“What about the show tomorrow night?” Jayden asked with a frown. Their band, The Dark Ones, had scored the gig of a lifetime, opening for a national act in Little Rock.
“You mean the show that isn’t going to happen because they shut down all of downtown?”
“What? No way! We need that show!”
“Jayden,” Tory said with as much patience as he could muster, “the riverfront is swarming with green-skinned brain eaters. Forget about the show and think about your own butt for a minute.”
Jayden set aside Tory’s crummy guitar and put his head in his hands. It was just his luck. Finally, after years of going nowhere, the band was finally going to get some decent exposure and now they weren’t, thanks to some stupid zombie virus that was hitting the bigger cities.
“Gah! This sucks so bad!” he bemoaned into his hands.
Jayden had heard about the supposed zombie epidemic on the news, but he hadn’t been terribly worried. It wasn’t the first time that some super virus broke out. Drug resistant staph, the West Nile mutation, countless bird flu epidemics, all kinds of terrible and deadly viruses were reported all of the time. But like most twenty-something Americans, Jayden paid them no mind. These things happened in major cities like Dallas and Miami, not the Arkansas suburbs. The worst thing that had happened in his neighborhood was one of the hillbilly pharmacists nearly blew up an entire trailer park when he tried to create synthetic Brain Freeze.
“Jayden, seriously dude, forget about the show. The guys are on their way now. We’re meeting them at the mall.”
“Fine,” Jayden said with a sigh, more than a little irritated that Tory didn’t seem at all upset about the show getting canceled. He was beginning to suspect that Tory had only joined the band to get girls. “Maybe I can pick up some new strings and see if that helps.”
Five minutes later, Tory pulled into the parking lot of the Northside Mall. There were a lot of cars for a Sunday morning, but as soon as they opened the door that led to the food court, it was apparent that something wasn’t right.
“Dude, where is everybody?” Jayden asked. His voice echoed through the seemingly empty mall. All of the lights were on and all of the eateries had their doors open, but besides them, there was no one else to be seen.
“Shush!” Tory hissed with a grimace as Jayden clomped across the tile floor, oblivious to the fact that his boots were making enough noise to wake the dead. “Dude, this is what I was trying to tell you. Everyone is probably either dead or hiding. Don’t make so much noise.”
“Whatever,” said Jayden, rolling his eyes at how dramatic Tory was acting. There was probably a reasonable explanation for the empty food court. After all, it was a holiday weekend. There was probably a huge sale at the department stores. That would explain all of the cars.
“Jayden, where the hell are you going?”
Jayden turned around and saw that Tory was pressed up against the wall. He appeared to be hiding behind one of the plastic trees that dotted the open dining area. “I’m going to Guitar Center,” he said, pointing down one of the mall’s many corridors. “What are you doing?”
“Oh my god. You really don’t get it at all, do you?” Tory said in complete disbelief. “We’re not here to shop, you idiot.”
“Then why are we here?” Jayden asked, growing more impatient by the minute.
“This is a survival tactic.”
“Going to the mall is going to help us survive the so-called zombie apocalypse?” Jayden snorted. “How does that work?”
“It works because the mall will have everything we need to survive,” Tory answered with a roll of his eyes. “Don’t you remember that old zombie flick we watched last Halloween?”
“Ugh, Mall of the Dead?” Jayden rolled his eyes back at Tory. The movie had been old and super cheesy.
“Dawn of the Dead,” Tory corrected. “And it was brilliant.”
“Tory,” Jayden said with a sigh, “that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of and trust me, you say some dumb stuff.”
“Do you got a better plan?” Tory asked.
“Um, yeah,” Jayden said with a sarcastic huff. “Look around you. We’ve got our pick of at least fifty stores selling women’s clothing, a bunch of kids stuff, some collectables, and a few electronics. What are we going to do? Dress the zombies up like chicks and take them on dates to the stuff your own teddy bear store? If you really wanted to survive some apocalypse then we should have gone to Walmart to get what we needed. You know, like everyone else probably already did.”
