Episode 33: Mina

“They’re going to come through the door,” Marty said. “They’re already in the house. Any minute now, they’re going to come through that door.”
“That’s the most coherent thought you’ve had all night,” Jack said.
“Gallows humor. Hey, mom, does that ever help out in the field? There’s a lot you have to tell us after ten years.”
“Marty, can we please talk about that later?” Sally whispered urgently to her youngest daughter.
“It’s morning,” Dawn said quietly.
“What?” Jack asked.
“It’s been morning for about four hours now.”
“But 12 o’clock is midnight; it’s the middle of the night. Not the end of it.”
“I’m glad to see you three are getting along,” Sally muttered.
“I’ll be mad at you when we’re not about to die anymore,” Dawn said. “I’d rather die with my old, honest family than the ten-years-later one that thrives on deception.”
They were quiet for a minute as the zombies rustled around upstairs.
“I’m with Dawny,” Marty said.
“Yeah,” Jack said. “The family that, er, doesn’t lie together, stays together?”

“Oh, just get ready to shoot,” Sally said. She hefted her gun and pointed it towards the door. She wasn’t ready to start joking about their family’s collapse like the rest of them were. Unfortunately for her, she had forgotten that friendly mockery of obstacles had been what had kept their family from collapsing that long.

“Oh, god, I kissed him... That’s awful... I shouldn’t have kissed him. He’s too young for me. It’s evil. I’m a pedophile,” Jennifer was rambling to herself as she followed Mina’s car. She didn’t realize that she was very nearly tailgating Mina, making sure she didn’t lose her, and watching to make sure that neither of them tried to kiss the other. Suddenly, she felt horribly betrayed. If he really loved her, why would he leave her for Mina?! Mina was nothing. Was he just toying with her heart? Was he going to stop loving her so soon and begin to love Mina instead? Oh, god, what if the two of them were conspiring to break her? Or, even worse, what if they decided to? What if they decided to conspire to destroy her when Mina told Todd what she was really like? She was terrified. Oh, no, no, Mina was going to tell Todd what she was really like, and then no one in the group would like her, and she’d be alone-again! But she wasn’t really like that anymore. That’s how she had been ten years ago. Until about a year ago. But she had changed! Oh, god, Mina was going to ruin her one chance at redemption! She began to consider just leaving on her own. That would make things much easier. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not Mina hated her, or whether Mina had made Todd hate her. She would just be free of it all. And alone. And the memory of the kiss came back to her. She touched her lips. Oh, god, it felt good. And that brought the guilt back. She slammed her hands down on the rim of the steering wheel and played through the whole cycle again.

“Why did I have to go and kiss him on the cheek? I‘m awful. I should’ve just... Told him it would be okay... Or something. Dammit! I’m horrible. And I should’ve stuck to the plan. I should’ve gone to Mina’s car. Ugh!” Sylvie paused and glanced in her rear-view mirror, just before remembering that there was no one behind her. She looked ahead and saw the back of Jennifer’s van.. She gripped the steering wheel and bit her lower lip gently. “No, no, this isn’t my fault. I was doing the nice thing. And they’re all ignoring me and attacking me. Elli has no right to treat me like that, even if he has lost his family. And that Jennifer woman-she stole Todd and made Mina insane! The only one I’ve got is Waldo, and he’s with Elli. None of them would come with me, would they?” She paused as she turned with Jennifer. “Now I’m talking to myself.” I trickle of blood touched her tongue. She stopped biting down and touched her lip gingerly. “Oh...” She wiped the blood away. She convinced herself to stop talking to herself. It struck her that maybe they all really did hate her, except for Waldo. And Waldo even. What if they had realized that she was really just a desperately lonely girl who thrived on feeling sexy? They would never speak to her again! She would be alone! But, no, no, that wasn’t what she was really like. Only the boys and girls who didn’t like her said she was that way. It wasn’t true, it was just bitterness. Yeah. And now, they all would think it about her. She began to consider just leaving the group, on her own, so that she wouldn’t have to deal with their hatred. She would find a different group of people, people who properly liked her. But she realized that she did like these people. Even Jennifer was interesting. Mina was her best friend. Dawn needed protection. And the boys were sweet. And then she remembered Elli, and the guilt returned.

