Prompt: challenging you to do something short. addison goes missing. zed is left to deal with the aftermath.
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Presumed dead, the police say.
Lawsuit, her parents say.
Gone, his heart says, and then it shatters into a million different pieces, scattered across the floor like so much dust.
The house is cold and empty and dark, like it has been for three weeks now. It has nothing to say at all, no comfort to offer him than the comforts that she had placed there, remnants of a ghost. The people outside have nothing to say either as they pass on the street, eyeing his house with a mistrust he'd fought so hard to win his way past.
Stupid, really, to think a zombie could live in peace in a human community. That they wouldn't find something to blame him for, the first chance they had.
He ends up in the kitchen, flipping the lights on as he goes. This is the last place he remembers seeing her, laughing as she handed him another drink, her cheeks turning red, her hands soft and clumsy. The bottles are still on the counter, lined up in a row against the wall; there are too many, far too many. He can't remember drinking them all, though he knows most of them were his.
He can't remember where the line of red stuck in the grout of the tiled floor came from either. Some spilt food, maybe, or residue from that rose-scented soap she liked so much. It's all a blur - the before, and the after, everything he's done in the past month. That night is the blurriest of all. He remembers drinking, and dancing, remembers kissing her somewhere in between, soft and sweet, his back pressed up against the kitchen wall.
He remembers waking up alone on the back lawn, head aching and stomach churning, and Addison nowhere to be found.
The lawn is dark now, the lights she'd strung around as a homage to Zombietown all turned off two weeks ago, when he couldn't bear the sight of them anymore. He doesn't want to see it, the lawn, or the oak tree in the corner, or the bed of freshly-turned earth. She'd been planting tulips there, at the back of the house. They haven't sprouted, not even now, after three weeks of him watering them. He's decided they never will.
There's a ring from the phone in the hall, loud and sharp and echoing through the house. He doesn't answer it. It will be Bree, calling to make sure he hasn't gone anywhere, while she tries to decide whose side she is on. Or it will be Eliza, asking him again if he remembers, if he knows what happened, where she went. Or maybe it will be her parents, calling to throw abuse at him again, to accuse him of all the things he never wanted to be.
Maybe this time, it will be the Zombie Patrol, to inform him that they have figured out what happened. That they will be coming in the next hour, that this is the end.
He sits down on the kitchen floor, stares at the red line of the tiles, and waits for the phone to stop ringing.