Surviving in Chaos

Attacked

The next morning, I felt particularly shy around Blake. It did not hurt as much as I thought it would and it had been pretty much amazing. I could not help blush whenever I saw his knowing smile or when he caught me just staring at him and I really liked holding his hand. But, we had to get back to reality and I had to kill my dad whether a cure was possible or not.

We drove up to the beach where we last saw my dad and began our search there. As we walked around, I remembered how it was in the past when the monorails were sort of the only thing my family visited Sentosa for. My dad would have had let me sit on his shoulders as we walked around tired from the hot sun. There was also a talking parrot that mesmerized us at one of the monorails stops.

We became alarmed when I spotted Joyce waving to us from a distance. Whenever their group was around, it spelled of trouble. I scanned my surroundings looking for a weapon, hoping to find something bigger than the knives that were tucked in my boots and jeans. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an axe stored neatly in a red compartment hanging on the wall of a mini shelter that is use to break the glass for the fire extinguisher. She started running towards us. I quickly opened the compartment and grabbed the axe but it was heavy, at least two kilograms, so initially I nearly dropped it. I swung it in front of me, just as Joyce reached, the blade a hairline distance from her neck. She leaned back and held her hands up.

“I am here to help.” I looked at Blake. He nodded so I lowered the axe. “I can’t trust you anymore, Joyce. Every time we run into you, you are out to make trouble for us!” I was surprised to see tears in her eyes. “I am here to help. Don’t let Zachary see you” she sobs. Blake stepped forward to pat her back in an effort to soothe her, “Alright, we are looking for Cassie’s father.” Joyce looks up at us, eager to help. “There hasn’t been any live people that we have come across…unless you are looking for a zombie?” I swallowed hard unable to answer that and looked away. Blake squeezed my hand that he was holding lightly and shook his head at Joyce. She accepted that and thankfully started to guide us around, avoiding the areas Zac, gamer boy was likely to be.

We walked the entire Resort World, past the Merlion, and was at the tower when we saw the hoard of zombies that was gathered around a new victim. Joyce gasped. It was Zachary. He was being eaten by the zombies that he had so gleefully released from their enclosed gates. I did not know how to feel, relief was definitely one emotion that filled me, along with a twinge sympathy. He shouldn’t have had to die so cruelly even though he was a mean person.

I scanned the zombie faces, and true enough one of them was my dad. He looked more haggard than we had saw him last, with clothes more rumpled and skin looking paler, a sign that decay had been taking its toll. There was too many of them to charge in and attack my dad. We got into a car to row some of them over, but we didn’t hit my dad. I had to get out and fight the remaining zombies that were plastered all over the windshield and glass windows of the cars. I stared at the zombies, wondering what it felt to be one of them. Did the soul really live the body, leaving them dead? What sustained them other than eating the living? Was I doing the right thing to kill my dad despite this being my mum’s final wishes? I took a breath to brace myself and closed my eyes a second.  Before I could turn the handle of the car door, Blake yanked me to him by the collar and gave me quick kiss, which helped calm my nerves a little.

There were roughly 20 zombies swarming the car with Dad on the outer circles. I wielded the axe and swung it around like it were made of plastic though the weight of it made my arm ache. Blake was also using his butcher knife to kill and attack zombies.

When I finally got to my dad, Zac who was now a zombie came charging at me. I tried to swipe him off but he kept moving unstably and I missed. “I’ll take him down” Joyce called out as she dashed towards us with a knife.

It was time to kill my dad. I turned to face my dad, when he lunged at me suddenly, throwing both of us onto the hard cement floor. My hands gripped his shoulders hard as I struggled to prevent him, open mouthed from biting me. I did not want to die, especially not at his hands. With a free hand, I managed to reach for the axe that had been dropped to the ground when he threw himself at me, and used it to form a shield by putting it under his neck and reversing our positions. I sat up on his stomach, and used my trembling left hand to hold his neck down as I slipped my knife out of my boot. I looked into his dead eyes, the familiar rich brown had faded into a slight dead grey and pushed it down the middle of his head. As I got up, a bit shaky from what I had done, and tears streaming down my face, a zombie grabbed me from behind and bit my arm.