The Most Uncommon Cold I - Life in the Time of Zombies by Jeffrey Littorno Page B

moment, I was curled up in bed having an intense dream.  My mouth curled into a smile at the thought.  Could this whole thing be merely a dream?  Or rather nightmare?  Could it be easily explained away as simply a piece of undigested meat as Scrooge had done when confronted by ghosts?  These were the peculiar questions rattling around in my head.  Still, as strange as the questions were they gave me some comfort, some hope for a logical explanation.
       Then in the next moment, another overwhelming insight slapped me.  The possibility of everything around me being simply a product of my own imagination did not change anything. I could not just stop reacting to what I saw.  I could not just stand by and watch whatever was going to happen as if it was out of my hands.  That sort of action or lack of action required a leap of faith I could not take.
         Without being conscious of it, I had slid to the floor of the garage with my back against the door. I am not sure how long I sat there, but the reality was brought crashing back by a sudden push on the door.  From my position, I twisted around and could just see through the small glass square of the door.  The wild-looking face of the older woman with curly black hair appeared in the glass.  The pale, cold eyes were still unfocused, but her expression was full of rage.  She was shaking, almost vibrating with fury.  Her hands were slapping the other side of the door.  Clearly, she could not see me or understand why the door would not open. I kept out her sight and waited.  I am not going to lie about how I felt.  I was scared.  Plain and simple.  I was scared practically out of my mind. Previous notions of explaining things away with simple logic were gone. I might have stayed sitting on the floor against that door in the garage for five minutes or it might have been an hour. I was not in a frame of mind in which time mattered. 
         The theory is that the attacks were the result of some sort of mass psychosis...
         The thought of the comment I had written just hours earlier caused me to giggle hysterically.  The face of the older woman had been absent from the glass for quite some time, but the thought of her sent me into a new fit of giggles.
         “She sure doesn ’t look like some ‘mass psychosis!”  I joked aloud and went into more spasms of laughter.  Fortunately, I was the only one around to hear my joke. 
         Maybe it was a way to deal with the shock of witnessing the horrible things I had seen, maybe it was a way if accepting the unacceptable, or maybe “laughter is the best medicine” as they say.  Whatever it was, after the fits of giggling had subsided, I felt more focused and able to deal with the matters at hand.  Right now, the matter at hand was checking on Bonnie’s car.
         For some reason which I never understood, the building owners randomly assigned parking spaces to tenants.   That’s why my car was parked in a space near the door I had come in, and my wife’s car was assigned to a space at the other end of the garage.  I glanced over to see my Jeep quiet and apparently undisturbed by the strange events of the day.
         I crossed the vast paved wasteland looking to see if  Bonnie’s little red Toyota, was in her parking space. As I was walking, I realized that once again I was holding my breath. This time my unfinished respiration was not due to a need to go undetected.  This time I was holding my breath as a way to keep hope alive.  It felt as if I kept my breath from escaping I could keep my hope from escaping, as well.  At that instant, the hope I was hoping with everything inside of me was that Bonnie’s car would be gone from that parking space.  If her car was gone, it meant she had gotten away from here and away from here meant hope of her being safe.  Even as I held my breath, something crept into my head and let me know that her car would be there, but I struggled