My Last Testament

by George Milonas

  I was getting tired. I had been tired for years. I never rested. Even on vacation I read and worked out to better myself. At least that’s what I told myself. It wasn’t quite right however. The truth was, I just didn’t have the capacity to rest and relax. I grew bored and mischievous and then I would get mad at myself for wasting time. Hell, I couldn’t even sleep. I wished I could relax and just fall asleep, but I thought it was a complete waste of time. I spent hours laying in bed just planning for the future or going over the past.

  I liked to think of myself as unique, but I wasn’t. Millions of leaders showed this exact same trait. Overconfidence, narcissism, worry, stress, excess, and a quick temper were always the negative signs of someone born to lead. Sometimes these people were actually competent, but frequently that didn’t necessarily follow. There were thousands of politicians and leaders who wouldn’t be normally trusted to dogsit that had actually made it to the pinnacles of power. Fortunately, sometimes the people surrounding these narcissists actually were competent enough to compensate for these so called leaders’ weaknesses. Sometimes. More often than not these leaders messed things up beyond repair. Even in my own profession, there were lots of incompetent docs who continued to practice medicine. We all knew who they were. We avoided them at all costs and never referred patients to them. We whispered about them behind their backs, or we shunned them. The problem was that a significant proportion of these idiots wound up becoming our administrators. I worried about that. I was always prepared to stop them. In the beginning, when I was first building my practice, I refused to go to meetings. I was too busy. Then I realized that I had to go because these fools would wind up doing something stupid, forcing everyone to live up to their own level of incompetence. After a while, I never missed a meeting because it became my duty to stop these guys. I was the go to guy that screamed at them and publicly humiliated them in order to prevent irreparable harm. The people under me loved me- the people over me hated me. I just couldn’t get along and play well with authority, and that was why I never became the leader of it all. I was content to be the leader of my team and scream ‘STOP’ as the world changed for the worse. Now I was in charge of it all, and I was afraid there was someone out there who would do the same thing to me. Karma was a bitch.

  I was introspective because of the boredom. The truth of the matter was that I was becoming tired of everything. I could never be a farmer. I was starting to look forward to the occasional attack to break up the monotony which was not good. The best case scenario was to lie low and pray that the world would take care of itself. Of course, I knew that was never going to happen, but what the Hell. A man could dream, couldn’t he?

  I patrolled. I ate. I trained with everyone in the rain. And I repeated the process ad infinitum. Yawn. I needed a vacation, and it was never going to happen again. I needed to hit the black jack table in Vegas. Too bad the buffets were all staffed by Zeds with the tourists as the main courses.

  For some reason I took a malicious pleasure from making everybody work out in the rain. I had them all start off wearing their rain gear and go through fighting and shooting drills. I had them all do it over and over again until I was satisfied they could do it in their sleep. It took hours until I physically exhausted them. Then I had them do it again in the rain without their protective clothes. You would have thought I was torturing them. I wasn’t. There was an old military adage: ‘The more you bleed in training, the less you bleed in combat.’ I was a firm believer in that. I wanted them miserable and angry. I wanted them to take out their aggressions on their targets. I wanted them to never give up. Most of them were ready to give up despite this. I made them do laps and then come back to training. A little attitude adjustment went a long way. I hoped they would thank me for this eventually. Right now they hated me. Too bad.

  I trudged along in the mud of my yard always on the prowl. I started taking Sam along for walks, forcing him to pick up helpful anti-Zombie tricks on the way around the compound. He took to it immediately. The man had changed irreparably. Looking into the Devil’s eyes has a tendency to make you a little more cautious.

  At first Sam said nothing. He allowed me the chance to do all the teaching. We walked without him talking for hours at a time. When he had time off I found him pounding on the wood targets until he could barely stand. I guess it was cheaper than therapy.

  I simply nodded to him and walked away. He would talk to me when he was good and ready. The next morning he was up before me walking the beat. I let him do it all on his own while I finished up the farm work. When I was finished by 8 am, I relieved him. At least I tried to- he stayed with me.

  He said nothing for hours. Then I stood with him in the rain looking down my long driveway at the Zeds milling around the town. They looked bored for the moment and didn’t have the thought capacity to actively search inside stores and houses for their targets. I knew it was only a matter of time before they realized we were here waiting for them, and then we would be right back at war, fighting for our survival.

  I felt like a villager in The Seven Samurai- except there would be no saviors to fight for us and protect us. We were all on our own behind this strong fence. I felt constant fear because I knew that all it would take was one of them to get in and destroy everything we had. I had already developed a siege mentality. We were all victims of this terrible fate and luckily for the moment I had a group of friends and fellow fighters to help me. I just hated being cooped up in my little fortress waiting for the inevitable. I wanted to get out there and fight and kill them all. But that would be stupid. The road outside led to death, of that I was sure. Our safety depended on us staying quiet and prepared. So we patrolled and we stayed quiet. And we got very wet and depressed and angry at our lots in life. But it could be a lot worse. We could be one of them, or dead. At least we were free here in our cage.

