Zombieboy

Chapter 14

Kyle didn't sleep, he had laid his head down on the table and stared at the walls of Katie's dining room for awhile, an outsider would've thought him a statue, or in some bit of cosmic irony, dead. His eyes remained open, and he was absolutely motionless. Inside his head the wheels were spinning and he was attempting to figure out what had happened to himself. Absent was the normal fidgeting for a boy his age, he was deep in thought, rationalizing what he was and trying to do the nearly impossible or a ten year old anywhere; plan what to do next.

This is not a normal sort of 'plan your day' thing, it was more of a 'plan the rest of his life' sort of thinking process. Before he woke in the alley he had not even thought of such things as next year or even next month, the start of the school year, a distant six weeks away was lumped in with all those other distant dates that arrived magically because adults said so. Dates like Christmas, his birthday and Halloween, they were here when they got here and he never spent too much time contemplating them until he was maybe a week out. His status as undead and the reaction of people to him because of it had given him some perspective. Would his mom be like Chuck and Katie? Did he have a goal to accomplish? Who would take care of him when it snowed? Would he go to college like his dad wanted him to? Thought after though bombarded his brain in rapid succession while his unseeing eyes stared at the floral pattern Missy had hung on her dining room walls a mere two weeks ago.

After three hours of this thought process, incomplete, abruptly ended; someone was trying to get in through the front door. Kyle's eyes blinked once, slowly as he roused himself from his thoughtful stupor. His head rose above his slightly dirty hands about the width of a pencil and he turned it slightly to get a better look at the front door. It sounded like someone was trying to force the door open slowly, only the table Chuck had used was blocking it completely. Kyle blinked as the wood started to splinter over the table top, it was slow methodical and effective. The door was splinting into two pieces one below and the other above the table top, only the part above the table was continuing to move inwards. It splintered in such a way as to make very little noise. Kyle was surprised, he didn't think anything could do that to a door, doors were strong, they kept bad guys out.

Then a thought struck Kyle, he was a bad guy now. Really, being honest he wasn't good anymore, he had probably eaten people, he was pretty sure he had anyway. Looking to the floor he saw his baseball bat. The debate had been raging for years in the little league, metal or wood? Parents of children hurt by baseballs were convinced that metal bats were the problem, Kyle's dad was not, he said as soon as metal bats were banned some kid would be hit by a ball from a wood bat and then the race would be on to ban them too, then how would anyone play baseball? Life, he told Kyle, involved risk, if you want to keep your kid in a padded room to prevent them from ever having a chance of getting injured or killed, then you deserve the kind of kid that grows up that way. His dad, on the other hand just made Kyle practice more and threw particularly fast balls at him from time to time. And he had bought him a metal bat.

It was that bat that Kyle picked up quietly and hefted as he headed towards the door. Chuck had said to hit them in the head, then they would be die. The door opened enough for someone to get their hands wedged into the opening between it and the frame...

...back ..home.. next...