Death Role

The Roller Skating Rink

Practice had just ended for Hayley’s roller derby team. The other women unlaced their skates and went about the usual after practice routine of checking their cell phones. Voices raised in horror at the text messages and voicemails they had missed detailing the chaos that was unfolding outside. A plague had arrived in their town that day and it had spread quickly in the two hours they’d been skating.

Hayley watched their reactions from a distance. She knew the pain on their faces and the fear in their hearts. Before practice, her husband and young son had fallen victim and she was forced to do an unthinkable thing, kill them. But she’d come to skate anyway, seeing the women on her derby team as the only family she had left. She looked down at her own phone knowing it would be empty of notifications and wishing that wasn’t the truth. She could still see blood under her fingernails.

One of her teammates approached. “You should get home, Hayley, and check on them,” she said through tears. “They might have fared better than mine.”

The pain fresh and raw in her heart, she couldn’t talk about it and so pretended there was still a man and child at home to check on. “Yeah, I will. I’m gonna take a few more laps first,” she replied in a daze.

“No, you need to get home,” the woman screamed, shaking her. “People are dying. This is serious!”

The important ones are already dead, Hayley wanted to say, but she knew the breakdown it would initiate. Too emotional to argue or explain, she simply left her friend, rolled back to the wood floor of the rink and skated wearily around it in large circles. The other women grabbed their belongings and left hurriedly, leaving her alone. Stale popcorn, wood cleaner and sweaty feet combined into a unique scent that hung in the air. Hayley breathed it in, accepting the rink as her refuge.

After a few laps she crossed the neon nylon carpet to the lobby and locked the front doors. Water, she thought and she went to the fountain, drinking in it’s cold, refreshing liquid. Just as she turned to enter the rink again someone pounded on one of the doors. Through the glass she could see it was a teammate. Without thinking, Hayley let her in.

“Someone bit me in the parking lot!” Ki, or “Yippie-Ki-Yay” as she was known on the team, rushed inside, nursing a small wound on her forearm. Blood dripped slowly to floor where it hid easily amongst the bright swirls and circles of the carpet pattern. “I think he’s still out there!”

My husband was bitten. He turned and tried to kill me, Hayley reflected. “No, no, no. You can’t be in here. Ki, you have to go!” she said as memories of the massacre she’d had to perpetrate at her home came flooding back.

“What do you mean? Help me wrap it up. Get the first aid kit!” Ki said, her eyes wide with anxiety.

Hayley stood still, knowing a bandaid wasn’t going to improve her doomed situation. “No!” she yelled before softly adding “nothing can help you.”

“It’s no gorier than a derby wound, really! Just help me!” Ki walked toward her and held out her bleeding arm. It was already starting to swell and discolor.

Hayley stumbled backward in her skates. “Stay away!” she warned. “You can be here in the lobby, but don’t come near me.”

“What is wrong with you?” Ki asked, confused. “I’ll go where I please. This isn’t your rink.”

She would have to fess up. Admit to what she’d had to do. It was the only way Ki would understand. “I had to kill them,” Hayley cried. “My son, my husband. Someone bit them too. I don’t want to kill anymore!”

Ki laughed nervously. “Well, that’s good. I don’t want you to kill me either.”

Frustrated that the words that hurt so much to say did little to impact her teammate, Hayley started placing round trash cans from around the lobby into a line to build a barrier between them. It wasn’t much and they could be pushed over easily, but it would buy her some time if she needed it.

“What is the great wall of garbage for?”

“I told you, I killed my family and if you die, I’ll kill you too,” Hayley said matter-of-factly.

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“You are infected. That bite is going to kill you, but you won’t stay dead.”

“I still don’t follow,” Ki, whose color had changed, said.

“You,” Hayley pointed at her, “zombie.”

“Ok, right. I’m a zombie,” Ki laughed as she held her arms in front of her, mimicking a walking corpse. She stopped mid-stride and hugged her arms close to her body. “My skin feels weird.”

“Next you’ll go numb. Like I said, it happened to my husband and son.” Hayley began to skate back and forth, pacing on wheels. She knew the change had begun and it wouldn’t be long before she would have to put down her friend.

“Hay-” Ki said as she collapsed. Her body quivered and then went still.

Needing a weapon, but finding that everything sturdy enough to take a life was bolted to the floor, she skated behind the rental counter. When she found the heaviest skate, with the biggest wheels, she returned to her former teammate’s side. It was going to be messy.

She clutched the skate in her hand at an angle that would put the front wheels and brake in line with the zombie’s head. Anger, sorrow and hatred welled up in her and summoned enough fury to motivate the first swing. After many more, when the roller skate was dripping with blood and the zombie stopped moving, only then did she stop.

“Rest in peace, Ki. I’m sorry.” She wiped her hands on the carpet, pushed herself from the floor, rolled over to the water fountain for another drink and then skated back to the rink once more.

The sound of the spinning wheels was calming and the rush of air hitting her body was already drying out the new blood.