“So, Mina,” Todd said kindly a couple of minutes after the four-car convoy had left Sylvie’s house. “What’s the story?”
She shut her eyes for a second, remembered that she was driving, opened them back up, clenched the steering wheel, shut her eyes again, opened them again after remembering once more that she was still driving, and sighed nervously.
“Mina, whatever it is, you don’t have to be afraid.”
“Why did you come with me?” She asked in a voice that was obviously nervous but obviously trying to sound accusing.
“Because Sylvie ditched you.”
Mina scoffed. “Yeah, that’s new.”
“Sylvie ditches everyone.”
“No, being ditched,” she whispered.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.” There was a pause for a minute. “Why is Waldo leading us to my house?” She yelled in her particular way of almost whining loudly instead of yelling. There was another moment’s pause. “Alright. You want to know what happened?” Her voice was that of someone who had overcome fear with anger. “It started almost eleven years ago...”

“Hey, Elli, it’ll be alright.” Waldo said not turning away from the road, being the only person in the group who could talk to someone without trying to look at them. Elli, meanwhile, was lying in the backseat, having just in the last few minutes finally allowed the true severity of his situation wash over him. His emotional spectrum, unlike the others, was all of one kind: Sadness. It was a wide spectrum of sadness: Guilty sadness, Lonely sadness, general sadness. But none of it, unlike the others, involved betrayal or anger. Waldo, meanwhile, was on his guilty stage. He kept asking himself how he had let Elli’s family be killed. How he had saved Elli when Elli was sure to be nothing more than alone. And then of how he had let Elli slap Sylvie, which she hadn’t deserved, and hadn’t said anything about it. And then he thought of how he had let Sylvie go alone, and about how he had been prepared to let Sylvie not take her dear, dear car, the thing she loved the most in the world. “It’ll be okay,” he said aloud involuntarily, quickly adding an “Elli” to save face. Elli didn’t notice. Elli wouldn’t have cared anyway. He began to cry. Not to sob; he was far past sobbing. He just cried. Without noticing this fact, Waldo began to feel a little bit betrayed. After all, saving Elli’s life had been the right thing to do, for Elli especially, despite what he thought earlier. And then Elli had gone and slapped the woman that he, Waldo, loved, pushing her farther from both of them. The ungrateful little... And Todd had insulted Sylvie too! Waldo gripped the steering wheel and told himself that he should just convince Sylvie to leave the group with him, in either of their cars, leaving the other for the others. And then he realized that the others would never let them do that, and that he wouldn’t want them to. He resolved to stay with them, and began to feel guilty for even thinking of it, and then again for the other things.

