Day Off of the Dead

Rudy slammed the front door open and jumped the three steps down to the front yard. “Hey!” he screamed, turning off the front walk. “Leave her alone!” His bare feet slipped on the wet grass but he quickly reached the struggling figures. He reached out and grabbed the man’s shoulder and pulled him backwards. With a wet popping sound, the man sprawled to one side. Rudy looked down and saw that the man was holding a strip of meat between his teeth. Confused, Rudy looked back at his neighbor, who was now missing a large piece of her neck.

“Oh. Shit. Oh. Shit. Oh shit oh shit!” he cried, eloquently, and then stumbled backwards. His feet slid out from under him and he landed on his back. He sat up in time to see the man pulling himself back onto his feet, the chunk of bloody flesh disappearing into his mouth. The man fixed Rudy with a milky stare. Rudy couldn’t tell if the man’s heavy-lidded expression looked angry or just bored. It didn’t really matter, since one way or another the expression was limping closer and it was opening its mouth again. Rudy screamed and scrambled backwards in a crab-walk across his front lawn. As he turned to get on his feet, he collided with another man and he tumbled to the grass again, along with the newcomer. Rudy pulled his face out of the wet lawn and saw the gun and handcuffs on the hip of the man he’d knocked to the ground.

“Oh thank God! Officer! God! That man, he…” Rudy trailed off as he sat up and looked at the cop. The man was in bad shape. A gash over his left eyebrow had covered half his face with blood. Part of his shirt had been torn away, revealing a light Kevlar vest. As Rudy stared at him, the officer opened a mouth full of broken teeth and raised his arm.

Most of it.

The arm that had been hidden from Rudy by the bulk of the cop’s body came up, ending abruptly half a foot past the elbow. An inch or two of shining and bloody bone protruded from the end of the ruined limb and was now being waved towards Rudy’s face. Rudy screamed again, rolled away, and then scrambled back onto his feet. He ran the last dozen feet to his front door, bounded up the front steps, and ran into the house, bolting the door behind him.

Once the door was locked he got on with the business of throwing up into his mother’s umbrella stand.

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Rudy Bannister woke up when a shaft of sunlight managed to make it through his curtains and shine directly across his face. He rolled over, glanced bleary-eyed at the clock and groaned.

“Eight-thirty?” he grumbled aloud, “damn it.” He tumbled out of bed and shuffled his way across the carpet into his bathroom. “Why the hell did I wake up so early on my day off?” he complained as he used the toilet. While he washed his hands, he stared at himself in the mirror. Not bad, he thought, not too bad. He pushed some dark hair out of his green eyes and then jutted out his chin and turned his head side to side, examining the grayish shadow of a beard forming along his jaw. I should grow my sideburns out. Girls like that, don’t they? He idly pondered women as he turned on the shower.

Rudy was tall enough that he had to stoop slightly to get the water from the low-placed showerhead to wet his hair. As the stream ran over his chest he brushed his teeth, spitting the paste out to fall into the water running between his feet.

After toweling off in his bedroom, he pulled on a black t-shirt and an almost-clean pair of jeans. He wandered down the stairs and into his kitchen to pour a bowl of cereal. A quick inventory of the fridge revealed that there was not a single drop of milk in the house and that Cinnamon Toast Crunch would be consumed dry this morning. Grumbling, Rudy carried his bowl into the living room and was about to turn on the TV when he was startled by a loud scream from outside. He rushed over to the window and pulled aside the curtains. As he took in the scene on the street, his jaw dropped, followed by his bowl of cereal.

His next door neighbor, Mrs… Mrs… something, Rudy’d never interacted much with his neighbors, staggered backwards up her front walkway, towards her house. A man in a suit was walking up the path towards her. Rudy noticed that he had an odd sort of limping gait, but that was a distant second to noticing the man’s ear was missing, replaced with jagged flesh and a trail of blood running down his neck. As he watched, stupefied, the one-eared man caught up to Mrs… well, let’s call her Unlucky, and the two toppled to the ground. Rudy watched the man roll on top of his neighbor, who was holding her assailant’s face away from hers as best she could. She screamed again, an ear splitting shriek, which was enough to startle Rudy into action.

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