Chachi

I peered out the window to see if he was still there. I didn't see him for a moment, but then he stepped into view. That little familiar gate of his was the same, just slowed way, way down. At the rate he was walking, it took him about two minutes to get from one end of the sidewalk in front of our house to the other. He took a step with his left foot, waited a few seconds, then brought his right foot up to rest where his left foot was. Another pause, and then he would throw his right foot out and take another step.

He looked almost cute down there, dressed in the little outfit I had put him in almost a week before. His little Nikes were still tied tightly in a double knot. It had been a chilly October morning, so I had put a little red windbreaker on him to keep him warm. His twin sister had the sniffles, and I didn't want him to get sick as well. The windbreaker was now hanging unzipped, revealing the grubby T-shirt underneath. His jeans, which had been new a week ago, now sported a hole at the left knee. Somewhere along the way he had lost the little Dodgers cap I had bought for him for his last birthday.

I had noticed the day before that he had begun falling down more. He had never been a graceful kid, and he had taken his share of spills over the years. Nothing serious, thank God. Just the usual cuts and scraps. But now, as I watched him walk towards the area where he would turn around (almost as though there were one of those invisible fences there, you know, like they use to keep dogs in an open yard), the glare from the streetlight caught his eyes. He looked up, lost his balance, and fell down.

Ever so slowly, he tried to regain his feet. Like he did every time, he looked slightly confused for a second when he threw out his hands to pick himself up, only to discover that one of them was gone. I had stopped cringing every time he jammed the open ended stump down into the sidewalk, the bone clacking and grinding audibly, even from this far away. I had stopped cringing, but that didn't mean that it didn't make me grit my teeth a little.

Finally, he was standing again. As always, he absently brushed himself off before attempting his next step. I think that was what killed me the most. Him using his little hands to try to brush himself off, forgetting already that one had gone missing. He had a half dried streak of red and yellow running down the front of his T-shirt and jeans.

Having regained his composure, he settled down and took another step. His name was Chachi, he was five years old, and he had been dead for almost 7 days.

****************

His real name wasn't Chachi, of course. It's not like the wife and I were crazy Scott Biao fans. His real name was Richard. His sister's name is Emily.

When he was a baby, he was colicky, and he would go on these endless marathon screaming jags. He would scream and scream until he was horse, and then he would scream some more. His sister would be sleeping peacefully beside him, oblivious to the nightmarish caterwauling that was her brother's claim to fame. Before long, we were calling him 'Little Richard', in tribute to his screaming abilities.

That nickname lasted for several years, and my wife and I amused ourselves when he was a toddler by singing Little Richard tunes to him as we went about our daily routines. Feeding time was accompanied by 'Tutti-Fruity'. Screaming fits were quelled with a soft rendition of 'Good Golly Miss Molly'. And bedtime just wasn't bedtime with out 'Roll over Beethoven', which was his favorite.

When he was around three, he started trying to sing along. It was pretty adorable. He would kind of gurgle and garble along with the verses, and then he would kick in with the chorus. "Roll over Beat-uh-uh, and tell Chachi the news." A couple of weeks of that, and he became Chachi. We expected the nickname to stick for the rest of his life, whether he liked it or not. The wife was pretty funny, and she came up with the idea of never explaining where the nickname came from to him when he got older. I think she was interested in seeing what sort of wild theories he could come up with.

Emily, his sister, was just Emmy.

****************

Emmy and I were now huddled in the attic together, peeping out the tiny window that faced the street, watching her brother lurch back and forth in front of the house, a dazed, slightly confused look on his face. I guess we had gotten a little used to him being there. It was almost reassuring to have him out there, like a sentry keeping watch over us. If only I could stand to look at him for more than five seconds without crying.


****************

I recognized what was going on for what it really was surprisingly quickly.

I suppose every generation has it's own version of 'What If'. In the fifties, it was probably "What would you do is aliens invaded?". The sixties through the eighties were mired in "What would you do if the Russians invaded?". For the last ten years, my peers and I had been discussing what we would do in the face of the zombie apocalypse.

The conversations would start spontaneously at parties. Or sometimes I would get a random call from a friend. "Okay, check this out, you have to have a bat, right? Then you fight your way to a car...". The discussion could go on for hours.

Some people had some seriously detailed plans. One guy would head straight for the local grade school (windows high off the ground, lots of lockable doors, plenty of food). Another had a route planned out to the Great Lakes, where he would dock his stolen boat at an offshore nature preserve (no people allowed, ever). Wal-mart, mountain cabins, secret underground bunkers, they were all carefully discussed, pros and cons. Plans that were considered inferior were harshly criticized and dismissed. Discussions could become pretty heated. Zombie invasion was some pretty serious business.

My own plan (hatched over about fourteen beers) was to drive my family downtown. There are a bunch of half finished condo buildings down there, sitting empty because the economy took a dive and no one could afford to buy a new fancy condominium. We would park in one of the underground parking lots a few blocks away, and make our way through the tunnels connecting all the buildings downtown, gathering food along the way. We would calmly walk up the stairs, locking each level behind us, and take up residence on the top floor. Top floor of an abandoned building was pretty good, right?

Then it happened for real, and all of our carefully formulated plans went to shit.


****************

The thing one doesn't expect about zombie apocalypse is how boring it is. I imagine that quite a few people got themselves killed simply because they got bored in whatever hiding place they were in and tried to move to someplace more entertaining. I refused to make that mistake. Aside from our tiny guard outside, there was no indication from the outside that our house was inhabited, and I intended to keep it that way.

Emmy, on the other hand, was going ballistic, bouncing off the walls. The electricity in the attic had failed two days prior, which means that her Nintendo DS could no longer be charged. The few kids books that we had stashed away in the attic had entertained her for about 7 minutes, and now she was spending most of her time alternating between whining about being bored, whining about being hungry, and staring out the tiny window at her brother and crying.