“You just answered your own question, dummy. Everyone else is already doing that. I bet you Walmart is already sold out of everything. Crap, what’s taking the others so long?” Tory glanced at his phone to see if Ed or Gus, their bandmates, had sent him any messages and saw that his cell signal was gone. He started to get nervous. Jayden had a point. The mall in the movie had all kinds of stores that sold food and even weapons. Northside didn’t even have a sporting goods store. “Look, maybe you’re right. Let’s just… what was that?”
A loud shriek echoed down the hallway and seemed to be getting louder. With an even louder crash as he knocked over a kiosk of jewelry, Gus ran around the corner and crashed into Tory. Jayden had jumped out of the way.
“Oof! Dude, what’s wrong?”
“Guys! This was a bad idea!” Gus panted as he tried to sit up. “We got to get out of here!”
“Where’s Ed?” Tory asked.
“They got him. He’s one of them now.”
“For real? Ugh! Could this day get any worse?” Jayden threw his hands in the air with a groan. Ed had been a phenomenal drummer and the only other member who took the music as seriously as he did. Replacing him was going to be difficult, if not impossible.
“Why did you want us to come here anyway?” Gus asked Tory.
“I just thought,” Tory started, but shook his head. “Never mind, it was a stupid idea. Let’s get out of here and figure out some place we can… Oh crap!”
Blocking the exit was at least a dozen of the infected.
“Good job, A-hole. Now what?” Jayden asked, completely transfixed by the zombies.
“Uh, run!” Tory took off toward the center of the mall, not bothering to see if his friends were behind him. Jayden was about to follow, but Gus held him back.
“Dude, what are you… Aw, man!” Jayden started to ask as he turned around. Gus had taken on a sickly greenish hue and groaned, open-mouthed and drooling. “Not you too!”
He yanked his arm back and took off in the direction where he had seen Tory running. By the time he caught up, he was too late. Like Ed and Gus, Tory was now a part of the throng of mindless monsters wandering around the mall.
“Wait a minute? How did you even get caught?” Jayden wondered out loud. Though dozens of pairs of eyes were focused on him, none of the zombies seemed to want to eat his brains badly enough to move faster than a slow shuffle. “I really am surrounded by idiots,” he said, shaking his head as he began walking casually down a mostly empty corridor.
As he passed random zombies, Jayden noticed that they would add themselves to the growing number shuffling along behind him, but they never did get any closer to catching him. He thought back to Halloween, when Tory made him watch that stupid movie. The first thing Jayden had noticed, and pointed out, was that the zombies couldn’t run and that only idiots who panicked would be caught. Ed had even joked that his grandmother, who got up and walked around Northside every morning, would have smoked the zombies, even with her arthritis.
But that’s exactly what had happened. They saw the zombies and they panicked. Jayden sighed. On one hand, he was sad, upset that his friends were all dead. But on the other, he was angry with them for being idiots. If they had just kept their heads for a minute or two, they would have been walking out of the mall with him, cracking jokes and coming up with a long-term plan for survival. Already, he could see the exit, but something else caught Jayden’s eye and he paused.
/> He was standing outside the music store. In the display window was a guitar. Not just any guitar, but a vintage Rickenbacker. His dream guitar. Jayden eyeballed the growing crowd that straggled behind him and did some quick calculating. With a wide grin, he entered the music store, snatched the guitar from the display, and grabbed a couple of cables before climbing onto a stack of amplifiers. At the zombies’ current speed, he had more than enough time to play a song or two.
Jayden kicked the power switch to the on position and curled his fingers around the neck, relishing the feel of the strings beneath his fingers as he picked out a simple, but haunting tune. He closed his eyes as the melody echoed around him, imagining himself on stage, surrounded by thousands of adoring fans, instead of alone in an empty music store. When the last clear note faded away, Jayden opened his eyes and saw that he was no longer alone. The hoard had caught up to him and stood, mesmerized as they watched him play. Jayden launched into another tune and smiled.
