Roddy died last night…and he came back to life a few minutes later. They had him locked away in a small side room with a window slit in the door, and Tim and Jerry were there to watch. Charles waited next to the door with a fire axe, and he was ready to take Roddy down as soon as Tim ordered. I could see that he didn’t want to do it, but he knew what had to be done.

This is when Roddy did something that no one was expecting. When he became a zombie, he got up and started running around the room. He was grunting frantically and running into everything. I could hear the slams against the door and walls from the next room. The way Charles described it was that he acted like a crazy person who was throwing the world’s largest temper tantrum. He seemed to have unlimited energy and was looking for any kind of food. At one point he saw Tim looking through the window at him, and he tore at the door for a half-hour without any sign of slowing down. But, at about the 90 minute mark, he started to slow down. His frantic energy went away, and he stiffened up like a board.

Apparently an hour and a half after death is when Rigor Mortis sets in. I remember learning about this last year in Biology class, and it is when the body’s muscles stop moving and they tighten up. If this happened to everyone, then that would explain how the disease spread so fast. 90 minutes of running around non-stop will allow a zombie to attack and feed on any human he faces.

As soon as Roddy acted like a normal zombie, Tim gave Charles the order to go in and finish him. I could hear Roddy growling when Charles entered the room, and then a minute later…there was silence.

When Charles came out of the room, he looked at me and nodded. It was my job to go and inform Elizabeth and her mom Tina, that Roddy was gone.

That was the hardest thing I’ve had to do in my entire life.

I never want to do it again.