To the survivors I say, don’t despair--you will never again have to stand there with your unimaginative, glassy-eyed neighbor who is overly jazzed to discuss the weather with you. You’re done being that captive audience, trapped by your own social graces at the water cooler while some noxious co-worker drones on about their opinions of Dancing with the Stars or gay marriage. And nobody will ever ring your doorbell, rousting you from a relaxing afternoon nap, to ask if you’ve ever heard of Jesus. Maybe the best perk of all--jobs don’t exist anymore!
Am I the only one who’s glad that civilization is dead?
Chapter 2: Then
I owned a television, but it was only connected to a DVD player. I had no cable, didn’t even own rabbit ears. I didn’t listen to the radio, ever, because I loathe commercials, station jingles, and radio “personalities.”
I’m also a night owl: my bedroom window was covered with a duvetyn curtain to keep the sun out. In the original Star Trek, all the space scenes were shot with glitter glued onto duvetyn—this stuff is the black hole of the textile industry: no light gets through it. Even my daytimes felt like night because of it. And I liked life that way, living in my private cave and hiding from the world. I didn’t like people before the apocalypse, and I liked them even less once they started trying to eat me.
I’m pretty much the last guy in any city who would even notice a zombie apocalypse happening, and I’m probably the most useless guy you could ever have on your team during a crisis: not a team player at all, possessing zero knowledge of how to operate machinery or build explosives or even put together a particle-board TV stand. And I didn’t own a gun or chainsaw or a baseball bat. I did have a shirt that said ‘You can take my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers,’ but only for the amusement of my students. My life was like a joke at my own expense back then.
Facebook was the first indication I saw of the zombie apocalypse, and I ignored it. My news feed was exploding with zombie crap, but I assumed The Walking Dead must’ve just had some grandiose season finale, because people never shut up about that show. It should’ve tipped me off that there were people sharing zombie articles and videos who should not have been. Dr. Yakuhima, a brain surgeon at Northwestern Medical Center, had a YouTube share titled ‘Preliminary Pathology of the Undead,’ which should’ve really glitched my circuits, but my eyes rolled right past it as if it were Doug Donahue class of ‘98 sharing a poop pic from ratemydoodie.com.
That says a lot about our species--the first thing everyone did when the world ended was get on Facebook to post about it. Apparently, the second thing most of them did was get bit. Charles Darwin probably rolled over in his grave at the irony, (and then climbed out of it and started chomping on people).
I didn’t panic at all; I was cool as a cucumber during the zombie apocalypse. I got multiple invites to an app called New Zombie You, which would take your profile photo and add wounds and bite marks to make you look like a zombie. Everyone seemed to be using it. There was no way you could actually believe people were dying while everyone joked about it on Facebook, especially if you’re just a headline surfer like me.
“Enough with the zombie shit, you fucking idiots,” I muttered as I scrolled down my feed, my body awash in post orgasmic bliss from Lewd Contact #29.
People were posting zombied-up pictures of Tom Cruise and Donald Trump and Beyoncé . Kinda like how there were blue people all over Facebook when Avatar came out, because everyone was using apps to turn themselves into blue skinned, yellow-eyed Na’vi.
The whole zombie thing bored me right off Facebook, and I curled up with a Bukowski book and my wave machine roaring. I might live in Upstate New York, but I could at least pretend I was in Hawaii during my sleep.
And what do you think it was that woke me five hours later? Sirens? Nope. Gunshots? Nada. Explosions? Pshaw.
My goddamn cat, Shakes, tearing across my bed like the house was on fire. You might think Shakes, short for Shakespeare, was trying to warn me about the hordes of undead that were right then roving through the streets of my neighborhood, but you would be wrong. She had actually discovered an old catnip mouse I’d kicked under the couch, and got all wonky from it.
“Fucking knock it off, Shakes!” I yelled. Then I made a hissing noise to tell her she was four seconds from me leaping into action and backhanding her dumb furry ass with some Bruce Lee fury. Shakespeare gripped my bed, staring wildly at me while her lips formed a fellatio grimace around the frayed blue catnip mouse with its pink eye dangling off like foreshadowing. Then she leaped seven feet horizontally through the air, clearing the pile of books and papers that littered my bedroom floor, hit the ground running, and bolted into the hallway with the ripping sound of claws pushing hard off carpet.
That’s when I heard the Sunoco station blow up. I even felt my house tremble from it, and for a minute, I screamed, “SHAKES!” in the most furiously reproachful pet voice I could muster, until it occurred to my sleep-baked noodle that an airplane must’ve just crashed on my street.
It was still dark outside. I’d fallen asleep in my jeans.
Something gruesome caused me to lurch to my feet and stumble down the hallway looking for burning jet fuel and bodies out my living room window. Peering out, I was rewarded with the expected fire, which was a quarter-mile down the road, but shocked beyond belief to see that the entire Sunoco was engulfed. The silhouettes of people watching the silhouettes of other people who were actually burning sort of made me feel like I should go get a closer look, so I walked right outside. Barefoot. Cold as fuck. I slipped on sandals, grabbed a coat for the nippy cold.
A lot of people wandered the street, which didn’t seem odd at all considering the gas station had blown up. There weren’t any sirens, which was odd, but it didn’t even occur to me to call 911. I was sure someone else had already done it. They call this the Bystander Effect. First observed in 1964, when Kitty Genovese was slowly beaten to death in front of her apartment in Queens. Sixty-six people watched from their windows, and nobody called the cops. Everyone assumed that someone else must have done it. So how come no one went down to help her… The Couch Potato Effect?