They were digging it.
Jayden couldn’t believe it. The zombies liked his playing. More and more zombies crowded into the store, bobbing their heads and weaving in place, all eyes transfixed on him as he laid down some sweet riffs. Spurred on by the attention and unfettered by bandmates with creative differences, Jayden launched into a song he had been working on for years. A song he had only dreamed about playing on an instrument like the one he now cradled delicately in his hands.
So what if he didn’t have a band? So what if the show in Little Rock was canceled? He was playing to a captive audience. It didn’t matter if it was a sold out stadium or a mall music store in the middle of the apocalypse. It didn’t matter that his adoring fans were undead and unable to show their appreciation with much more than groans and gestures. All that mattered was that Jayden was alive and he was living his dream.
“Thank you, Northside!” he shouted, lifting the Ric high over his head. Sweat poured into his eyes and he felt like a true rock legend. He looked out over the crowd. The crowd that had filled the store and surrounded his makeshift stage atop the stack Marshalls. The crowd that was making a very good attempt to climb the stacks themselves. Jayden realized, belatedly, that the hunger in their eyes was not hunger for more rock and roll, but something a little more substantial.
Slowly, he lowered the guitar, readjusted the strap, and closed his eyes, once again imagining the crowded stadium full of adoring fans.
This is it, he thought as he imagined he could hear the crowd chanting his name, calling out for one more song. This is Jayden Winslow’s final farewell performance. He brought his fingers down on the strings and played like he had never played before, and never would again.
The Best Laid Plans…
Excerpted From the Diary of Rory Violet Clark, Age Sixteen
Ugh! Zombies, seriously? Zombies are the worst! Of all the things to become a reality, we get the dumbest, most useless, disgusting apocalypse ever. Why couldn't we wake up one day and find out that magic was real? Or that super powers were totally possible. I would have been happy to meet a fairy or an angel or an elf or a wizard, or heck, I'd take vampires and werewolves over stinky rotten corpse people any day. I'm completely over it.
The television keeps interrupting my favorite shows to play their stupid warnings: Stay inside, don’t approach the infected, and call the local CDC authority. Duh! Like anyone is just going to walk up to the infected and be like, “Oh hey there, zombie. Does somebody need a hug today?” It’s like they think we all have the mentality of those kids in the old horror movies. Oh look, something dangerous! I should totally go exploring. Nope!
* * *
Forget everything I said yesterday. I am no longer optimistic about humanity’s collective intelligence. Today I saw a group of church missionaries approach a rotting gang of zombies as if they thought the power of prayer was going to save them. I didn’t stop to watch what happened next, but it was on the news earlier tonight and it was as gross as you would imagine. The school is talking about shutting down, which I am behind one hundred percent, but this stupid hippie group keeps protesting, saying that education is the key to survival and the board just keeps voting to keep us going. Easy for them. They aren’t the ones who have to walk almost a mile through a real life video game to get there. Doesn’t anyone notice that the number of teachers and kids showing up gets lower every day? Do they think they’re calling in sick or something? Did no one notice that the zombie chick standing at the bus stop on Main looked a lot like Laurie Daniels, who didn’t show up for school today?
I need a plan.
* * *
I’ve secured a hideout. Operation Rory Lives is in effect. Time to start stocking up on rations. I’m going to stockpile packet food and multi vitamins. The idiots on TV are telling everyone to buy canned goods, like this is a blizzard that will pass in a week. Packet foods last longer, have less salt, and still taste like food. There’s a reason the military and space agencies use them. I shouldn’t be surprised though. People still eat at McDonalds and they aren’t even required to use FDA approved ingredients anymore.
