I’m not sure how close any of you got to the infected, but their eyes— Did you ever really look into their eyes?
There was no life in them, but at the same time they were...wild.
I stepped behind a couch and he had trouble figuring out how to navigate around it. I wanted to run away faster, but I was really kinda fascinated by him.
His movements, his motivation—His eyes.
As he slowly figured out how to get around the couch, he reached out for me again.
It was scary, but I didn’t feel an immediate threat. He was so slow. I moved slow as well. I didn’t want to let him out of my sight.
I knew that he was dangerous.
It’s funny how your brain works during a crisis. Because I knew this thing was a threat to me. I knew it wanted to kill and eat me, but for some reason my brain just wouldn’t connect the pieces.
He’s the reason why I don’t see the other residents, I thought. They must have locked themselves in the kitchen like I thought earlier.
I should have gotten the hell out of there, but if there was a chance that my grandma was alive, I was going to find her.
I slowly backed into the cafeteria and called out to any survivors who might be locked inside.
Mr. Lynn made slow, determined movements after me the whole time I backed my way into the cafeteria. He never took his eyes off of me, not once.
I guess that zombies don’t really have the same focus problem that we do.
Once I made it into the dining hall, I felt a little safer because there was more light coming in from a couple of windows that hadn’t been covered. Sun was coming in through one of the windows casting a perfect square of light on the wall by the cafeteria’s entrance.
Then, something broke up that perfect sunlit square.
A figure—something moving in the sunbeam.
I spun around as quickly as I could and saw about a dozen of the old people shuffling towards me.
They were all infected.
All of them.
Everything in the room came into focus, and the whole story played out perfectly in my mind.
The floor was covered with broken dishes, pots and pans from the kitchen, and hundreds of broken bits of furniture. There was a fight in here. Something got loose and the old folks tried their best to put up a fight.
There were a few bodies of residents that hadn’t been reanimated. They probably died during the attack— heart attacks or something.
All of the infected old people who were now making their way towards me had the same laser focus as Mr. Lynn.
Smaller things like pots and pans on the ground were easily kicked out of the way by their shuffling feet.
I ran into the adjoining kitchen, hoping to find a back exit, or any place safe to go.
There was nothing. It was a dead end.
The old zombies crowded into the kitchen, and as they did, I was pretty much screwed. The only way out was past them, and there were enough of them that I didn’t think I could just scoot past.
They all kept shuffling towards me.
Some were slowed by a food prep island in the middle of the room. But they quickly figured out a path around it.
I looked back to Mr. Lynn in his pajamas, and behind him, two more were walking into the room. I had no way out.
The pantry door was open, so I ran in.
It was about the size of a small walk in closet, and the door was wood slats.
Not sturdy, but better than nothing.
I closed the door, and within seconds, soft hands began scratching at it. The knob started to wiggle, but it never turned. The knowledge of how the doorknob worked was gone, but maybe there was some stored memory, or reflex that told them there was some way to get in using it.
The infected are clumsy. It’s not that uncommon for them to trip or collide with each other. Well, that must have happened, because there was a loud thump, and then a crash into the door.
Three of the wood slots in the door cracked open, and I could see the head of an elderly woman starting to poke into the pantry.
Three slots wasn’t enough to shove an arm through or anything, but they could see me now.
Some tried to chew on slats to make the opening bigger. But most of the people there didn’t have their own teeth.
Dentures is a big disadvantage for zombies.
I sat in that room for about seven hours before I heard my dad’s voice from inside the building.
He called out to me, and the old people that had been clawing at the pantry door stopped and started moving towards the direction of the new possible food source.
I screamed to him to tell him where I was, and they turned back to me.
About a minute later, I heard a gunshot. It was loud, and the sound sunk into my body, and made my skin hot.
A few seconds later, there were a few more shots. Each one seemed louder in my ears.
I heard my dad calling my name again, and this time it sounded like he was in the kitchen. I screamed for him again. “I’m in the pantry, Daddy! Help me!!”
I heard more gunshots, and then the air smelled like the fourth of July after all the fireworks had been set off on the driveway. The door opened, and my dad ran in and hugged me! He looked at me all over then asked if I’d been bitten. I told him “no”, and he hugged me again.
I was expecting some yelling, or maybe him to hit me. He never had before, but I was expecting something big—but nothing.
He just hugged me and cried.
On the way out of the building, I saw all the dead infected he shot. He kept his eyes up towards the exit, but I took it all in.
I saw Mr. Lynn’s body on the floor. His eyes were still lifeless, but now they were still.
Next to Mr. Lynn on the floor, was my grandma.
A bullet hole in her head.
Her nightgown had streaks of blood down the front, and her chin was brown with stains of someone else’s old blood. My dad never talked about what he had to do to save me. He never talks about the incident at all, or the fact that he shot his own mother in the head.
Someone just the other day asked my dad about his mom, and he said she died in an accident, and he was right.
