Undying Affection
Written by me
Photo by me
Undying Affection
By
James Raisanen
His girlfriend of four years had just broken up with him while she was in the hospital. She had just been savagely bitten on the hand by some vagabond while she was on her way to the store. In the recovery room, John had gone to visit her, and she flipped out on him. "You're a loser, John! Four years and you haven't even made any real effort toward this relationship! No more, John!" And that was it, no more relationship, no more happy days.
John unlocked the door to his first floor apartment, swung the door shut as he walked into the living room, flopped down onto the couch and sighed heavily. His eyes were puffy, red, and bloodshot due to crying, both in the hospital and during the entire drive home. He lay on the couch on his stomach and reach in front of him to grab the remote to the television. Turning on the T.V., John began flipping channels.
"...hospitals filling up..." click, "...increasing amount of physical assault..." click, "...bite wounds..." click, "...the imaginary friend of a future French aristocrat, picked a fight with a clockwork man...." Finally, he had found something interesting! A Dr. Who episode, and even though it was one that he had seen, anything was better than the news. After ten minutes of watching the program, John heard a scratching on his window and door. He always had the curtains drawn, so he was unable to see what was going on. Then something broke the window in the dining room.
The KSSSH! of breaking glass startled him up off the couch; he mused simultaneously at how very much the shattering glass was like what he heard inside himself, a hammer smashing the glass that was his heart. He walked tentatively to the window, his heart racing and his breath shallow and audible. When he got to the window in the dining room, he saw the curtain sticking out much farther than it had any real right to do naturally. Moving the curtain aside, he saw a hand reaching into his apartment blindly.
It was a hand he recognized, John had seen it so often, it belonged to Jennifer, his girlfriend. A loud sob escaped his throat as he realized what was going on. "I should have watched the news," he muttered to himself as he looked around for something to use to start defending himself. He had a few tools, but out of all of them the only useful one was a hammer, so he picked up it and gave it a test swing to truly feel the heft of it. Once again, he was reminded of the metaphorical hammer that was Jennifer as she smashed his glass heart and broke their relationship off forever.
Unfortunately for John, the windows were low enough to crawl through from the ground, and the hole in the window had been opened further by hands from multiple zombies, which allowed Jennifer's animated corpse to pull itself up into his living space. "Oh, you bitch," he said out loud to her, which made her turn her head to look at him. She began to get up, crawling as she did, glass sticking into her right arm, left hand, and her legs at odd angles, but she felt no pain, would never feel anything again.
John had stood there, horrified yet angered, watching as this abomination crawled toward him. The sight of his ex-lover's body standing up galvanized him into a rage he had never felt before, and he charged her, holding the hammer high above his head. Just as he was bringing the hammer down to strike a blow to her skull, she lurched forward, so John hit her on the shoulder, instead, which caused her to bite him on the stomach, biting clean through the shirt.
Instinctively, despite the pain, John reeled back, forcing Jennifer's body to continue the momentum and fall back to the floor. The man raised his booted foot high and brought it down upon the back of her head, which issued forth a sickening CRUNCH! As that sound reverberated through John's brain, he raised his boot only to set it back on her skull forcefully, repeatedly.
He laughed madly; knowing his fate, he ran to the door to rush outside among his zombie brethren, swinging his hammer not in any specific direction, but erratically. He ran until he simply could not anymore, collapsing onto the street, gasping for breath and looking around, but not truly seeing. Zombies had chased him as he ran, and finally they caught up to him, gasping and hitching, sobbing and laughing. They swarmed over him like a gigantic dog-pile at a frat house party and began eating him. John's screams echoed into the night before he died.