Weekend Freewrite -12/7/2019 - Windows

(Source: https://pixabay.com/photos/bedroom-window-view-window-interior-1082262/)

Here is a story for @mariannewest's always entertaining Weekend Freewrite (https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/weekend-freewrite-12-7-2019-part-1-the-first-sentence). The prompts are in italics.

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WINDOWS

Yes. She is a friend. Well, she was one until recently...

They say that when things get bad, that's when you find out who your friends are. That's when people show their true colors. And things have gotten...pretty bad. I guess a zombie apocalypse is good for zombies, but it's bad for people with brains. Non-zombies are reduced to feeling like walking fruit trees, each bearing one large, juicy, melon-sized fruit at its apex. Tabitha and I were non-zombies together. The adversity we faced as a team brought us closer to each other than we'd ever been pre-apocalypse.

We hadn't spoken much when we'd been interns at the lab, before it happened. I still have my daily planner from those days. A real paper one, bound with metal rings, sandwiched inside of a thin black plastic cover which was textured to lazily mimic the look of leather. Tabitha never had a day planner. She'd kept track of things on her phone, which, like mine and everyone else's, is now useless. But I felt that when you're working on (or taking lunch orders and cleaning beakers for the scientists who are working on, more like) research that has mind bending implications, it can be psychologically healthy to have a tangible item dedicated to the specific task of keeping track. Month by month, your calendar is a vivid reminder of all that the work means to you, and to the world. Concrete, sobering evidence that you just might be involved in making history.

Or breaking it...

Tabitha'd been trying unsuccessfully to charge her old Samsung Galaxy with a tiny solar charger she'd found at what was left of The Great Outdoors camping store on 3rd Street. But the phone dropped from her hands when she saw her sister's face at the window. Or...the face of something that had once been her sister. June's eyes reflected glassily back at her, like those of a china doll, staring relentlessly at nothing. But there was a moment...a flicker...Tabitha's body stiffened when she saw it. I'd seen it too. And the instant I did I knew. I knew what came next. Tabitha turned to me, her body pivoting as if in slow motion. "Did you see that?" she mouthed silently, so that the zombies wouldn't hear her, go ballistic like they do when they hear human speech, break the glass...

I shook my head, lips tight, but she could see it in my eyes. That I had caught it too, the flicker...as if her little sister, a zombie, had recognized her. As if such a thing were even possible.

I shook my head again, more vigorously, clenching my jaw, as if that would stop her. She sprinted past me, up the stairs. I clutched at her sweater as she passed, but couldn't get close enough to grab it. I felt slow and stupid, like one of the things that stood at the windows, emptily gazing in.

She took the stairs two at a time, had one of the windows of the small bedroom open before I could reach her. She was straddling the sill when I got there, her eyes shining with what I knew from the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach had to be hope. "I knew it", she whispered to me. "I knew they were alive". And then she was gone, shimmying down the trellis like we did when we needed to find supplies. Except it wasn't dawn out there. It was dusk.

I can hardly see her face peering in at me through the window. The tears in my eyes are making everything so blurry. But I could have sworn, a second ago, that I saw something...an expression...a half smile...as if she still knew who I was...

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