“... I had to keep going. My best friend had been killed. I had no reason to leave. I had to keep going, and help them find out what was happening. Dawn, she said that she was... Seeing something. I trusted her too much to not help her. Jennifer was helping too... And more of us were killed every week. More students pulled out. And...” Mina really began to cry. “Dawn survived an attack, and she knew where it was all coming from. That was the last day of school. A few days later... We went to stop it. Jennifer was supposed to come, but... She didn’t show up. She didn’t show up!” Mina paused to catch her breath. “The thing... The black thing... It started to spin... It stopped just being black and Dawn...” Mina shut her eyes for a moment once again, and gripped the steering wheel even harder. Todd saw her knuckles turning white. “Dawn threw herself in,” she finally said. “She threw herself in, and the colors exploded, and then... That was the last thing.”
Todd began to realize some of what he was afraid to find out. “And... You were...”
“I was as old as I am today,” Mina said quietly, through the tears.
Todd tried to continue the conversation to suppress his personal concerns. “Is that what you’re really afraid of?” It didn’t work so well; as she talked, he began to realize that Jennifer must have been the same age too. He began to feel terrible. He had basically just made her into a pedophile, he thought.
“Yes... Well, no... Sort of.” She sighed nervously again and shifted her hands on the steering wheel. “I woke up somewhere I didn’t recognize, not knowing what was happening. I could barely remember the last year, only that something bad had happened. It took me two weeks to get home, and when I got there...” She choked down a sob. “My family... They were different. After they stopped being afraid of me, they told me that it had been two years...”
“You had been unconscious for two years?”
“I don’t think so... No, definitely not. It turned out I could only vaguely remember the last three years. Not the one that I had thought I couldn’t remember. I had been awake. I...” She couldn’t choke back her next sob. “I figured it out when my little brother killed me.”
“What?” Todd yelled. He pressed himself up against the door of the car. “You’re not dead!” The statement had made him lose his train of thought just after the betrayal phase. As Mina was speaking, he had been thinking that Jennifer had lied to him, and that she had been keeping it a secret, so that he would fall for her. Where this a novel, he knew, he would have felt also betrayed by his heart. But he didn’t. And now he had forgotten the betrayal anyway. Now he thought he was in the car with a super-intelligent zombie.
“I didn’t die,” she yelled. “See, this is what I was afraid of!” She swerved the car slightly which, unbeknownst to her, panicked Jennifer behind her, and caused Sylvie to think that Jennifer must be drunk. Elli and Waldo, being in the lead and caught up in their sorrow and the road, didn’t react because they didn’t notice. “If you knew, I knew you would be afraid!”
Todd shook a little in fear, no longer of Zombie Mina, but rather of Angry Mina. “Mina, it’s okay, it’s okay. Just tell me what happened.”
She furrowed her brow, as tears streamed down her cheeks. “He thought I was a fake. My little brother, I mean. He dropped something very heavy on my head... I think I died, but only for a minute...” Todd stared. “He ran. He ran away, and he was gone. My parents, they thought I had killed him or something. They killed me too.. It didn’t take again...” Todd’s eyes grew wider. “I hid in the basement... I hid there for years... My parents, they didn’t know what to do but send food and water down... They wouldn’t talk to me or anything... It was there that I remembered... The year at school... The two years that I had lost... I didn’t remember much...”
“The two years... Someone did something to you, didn’t they?”
“Yeah... I can’t remember who they were... But I knew it was because of the... Thing... And I remember that they killed me three times, too.”
“You’ve died five times?” Todd almost yelled it. Mina swerved a little again, causing the same reactions in those behind them.
“Six... I tried to run away two years ago... And I got hit by a truck...” She giggled almost insanely. “That was actually my favorite. It’s more fun than something hitting you on the head, or getting shot in the head.”
“Why did you come back to school?” He asked suddenly, not wanting to be left alone with the resurfacing thoughts of terror, primarily about what Jennifer wanted with him. What if she was driven insane by whatever had happened?
“I don’t know... I wanted to. I wanted to get my life back. I thought maybe if I lived normally, I would stop not dying... Then.... Dawn showed up... She was the same age either. But she didn’t recognize me. I was almost glad for that, except that it worried me. And then this happened, and there was Jennifer, the same as ever... And she knew both of us. And she was... Just the same. Just the same...” She whispered. She looked up at the road sharply. “What about the others?” She said scared. “Did any of them age? What about Lucky? What about Seth, and Summer? And Dave? What about that cop? Are they all still just the same?”
Todd stared at her. But he wasn’t thinking that much about her anymore. He was thinking about Jennifer. He had briefly considered not going back to her car, to avoid the confrontation. And then he realized that she had tried to tell him, that she would’ve been telling him right now if he hadn’t come to Mina. And that he still loved her.

All six trains of thought in that convoy became derailed when Waldo stopped his car, though. They all stared at Mina’s house in horror, concerned now only for what was inside.
All that could be seen of the house was the zombie horde.




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