  I looked over at Sam who was fixated on the sight below him. He stayed there unmoving for over ten minutes not saying anything as the rain pelted him and ran down his hoodie. He was mesmerized by the sight and stayed as still as a mannequin.

  “We were trapped in our house for days.” Sam continued to look down the hill as he talked. He was monotone and without emotion. I left him alone to speak without interrupting.

  Sam continued, “I got home from work, had a martini, and pretended to play with the girls as I watched the news out of the corner of my eye. It was always Barbies with the girls, and I couldn’t understand how they could be so into those dolls day in and day out. I was bored out of my mind with that game, but they persisted. I half paid attention which was what I did virtually every night after they finished their homework. Anyway, I was watching the news, and I heard about an outbreak of some virus or another causing what looked like meningitis. I made a joke to my wife that maybe you were infected-maybe that’s why you went nuts. We both laughed at that. We thought we were being clever.” He stared out into space.

  I went into work the next day. We were dead slow. Nobody was looking to buy a house. I guess that wasn’t too unusual because of the economy but still, we didn’t get a single call.”

  “Anyway, as I was driving home, I saw two guys set upon another and beat the shit out of him. I didn’t stop. I just called the police. I didn’t want to get hurt. I kept going. Then when I was two blocks from my house, I saw it happen again. This time it was four or five of them against two young ladies. I called the police and pulled over and honked my horn. They ignored me. I watched not knowing what to do. The cops came, and I drove away when I saw blood. It was gushing out. I had no idea from whom. At that point I was scared, and I didn’t want to know anything more. I just wanted to lock my doors and hug my kids. It was terrible how impotent I felt- but not as bad as I was going to feel later.”

  He continued, “I barricaded the doors and pulled the shades down. I heard screams the entire night. We were scared shitless. We drew the blinds and turned off all the lights and hoped and prayed the crazies would pass us by. I was unarmed.
I grabbed a couple of butcher’s knives and a rolling pin and kept them close.” He shook his head as he looked out into the ether. “What the Hell was I supposed to do? I was their husband and father, and I had no way to protect them. I did what I could as my wife cried. I comforted her the best I could, but...”

  I looked at him. His face was wet but I could tell it wasn’t just because of the rain. I looked back downhill and said nothing.

  “I stayed in front of the TV for the next five days. I barely wanted to go to the bathroom in case, you know, something happened. My knife never left my hand. I was getting blisters from it. I didn’t sleep. I barely ate. I just stared at the TV. My kids stayed far away from me.”

  He gulped, “Every so often I heard growls from outside as people ran by. I heard them being chased by what I thought were rioters. I was afraid they were going to burn my house down or hurt my...” He stopped talking abruptly. Every parent had the same fear. We spent our entire lives telling our kids there are no monsters. Now there was proof that there were.

  Sam started talking again. “I thought they were monsters because they were hurting the innocent. I didn’t realize that the monsters were real until I finally saw some on TV. Then I realized that you were right. They were coming for us.

  “I kept waiting for help to come. Where was the Military? Where were the police? They were nowhere. I guess they were doing what we were doing- staying home and protecting their families. I couldn’t blame them, but I still hated their guts. I wanted somebody to save us, dammit.” He said it without raising his voice. He was spent.

  “I was getting tired and irritable. I was getting angry with my family if they made a peep. While watching the news, the cable went out. This freaked me out more than anything. How the fuck could the cable go out? Never mind the fact that it went out every month since I got it. It was a sign of the Apocalypse. I flipped out quietly. I wanted to scream and shout, but that might attract the monsters. And I knew what would happen. We would be helpless.” He stopped and looked at his feet.

  I said nothing. He was reliving everything in his mind. He was on the edge of a breakdown he already suffered, and I knew he was doing everything in his power to keep himself from slipping back down into the rabbit hole.

  Sam looked out and began again. “I went down into the basement and looked around frantically for my old electronics. I found an old TV that could still get over the air TV. I hadn’t manipulated the old rabbit ears in at least two decades. My kids were fascinated, having never seen them before. I was horrified. Finally I managed to get a single local channel that was still broadcasting, but I could get no sound. All I saw were repeated pictures flashing by of things happening on the street. I listened to an old radio that I found too. I had a country/western station and a news station in Chicago. It kept talking about race riots and fires and killings on the streets that the police couldn’t stop. From the way they were talking, it was the big one that everyone was expecting. The country was collapsing. I don’t know. I wasn’t there, and I think none of them were there either. People kept calling in with rumors and innuendo about explosions and gangbangers riding around shooting anyone who was out. But nobody witnessed that- it was always a friend of a friend who heard about it from someone else. I knew this, but still my stress level kept going up. I heard them wandering around outside and knew that all Hell was breaking out around me.”

  He rubbed his brow to get some of the water off of it. It didn’t help. The rain soaked him instantly again. Finally he gave up and just kept talking. “After two days of this, I started to hear more and more about Zombies. I started to laugh at this delusion. I laughed at you again. And then I stopped laughing. In the middle of the night, I moved to the upstairs bedroom and looked outside with all the lights out in my house.”

