Chapter 23

Zoe frantically looked for an exit.

There was one to their left.

She ran towards the door, screaming for Arthur to come with her before more zombies appeared. She led. He followed. 

They were close to the door when a small figure appeared. She thought it was a zombie but then saw it wasn’t.

It was a child. A young boy, about eight or nine years-old.

"Please help me," he said.

"Come on!" Zoe yelled at both of them as she opened the door. "We have to go. Now!"

She ran with Arthur and the boy. But when they got further down the hall, she stopped. "Wait," she asked the child. "Have you been bitten?"

 "Yes," the boy admitted.

Oh, shit! She looked at Arthur.

He said, "We'll deal with it later."

"We have to deal with it now. We can't have him in the car with us like that."

"Later!" he said sternly. There was no time to argue. Just a lot of time to be terrified.

They kept running.

On the way out of the building, they came across a group of children around the same age as the first boy. Zoe knew they had to try to save all of them, but it seemed impossible. How would they all fit in the car? 

She yelled at them to run, although they still had time. The zombies were still in the building.

Well, never mind. Now they were outside too, and there were a lot of them.

She ran.

The kids ran.

Arthur ran.

She didn’t feel she could run fast enough.

The distance between their group and the zombie group was shrinking.

As she got closer to the car, she yelled at the kids not to worry about putting on seat belts. “Just get in and slam the door!”

The kids didn’t hear her over all the commotion. She saw a few of the ones in back get grabbed by rotting hands.

She had no time for mourning or regret. She kept running.

The car door felt miles away but then she finally reached it. She felt the handle; then felt a bony hand on her shoulder.

She screamed hysterically as she saw the deadened face about to bite her.

Then he appeared out of nowhere. Unlike everyone else, the boyfriend didn’t look at all frantic. He looked perfectly calm. He gently pushed the zombie away from Zoe. 

The zombie came right back at her. The boyfriend pushed him away again. He didn’t seem at all concerned.

"He's going to kill me!" Zoe cried. Why wasn’t he worried? What kind of boyfriend was he?

The boyfriend smiled "You're fine, Zoe." he said. "All of this? It's just your imagination."

"No…" she said.

"Look. Try this. Think of the zombies dancing."

She tried. The zombies didn’t dance. But they did stop chasing and attacking. They stood there looking very perplexed.

 "Oh," Zoe said, kind of speechless.

 "Now get them to dance."

She tried again. She imagined them salsa-dancing.

The zombies continued to stand there.

The boyfriend looked at the zombies; then to her. "Well…uh, you'll have to learn how to do that eventually, but for now you're okay."

"So they're just figments of my imagination." Zoe felt quite relieved. It was nice to know you weren’t going to be torn apart by teeth.

 Then she remembered to ask the question. "What about you, Keith? Are you a figment of my imagination?"

 ***

 Zoe woke up feeling no relief that she'd been saved by zombies.

That feeling was long gone and replaced by the same feeling she had all week after waking up— very frustrated and slightly depressed.

She kept asking the boyfriend if he was a figment of her imagination or not. Every time she asked, she woke up. If he was not a figment of her imagination, he would tell her.

No, I'm your lover from a past life.

 No, I'm an alien, and I'm with a group who's decided to replace anal probes with dream visits.

 No, I'm a ghost and I'm madly in love with you. Do you still want to be my girlfriend?

Zoe's little sliver of hope that it wasn’t all just her imagination was getting smaller and smaller. The fact was, she had been reading lots of blogs and Reddit stuff about the spirits visiting dreams. Both ghosts and living people had answered. They all pretty much said the same thing. It was hard to visit dreams, and the ghosts rarely did it.

They also said It was hard to talk to mediums. And it was hard to make objects in the living world move. All of this took a ton of energy and experience.

Talking on the internet, though?  Extremely easy.

Why in the world would a dead guy be able to visit her dreams so often but not talk to her on FaceTime?

He couldn't even send a simple text?

No, Keith was just a figment of her imagination.

Keith? Where the hell did that come from?

The boyfriend didn’t have a name.

After all these years….

Zoe thought back to the day before and the days before the day before. Had she seen the name Keith somewhere?

How did it get in her mind? In her imagination?

Well, what did it matter? If she was going to ask that, she should also ask: How did zombies get in her head? It's not like she was a fan of The Walking Dead, or anything.

 ***

 Zoe hated doing work-related stuff on the weekend, but since she was desperate to occupy her mind, she looked at preschool art project websites.

