Ghouls on Film

“Shuuut uuup,” Carol moaned, mocking her daughter’s voice.  Mia had been moaning and banging on the other side of the bedroom door steadily for nearly an hour.  What had started as an anxious, angry pounding had morphed into a slow, repetitious thud-thud-thud against the wood, as if she had given up using her fists and just started banging her head against the door.

“Mommy, let me in.  I’m scared, Mommy,” Mia groaned.

“Nice try, you monster.”  Carol had called her daughter a “monster” before, but it had always been as a metaphor for her grotesque behavior.  This time was a little different in that it was more of an accurate description of Mia’s physical condition.  Less than twenty-four hours ago, Mia had been a rude sixteen year-old, who enjoyed nothing more than pushing every button her mother had.  Now she was riddled with the zombie disease that had spread down the Eastern seaboard like wildfire.

Carol wasn’t at all surprised that Mia had contracted the new disease.  Mia was, in a word, a slut.  A slutty slut slut.  Giving it up to every Tom, Dick and Harry… and zombie, apparently.

“And you never called me ‘mommy,’ not even when you were a little girl!”

Looking around, Carol tried to remember how long it had been since she’d been in her daughter’s room.  Had it been more than a year?  Probably.  Maybe even two.  Mia was obsessed with her privacy and threatened her mother with physical violence if she ever stepped foot in her room.

On first glance, anyone would have thought the room belonged to a 14 year-old boy.  The walls were plastered with girls in booty shorts and bikini tops, oiled and pouty, most covered in a light dusting of sand.  But Carol knew better, these were her daughter’s idols.  These nameless, brainless pieces of sexed-up flesh were what her daughter aspired to be.  When she was Mia’s age, Carol had wanted nothing more than to be Jennifer Beals in “Flashdance.”  She’d gone to dance classes for four months before she realized that she was already a decade behind the best dancers and quit to join the debate team.  Carol recalled that although Beals’ character was a welder by day, she was a stripper by night.  Maybe she and her daughter weren’t so different after all.

Carol opened a drawer full of what looked like pirate-style eye patches in every color imaginable.

Nope, those would be panties.

Carol and Mia were definitely as different as she first thought.

Earlier that month, Carol did a double take when she caught Mia scribbling away in a diary.  Diaries seemed so old fashioned — they were for Patty Duke and Marsha Brady, not for Lil’ Kim and Paris Hilton.   And it wasn’t even hidden, the diary just sat there on the nightstand.  Kicking off her flats, Carol threw herself on the bed and began to flip through the pages.   At first glance it looked like it was written in some sort of code, until Carol realized it was a remedial bookkeeper’s ledger.  And, yes, there were even dollar amounts associated with most of the names and dates.  Carol grimaced.

“Good to see you’re not just giving it away,” she yelled at the bedroom door.  Truth be told, Carol was not at all shocked by her daughter’s behavior, she would have been more surprised had Mia been able to string together a coherent sentence.

Suddenly, the banging ceased and she could hear Mia start to claw at the floor as if trying to burrow under the door.  She growled and sniffed at the door frame like a wild animal.  A couple of discolored fingers caked in blood reached out at Carol from under the door.  The middle finger caught on the wood and ripped the nail clean off.  It immediately began to ooze something the color and consistency of crude oil.

Carol let the diary drop to the floor.  She picked up one of Mia’s discarded red patent leather stilettos off the floor and proceeded to hack at the fingers with the heel of the shoe until they disappeared back under the door.

“What a crazy day.  How did I even end up here?” she whispered to herself, glancing at the clock on the nightstand.  Only five o’clock?!  She couldn’t believe it had been less than a couple hours since this madness began.

It was 3:27pm when the public address intercom crackled to life at the marketing firm where Carol had worked as a copywriter for eight years.  Janie Robertson from Human Resources was less than successful in hiding the panic in her disembodied voice.  “We’ve just received word that the zombie virus has reached the city limits.  We ask that you all leave immediately.  Return home to your families and remain indoors until the CDC makes an official statement.”  And then, in true dramatic fashion, Janie added “May God help us all.”  Carol calmly started to pack up her files before laughing at herself and the futility of her actions.  She headed to the stairway, opting not to wait for the elevator with her co-workers who were no doubt freaking out.   Later she would realize the nagging feeling that she had forgotten something was due to the fact that she failed to properly shut her computer down for the night.