"Why can't Chachi come play with me? Can't we just put some Band-Aids on his hand and bring him in? Why can't I go outside and play with him? No one is bothering him, why would they bother me?" I tried to explain as best I could that Chachi was different now, that he might try to hurt us if we let him in, but Emmy just couldn't wrap her head around the fact that Chachi would ever try to hurt her. Neither could I, for that matter.

****************

It was about 1:00 in the afternoon when the neighborhood exploded in violence. 45 minutes later, Emmy and I were in the attic. It happened that quickly. There were no warnings, no dramatic news reports from distant cities, no mysterious meteors falling from the sky, no government quarantines. Just one minute it was a quiet fall day, and the next minute I was watching my neighbor and longtime friend Bill throwing his 7 year old son in front of a speeding bus.

I had bundled up Chachi about a half hour before. My wife had decided to take him to the park a few blocks up the street for an hour or so. With Emmy sick, he had been couped up for a few days, and the kid needed to get some air.

Fifteen minutes after they left, I started hearing what sounded like thunder drifting from across town. Thunder that didn't stop. Just a low rumble that went on and on. I called my wife's cell, and her voicemail immediately picked up. That was the last time I heard her voice.

The next thing I knew, all hell had broken out.

I won't bother trying to describe it to you. It was just images really. Many of which you have probably seen in a thousand movies over the years. There were screams. There was blood. There were fires and explosions. There were my neighbors running in and out of each other's homes, killing each other. I watched all of this through the blinds of my second story window, with Emmy locked safely in the bedroom closet behind me. I stopped watching after about five minutes when I saw a mob overtake my wife. She was running from the direction of the park, and a group of five or six people were chasing her. When they took off her arms, I snapped the blinds shut. I knew that my son was already dead.

I didn't go into shock. I didn't freak out. I didn't scream and cry. Leaving Emmy locked up, I walked quietly downstairs and threw the double latch on the door. I pulled closed all the blinds and curtains. I went to the kitchen, and began dumping everything in the refrigerator in the trash. I filled empty milk cartons and pickle jars, salad dressing bottles and cottage cheese containers with water from the tub upstairs. I threw as much food as I could into two hefty bags, and hauled them up the ladder into the attic. I carried Emmy up there, and then handed all of the containers of water carefully up to her, having her stash them in a corner.

I went out the side door into the attached garage, grabbed the 'Port-o-potty', and carried that up to the attic as well, along with some paper towels and toilet paper. I grabbed the flashlights from under the sink, and some extra batteries. After a second of thought, I also grabbed Emmy's game and her charger. All of this took about 15 minutes. I didn't look outside. I didn't answer the frantic knocking at the front door. I didn't answer the phone. When I had everything I thought I needed, I pulled the ladder up through the hole into the attic, and shut the hatch behind us.

And there we waited. Five hours later, Chachi showed up.

****************

Despite all of the varied plans that people came up with to deal with zombie invasion, there are a few accepted rules that pretty much everyone agrees on.

1) A human faced with zombies can never hesitate to use overwhelming, sudden violence. The quicker you accept the fact that you have to bash heads to survive, the better off you are.

2) You never go after anyone. If you attempt to retrieve a friend or family member, either you will die, they will die, or you both will die. Nothing good will come of trying to make your way across town (or across the street for that matter) to find someone. If they are not with you, they are lost.

3) Hesitation kills. If a friend or family member becomes bitten, or infected, or whatever, you must immediately put them down, hard. Do not wait for them to turn and bite you. Kill them, and kill them now.

There are no rules for what to do if you are hiding in the attic and your beautiful little son appears outside and won't go away. So far, all I've come up with is:

4) Sit quietly. Try not to think about it.

****************

No one has attempted to come inside our home. I have been able to occasionally slip downstairs to empty the potty and get fresh water. Our house feels both foreign and familiar at the same time. It is still exactly the same, but the entire world around it has changed. I no longer know if it's home.

I don't know why Chachi came back home. I don't know if other victims (I still can't think of my little son as a zombie) wandered back to their homes. I have always instructed my son that if anything should happen to him, he should try to come home, no matter what. If he got separated from his mother, he should try to get home. If someone snatched him, he should kick and scream and fight and try to get home. If he ever got hurt, he should come straight home. It looks like he listened. I can't help but wonder if he knows we are in here and whether he wonders why we don't let him in. Or maybe he thinks we're away, and is walking back and forth, waiting for us to come back. Or maybe he just doesn't think at all, and it's just instinct to keep moving that makes him pace the way he does.

Maybe he just doesn't know where else to go.

***************

I have always kind of wondered, watching zombie movies, how long it takes for the invasion to die down. The issue is, I don't know what kind of zombie I'm dealing with here. Are they dead, reanimated people, that bite each other in search of brains? Are they infected with some disease that some research lab lost control of? Have they been dosed by a stray canister of top secret military gas? No idea.

The streets have been quiet for over two days. I haven't seen anything move out there at all. No one has walked past. No cars are moving off in the distance. No planes fly overhead. The nights are peaceful and silent.

The only information I have is from watching Chachi. He doesn't eat anything. He doesn't use the restroom, that I can tell. He drinks no fluids. He just walks, back and forth, back and forth. His skin is starting to take on a slight, greenish hue. He is looking a little shiny. And he is falling down a little more often.

****************

So here we sit, waiting for Chachi to fall down and never get up again. Every time he falls, I die a little inside. My need to run out there and scoop him up and comfort him is overwhelming. I want to take his hand, and lead him back down the street to the park. I want to find his hat. I want to hold him, and rock him, and tell him I love him.

Instead, I sit silently and watch my little son walk back and forth, back and forth.