Zombie Story

Zombie story
The streets were dangerous, busy, and full of traffic buzzing around: here and there were market stalls, packed together, selling fruit, vegetables. Tarpaulins of faded colours hung over head, bleached by the sky. People walked by, talking, shopping, lively, busy. The roads were poor quality, pot hole filled and full of debris. A 3 legged dog ran, or rather limped out from the sun, seeking the shade, underneath the stalls. Brightly coloured buses, built nearly 70 years ago chugged in the streets. They had slogans painted on them, often religious ones, such as “God is strength” but those buses were rusting their way to heaven. Everthing happened in the street as those metal cabs and wooden clad trailers, full of smiling faces thundered past. People bought, sold, lived, and died. There a man urinated, and over there a baby was born.
How ridiculous they were, the man and his son, on the scooter. Riding tandem, weaving through the traffic, past the people selling honey, rum, mangoes, pineapples, goats, everything you could imagine and more. They weaved past one- handed beggars, their faces grey with fear, their withered hands and stumped arms, the look of hunger in their eyes.
It was easy to escape the beggars. The man pulled on the scooters throttle, but not too fast. These streets were more bomb craters than tarmacked avenues. They weren’t trying to escape the beggars, or the market, but the zombies.
The zombies were on their scent. The boy pointed and the man aimed his scooter at a large deserted building. They could hide up in there. The boy and the man shut the doors and windows they could find, and hid inside the metal building, boiling in the sun. The sun hammered down on the corrugated roof, and so the boy and his father looked for a cool spot. They found the longest corridor, and secured their zone. They opened the doors, one by one, into the long empty dusty offices, looking for barriers, weapons. The last door swung open, they found the janitor’s supply niche full of chemicals and cleaning equipment.
There was a sink. Water.
They splashed themselves with dizziness and glee! Cool, fresh, the water trickled over them as they splashed, cooling down. A moment of pleasure in the heat and fear.
Banging started outside, on the metal walls. It seemed to freeze the water to their skin.
The zombies were closing in, that was sure.
The boy and the man, startled from their daydream, hid under the sink. The tap was running, water dripped over the sink, onto the floor. They watched in the shadows. The zombies staggered past , down the corridor, one by one, their shadows creeping across the wall. The zombies could hear heartbeats, the boy had told his father. But the gushing of the tap drowned out the heartbeat, and the water dripping down hid their body heat; Shivering in the damp, hardly daring to breath, eyes bulging with fear, sweat foaming in their fearful skin. The zombies continued their crazy goose step. The man looked around; here were some cleaning chemicals; that could be useful. But how could you kill something already dead?
In their search for a safe place, the man and boy had become boxed in. The father looked into the eyes of his son. He could see fear, dread, and love. They were crouching; the zombies would kill them if they found them. He scrabbled, looking for a solution, and found a tin. An insecticide bomb!
The pulled off their t shirts, and wrapped them round their faces, trying to cover their mouths from the gas, and then the man pulled the bomb safety clip and threw it into the corridor. Smoke poured out, filling the zone. The boy took his father’s hand, and they ran, pushing at zombies in the smoke, running into the shadows, and out of the building. Haiti had certainly come to life. Outside, they slammed the door, trapping the zombies. They climbed on the scooter and headed for the hotel and then the airport. At the hotel, they grabbed their stuff, paid the bill, and left.
They got to the airport, and took the next plane out, to Miami. It didn’t matter about the cost or the destination, just flee! They just hoped the pilot wasn’t a zombie.