Zombie Night

Kelly heard a small yelp rising up from his throat, then he realized he'd actually woken himself up yelling, too late he realized he'd rolled over to the edge of the bed and he fell on the floor. Pushing up on his hands, he looked to the clock and saw it was going on 3:00 in the morning, what a night. He waited to see if the noise had woken Casey up, but he didn't hear anything, and he was grateful for that. He felt shaken up, he didn't want to go back to bed, he wasn't even sure if he could, so instead he staggered out to the kitchen and made himself a cup of coffee, and sat down at the table to drink it.

The memories of his nightmare were still fresh in his mind. A lot of times, he started to forget what he'd dreamed as soon as he woke up, it was a weird feeling, asleep, moments or seconds from waking up it was all clear as day, then the second his eyes opened, it was just gone. Not this time though.

He didn't need to wonder what had planted the idea in his head. It was October, it was going to be Halloween soon, zombie movies were playing nonstop on TV, and it had spurred a discussion during last shift when things got slow in between calls. Otis of course had been the one to start the discussion, and bit by bit everybody else had contributed to the debate about zombie movies, about the different kinds of zombies, the ones you could kill, the ones you wouldn't, the ones that ate your flesh, the ones that ate your brains, etc. And Kelly could still hear Otis rambling on about it.

"If we know anything from working in this profession, it's that eventually everything burns, some just holds out longer than the rest, even our turnout gear will only withstand so much heat, but eventually, everything burns. The same applies here, eventually everything wears out, erodes, wears away, posing the question, what could actually withstand a zombie apocalypse? No matter what movie you see, they can break down doors, they can bust through windows, they can turn over cars, they can tear down barricades, they could tear apart siding, so what's left? Where could you hole up that they couldn't get to you? I mean think about it, you could put 50 zombies in the middle of Egypt, and if somehow you could convince them there's food in a pyramid, in a month's time there would be no pyramid, there'd just be a big pile of sand in the middle of the desert. Eventually they could wear everything down to nothing if they're determined enough."

"Assuming they don't rot away before then," Kelly had pointed out, "They're dead, they're decaying."

"So then it's just a question of what will give out first, their rotting bodies or the structures around them?" Otis had replied. "Hundreds of years ago in Europe, some people were buried with bricks in their mouths so they wouldn't be able to come back as vampires and bite people."

Even Casey had felt a need to add at that point, "Surprised none of the zombie movies have resurrected that idea."

"What's the point? If they're able to dig their way out of the grounds, surely they'd be able to get the brick out too," Cruz interjected.

"How do they do that anyway?" Mouch asked, "How do you first of all break out of a coffin, and then proceed to upturn six feet of dirt to get to the top? Even if the dead could come back, that's just impossible."

"Well here's a thought," Casey commented, "Back when they were sticking bricks in corpse's mouths as a precautionary measure, why didn't they bury people face down? If they did come back to life, they'd just keep tunneling deeper and deeper into the earth."

"You know that movie 'An American Werewolf in London' was inspired by an idea that in some countries they buried dead people feet first standing on end, so if they came back to life they couldn't get out of the ground," Otis said.

"Hell, if they're gonna go to all that trouble, why don't they just bury them standing on their head?" Herrmann wanted to know, "Then they'd know nobody was coming back from that."

The discussion had carried on for half an hour or so and Kelly didn't even remember what finally broke it up. At the time it had just seemed like a good way to kill time. Now, he blearily looked at the clock on the microwave and he felt his hand shaking as he gripped the handle of his coffee mug. There hadn't been anything amusing about the dream he'd just had.

Like most people, Kelly had had dreams about zombies coming to life since he was a kid and saw 'Night of the Living Dead' for the first time, and over the years the dreams would come and go, all different, all feeling very real, but none of them like the one he'd just had.

Zombies had come to life, and they were infecting the whole city, nobody was safe, nobody could get away from them. He didn't even remember where they were, all he knew was it was just him and Casey and suddenly three undead people had found them, and they'd grabbed Casey, he was pinned to the ground and screaming in terror as he futilely tried to fight them off. Kelly felt for a brief instance like he was out of his body and watching all this unfold like a fly on the wall, then suddenly he snapped to action, and he grabbed an axe and swung for the zombie nearest him, and tried to take the damn thing's head off.

They may have been dead, and they may have been decaying, but the head hadn't come off, all Kelly had managed to do was get the axe blade stuck halfway through its neck. It screamed and let go of Casey, and Kelly struggled to pull the blade back out, and when he finally did, he swung and struck it again, and again. Blackish green blood spewed from the wound in its neck, but it wasn't until the third try that the axe finally cut through and the head fell off the decomposing body and landed on the ground with an unearthly thud.

Somehow the other two zombies were gone, and it was just them again. Casey got to his feet, and the two of them just looked at each other, both of them were covered in the zombie's blood and both of them were wide eyed and terrified that it would infect them, and turn both of them into zombies. Neither spoke but both were met with the burning question what were they going to do now? If they did turn, who would go first? What should they do?

Kelly felt his whole arm shaking as he raised his hand enough to press the tips of his fingers against the fleshy part of his cheek just under his eye. Even now the whole thing still felt so real.

Even back when he was a kid, Kelly had always heard other people talk about what if zombies actually became real, how they would kill them, over the years it became something people joked about over dinner, everybody thought about it, but nobody actually thought about what it would be like. He did.

In his career as a firefighter there were a handful of times when they had a trapped person and the only way to move them was to have a trauma surgeon on the scene to cut off a body part to free them. More than once, whether out of panic, or excruciating pain, or a desperate need to see their family, the victim would beg him to do it instead because he was right there. He'd contemplated it, but he could never do it, and he knew he couldn't. He was a firefighter, he saved people, and no matter what, he couldn't reconcile the idea of him taking a power saw or axe and cutting someone's limb off with saving them, he wasn't a surgeon, he wasn't trained for something like that, it would be very easy to do it wrong and they'd bleed out before they could be moved. Just thinking about it, no matter the circumstances, cutting through somebody's flesh and bone and muscles and tendons, made him feel sick. And if something happened and they did suddenly find themselves in a living dead situation, the fact remained that was still a human body, somebody's parent, child, spouse, etc., that would have to be disembodied to stop them, even if it was to save somebody else. Just thinking about it now sent a sick feeling through Kelly's whole body.

Casey padded into the kitchen and reached for the light switch before he realized the lights were already on, then he saw Kelly at the table.

"You're up too?"

Kelly nodded, not even looking at Casey. "Yeah."

Casey looked at him and tiredly asked, "Is there more coffee?"

Kelly gestured to the coffee maker with a half full pot. Matt went over and poured himself a cup and asked him, "You have a weird dream too?"

"Something like that," Kelly answered absently. He finally looked up towards Casey and asked him, "What was yours about?"

"Ohhh," Casey groaned as he pressed the flats of his hands against his eyes, "it was unbelievable, I dreamt I was back in the fire academy, getting ready to head into a 6-story walk-up full of smoke, carrying lines...I look down and I'm naked, and everybody is there watching."

Kelly laughed, "Believe me, buddy, you still had the better night."