* * *
I can't believe how many kids at school think this is cool. What's cool about death or infection? It's as if they don't process that this is real. You kill a zombie and you're killing something that used to be human. If a zombie kills you, you don't wake up in a save room because this isn't a video game. The other day I actually saw two seniors playing kickball with a zombie head. How disgusting is that?
You know, it’s probably a good thing magic doesn’t exist and we can’t get super powers. We’re not smart enough to use them responsibly. Five minutes after we all got the ability to shoot lightning bolts out of our hands, we’d be blasting each other to charred bits. I’m beginning to think we deserve the zombie apocalypse.
* * *
When did we become so desensitized?
All the old people say it was the internet. I have heard that my whole life and that is total crap socks. I know there’s a bunch of creepy stuff out there, but I grew up on the internet. I learned more from scientific blogs and hacker sites than I've ever learned in school. Besides, ever since the zombie outbreak happened, the internet's been spotty at best. Last night it was down for almost two hours, which really messed with my plans. Literally, my entire survival depends on the internet staying up for a few more days.
* * *
I know we're going to be evacuated soon. Too many people have become infected and the mayor already went missing. Some people think he’s a zombie, but come on, he’s the mayor, a rich white guy. I’ll bet he was evacuated to a bunker somewhere. My crazy uncle in Nebraska has a bunker. He's been trying to get my dad to drag us out there. Have you ever been to Nebraska? I doubt it. No one who isn’t my crazy uncle goes to Nebraska on purpose. I don't even know why he built a bunker. It's not as if he can't see the zombies coming from fifty miles away because, seriously, there is nothing out there! Just a bunch of flat nothingness and crazy guys with guns. Like my uncle. That guy loves his guns.
* * *
I heard my parents talking about it last night and they plan on moving us this weekend. They aren't even going to tell us. Dad's packed the basics in the van and he's just going to round up my brother and I and tell us we're going to Applebee’s. Kind of crappy, don't you think? I don’t even like Applebee’s.
But I'm not going. I've been making my own plans for a lot longer than dad or my crazy uncle, and I’m ready to make my move. I just need the internet to hold out for another night and I'll be ready to go. Now I need to make one more trip to the e-yard.
* * *
My friends always made fun of my cloud paranoia, but screw them. Why trust some faceless corporation to keep my media on their 'secure' server when hard storage is so readily available for the taking? Okay, sure, technically, I'm trespassing, but everyone dumpster dives at the e-yards. Mostly the people I used to run into there were artists looking for vintage stuff, like landline phones and super old computer m
onitors, which is great for me because they pass up all the good stuff that still has a purpose.
The e-yards were set up about five years ago. It was an attempt to bring electronic recycling back to the states because all the junk we thought China was recycling was really just getting dumped in a hole in the desert or something. It worked great until a few months ago when everyone stopped showing up for work out of fear of zombies hiding in the stacks. But even with the gates locked, people just drive up and dump their old stuff over the fence anyway, so there are all these leaning towers of junk all over the place.
It's on one of these towers that I hit pay dirt last night. There weren’t too many other scavengers. I guess not too many people want to risk running into the zombies these days. The only people out last night were Rick, the old hipster guy who was practically peeing himself over a stash of crummy first generation iPhones, and Stella, the weird chick who just picks apart old motherboards to make jewelry. They didn't even look my way as I climbed the newest pile of junk, passing over tablets with cracked screens and outdated laptops. I did swipe a handful of micro SD cards from the bucket full of them. They may not seem like much at just a few gigs, but they're practically indestructible and most of my tablets still have slots.
I was just about to give up hope on this pile when I saw it. A ten-terabyte Western Digital passport, still in the original package, which means it probably even has the original usb connection cable! One less modification that I'll have to make. I slid the plastic box into my backpack and headed back down, sliding for a little bit when I hit a loose patch of Bluetooth peripherals. That’s how dumb people are. They buy something smart, like a hard drive, and then just throw it away because some mega-corporation promises to keep their stuff for free.
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