Do you know what happened to them?
No, even to this day, I have no idea. I know they didn’t abandon me, I’m sure of it. Maybe my father was caught out at work, my mother trapped while trying to go grocery shopping. They could have been lost together, going to or coming back from the relocation office. Anything could have happened. There was no note, nothing. I’ve been trying to find out ever since.
I went back into my parents’ room, just to make sure they weren’t there. I tried the phones again. It wasn’t bad yet. I was still in control. I tried to go back online. Isn’t that funny? All I could think about was trying to escape again, getting back to my world, being safe. Nothing. I started to panic. “Now,” I started to say, trying to command my computer by force of will. “Now, now, NOW! NOW! NOW!” I started beating the monitor. My knuckles split, the sight of my own blood terrified me. I’d never played sports as a child, never been injured, it was all too much. I picked up the monitor and threw it against the wall. I was crying like a baby, shouting, hyperventilating. I started to wretch and vomited all over the floor. I got up and staggered to the front door. I don’t know what I was looking for, just that I had to get out. I opened the door and stared into darkness.
Did you try knocking at the neighbor’s door?
No. Isn’t that odd? Even at the height of my breakdown, my social anxiety was so great that actually risking personal contact was still taboo. I took a few steps, slipped, and fell into something soft. It was cold and slimy, all over my hands, my clothes. It stank. The whole hallway stank. I suddenly became aware of a low, steady scraping noise, like something was dragging itself across the hallway toward me.
I called out, “Hello?” I heard a soft, gurgling groan. My eyes were just beginning to adjust to the darkness. I began to make out a shape, large, humanoid, crawling on its belly. I sat there paralyzed, wanting to run but at the same time wanting to…to know for sure. My doorway was casting a narrow rectangle of dim gray light against the far wall. As the thing moved into that light, I finally saw its face, perfectly intact, perfectly human, except for the right eye that hung by the stem. The left eye was locked on mine and its gurgling moan became a choked rasp. I jumped to my feet, sprang back inside my apartment, and slammed the door behind me.
My mind was finally clear, maybe for the first time in years, and I suddenly realized that I could smell smoke and hear faint screams. I went over to the window and threw the curtains open.
Kokura was engulfed in hell. The fires, the wreckage…the siafu were everywhere. I watched them crash through doors, invade apartments, devour people cowering in corners or on balconies. I watched people leap to their deaths or break their legs and spines. They lay on the pavement, unable to move, wailing in agony as the dead closed in around them. One man in the apartment directly across from me tried to fight them off with a golf club. It bent harmlessly around a zombie’s head before five others pulled him to the floor.
Then…a pounding at the door. My door. This…[shakes his fist] bom-bombom-bom…from the bottom, near the floor. I heard the thing groaning outside. I heard other noises, too, from the other apartments. These were my neighbors, the people I’d always tried to avoid, whose faces and names I could barely remember. They were screaming, pleading, struggling, and sobbing. I heard one voice, either a young woman or a child on the floor above me, calling someone by name, begging them to stop. But the voice was swallowed in a chorus of moans. The banging at my door became louder. More siafu had shown up. I tried to move the living room furniture against the door. It was a waste of effort. Our apartment was, by your standards, pretty bare. The door began to crack. I could see its hinges straining. I figured I had maybe a few minutes to escape.
Escape? But if the door was jammed…
Out the window, onto the balcony of the apartment below. I thought I could tie bedsheets into a rope…[smiles sheepishly]…I’d heard about it from an otaku who studied American prison breaks. It would be the first time I ever applied any of my archived knowledge.
Fortunately the linen held. I climbed out of my apartment and started to lower myself down to the apartment below. Immediately my muscles started cramping. I’d never paid much attention to them and now they were reaping their revenge. I struggled to control my motions, and to not think about the fact that I was nineteen floors up. The wind was terrible, hot and dry from all the fires. A gust picked me up and slammed me against the side of the building. I bounced off the concrete and almost lost my grip. I could feel the bottom of my feet bumping against the balcony’s railing and it took all the courage I had to relax enough to climb down just those few extra feet. I landed on my ass, panting and coughing from the smoke. I could hear sounds from my apartment above, the dead that had broken through the front door. I looked up at my balcony and saw a head, the one-eyed siafu was squeezing himself through the opening between the rail and the balcony floor. It hung there for a moment, half out, half in, then gave another lurch toward me and slid over the side. I’ll never forget that it was still reaching for me as it fell, this nightmare flash of it suspended in midair, arms out, hanging eyeball now flying upward against its forehead.