by Bryan Smith
I decide to call Crazy Sue. I know what you’re thinking. Big mistake to get drawn into a conversation with a girl right after breaking up with her. It’s gonna be one endless guilt trip, right? But I figure if Crazy Sue is determined to talk to me, there’s no getting around it. She’ll damn well talk to me whether I want it or not.
And the longer I make her wait, the more pissed off she’s gonna be. Also, the chances of her finally shifting into homicidal mode are likely increasing expo-fucking-nentially with every passing second, so it’s best if I rip off the proverbial fucking Band-Aid and get on with it.
So, I grab my phone and make the call.
She answers on the first ring, her tone frosty as she says, “I have George.”
My breath catches in my throat at the sound of my hamster’s name. I can’t believe I’d forgotten about leaving George the Magnificent at Crazy Sue’s place. The poor little guy slipped my mind. Between breaking up with the craziest girl on the planet and the subsequent total annihilation of my brain cells via an apocalyptic level of boozing, these sorts of lapses are maybe kind of understandable.
Understandable, but not even a little okay.
I jump out of bed and start pacing about the room, shaking as sweat breaks out on my brow. “Now, listen, Sue. Don’t do anything rash.”
Ignoring this, she goes on in that same icy tone: “Be here in thirty minutes. Or George gets squashed.”
The line goes dead. The silence is fucking ominous. It’s like suddenly hearing the buzz of a plane engine after hours of quiet on a bloody fucking battlefield. Only minus any fucking sound at all because this is fucking silence we’re talking about here. I feel like some sadistic lunatic has his hands in my belly and is giving my guts a slow, excruciating twist. Diarrhea keeps fizzing out of my fucking butthole. I want to cry. This really isn’t one of my prouder moments overall.
I stare at the phone for maybe ten seconds.
Then I grab my wallet and keys and start to run out of there. Halfway down the hallway, I feel a wetness in my underwear and veer off toward the bathroom where I drop a splattery brown toilet-bomb my twat-gobbling mother can clean up later.
PART II
THE FUCKING ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE
THE FUCKING ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE IS happening all around me as I rush out the front door of my mom’s dilapidated old row house on the south side of town. I remain almost completely oblivious to this for longer than you’d probably fucking figure.
Now, look, it’s not because I’m some kind of fucking idiot. A lot of it has to do with being worried sick about George the Magnificent. The thought of my little rodent buddy being squashed beneath one of Crazy Sue’s platform stripper shoes has given me a pretty severe case of tunnel vision. Sue does not make empty threats. If I don’t get to her place within the mandated time frame, George will be a furry little red smear on her kitchen floor. And knowing her, she’ll probably film his flattening and make me watch it at fucking gunpoint because that’s the kind of gal she is.
So, getting the fuck across town and saving George is kind of all I can think about. Also, you have to understand the local environment. As I run out of the house, there’s a lot of general fucking chaos going on outside. People are shouting. Horns are blaring. I even hear a screech of tires followed by a crunch of impact as a vehicle somewhere out there collides with another one. And then there are the multiple loud pops that can only be fucking gunfire.
Having lived in the bad part of town most of my life, none of what I’m hearing strikes me as unusual. Blood is shed somewhere out in these mean streets on a daily fucking basis.
Mom even warns me about the zombies one more time before I yank open the front door. “They’re eating people, Phil!”
I don’t bother replying. Mom is drunk as a fucking skunk and spouting delusional bullshit. Nothing new there. Turns out the joke is on me, though, because, for once, what sounds like Mom’s usual wet-brained crap is nothing less than the stone-cold motherfucking truth.
But, like I said, it takes me a while to figure that out.
A chain-link fence surrounds the little patch of overgrown and trash-strewn lawn out front. Mom’s place will never be featured in motherfucking Home and Garden magazine, I’ll tell you that much right now. My puke-wagon on wheels, aka the shitty old Neon, sits parked at the curb.
At the curb is a bit of an exaggeration, actually. The car’s wheels are not exactly aligned flush with the fucking sidewalk. One of them, in fact, is sort of up on the sidewalk itself.
