While I was crouched behind the door, Cody and Connie took an extreme fascination with what was happening outside. The two couldn't take their eyes off of it and pleaded to be let out so they could get closer. I didn't see the fun in that, watching actual people get killed like it was nothing.
"You guys like watching that? How can you stomach it?" I asked both Cody and Connie.
"Do you honestly think they're still people? They bit Henry like he was a wild animal and they were starving. You think they aren't monsters?" Connie asked me. Her tone was harsh and malicious as if she had been fed up with me for a while.
"They still resemble people, so until they don't, I can't see them as anything else... I know what they did to Henry, but still, treating them as bad as they treat us isn't the way to live, is it?" I asked her.
I had been severely locked away in this school, away from all the dangers, but that fault doesn't belong to anybody besides me. I was the one to blame for everything. I didn't want to be exposed to this world and how terrible it can be.
There was a lot going on in my head, thinking about how maybe things would go back to normal if I didn't look, but also how prepared everybody was getting. We weren't going anywhere. My optimism was draining, and it was starting to affect the way I thought about the zombies.
This isn't a game, these are real people. It's the same core idea when Dad taught me to handle a gun. It's not a toy, this is real life. This is all that remains in my life. The greenhouse, the crops I go, literal dead people walking around and threatening us for days on end, this is the world now.
I peered up through the window again, watching five zombies all move over to Dad and Uncle Brandon. They worked together, grabbing each one and then stabbing them in the head respectively. The knife plunged into their skull, and when they tore it out with the serrated edges on the opposite side of the blade, chunks of the brain came out like it was being torn up.
They didn't scream in pain as blood poured out and even when they hit the floor with a loud bang. They didn't react like I assume a person would if they were in that situation... so, what were they?
It's so odd to me to imagine people, who used to have souls and lives like mine, all for it to come to an end. This end wasn't discriminate either, as even children climbed over that fence. The electricity must not have worked anymore if so many got over. That, or too many piled up against it and they intelligently climbed over. What kind of monsters was that smart? Could animals even measure up to that intelligence?
And, this number of supposedly twenty, that couldn't have been true, could it? There were far too many bodies to just be twenty, maybe it was around fifty. I think I counted that Uncle Brandon and Dad killed ten, ever since I picked my head back up, not to mention when I took my head down.
"Do they need help? We should go get somebody," I said, looking back toward the door.
"Yeah, maybe we should. Who wants to go?" Connie asked, getting the best look by putting her head in the center of the door.
Blood was getting everywhere, as they were still people filled with it. I could see bite wounds, just like I saw on Henry, and some of them weren't even injured at all. The only thing that made them stand out above all else is their grey, dry skin.
They looked like rotting corpses like they couldn't stop how they rotted. They still acted human, so where is that line that defines them as monsters? Can I search for it? Can I see it through this window? What about... right up close to them?
In my probably most stupid decision ever, I turned the handle to the door and walked outside. The creaking door alerted both the zombies, Dad, and Uncle Brandon.
"What are you doing buddy?! Get back inside!" They shouted to me. I stood at the forefront of the door, with Connie's hand on my arm, and the zombies getting closer and closer.
What makes you and I different? I constantly thought that as the zombies walked closer to me.
We were at a strange angle, where Dad was about forty-five degrees from the zombie right in front of me, and he took out his gun from the holster on his hip and shot it straight through the zombie's head.
His right eye exploded out of the side of his head as blood got everywhere around both him and me, but strangely not even scathing me.
Dad started to shoot a lot of the other zombies, the noise of the gun going off blindsided me, the first time, and I barely even heard the second, third, or fourth shot.
It was probably the loudest noise I've ever heard, and it felt like my eardrums exploded. Looking back on it now, that was a dumb decision I made as a kid, but not everything bad came from it.
Dad and Uncle Brandon had used their knives to keep a quiet approach, avoiding attracting any other zombies with noise, but what they didn't know is that from the right in the woods, there were plenty more on their way. Had they stayed there, they would've been surrounded had it not been for my terrible decision to walk outside.
Niko stole the chain link fence from that area, so it was very simple for them to walk past the demolished fence to corner Dad and Uncle Brandon. Again, they were smart, trying to corner the two before mindlessly walking at them after watching the other zombies die.
They ran back inside and closed the push door so the zombies couldn't open it. They panted heavily as more poured in over the fence, and Dad crouched down to my level.
"I won't say you didn't save us, but what I will say is that when you opened that door, you made a very unwise decision. You could've gotten yourself seriously hurt, and maybe even killed. They're dangerous, and I don't want you near them, do you understand me?" Dad asked. He tried his best to keep a level tone while speaking between short breaths. His look was stern, forceful, almost demanding, but I couldn't have heard him any clearer than that moment.
"Understood, I'm sorry. I just... it's weird, watching them die like that. I thought they were people," I told him. He sighed again, standing up, and putting the bloody knife into his leather sheathe.
"I think you should always question authority, you should always have questions about everything... but the one thing I never want you to question, especially in the heat of danger, is how dangerous they are. They aren't people anymore, they're dead, and they want you dead too. You wouldn't trust a bad guy in your game, would you?" Dad asked me.
The idea finally started to circulate in my head. I understood that they were monsters... but something still bothered me about them. Watching something die like that, animal or not, still affected me.
I know it's irritating to hear over and over again... but this is a real human life that I'm thinking about. Reduced to nothing once by whatever cause killed them, and then permanently dead after I killed them a second time. Could I get over that?
I was thinking that it was necessary to, either because it was a pinnacle in my development during this world to understand that whatever was necessary to do, is what I had to do. As long as I can still be a human, I don't think I'd end up being a monster. Not yet, at least.