Karen had lived in the same small town all her life. Married her high school sweetheart, Jim.  Bought the cute little house on main street that she'd passed almost every day of her life. Together they had three beautiful children. She stayed at home and took care of her family. Her husband worked in the city about 20 mile to the north as a lawyer in a very successful firm. She had everything she could ever imagined she could ever want. Life was perfect...perfect until two months ago when Jim was killed in a freak car accident on the way home from work one Friday evening.

Now she lay alone in the dark attic of the house she always knew she'd own. Curled up in a corner behind a stack of boxes in the dust and cobwebs. She tried to think of all the good times she had in her life as she struggled to stay awake. She'd been awake for four days and nights now, that's when the horror outside started. It was all so unreal, it had to be a nightmare.
 
The day started off like any other day, there was no way of knowing what was about to come within a few hours. She had gotten up and gotten the children off to school, still every day was a fight to get through without Jim, but Karen stayed strong for their kids, she tried her best to keep their routine as close to normal as possible.  She cleared the breakfast dishes from the table and put them in a sink of hot soapy water to soak for a few minutes. Karen turned on the tv on the kitchen counter to catch the morning news when she washed the dishes. Then she called their dog Sammy and let him out the backdoor in the kitchen into the the fenced yard. It was going to be a wonderful day with the high in the low 70's and he would spend the day stretched out sleeping the the shade. 

As she stood at the doorway, a frantic voice from the tv caught her attention. Did she just hear the news man say "zombies"? Karen thought to herself, it's finally happened, I've lost my mind! She turned around, looking in disbelief at the tv. The man on the tv was screaming "lock your doors, barricade your windows...zombies, walking dead, people rising from their graves, it's happening everywhere". Before she could finish the thought, "what kind of sick joke is this?", the station went out, only white noise and snow remained. She changed the channels quickly to find them all the same way. Her cable had gone out...not just the one station. Through the white noise she thought she heard a scream. She turned off the tv and listened intently... Another scream, joined by other voices yelling, they sounded like they were coming from the front of her house on Main Street. Karen ran to her front door, her neighbor Lisa, from two houses down ran past screaming, "Stay inside, they're coming, lock your doors!". Lisa ran past old Mrs. Martin, who was out walking her dog as she did every morning, screaming at her "Get inside, lock your doors!". Mrs. Martin looked up the small hill and froze in terror. Karen turned to see what she was looking at and what Lisa was screaming about, That's when she first saw them, not just one, but at least two dozen walking corpses in all stages of decay. They were coming from the direction of the town cemetery. She opened her mouth to scream, except no sound came out. Karen stood there, frozen like Mrs. Martin.

Mrs. Martin finally came to her senses and tried to get inside, she was 73 and her legs just didn't move as they once did. Even with the zombies' slow shuffling stride, they closed in on her before she could reach her door. Karen watched in horror as they toppled her to the ground and cracked her head open against the sidewalk like a melon and began to feed on her brain. Her little dog tried to defend her as long as he could, his yapping must have annoyed one of the zombies because it squashed him flat with a single swat, Karen could hear all the bones crunching. The sound snapped her out of her frozen state, quickly and quietly she closed her door, locking the deadbolt. As she ran through the house to the backdoor she heard Sammy yelp, it was an awful sound. She could see a zombie already had grabbed him, all she could do was lock the backdoor before one of them got into the house. Karen realized what a blessing it had been that the older woman they had bought the house from had installed wrought iron bars over all the ground floor windows, she lived alone and had feared someone would break in. The zombie in the backyard happened to look up, their eyes locked, Karen felt a sudden wave of nausea and this time she did scream...an unearthly sound emitted from her throat. She realized she was looking into the eyes of her dead husband Jim.

That's when she had ran to the attic. She had only ventured to the ground level once since then, on the third day to grab some crackers, she couldn't even eat them after what she had seen that day. Karen had been tortured wondering what had happened to her children, she saw them that day after she grabbed the crackers. The two oldest, obviously now zombies, were dragging around what was left of the youngest. It was so horrible she ran to the upstairs bathroom and threw up. She made her way up to the attic again, curl up in the corner behind the boxes and waited. Eventually they would find a way inside, they knew she was there. Or maybe she would kill herself first, all trick and no treat.