I cringe at the sight of this, cursing myself for the stupidity of driving home completely fucking obliterated. I could’ve really hurt someone, I guess, or, worse, totaled my fucking ride. But right then I don’t care that much. All that matters is the rolling junk-wagon is right there instead of in some bar parking lot. I have transportation, the means to get to where I need to be in order to avert rodent tragedy.
I’m fumbling with my keys as I run, trying to locate the one for the Phil-mobile when I encounter the first of many annoying obstacles. The fence’s gate is closed. I hit it at full speed, stagger backward and lose my footing, falling on my fucking ass. Sure, laugh. Be a fucking asshole. I admit, it’s not my most graceful moment. It’s that tunnel vision fucking with me, making me oblivious even to the closed gate right in front of me.
Anyway, falling on my ass like that hurts like a motherfucker, but it kind of helps too because it sends a jolt of adrenaline racing through me. There’s still a significant level of alcohol in my system and it’s doing a number on me, but things get a little bit clearer right then. I bounce right back up, grab the keys I dropped, and get moving again.
Out on the sidewalk, a dirty, drunken bum stumbles into me. He stinks like a sewer. Like a terminally backed-up sewer in some rotting post-apocalypse city. Like his guts are decaying inside of him and the stench is wafting out of him in endless, swoon-inducing waves. The wind from the deepest, darkest bowels of hell must stink like this. Included in this toxic stew is a strong reek of piss. It’s that cheap hooch all the fucking homeless drink. It oozes out of their fucking pores. Thunderbird sweat. There’s also that noxious fucking odor of human flesh that hasn’t been washed in fucking months.
I’m talking about a rank human being, okay?
This isn’t a total surprise. You enter the world outside Mom’s house, this sort of thing is gonna happen now and then. Just how it is on the fucking south side.
Yeah, I’m sure I don’t sound too compassionate to you right about now. You keep forgetting my goddamn hamster. I don’t have time for bullshit like basic human compassion. Fuck that shit. Get out of my way, you stinky asshole, that’s what fucking time it is. I’ve got a life to save.
So, anyway, I give the bum a hard shove and send him reeling away from me. Of course, he collapses in a heap of festering filth and rotting clothes on the sidewalk. I scarcely glance at him as I go around to the driver’s side door of my car. I jab the key at the lock and miss. The keys drop from my hands, which are shaking. I’m a little fucking wired by now, you understand. Like I’m on the verge of a total fucking freakout or meltdown and I don’t even know about the goddamn zombies yet.
Doesn’t bode well, does it?
I scream in frustration.
I kneel and scoop up the keys.
I stand the fuck back up.
And there the goddamn bum is again. I flinch in surprise because he’s only a few feet away, right there on the street now rather than flopping around on the sidewalk, which, by all rights, is exactly where the motherfucker should be. The guy should be down for the count but, somehow, isn’t.
His eyes have the expected glazed look and his mouth is hanging open, a steady moan issuing from it. I figure he’s too fucking drunk to manage anything coherent. He has a thick, unkempt beard. At a distance, he’d be virtually indistinguishable from your average thrift store-shopping hipster douchebag. Lodged within the dense thicket of this bushy monstrosity are bits of partly chewed-up food. The guy prob
ably burped it up while passed out in some fucking alley.
Standard bum shit.
I don’t think too much of it even then, except that he’s grossing me out. Which, yeah, is kind of rich coming from a guy with wet, diarrhea-stained underwear, but what-the-fuck-ever, man.
The front of his ratty, olive-green army jacket is hanging open. Beneath it is the usual multiple layers of thrift store reject duds. The top layer is a white sweatshirt covered in what I instantly recognize as a whole fuck of a lot of fresh blood. Belatedly, I realize there’s more of it in his bird’s nest of a beard. Chalking this up to some form of typical bum mishap, I’m not as alarmed by the blood as you might think.
I’ve got a firm grip on the Neon’s key now. I tell the bum, “Get the fuck away from me, you filthy fucking hobo. I’ve got important hamster business on the other side of town.”
The bum moans some more and raises a hand, reaching for me.
I knock it away and say, “Dude, seriously. This is your last warning. Keep fucking with me and I’m gonna fuck you up.”