It smelled like Auschwitz outside. Melting people choked my nose with a greasy nauseating stink, like chicken skin marinated with dog hair searing in the oven. I dry heaved, then pushed my shirt up over my nose. A dog shit smell filled the air so much that I actually checked my sandals, but they were clean.
Sunoco was five houses up the road from me, next to the Catholic school. I was walking straight down the road, a moth bee-lining for fire and not paying much attention to the other people shambling through the darkness alongside me. Which inadvertently saved my life.
It isn’t every day that you see people walking around on fire, so at first, the experience is overwhelming. It sort of hypnotizes you. You look at them and want to put the fire out, but then you look around and don’t see a hose or any water and you just sorta do what everyone else is doing--wait for someone with water to show up. There’s experts to handle this, right? That’s the kind of thing you tell yourself when nobody is doing anything and you just melt into the crowd and become part of the scenery, no longer an active participant in your own life for these crisis moments. The Bystander Effect. Or maybe you only react that way if you’re an Attention-Deficit-Borderline-Sociopath-with-Obsessive-Compulsive-Disorder standing in a crowd of burning zombies and surrounded by a crowd of nonchalant non-burning zombies who you don’t realize are zombies?
They haven’t been diagnosed as zombies yet, and I’ve never been officially diagnosed with ADBSOCD.
So there I am, standing close enough to the burning gas station that I can feel the immense heat from the conflagration washing over me like a tanning lamp, and only dimly do I begin to notice that many of the other folks around me aren’t even watching the fire or the people who are in various states of combustion. In fact, there’s something very very wrong with all of them, I realize.
This is the moment I
begin backing away from the scene. It all hits me at once, like that moment in The Twilight Zone where the punchline of the show is revealed and your brain marvels at how cleverly Rod Serling machinated this episode’s theme. Except there’s an added element--the fact that this is really happening, and I don’t have a clue what *this* is, but it’s bad and I need to get back inside right now.
The moment I notice them is about the exact moment they notice me. Or notice me noticing them. I don’t have time to think about it, because suddenly all the nearby people are heading toward me. Many are wounded and gory, missing chunks of their faces and bodies. Some are completely mangled, an eyeball hanging out, a torn-off cheek revealing teeth beneath, a face chopped to pieces with a hatchet that is now lodged in his collarbone. But they don’t seem to notice or care about their own health, because they’re all looking at me. I don’t know what they want from me, but moments like this are when pure instinct takes over. It’s survival, nothing more. It’s get-the-fuck-out-of-here time.
This is a little like playing football when you’re running for the goal carrying the pigskin and your eyes take in every guy who’s trying to stop you, calibrating each of their velocities and trajectories simultaneously and navigating a path through them. Except the football field is suddenly 300 yards long, and there are 45 members of the opposing team between you and the goal, which you know isn’t a very good place to run because you could easily get killed there! But it’s the only place you can think of, and let’s say these 45 gruesome people standing between you and that very shaky goal consist of Ebola patients who are trying to give you their disease. It’s that kinda feeling, and I was vastly lucky that they were slow to think and slow to move.
Did I consciously know these were zombies? Let’s say I accepted that they looked like zombies, and behaved like zombies, and that there was zero thought that it might be some elaborate candid camera prank, since I’d watched human beings shambling around on fire and dying quietly in the night without a scream or a helping hand. My panicking survival instinct would’ve killed any or all of them without hesitation if I had a Gatling gun or a bazooka.
So there I was, shuffling down Kirkville Road in my goddamn sandals, the scuff scuffing of my feet echoing back at me from the houses and the Catholic school. This is when I remembered all the zombie crap on Facebook tonight. No sirens would be coming, I knew. No police. No army. Something beyond terrible had happened, and it was only going to get more and more horrible.
Shakes! I suddenly thought, unbidden. My poor dear cat. What would she do without me?
Dodge left, weave right, backpedal away from 8-year-old Billy Rogan who’s moving faster than the others and has a face that looks like he stuck it in a piranha tank. The reason I recognize him is because of his tortoiseshell hair that his idiotic punkrock dad dyed for him. The kid looks like a fucking raccoon with that hair. Billy lived next door to me, and I rode bikes with him sometimes since his parents just sat around smoking cigarettes and drinking on the porch all day. Nice enough kid; not much coordination or self-esteem.
Billy was coming at me now with his stupid hair and his mouth open, and his speed caught me off guard so I did what came natural--kicked him right in the face as hard as I could. His little zombie body flew like a ragdoll and skidded hard on the asphalt. My sandal went with him, so I kicked the other one off and covered the last of the ground separating me and my front door.
Inside, I locked and bolted the door. It wasn’t ten seconds before I heard a thump against my front window, which is a huge plate window that runs almost floor to ceiling. Oh shit oh shit.
“Shakes!” I called, running for the hallway. I grabbed the ceiling rope and pulled the retractable attic stairs down at almost the same moment my front window shattered.
“Shakes!” I called again, peering in the bedroom. Shakes was under the bed, looking up at me with her moon eyes and her tattered blue catnip mouse hanging from her mouth. More shattering glass from the living room sent me dashing up those hinged ladder-stairs, pulling them up behind me.
I sat there in the dark, clutching my knees to my chest, rocking back and forth as silent sobs wracked my body. I’m such a coward, why didn’t I grab my cat? All of it was too much, but all I could think about was the thumping noises downstairs and my poor stupid cat alone with those things.
Destiny Nowhere is available from Amazon here!
Harvest of Ruin (Book 2): Dead of Winter Page 34