later his body toppled forward, the handle of the bat hitting the floor first. It ripped from his skull, tearing a chunk of flesh from the side of his face. The body fell facedown on the cold concrete floor of the basement. Trisha stepped gingerly beside the body, reaching for the bat. David's gray hand grasped her hand as she reached for the bat, she screamed as he levered himself up. His mouth was open, his swollen tongue allowing only an ungodly moan to escape his throat. She yanked her hand as hard as possible from this cold iron grip.
It worked and she tumbled backwards and saw the bat underneath her legs. Standing up, she grabbed the bat and landed another blow to the side of her husband's face. She vaguely remembered landing blow after blow until her arms couldn't move anymore.
When she woke the next day, her face and hands were clean but her clothes were covered in crimson stains. She found the bat beside her. One of the nails was dull and bent; the other was almost entirely hammered back out of the bat. The bat was coated in a thin slime that she knew had to be blood. She glanced up only once at the misshapen head of her dead husband. It looked like a partially deflated basketball. Half of it was completely demolished, the other half caving in on itself.
Trisha looked at the basement door. She had to act now; she couldn't last much longer in this house. The bodies of her three dead children were upstairs and her dead husband was 15 feet from her. The gunshot meant someone was out there. Someone was still alive.