During the short drive home, Carol was pretty proud of how well she had handled the distressing news of the zombie virus outbreak.   She was confident that there was enough food and fresh water in the house, she would just hole up in the basement with her emergency hand-crank radio until the “all clear” was sounded.  Plus she had five months of Vanity Fair and three Netflix movies to get through.  The zombie threat could actually be the perfect excuse to get in some much needed downtime.

That was unless Mia was already home from school.

“Please,” Carol begged aloud, “please, don’t let her be home.”  The idea of having to spend what could potentially be days, or even weeks, alone with her daughter frightened her more than the reality that the world was experiencing a very real zombie pandemic.

The garage door opened at a snail’s pace.  “Please, please, please,” Carol pleaded to whatever higher power would listen.

“Fuck.”  Mia’s Prius, an inappropriately expensive and not-at-all deserved birthday present from James, sat parked in its usual spot.  “The one fucking day she’s not off fucking some fucking idiot.”  Carol took a deep breath and urged her thirteen year-old Chrysler Sebring forward, parking it over the familiar and ever-present oil stain on the garage floor.

Carol hung her keys on the hook by the door.   “Mia!  Grab something to keep you busy, we’re going down to the basement,” she yelled loud enough to be heard throughout the house.

No response.

“Mia!”

She heard a low grumble from the other side of the kitchen island.

“Ira, is that you?”  The tone Carol used with her Boston terrier, Ira Glass, was soft and kind and patient.  If she were being honest, Carol would have to admit that she loved her dog more than anything else on the planet.  He never judged her and he loved her unconditionally.  Nothing, absolutely nothing brought Carol more joy than Ira Glass the terrier.

Second place would go to Ira Glass the man.

“Ira, sweetie, don’t be scared.”  Carol made her way around the island where she saw Mia crouched down in the corner under the sink.

Carol rolled her eyes.  “Mia, what in the hell are you doing?  We have to get downstairs.”

Mia’s head turned around one hundred and eighty degrees and she stared at Carol with dead eyes.  Her hair was streaked with puss and blood, her skin was gray and flaky, and she tore with her teeth at a mass of bloody meat in her hand.

“What the fu—”

The pieces immediately fell into place.

The bloody mass was Ira.

Mia’s other hand plunged wrist-deep in the dog’s chest cavity and his little head was nowhere to be seen.   Carol took a step toward her bloodied daughter.  Mia growled.  In the back of her mind, Carol knew she should run, but her eyes burned with hatred for her daughter at that moment and what she’d done to Ira Glass.  Without thinking, she grabbed a cast-iron skillet from the drying rack on the counter and swung away at Mia’s head.

She merely blinked at Carol, as if momentarily confused.  Then her growl turned into a roar.  Carol spun on the ball of her foot, sprinted toward the stairway and climbed, pumping her legs faster than she ever thought imaginable.  She paused at the top of the stairs and risked a brief look down.  Mia had only managed to make it to the foot of the stairs, struggling to move with any sort of efficiency in her tight, vinyl skirt and knee-high platform stripper boots.  Carol laughed and walked calmly towards the closest door which just so happened to lead to Mia’s forbidden bedroom.

So that’s how she ended up there, laying on her daughter’s bed – avoiding the dried semen stains that dotted the comforter while trying to figure out who in the hell this person was she was legally obligated to care for.  Mia’s father, James, and Carol had not seen eye-to-eye towards the end of their marriage, but there was one thing they could always agree on — that neither of them were responsible for the way their daughter had turned out.

Carol and James had been thrilled to start a family.  They were loving, supportive parents who believed in firm discipline and the value of education.  Mia wouldn’t have any of it.  She was confrontational and abusive from the beginning.  Breast feeding was one of the most painful experiences in Carol’s life and it lasted exactly four and a half weeks.