Though I’ve still kind of got that tunnel-vision thing going on as I deal with the bum, a bit more peripheral awareness of the increasing chaos happening all around me finally begins to fucking penetrate. There’s a lot of screaming. The sound of horns blaring is getting louder all the time. There are more gunshots now. A lot more.
And then some people go running by on the sidewalk as I stand there. One of them—a pudgy, balding dude—races into my field of vision, stops in his tracks, and spins about nimbly, like the world’s fattest ballerina. Or whatever the fuck you call a guy ballet dancer. Fuck it. You know what I mean. He’s graceful. It’s fucking weird.
He raises a gun and fires at something I can’t see yet. Okay, this gets my attention. Gunplay going on right next to me? Even I can’t ignore this. My head snaps sharply to the left, instinct making me look for his target.
I see her right away. Wearing only lacy black panties and a matching bra, she’s a shapely young thing, with dyed-black hair and skin like a ghost, so pale she’s almost fucking see-through, you know what I’m saying?
So, anyway, like the bum, she’s got smears of blood all over her. A hole in her flat belly gushes more red stuff. The fat man’s bullet went in that way. I’m still a bit slow on the motherfucking uptake at that point, but even I can figure that out. So, this hot gothy chick is moaning and moving around all herky-jerky-like, like a goddamn spaz, but she’s still on her feet and moving, even with that bullet in her.
I’m impressed. A bullet in the gut? I’d be on the ground, blubbering and crying out for my cunt of a mother. But this gal keeps on trucking, even if she’s a bit wobbly. She’s fucking tough. It’s kind of sexy, in a weird way.
Hey, don’t judge me.
The fat man fires his gun a couple more times. Another hole opens up in the gal’s flesh, the bullet punching a hole through the space right between her tits. More blood spills in a line down her belly. A chest wound on top of being gut-shot? Chick should be stone dead on the fucking sidewalk, but she’s still upright and her arms are outstretched in obvious eagerness to get to the fat man.
The fat man does not dig this one little bit. Looks to me like he thinks it’s a load of frustrating fucking bullshit. I kind of can’t blame him. The bitch has a bunch of bullets in her and just won’t fucking die. The dude squeals in frank terror and squeezes the trigger of his gun several more times, screaming, “Die, bitch, die!”
He doesn’t stop until the hammer clicks on an empty chamber. The girl’s still coming. She’s, like, impervious to death or some shit. It’s then that I remember what Mom said about zombies.
I look at the bum.
He’s reaching for me. Grime-encrusted fingernails claw at my T-shirt. My freakout-o-meter suddenly pings into the fucking red zone. The bum’s mouth is hanging open. The close-up view gives me a glance at what looks suspiciously like bits of partially chewed-up human flesh wedged between rotting teeth.
Uh-oh.
Shit is getting real as a motherfucker. It’s all starting to hit home. I’m panicking, man. So, I knock the bum’s hand away and punch him hard as I can dead-center in the fucking face. There’s a crunch. It’s loud. I’ve broken his fucking nose. There’s a big burst of blood. A bunch of it gets on my hand. The hobo totters backward a few steps before falling over on his ass.
Okay, so, like, he’s got his hand held out to break his fall, right? Only things don’t work out quite the intended way for the undead motherfucker. The impact with the street snaps his forearm. A bone fragment tears through his fucking skin. And then he’s got something else in common with the goth chick because the damage to his body doesn’t seem to bother him much.
Because he’s a zombie, I think. Holy shit.
Any other day this fact would immediately seize and occupy the whole of my attention. But just then an image of my hamster quivering beneath Crazy Sue’s platform heel pops into my head again and things are right back in fucking focus. I love that magnificent bastard of a rodent and only I can come to his rescue. Yeah, okay, the world is falling apart around me, but that’s not something I can do anything about. But George is another matter. Maybe I can save him.
The bum zombie starts trying to get up again, but the broken arm makes it an awkward process. Twice he tries bracing the hand of his bad arm on the pavement to push himself up. You may not be shocked to hear this only makes things worse for the braindead fuck. The second time he does this there’s a louder snap and then half his fucking arm is hanging on by a thread of gristle.
