The pale hand that reached out of the pile of clothes was latched firmly onto my leather booted ankle, and I could feel its grasp tighten as it tried to pull me from my feet. I stepped back quickly and partially dragged the body from out of the pile when it refused to let go of my foot. Clothes and shoes fell around me, slowing me down as I tried to get away.
My attacker was wrapped up in all the junk on the floor, looking like a mockery of an ancient mummy as it awkwardly tried to stand and a muted scream erupted from beneath the layers of clothing heaped upon it. I screamed right back at it as I dropped my flashlight and the closet was plunged into spinning darkness as it rolled down the pile towards the wall.
The bat was in my hands and I could still see the outline of my attacker as it fought its way out of the pile. It thrashed back and forth and nearly pulled me down as it refused to let go of me.
I reacted quickly, swinging the baseball bat with both hands as quick and as hard as I could at the dark figure. All thoughts of escape were gone as I felt it connect, a solid hit that echoed up my arms and into my shoulders. It made a hollow sound that reminded me of batting practice when I was a kid in little league. My attacker stopped screaming and slumped sideways, finally letting go of my ankle. Even though I was free of its grasp, I didn’t stop swinging. I slammed the aluminum bat into it again and again even as it fell and lay on the piles of discarded clothes.
I was scared and angry and completely lost in my fear for my own life. All I could think of was swinging the bat, of beating this thing into a pulp, of what would happen to me if I was bitten. I know I tried to aim for the head, but I couldn’t really see what I was hitting in the dark little closet, so I just kept swinging. I felt the impacts in my back and shoulders each time as I raised the bat and brought it down as hard as I could, my strength born of fear and rage.
I don’t know how long I stayed like that, how long I kept swinging until my arms couldn’t lift the bat any longer. I remember finally leaning against the wall, my chest pumping up and down as I breathed like a bellows, my throat sore from screaming and the bat held limply in my right hand. My attacker wasn’t moving. I don’t think it really had after the first swing, at least not that I could recall.
I forced myself to find the flashlight, finally pulling it out from under a jacket along the edge of the room. The beam of tightly focused light showed me that my hands were covered in blood spray. My clothes were the same, and I realized that the metallic taste of it was on my lips and in my mouth. I turned the flashlight to the fallen figure across from me.
The body was covered in blood, just a broken and crumpled heap.
It suddenly clicked inside my head.
Blood on my hands. Blood on the body beside me. It had been bleeding while I beat it. Z’s don’t bleed.
It wasn’t a zombie.
I felt my stomach turn over as my skin went cold and clammy.
I jumped across the small space between us and knelt beside the body. I wedged the flashlight beneath my right armpit as I placed my fingers against his neck praying to find a heartbeat, cradling his head even as I knew there would be nothing to find. No one could take that kind of beating and survive. There wasn’t even a flutter under my fingers as I searched. I put his head down, noting that my hands were covered in more of his blood. I turned the flashlight over him in cold acceptance of what I’d find.
His face was almost completely destroyed. The skin looked like bruised fruit, the skull cracked and leaking a mix of blood and gray matter onto the pile of clothes beneath him. His right cheek was folded in and a pulpy eye was hanging limply from the broken socket where I’d likely connected with the bat on my first swing. Even with all that damage I still could tell who it was.
It was the Twit, or what was left of him.
What the fuck had he been doing hiding in here under all these clothes? Why had he reached out for me? Why hadn’t he come out when he heard me searching through his stuff? Had he been the one to trash his apartment? What the fuck was he doing in here?
I got angry. I should have been saddened, shocked at my own actions, shamed by my response. In that moment, none of those emotions came to me. I’d just killed a man in fear, and all I could feel was rage bubbling to the surface.
I punched the wall and the sheet rock crumpled beneath my fist. I hit it again just because the pain in my knuckles was distracting, the hurt something I could recognize and focus on. I sat there for a few minutes trying to make sense of it all, but it just didn’t want to stop spinning around inside my head long enough for me to make it all clear.
Finally I stood up, used a wad of clothes hastily grabbed from the floor to wipe the gummy blood from my hands and face. I picked up my bat and wiped it off next. I covered the Twit with a jacket and took a few deep breaths to steady myself. I grabbed a few of the bags from the floor and headed back to the kitchen.
I methodically packed up all of the canned goods and even grabbed a few of the expensive knives from the cutlery block on the counter. Everything went into my backpack or the bags I’d grabbed from the closet, and I was able to shoulder most of them easily. As I left the kitchen, I picked up the case containing the compound bow that I’d left leaning in the hallway. I quietly opened the front door, set the security lock as I walked out, and closed it all up behind me.
I turned back to my apartment in a daze, just putting one foot in front of another to get back into my home as questions flew around in my mind, questions that demanded answers about what I’d done and why I didn’t feel anything – anything at all.