As the years wore on, no amount of therapy seemed to help.  Carol and James were at their wits end, they couldn’t figure out why their flesh and blood wanted nothing more than to hurt them.  The only logical explanation for having a daughter like theirs was that she wasn’t actually their flesh and blood.  That’s when Paul Brownstein, P.I. entered the picture.  He was hired to look into the possibility of a baby swap at St. Luke’s Hospital in August of 1994.  He came back with nothing.  Carol and James had him increase his search to all area hospitals.  Nada.  They asked him to go state-wide.  Two weeks and three thousand dollars later, Paul Brownstein, P.I. wasn’t able to provide a single shred of evidence to suggest that any babies had been switched at the time of Mia’s birth.  Carol had to face facts.  And it didn’t help her case that they were nearly carbon-copies of each other.  She and Mia had the same small nose.  The same wide-spaced, deep brown eyes.  They both were easy to blush and prone to split ends.  Physically Mia was her daughter, but Carol couldn’t have felt more different than her offspring.

Suddenly she was at the brink of tears.  It was a foreign feeling.  Carol hadn’t let herself cry over the mother-daughter schism since Mia was in eighth grade.  But she felt so utterly helpless and alone and exhausted and she knew her mutant daughter was singularly focused on breaking down the door to get at Carol’s brains, which she would eat straight out of the skull with her disintegrating fingers.

From what seemed like miles away, she heard someone shout her name.

“Carol!”

It was James.  He must have rushed across town to make sure she was okay.

“JAMES!” She screamed at the top of her lungs.

Mia stopped clawing at the door.  Carol could hear James pounding up the stairs.

“James, look out!  Mia’s a zombie!”

“I figured as much as soon as I heard that the virus had hit the state line.”

Carol put her ear to the door.   She could hear Mia grunt and spit.  She imagined them staring each other down in the dark hallway.  A father and his daughter caught in the most impossible of situations.  Carol’s heart ached for her ex-husband, thinking about the moral turmoil he must be feeling, seeing his baby girl turned into a monster.  She pushed her ear harder against the door.  The silence was deafening.

Then…chaos.

Mia screamed the scream of a bald eagle on fire.  Then a horrible hacking sound that Carol would later describe as someone hacking at a watermelon with a blunt hatchet.  It seemed to go on forever.

And ever.

Then…silence.

“Carol, it’s safe.  You can come out now.”

She could hear James breathing heavily, out of breath, on the other side of the door.  “What’s the secret code?”  she asked.

“Secret code?”

“Yes, what’s the secret code we came up with to let each other know that, in the event of a pod person-type attack, we are really us?”

James hesitated.  “Shit, I don’t remember.”

“I don’t remember either,” Carol opened the door.

There was an awkward moment when they didn’t know what to do.  Finally James kissed her on the cheek.

They both looked down at the body of their daughter in a heap on the hardwood floor.  Mia’s severed head rested close to the neck, separated by a growing pool of metallic green blood.  It made her look as if she were wearing a futuristic scarf.

“Do you let her leave the house dressed like that?”  James asked, wiping the machete on his jeans.

“Very funny.”  Carol stepped over the body and headed down the stairs.  James followed close behind.

As she approached the kitchen, Carol saw a clump of bloody hair on the carpet. Suddenly the pain of Ira Glass’ untimely demise hit her all over again.  She doubled over the kitchen counter, hiding her eyes from the carnage.   James pulled the dish towel free from the refrigerator door handle, and tenderly placed it over what was left of the tiny canine corpse.  He took Carol in his arms.

“I’m so sorry about Ira, I know how much he meant to you.”

James stroked his ex-wife’s back as she sobbed into his sweater.

“And I’m sorry I had to kill Mia.”

“That’s okay,” Carol wiped her tears away, and sniffled.  “Let me make us some coffee.

We’ll probably be here awhile.”

“Coffee sounds great, thanks.”  James pulled the stool out from under the counter and sat down.  He smiled at Carol.

Carol smiled back.

Maybe being holed up while the zombie pandemic raged around her wasn’t going to be so bad after all.