He always was.
Cyrus Willis
When Cyrus Willis approached the mic, I had no idea he was a homeless man. To be painfully honest, I hadn’t once thought about the homeless during this pandemic. I hadn’t thought about the life of the people who lived on the streets. He spoke with the intensity of a man with a vision. When he finished speaking, I was one of the hundreds who stood up and cheered his words. I hope that in transcribing his words, his message will continue to inspire.
Hello. My name is Cyrus Willis, and I know what you’re thinkin.’
“A homeless man survived the zombie shit?”
Yes. Yes, I’m homeless, and yes I survived the zombie shit.
Now my story starts off with a question. “How did a homeless man survive this zombie mess?”
I didn’t have a place to lock myself up at. I didn’t have a door to bolt shut. I tried going to the shelter, but it was already locked up tight. I banged on that door for hours and couldn’t even get anyone to look out.
I know they could hear me in there. But they didn’t want to.
They knew that if they opened that door, one of those things could get in. Or maybe I’d been bitten already.
I went to houses and knocked on doors, and it’s no surprise, but there was nobody willing to let me in there either.
But that’s what I’ve come to expect from people.
It’s every man for themselves. Fuck you if you’re outside! Even before this shit, it was “fuck you.” Sure, sometimes, some people are willing to give you a dollar, but they don’t give me that dollar for me—
They give me that dollar for them.
So when they go to sleep at night, they can say, “I did my part.”
You should see the looks on people’s faces when they han
d me a dollar. They wish that dollar bill was five feet longer so their hand doesn’t have to get so close to mine when I take it.
I know, I sound angry, but I understand.
If you get close to me you might have to care for me. And you don’t want to care for me because I’m not you.
I wasn’t always homeless. I wasn’t always a “brother of the pavement.”
That’s what me and long-haired Bob called ourselves. “Brothers of the pavement.”
Bob’s dead.
He couldn’t get into the shelter either.
Bob was a good guy. He was white and weighed about a buck ten wet. When this shit started happening, we would hear crazy stuff on the streets.
Infected people.
Zombies.
The shit was crazy. Bob and me promised each other we would stick together. Once the streets were cleared, and regular people weren’t walkin’ around, we decided we were safer together.
Four eyes were better than two eyes.
For a while, it worked. One of us would see one of those rotten fuckers walkin’ down the street, and we had time to hide, or just stay the fuck away from it.
We would see the parachutes from the supply drops, and run our asses off to get there, but by the time we made it, everything was gone.
I saw this one woman drive away with the back of her minivan full of cans of food.
FULL.
She had enough for a shit load of people, and I saw some other people shooting guns at her car.
She got away, but it just proved my point. People are assholes.
She took more than what she needed and didn’t give two shits about how everybody else was goin’ to survive.
Now, I’m not a religious man, but I remember thinking many times, “Maybe we brought this shit on ourselves.”
Think about it. We’re awful. We’re greedy, we don’t give a shit about nobody but ourselves, and when the shit hits the fan, it’s your problem, and get the fuck out of my way.
People are assholes!
I liked long-haired Bob. He didn’t have shit, but he would give you the shirt off his back if you needed it. He would always want to do first watch when we needed sleep.
Night times were bad.
Not that there were more of those things, because there weren't. It was same day or night. But at night, they were just harder to see.
One night, Bob stayed up all night so I could sleep. He was supposed to wake me in 2 hours so I could watch. But he did that shit because he was a good person. A good human being!
He died being a good human being too.
We were hungry, and getting food was hard.
One day I pushed open the drive-through window of the McDonalds just up the street over there. It opened enough for me and long-haired Bob to get in.
When we got in, we grabbed all the food we could.
Really all we had were moldy buns, but we could pick around the mold.
Squeeze some ketchup packets on there, and it wasn’t so bad!
All the rest of the food that was in the walk-in freezer had been frozen at one point, but was thawed into something that didn’t look like food no more. There were some burger patties that didn’t look too bad, but we couldn’t eat them shits raw.
We were probably in there for about 8 hours, and it was just nice to have a roof over us.
Then, Bob figured out how to get the power back on! They had a mother fuckin’ generator.
The golden arches lit up the entire fuckin’ street!
We decided we should use this opportunity to make some hot food. The heat lamps came on! I felt like I was a little kid again! It was warm in there, and I got the fryers workin’, and we dumped in some fries and nuggets.
Let me tell you, the fries and nuggets may not be actual food, because when we opened those bags, they looked perfect. I guess it’s all the chemicals and preservatives they use.
God damn!
Tasting hot food was gonna be a treat. It had been raining for the past few hours, and that thunder was loud as shit!
I guess that’s why we didn’t hear them.
I don’t know if it was the arches all lit up, or the smell of food, but there were a couple hundred of those things out there, and we didn’t know it.
