I hope this letter reaches you well...

The following letter was found in a basement drain in the rural Indiana farm town of Acton. The events preceding its creation remain largely speculative.

To Whom It May Concern,

I don’t know who will read this, or if it ever will be read, but I just want you to know what has happened here. I don’t have a lot of spare time to chronicle this but I want you to understand, I wasn’t always a monster. Three days ago was Halloween. The little children in the neighborhood were trick or treating and all was going well. Two days ago, the sun came up over my hometown and shone its rays on a land of death. I am not sure who was the first, or how it even started, but I awoke to terrible screaming in my front yard. I jumped out of bed and looked out my window and seen my neighbors child, Kayla I believe, still dressed in her Princess Cinderella costume standing in my yard. I strained further to see where the screaming was coming from when something caught my eye; Kayla’s mother, Mrs. Balzano, my neighbor of 12 years, was running towards Kayla… but was covered from the waist up in blood. I remember gasping and turning to run downstairs and make sure she was okay but my legs wouldn’t budge. I watched on in horror as Kayla turned to run but her little pre-school legs were not fast enough to outrun her mother.  Her mother went on to do things to her own daughter that I had never seen anywhere else but zombie horror movies. There wasn’t much left of Kayla’s little body in my front yard when Mrs. Balzano abruptly stood up in my yard and faced the street. At some point I realized I had been screaming because my mom burst through my door. But instead of concern and comfort I got a hand covering my mouth and her pulling me away from the window. I didn’t understand at first but the look on my mother’s face showed me enough. Now was not the time to be defiant or obtuse. “Abbigail,” she’d said gravely and put both of her hands on my face, “something’s… happened… to them. I don’t know what but baby… you’ve got to be real quiet right now.” I nodded silently because there wasn’t more to say. My head was spinning and all of those afore mentioned zombie movies came swirling into my mind. “Mom, where’s dad?” She looked at me lovingly and put her arm around my waist. “Baby, he’s in the basement. He’s putting some things down there and we’re going to go hide out in the basement and be safe. We’re going to be okay baby, don’t worry.” I remember her words like they were yesterday. I guess they nearly were. I miss my mom.

That was two days ago. Since that time we packed food and blankets in the basement. I never much liked this basement so when we came down and laid out blankets to sit on, I felt my stomach drop to my feet.  My mom and dad talked about what I’d missed after I went to bed. Mom says around 6 in the morning she woke up to banging on the side of the house. Dad apparently went to check it out. Mr. Balzano, the pre-school neighbor’s father, was apparently walking into the side of my house over and over again. Dad said when he went to help him, Mr. Balzano growled like a rabid animal and chased dad back into the house. Dad says they have watched in horror from the windows all that had transpired since that time. Neighbors who have babysat for one another were tearing limbs and organs and appendages off of each other. Little children were attacking their beloved pets and the parents, ones who were not these crazy zombie-things, were being attacked by their own children.

I shook my head through the whole story and found myself trying to imagine what that chaos looked like but I then remembered what happened to Kayla and I figured it was best to not have to see it firsthand.  We sat on the blankets in silence for quite a while. We ate sparingly that day, our appetites being far from ravenous. Using the bathroom was interesting; we used a funnel into the sump pump. I tried to hold all functions as long as possible. My father hasn’t seen my important parts in 13 years; I wasn’t trying to refresh his memory.  Occasionally we would hear, through the ground and concrete walls of the basement, feral screaming and gun shots. But mostly, to me, it was the silence that was concerning me. That night I slept lightly, every time my eyes would close I would hear a gunshot or a scream. Sometimes I would hear nothing but I would see Mrs. Balzano coming through the basement door and I would bolt awake. Everytime I woke up I would double check the basement door. It was always locked.