Always Crying

She’s fucking crying again. I can’t stand it when she cries. She’s been so emotional for the last six months. Ever since she found out she was pregnant. I wasn’t consulted. We weren’t ready to be parents. What the fuck was she thinking? We’d only been seeing each other for three months. Only known each other for four. We weren’t even living together yet. But that selfish bitch messed up on taking her birth control, and here we fucking are.

She’s already bleeding on the couch as I come back from the kitchen with the biggest knife that we had. 9” chef’s knife, doesn’t match any of the other knives we have. I wasn’t consulted about that, either. I tried telling her that we needed a full knife set if we were going to be living together, cooking for two means more than microwaving TV-dinners or throwing a frozen pizza in the oven (my meal of choice), or making due with whatever half-assed tools she had to work with for her precious “vegetarian” lifestyle. Let alone trying to cook for three with the baby on the way. I wouldn’t have to worry about that for much longer.

I knelt down next to the couch. Her eyes weren’t even open. She couldn’t even look at me. She couldn’t even look me in the eyes one last fucking time. One simple, common fucking courtesy after being together for almost a year, and I can’t even get that. All she had to do was fucking tell me the truth. That’s all. This whole fucking mess could have been avoided. We could have done something about it. We could have saved ourselves from all of this. But she couldn’t fucking tell me the truth.

She can’t even form words when she cries like this. It’s like she’s regressed into some infantile mental state. She can’t fucking say anything to defend herself. It’s not the first time she couldn’t defend herself. That’s for goddamn sure. I can’t believe it’s come to this. All she had to do was fucking tell me the truth.

I watch as her blood drips into the beige carpet of our living room. Our fucking home. Bought and paid for last month, no mortgage, no more paying rent. We own this shit. And she just had to have the beige carpet. Fucking beige. I never wanted beige. But she insisted that it “wouldn’t show dirt as much” as the burgundy that I wanted to go with. Know what doesn’t show blood stains? Fucking burgundy.

I take the knife and hold it over her throat. I feel my own breath catch in mine as I watch her chest struggle to rise at all with the godawful crying. I can’t fucking believe it’s come to this. If she would have just told me. All she had to do was fucking tell me.

I’ve never done this before. I force all the strength that I can into the doing. I push down with the edge of the knife and drag it away as fast as I can. Crimson erupts from the cut. Probably hit both arteries. Her blood is everywhere. Her blood is everything. She’s not crying anymore. She’s not breathing anymore. She’s not struggling to put her thoughts into words anymore.

I drag myself to my feet. I turn away and go into the basement. We never did get around to having the construction crew redo the foundation. Dirt floor cellars were so inconvenient. I never wanted to deal with this. I guess it’s a blessing in disguise now, though. I grab the garden shovel I stowed here last fall when we planted all of her precious rose bushes. I fucking hate rose bushes. I was pulling those thorns out of my hands for days. But she just had to have them.

I dig the blade of the shovel into the cellar floor. Dig a hole, shallow. No time to go six feet deep, too risky to take the time to do this properly. Three feet will have to do. I go upstairs, pick her up from the couch. Thank fuck she’s stopped spurting blood, I can only imagine how much more of that precious beige carpet would be ruined if she hadn’t. I cradle her and carry her downstairs. I lay her in the shallow grave. Her belly is still swollen with our unborn child that I never wanted. That I’ll never get to meet. What a fucking waste. Guess I won’t be a father after all.

* * * * *

She’s fucking crying again. She’s always crying now. I slump down against the door of the basement. I can hear her perfectly. I can always hear her perfectly. It’s been almost two weeks now. Two weeks since I slit the throat of my best friend. My lover. My wife. The mother of my unborn child. The one person in this world that I could count on to be there no matter how bad everything else got.

I haven’t gone more than twenty feet from this door since then. I can’t. I walk away to get water. I walk away to get food that I force myself to eat. I walk away to take a shit. I haven’t showered. Haven’t shaved. Haven’t slept for more than fleeting thirty minute power naps every few hours when I get so exhausted that I can’t keep my goddamn eyes open.

Every time they close, I can only hear the sound of her fucking crying again.

Ten months of our lives spent together. Ten months and two weeks of mine. Two months ago was when the dead first started moving again, at least according to the global news. We thought we were safe here. We joked about this shit when we got together in the first place. Fuck, “What’s your zombie apocalypse survival plan?” was a question she put in her goddamn dating profile. It’s why we bought this cabin out in the middle of nowhere.

She got infected when we tried to get to her parents. It was the first time we visited them after I proposed. They thought it was way too soon, but we were in love, and we were about to be parents. She was perfect. She knew so much about common sense decisions. She wanted to keep things practical. She didn’t want to waste money on things like knife sets, or on carpets that would need a lot of maintenance and specialized care. She was right about the beige berber. She was right about everything.

We fled out here after her parents’ neighbors had broken down their door and killed her parents right in front of us. She had been through so much. We had to get out here. We had to get away from the city. But she never told me that she had been bitten. Not until I saw the wound on her leg, the wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding.  I watched her deteriorate for days as the infection spread. I watched that vibrant, beautiful soul fade into a gibbering husk. I knew that she would turn before too long. I knew that our child would never be able to take her first breath.

I knew I should have done more. I knew I should have dug a deeper hole. Maybe fully decapitating her. Maybe just driving the knife into her brain. I don’t fucking know. I just know that I should have done something. If I would have, she wouldn’t be fucking crying again. She wouldn’t be fucking wailing on the other side of my goddamn basement door. It just doesn’t end. It never fucking ends.

The last time that I walked away from the door, I went to our gun cabinet. I idly turn the shotgun over in my hands, studying the barrel. Steel so blued that it’s almost black. Stock of walnut. She never wanted me to buy this. She hated guns. But this was part of the survival plan. It was just practical to have it. She might not have been so hesitant if I would have gone for the cheaper one.

Great final thought, I guess. I never was great at saving money. I tucked the barrel under my chin as I felt her hands slamming against the other side of the door. As I pulled the trigger, I hoped that the slug would go straight through my brainstem and into hers so that we could at least find peace together.