Some walked into the front door and just kinda kept bouncin’ off of it. Then a big hefty mother fucker walked into it, and the glass door broke.
The sound of the broken glass is what we heard. We looked up from that kitchen and we saw zombie after mother fuckin’ zombie come walking into that place.
Me and Bob weren’t fuckin’ around. We ran straight for the back door to get the Hell outta there!
I pushed open the door, and this loud ass alarm started to go off.
That alarm didn’t much matter to us, because the minute we opened that door, we saw a shit load of dead mother fuckers just staring at us outside that door.
And while that alarm didn’t matter to us, it was like a God damned mother fucking dinner bell to all of them zombies that were flooding up the street.
I slammed the door, we turned back around just in time to see that fat ass dumpy mother fucker that smashed the door climbing over the counter to get us.
I saw a ladder up against the back wall, and a sign that said, “roof access.” I tried to show Bob the sign, but he was smashing a cash register into a zombie’s head, crushing it against the counter.
Before I knew it, there were about ten ugly mother fuckers comin’ right towards us.
I threw hot oil on one’s face, but it didn’t do shit to stop him! The oil did some damage though. The oil burned that dick head’s face right off, but it didn’t react at all!
Right outside the manager’s office was a fire extinguisher and a fire axe. “Bob!” I screamed! I threw him the axe and he planted that bitch right in a mother fucker’s head.
It dropped quick!
“Come on, Bob! Get up this ladder!” I said, but Bob did what Bob did. He swung that axe at another fucker and told me to go up first.
I didn’t argue. I climbed right up. Just like the rest of you assholes would’ve!
He was a good man— making sure his friend got to safety first.
Me?
I was scared like everyone else.
Once I got up top, I felt the ice cold rain on my face.
I couldn’t breathe.
I looked down the hatch, and saw Bob climbing up. “Alright, Bob!” I screamed, doing a little happy dance to cheer him on.
Then, when he made it all the way up, I saw his leg.
Man, he got bit!
Right in the calf.
There was a lot of blood.
“Quick,” he said. “We gotta take this leg off me!”
I didn’t argue—I knew it was his only chance.
It was my fault he was bit in the first place. I should’ve made him go up the ladder first!
He took off his shirt and tied it around his upper leg, handed me the axe, and told me to aim for just below the knee.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had someone tell you to chop off a mother fuckin’ body part—
Let’s just say, that shit don’t feel right.
We knew time was against us. We’d seen people turn, and there was no rhyme or reason to how long it took. Some people would last a day or so, and others, maybe a couple hours. We had to act fast!
I pulled back and took the best shot I could. I hit him right below the knee, and I heard the worst crack sound I’d ever heard.
Bob screamed loud. I wanted to put the axe down and run the fuck away.
What the fuck was I doin’?
My first chop didn’t make it all the way through, so I swung again and again till his calf and foot were completely separated from the rest of him.
He didn’t pass out.
He just sat there for a while lookin’ at his leg.
That’s got to be a strange feelin’. Your whole life you look at your leg and say, “No matter what hap
pens, that’s my leg.” Now he had to look at it and it wasn’t a part of him no more. It was just a leg all by itself.
He bled a lot, and he was paler than usual.
He looked at me and said, “Cyrus, you a good friend.” All I kept thinkin’ was, Shit! A good friend would have waited for you to get up the ladder first. None of those fuckin’ things could climb ladders.
We sat there in the rain under the glow of McDonalds’s glowing arches. That yellow light lit the entire street, and for as far as I could see, those mother fuckers were walkin’ towards us.
I remember lookin’ at the sign— “Billions and Billions served.”
It kinda made me laugh. To think that all those zombie mother fuckers wanted to do was eat. And where did they end up going? Mother fuckin’ McDonald’s.
There was this cinder block thing next to some electrical box, and I picked it up over my head and said, “I AIN’T NO HAPPY MEAL, MOTHER FUCKERS!!” I threw that block down with everything I had, and saw it hit this fat white bitch right on the head.
She went down hard, and never got back up.
Then I heard a noise behind me and when I turned around, Bob was standin’ up.
With one leg.
“Bob, what are you doin?” I said. He didn’t say nothin’. He just started tryin’ to walk like he had two legs.
That didn’t work out too well.
He hit his head on the ground hard, and I ran over to him screamin’, “Bob, what the fuck’s the matter with you, man?”
I grabbed him by the shoulder to help him up, then he looked at me with those eyes...
Nothing there—
His eyes were dead as he was. I backed up, and he slowly made his way back up to his feet...well, foot—
He tried walking again like he was all fine.
He didn’t—It, didn’t know it only had one leg. It kept standing up and trying to walk again and again and no matter where I stood, it always tried walkin’ towards me.
I went over and picked up the axe off the ground.
“Bob,” I said. “You know I don’t want to do this.”
It fell again. It reached out for me and started makin’ that sound. I picked the axe up over my head.
Zombies' End: Aftermath Page 5