He groans and reaches out for me with the other arm, the still intact one. Recognizing this as potentially very bad news for me, I kick him in the fucking face, snapping his head back so hard it breaks his neck. The sound this makes causes my stomach to knot up a little. I’m still suffering from severe hangover symptoms and this shit is not helping, man, not one fucking bit. But fuck it, I’ve got shit to do, so I shake the feeling off, get in my car, and drive the fuck away from there.
The road ahead is mostly clear for the next few blocks, except for a stalled Chrysler sedan. This is a big boat-sized ride from the funky 1970s. There’s even a pair of fuzzy dice hanging from the crooked rearview mirror. The car’s bashed-in front end tells an obvious fucking story, one about a head-on collision, but there’s no sign of the other vehicle. Smoke is leaking out from the crumpled hood. There’s glass all over the goddamn road. And, oh yeah, there’s an old dude’s bloody torso sticking out through the windshield.
This sucks for the old dude, but it’s not my fucking problem. Besides, I’m pretty sure he’s dead already and so there’s fuck-all I can do for him. So, I put the pedal to the fucking metal and go around the big Chrysler.
Pretty soon I get to an intersection. This is where things really start to get hairy. A right turn here keeps me moving along on the quickest route to my psycho ex-girlfriend’s place. So, barely slowing down, I crank the wheel hard to the fucking right, taking a turn so razor-sharp it barely qualifies as a proper turn at all. The Neon goes up over the curb at the corner, the side of the car scraping against a stop sign.
I’m bouncing up and down in my seat as the tires go up and over the curb and then back down into the street. This is because, not exactly being in a safety-first frame of mind, I haven’t strapped on the seatbelt. One time I bounce up so high the top of my head hits the fucking roof. Fucking ouch. And then there’s a squealing of tires on asphalt as I hit the brakes and skid to a stop.
I sit there and stare a moment.
Motherfucker.
Wexler Avenue is clogged with stalled cars.
But that’s not all.
A motherfucking airplane has crashed into the street a few blocks up. Not a jumbo jet, mind you. This is something smaller, one of those classic rock band-killing planes. Still, it’s plenty big enough to stop all traffic going in this direction and ignite a shit-ton of collateral damage, including multiple multi-car pileups. Of course, a lot of it
’s the fault of, you fucking guessed it, overreacting motorists.
A lot of dumb motherfuckers are standing in the street and arguing with each other. Maybe they’re threatening lawsuits or exchanging insurance information. The fuck if I know. Nor do I give a goddamn because, while they’re occupied with this trivial bullshit, other motherfuckers who are clearly reanimated dead are staggering around and taking bites out of other random motherfuckers.
Also, hey, look at this, a fucking fire is raging in the distance, somewhere out there beyond the mangled metal carcass of the crashed plane. And this thing is big. It’s got conflagration written all over it. The goddamn city might burn to the ground. And yet these yahoos just gotta be sure they’ve got all their legal angles and liabilities and what-the-fuck-ever squared the fuck away.
I want to kill them all. Like, seriously. Because there’s no way I’m getting anywhere anytime soon going this way.
“Fuck this,” I say, reaching for the gearshift.
I’ve put the Neon in reverse when something slams into the back of the fucking thing. The impact is hard enough to launch me out of my seat and slam my chest against the steering wheel. The top of my head smacks the windshield. Goddamn. This hurts. A lot. Blood is trickling from a cut on my head as I fall back into the seat. I kind of feel like crying.
But, again, no fucking time for that. George is still out there and needs my help. I’ve got to get moving again. Before I can do anything about that, someone starts banging on my window. There’s some muffled yelling, too. Someone’s pretty pissed at me, from the sound of it. Well, I’m not in the best mood either, motherfucker, so stand back and get ready to have your ass kicked up and down the fucking street.
This attitude lasts until I turn my aching head to the left and see a giant looming out there. An ugly giant, at that. Tall as a fucking skyscraper, he looks like he’s spent the last few years injecting every steroid on the fucking planet. I don’t mean every type of steroid available on the market. I fucking mean he took all of the shit. All the steroids. There’s no more for anybody else. The professional athletes of the world are shit out of luck.