Read The Turning: A Tale of the Living Dead for Free Online

was snoring, then he got up and went into
the living room.  When he got there, he heard Steve still beating his head
against the door and the others clawing at it. 
    He hung his head.  They weren’t
going to go away, not now that they knew he and Jenny were in there.
    Reluctantly, Jeff walked to the
door and looked out the peephole.  Yes, they were still there, but there were
four others, now, and his presence at the door excited them.  Their scraping
and thumping, which had been on automatic—like they were robots, repeating the
same pattern over and over—suddenly picked up pace and ferocity as he got
closer to them. 
    They knew he was there.  And they
wanted in.
    He stumbled back and ran into
Jenny, who’d slipped up behind him, and screamed.  Jenny moved around him and
looked out the peephole, saw what he had, and stepped away.  She looked at him,
worried.
    “What are we going to do?” she
said.
    He went back to the door and
looked out.  “I think we’re okay.  There’s only room for them to go two, maybe
three deep, before they’re pushed up against the rail.  So I don’t think they
can get any leverage to push the door in.  And as long as they don’t figure out
about the window, we should be fine.”
Jenny’s eyes flicked to the boarded-up window.  “We should reinforce that.”
“Yeah.  And I think maybe we should stay out of the living room as much as
possible, to keep from stirring them up.  Maybe if they don’t sense us for a
while, they’ll go away,” Jeff said.
    “Okay,” Jenny said.  She went into
the kitchen and Jeff followed.  He watched as she fished a hammer and some
nails from the cabinet underneath the sink.
    “I can take the door off to the
bathroom and we can nail that up,” he said.  “And I can take apart some of the
cabinets, use their doors to reinforce everything.”
“Aren't you helpful?” she said with a sly smile.
    “I used to work construction,” he
said.
    Jeff shook his head.  “Hell, no. 
They had me too busy to do that.  I was driving the forklift, moving stuff,
sweating my ass off.”
    “I guess it's a good thing for me
you ended up here,” she said.  She turned and opened the fridge, pulling out
some food to cook.
    Jeff smiled and went down the
hallway.  He stopped in front of the closed bathroom door, the smile dripping
from his face.  This was all nice and cozy, him and the pretty girl.  But the
truth was, her dead boyfriend was in there, and a whole host of zombies were
outside.
    He opened the door, the sound of
Bill’s hair scraping against the back of the tub filling his ears.  He pushed
the curtain back and Bill was still there, still with the sock in his mouth,
still unable to move anything but his head.  Jeff stared at him a long time,
looking into his glassy eyes.  There was no life there, no spark. 
    Jenny slid beside him.
    “I can’t stand him being here,”
she said.  “But I can’t let him go.”
    He pointed at Bill’s eyes. 
“There’s nothing there.  Nothing.  It’s empty and black.”
Jenny rested her head against his arm.
    “I listened on the radio, before
they stopped broadcasting,” she said.  “And all those talk show people were
on.  You know the ones, the conservative guys.  And they were all saying it was
God’s judgment.  That God was punishing us because of the liberals, and the
gays, and the abortionists.” 
    “Do you believe that?”
    “I don’t know what to believe
anymore,” she said.  She gripped him tighter.
    Jeff stared down into Bill’s
lifeless eyes one last time.
    “Me, neither.”
     
    He removed the door and they
nailed it over the boards on the window.  It attracted the zombies, of course,
and after all the hammering was done, Jeff and Jenny could hear their
fingernails scraping against the glass. 
    Jeff looked out the door and then
at Jenny.
    “There’s probably five more now,”
he said.  He looked back at her.  “We need to come up with an escape