  He began to shake as he stared out into the distance. There was no question in my mind that he had post-traumatic stress. He was mentally unprepared for all this. He knew there were bad people in this world, but he deliberately lived well away from them. His house was situated in a rural town in the middle of farm country Wisconsin. A murder a year in this county was the norm, and it typically involved a woman, drinking, and a bar. This was way beyond what he expected. Even for me being raised on the south side of Chicago and performing trauma surgeries, this level of violence was way beyond anything imaginable. This was war waged on a medieval stage.

  “What I saw scared the shit out of me worse than if there were gang bangers throwing Molotov cocktails.” His voice cracked. “I saw one of those things eating a...” He stopped. He couldn’t continue.

  After a few minutes he said, “They were eating people. There were actually people eating other people. I wanted to look away. I couldn’t do it. I kept looking at this scene until I saw movement further out. Then I saw someone else doing it. I stood there and watched and saw dozens of these people milling about. And when I saw somebody new enter the area, these things pounced. They didn’t move quickly, but they all moved together and grabbed and tore apart every normal person around them.”

  I saw it in his wide staring eyes that he was reliving every bite, every kill, and every ounce of his incapacity. He was judging himself a complete failure, and technically he was right. He was absolutely incapable of fighting back and saving those people. But so was everyone else. Without my prep time, all of my family would have been killed too. I was just lucky.

  Sam continued, “Across the street I saw a light pop on in a house. Like moths to a flame, these things all made their way over there. They looked inside and saw something. I don’t know what. They pounded on the doors on the windows and on each other until the front door smashed open. I heard screams as they moved inside. I think I saw a blood spray. I don’t know. I could be imagining it. But I do know the screams stopped suddenly. I knew my neighbor John and his family were dead. I watched it from the beginning to the end. And then these things left the house covered in...”, again, a pause that led to nothing.

  “Right then and there, I realized that everything you said was right. You knew, and we thought you were crazy. We treated you like you needed to be in a mental hospital. We were the ones that were crazy. We were in denial because it was just such a stupid idea. I guess it wasn’t.”

  “I went back downstairs to think. I went to the TV and to the radio. They kept repeating the same thing over and over again. They didn’t have any more idea about what was happening than I did. I didn’t turn it off though. I needed to listen to it to feel like I wasn’t trapped. But...I was really trapped wasn’t I? I was a helpless prisoner in my own house waiting for someone to save us. Our savior never came.”

  He shook his head in disgust at himself. “Two days later the electricity went off. That meant no more TV and no more radio. My cell phone died before this crisis. I had no communication. My wife freaked out. All our food was going to spoil and the stove was electric. I told her we could start a fire in the fireplace to cook. She cried out of control. I hugged her and prayed those things wouldn’t hear us. I was literally prepared to choke her into unconsciousness to shut her up. God help me, I was ready to commit violence against my wife.” I heard his cries. I stopped being able to see his tears long ago because of the rain, but his anguished cries started and went on for minutes as he stared out into space.

  After he got himself back under control, “Luckily, she stopped and I didn’t have to...” I saw him gulp. We both knew what men were capable of in times of extreme stress. Thank God he didn’t need to hurt her.

  He continued, “For the first time, I realized we couldn’t stay here. No matter what, we had to leave. It just wasn’t safe. Eventually those things would come in and get us, or we would starve. We had to get out.”

  “We started to pack at 3 am. We were up, and I didn’t think I had a moment to spare. A week of this, and I didn’t have the time.” He shook his head at his own stupidity. I understood completely.

  Sam started talking faster. “We packed up every bit of food we
had. If it spoils, we left it behind. I also filled up several old milk gallons in the trash with water to be sure we had something to drink. I grabbed all the money in the house. Counting all the old coin collections, I had about $400 in my car. We were going to be lucky if it lasted a week. We got our clothes, and then the kids and put them in the car. They were the last to go in, because we didn’t want them to see us freaking.” He shrugged.

  “Anyway, I had a great plan. I would simultaneously open the garage and start the car and floor it out of there. I looked at my wife and smiled. We were home free-literally. I started the car, and then the garage wouldn’t open. I must have hit the button a dozen times- nothing. I was getting panicky. My wife figured it out. She screamed, ‘the power is out!’” He shook his head. “I yelled out ‘SHIT!’ at the top of my lungs waking up my kids. It was exactly what I didn’t want.”

  Sam said, “I got out of the car knowing exactly what I had to do. I had to open the damn door manually. I pulled the door release and then I moved to the garage door. I yanked it up as fast as I could and saw a dozen of those monsters standing there. We both froze in the headlights of my car. I saw one of those things move and growl at me. I moved instinctively with all the adrenaline I could muster. I stabbed down on a dead woman as hard as I could and buried the butcher’s knife into the top of her head all the way down to the hilt. She went down with me still holding the knife handle. It wouldn’t come out! It was stuck solid. I tried to yank it out repeatedly, stupidly, and then I let go and turned and ran.

  “On the way to the car which was no more than five feet away, I saw a bat and grabbed it, swinging it backward at the Zombies. I didn’t hit a single one.

  “I got into the car and heard the screams from my family. We locked the doors, and I floored the accelerator. I must have run over four of them. My car was a beast.” Sam said it proudly.