Flossie's end of the world, zombie alarm

My friend Flossie is usually a reasonable woman. However, with all the new "end of the world" scenario movies and zombie Apocalypse television shows around these days; she has become a little paranoid.

She had an electronic alarm device installed in her home. For the first month she turned the alarm on just before she got into bed. By the time she settled down and started dozing off, a voice rang out in her living room "The alarm is now armed!"

Only waking up fully to hear the shouted word "armed" she spent a lot of time looking for intruders.

Flossie decided to put a weapon in her bedroom. Although she had inherited her grandfather's double barrel shotgun, she had tried shooting it once and ended up flying backwards across the shooting field.

She then got the notion of using throwing stars, like Japanese ninjas use. She reasoned she could hide under her bed and throw the lethal weapons at intruders' ankles. This idea didn't work out either as she found she could only throw under handed and not sideways.

That same day she had tripped over her kitten Tinkerbell and fell onto the couch. For her own peace of mind, she had put on the medical alert button necklace.

After her throwing star practice she tried to pull herself forward to emerge from under the bed. Tink, who had climbed on her bed and was reaching forward to "help" her along got her claws caught on the emergency alarm necklace, pulled it back suddenly and managed to flip the alarm up till it hit Flossie in the chin! The alarm sounded!

The box started flashing, the phone started ringing and Tink decided to hide under the bed with Flossie.

She did manage to get to the phone, which was across the room from the alarm box. She couldn't hear what the voice on the phone was saying because the alarm was sounding so loudly.

Three of her neighbors heard the alarm and were pounding on both of her doors, threatening to break them down if she didn't respond.

Finally, Flossie got the voice on the phone to realize it was all just an accident (not a hurtful accident, just a kitten related one). Flossie said she debated whether to save her doors or turn off the alarm.

She figured if the neighbors came to help, the least she could do was to invite them in to the turning off of the alarm. Going to one door then the other, she opened them to see her neighbor Sam holding a twenty pound sledge hammer ready to come to her rescue, even if he had to destroy her door to do it. At the other door was her neighbor MaryLou who is 88 years old. She was wobbling about holding onto her walker and looked ready for a stroke.

After everyone was assured that she was OK, they all started complaining about the noise. Flossie told them all to hide their eyes (this took several moments of pantomime as you can imagine) while she turned off the alarm. It suddenly occurred to her that she didn't remember the code. The phone rang and it was the alarm people telling her that the alarm was still ringing.

Flossie had no more than finished shouting at them and hanging up, than a policeman came to the door and yelled at her that she was disturbing the neighborhood and that she needed to shut off the alarm.

Flossie replied that everyone in the neighborhood was standing in her front room, all but MaryLou who had sat down on the couch.

Finally, Flossie called her son to ask him the code. He yelled it loud enough for her, the policeman and the fire department men who had just arrived, as well as everyone in the room to hear. Quickly Flossie turned off the alarm.

Everyone in the room looked stunned. They suddenly realized the alarm was off and they were temporarily deaf. They walked out the door like those zombies Flossie was afraid would invade her home.

When I last visited Flossie, her back door was just barely ajar. Worried that she had fallen, or was tied to a chair, I pushed the door wide open. The alarm went off! Flossie came flying from her bedroom (where she was folding clothes) with a Little League baseball bat in her hands, screaming her rebel yell.

I screamed, and by the time the neighbors and the police showed up, Flossie had applied the baseball bat to the alarm system. It stopped sounding the alarm and died with a whimper. Flossie looked at me, the neighbors and the police and smiled. "Didn't need the darned thing anyway!"