Flight
Day 1- Evangeline
Bring! Bring! Bringggggg! "Dammit, Nik, pick up the damn phone!" I paced the floor of my apartment, locking windows and shutting curtains as I went, carefully, methodically avoiding visibility through it all. I certainly wasn't going to encourage whatever the hell was outside... It rang again. Another ring. Another. "E-Evangeline?" Nikki's voice almost had me crying. She sounded scared, but alive. "Nicole, thank God, what's happening? Where are you?!" She sobbed into the receiver. "Oh, Evan, it’s horrible! There's blood everywhere..." Her voice broke and I felt my heart throbbing in my throat as I half-ran into my bedroom closet. "Nikki, calm down, tell me what's happened." As I listened, I pulled a pair of dark jeans from the closet and shrugged them on. "It's terrible..." She whispered almost inaudibly. "I woke up and it was all over the news and now… Evan, they’re outside..." She choked on a sob. "Please, come quick, Evan!" I nodded stupidly before I realized she couldn't see me. "I-I'll be over as quick as I can..." I grabbed a t-shirt and peeked around the closet door, through the open bedroom door at the locked front door, wondering what lay beyond. "And Nikki..." I sighed into the receiver. "Grab the gun I gave you, get to the second floor with David, and stay low." She whimpered an agreement and hung up.
I pulled on my t-shirt and shoved the phone into one of my pockets. I fumbled for the topmost shelf of the closet where I had stowed my trusty Remington and pulled it down along with the ammo that went with it. I scrounged up another three boxes for the glock and shoved whatever would fit into my pockets and looked around. I probably won't be coming back... I grabbed the military style camping bag I had stowed in the top of the tiny closet years ago and ripped open the top zipper. Whatever the hell was really going on here, I didn't want to be anywhere near it when there was so large a countryside so close. I found a flashlight, some batteries, plastic cutlery, hotel bottles of shampoo and conditioner; I left them in their pockets.
I grabbed a second t-shirt from my closet and stuffed it into the bag alongside a pair of jeans and a good five pairs of socks and underwear. I fumbled through my nightstand for my Glock's hip holster and an old survival knife before moving into the tiny kitchen. It was small, like the rest of the apartment, and what little space there was almost entirely empty. My cooking skills were more or less equal to those of a monkey, so I ate out most nights so I only kept a few crackers and canned foods around the house but I scrounged around for as many bottles of water and long-lasting cans of food as I could and managed to arrange them and a hand crank can opener in the duffel before moving on to the final room in the miniscule apartment; the bathroom.
I reached for the handle of the sliding glass of the medicine cabinet and caught sight of myself in the mirror. I was a disaster. Blood lingered in my hair, which was still matted from my disjointed sleep; my eyes were red and slightly puffy from my momentary breakdown, and... and I couldn't help but see something else in my appearance, the dastardly lingering image of my father that clung to the dark of my hair and the green flecks in my eyes. I closed my eyes against the resemblance.
I dug around in the cabinets and found a few loose Band-Aids and basic first aid kit; the kind soccer moms kept in their glove box. The only other things I kept in there were generic ibuprofen and some pills for my insomnia, which I shoved into the bottom of the bag, and tossed in as many toiletries as I possibly could before moving back into the living room. The low hum of an emergency alarm echoed somewhere far away, in another world, almost. It was a dim reminder of what monsters lay dead just outside of my chained front door.
My eyes flashed to the windows. The curtains were shut, the windows locked, but I could hear it. Rustling. My fire escape. My grip on the glock in my hand tightened reflexively as the rustling heightened. I cursed under my breath. The sounds heightened to growls. I crept across the floor, the barrel of the gun trained carefully on the curtained window, and reached slowly for a small curl in the curtain. I pulled it back, ever so slightly, and was met with the sunken bitter blackness of two dead eyes. I stumbled back slightly, but forced my gun on the black eyes. I pulled back the curtain further, feeling my muscles tighten as I did. The thing pressed its bloodied, torn face against the glass, smearing it red, and bored at me with those blank, starved eyes. It was hunched against the glass, one arm holding the side of the window, the other hanging limp and mangled at its side.