One website had a picture frame idea for Connection Day. What's connection day? There was a link on the word, so Zoe clicked on it.

Apparently, some schools and communities were lobbying for a holiday to celebrate the reuniting of family members with their not-so-gone loved ones. There were arguments over when it should be.

One person put themselves in the middle of a flame war by suggesting it replace Easter."Well, we know Jesus doesn't exist now." 

People argued against that.

Zoe skimmed through some of that.

She went back to looking at crafts. She was tired of all the ghost people stuff. Though she was pretty certain, she'd like it if she had a ghost in her life.

But she didn’t.

Her grandma Cornelia could have been one of them, but it wasn’t working out that way. Not only did Grandma reject all of them, but she went on an international broadcast to announce that she was against all of it.

Maybe Zoe was against it too, though. It wasn’t fair to people like her who got stuck with nothing but their overactive imaginary boyfriends. 

Or imaginary Keiths.

Her phone rang.

Not Keith

It was her dad.

She didn't want to answer, but she ended up doing so anyway.

Her dad counteracted her trying-not-to-sound-depressed greeting with overzealous, charming fatherly enthusiasm.

"How's everything at home?" she asked him, trying to be polite.

"We're all doing great. Your mother and I had Indian food; then we watched a fantastic movie. I forgot the name. It was a thriller. A man worked at a reptile park. Does it sound familiar?" 

"No. Sorry." Zoe said.

"Well, that's what we did. What did you do?"

 "Not much," Zoe said. "Just stayed home."

"On a Friday?" he said. "Was Mickey with you?"  Mickey, Mickey Mickey. It was always Mickey with her dad.

"No. He had something else he needed to do."

"Actually, I talked to him yesterday," her dad said. "He said he was going out with friends." If he knew what Mickey did last night, why was he asking her if she did something with him?

 Sometimes, she really didn’t understand her father.

"Oh yeah. He went out with some friends at work."

"Is everything all right between the two of you?" he asked. For a moment, Zoe was tempted to just blurt it all out. Or at least most of it. Everything is okay, but it's not good. It's never been good. I don't love him. He doesn't love me. I feel pressured by you to go out with him, and I wish you'd lay off. 

She instead said, "It's pretty okay."

"He hasn't dumped you, has he?" her father said."If he has, I can have a talk with him."

"No…"

"You know if he dumps you, he's fired."

Would that even be legal? Zoe hoped her dad was joking. She was pretty certain he was, but you could never be sure. "Dad, I don't know if–"

"If what?"

"Well…nothing."

"I wouldn't worry too much," he said. "All relationships have their ups and downs. Just make sure you don't take him for granted. I know the people that Mickey works with. You've seen them. Some of them are very–well, they're very attractive. And I believe some of them have their eye on Mickey."

What the hell? Zoe didn’t even try to respond to this. "I'm just saying...you need to keep your eyes on the prize."

Now she was tempted to say, Go to hell and hang up the phone. Instead she said, "Okay. Thanks." Then she made an excuse to get off the phone. She had work to do.

He respected that and let her go within a few minutes. She dropped the phone and pulled her knees up to her chest. She felt kind of sick.

 *** 

 Later that evening, Zoe decided to stop being a pushover. She thought of  calling her dad. She thought of standing up to him.

What could she say? Was there any way to get through his thick skull?

Maybe.

But she decided not to try. Instead, she’d deal with Mickey. She had hardly spoken to him this week, not since the boyfriend made his reappearance.

Things were cold between her and the Mick.  But they weren’t over yet.

They needed to be over.

***

She picked up her cell phone. She texted Mickey. We need to talk.

No, she wasn’t going to end things with a text message. But she was beginning the ending with a text message.

That was okay. Right? 

She waited for his response; for some reason, expecting it to come immediately.

It didn’t.

Minutes passed. Then an hour.

 Zoe looked at more preschool art websites.

 No projects appealed to her. 

Then finally, she heard the chirp of her text message alert. She picked up her phone and saw the message. 

Her heart beat frantically.  Her hands trembled so much, she could hardly hold the phone. The message wasn’t from Mickey.  

Zoe! It's me. Yes, sorry it's taken me so long to do this. I'll explain everything soon. I love you.

Zoe dropped the phone, and started crying.

 *** 

Later, when she recovered a bit, Zoe picked up the phone and wrote back. For now, she said only,  I love you too.

Then she waited for his response.

Continue to Chapter Twenty-Four

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