Mom.

[WARNING: mentions the loss of a child.]

Exactly thirteen days have gone by since Cibil had to lay her eight year old daughter, Naomi, to rest since the day she succumbed to her leukemia. For all thirteen days, she remained paralyzed in her unkempt spring mattress, hugging the oversized, stuffed alien plush doll Naomi would prioritize over everything else, even her mother, Cibil.

Cibil hadn't stopped crying since the funeral. Even as her eyes swelled, and her head began beating slowly in pain, the tears constantly flooded her eyes from below.

Cibil was all Naomi had, as her father skipped town the day he was asked by Cibil to help cover the expenses for Naomi's chemotherapy. It was that same exact decision on his part that lead to Naomi having to live with her cancer as it rotted her from the inside. Cibil blamed every bit of her devastating situation on him, the man who was supposed to fill in the role Naomi praised as "Dad".

Every death comes with different feelings from everyone involved, but ends the same. The grieving will grieve, then they eventually move on, accepting what they lost under the assumption that their late loved ones are either in a place a million times better than the dark hole they spent their last days in, or in a place a million times worse if they caused that much pain for their families when they were alive.

However, Cibil never reached that acceptance stage because she never moved on. In fact, she developed a new idea, one that could break the world if she's successful at it.

"I'm gonna bring you home, sweetie," Cibil croaked to herself, still balled up with Naomi's alien plush doll but no longer shedding tears.

The following morning, Cibil tossed a shovel she had placed on the tree in front of the house in the back seat of her card before returning to her job as a microbiologist, not to make an attempt at returning to normal, but to collect samples for her elaborate plan. Since she has a lab of her own, unexpected company wasn't something she was worried about, so she quickly got down to business. 

Before Naomi passed, Cibil was passionate about her job, and used to ramble on for hours about her work with Naomi because Naomi always wanted to know about her mother’s work. However, Cibil’s work freaked out Naomi because she revealed that during a trip in Greenland a few months back, she had found a type of bacteria that could create zombies trapped in a block of ice, but wasn’t sure how.

But with very little time to act, Cibil determined that if she wanted to reunite with her little girl, she needed to thaw the bacteria out and revive it as soon as possible, and when the clock struck midnight, what she called “A New Prologue”, had been successfully revived from the ice.

Cibil collected the bacteria in a small vial and darted out the door, ripping her car keys off the keyholder in a frantic rush to her daughter’s grave, suffering a cut on her finger from the keyholder in the process. As she crept towards a speed of eighty miles per hour, Cibil took a quick glance towards her back seat, making sure her shovel was still laying across the back seat. As soon as she fixed her eyes on the road, she suddenly found herself violently colliding with a deer, sending the deer flying across the road into the darkness that consumed the trees which vastly populated both sides of the long road. Rather than slowing down, Cibil kept driving at a consistent eighty miles per hour, mostly unfazed by her accident.

Finally, she parked in the small but vacant parking lot on the side of the cemetery that shelters her child, at which point she shoves her door open with one arm while grasping the vial with the other before traveling to the back to retrieve the shovel. Cibil knew as clear as day that what she was doing was wrong in more ways than one, but what she knew didn’t matter to her. All that mattered to her at this very moment is bringing her child back at any and all cost.

“I told you that I’d be back, my sweet angel,” Cibil whispers with a smile of anticipation and eyes pouring tears all over again.

She begins to mutilate the dirt below her, little by little until she sees the coffin holding her daughter. Without a second to spare, she jumps down onto the coffin to pry the upper half of the door, granting Cibil a sight she hasn’t seen in thirteen days; her daughter, Naomi.

Cibil hovers the vial over her child’s face like a small cup, leaking the bacteria into her nostrils and mouth until the vial emptied.

Cibil then fell back into a sitting position with her hands together, intending to pray.

“Please bring her back, Jesus. She is all I have,” Cibil cries out as she waits on the coffin’s lower half.

Suddenly, Cibil felt something was off. She noticed her entire hand was burning, and the cut area on her finger was foaming and sizzling, almost like a soda that had been opened for the first time. Before long, Cibil put two and two together and realized that some of the bacteria had fallen into her wound as well.

Despite understanding the severity of her error, she didn’t care. She has nothing to lose except sight of her goal, but the way she saw it, one way or another, she was gonna be with her little girl again.

As the sun began to rise, Cibil began to fall over, suffering the effects of the infection as it spread throughout her entire body at an extremely fast rate. She begins groaning in agony where she sat, foam and blood aggressively spurting out of her mouth and eyes, and an unknown green-red substance begins to pour out of her ears. Seeing that her daughter still remained where she rested and the bacteria hadn’t worked, Cibil began to sob, forced to accept that she had failed her little girl again. The bacteria proceeded to attack her brain, sending her into a violent seizure and rattling the coffin above her. Suddenly, a series of cracking sounds echoed from inside the coffin, and upon one last glance, Cibil, unable to control her body, watched as Naomi’s eyes began to open, her arms reaching upwards out of the coffin as if she were climbing upward on a ladder, and her mouth releases a foul, painful screech.

Cibil did it. She brought her daughter back from the grave, but in the process, she lost her own life, forcing Naomi to return without her mother. None of this matter, Naomi crawled out of her grave, completely mindless but hungry.

“Who’s there?” a man shouts. Upon seeing Naomi, he rushed towards her to check if she’s okay, unaware of her undead status.

“Naomi! Where’s your mother?” The man exclaimed, pulling the girl into his arms in a hugging fashion. The man notices a woman limping toward him and Naomi, but before he could act, Naomi bites a massive chunk out of the man’s throat, causing him to jolt back as he frantically attempts to stop the bleeding. Horrified, he looks up at the girl and the woman, who he quickly realizes is a dead but walking Cibil. “What have you done to my daughter?” the man gurgles as he begins to lose consciousness.

Cibil starts to groan loudly while looking up at her mother as their hands attempt to interlock, and police sirens begin to scream from a mile away.