The Fucking Zombie Apocalypse

by Bryan Smith

  And I still haven’t gone into the ugly part. Dude has a bald head the size of a beach ball and a face like a squashed-in pumpkin. He looks sort of like the Incredible Hulk, only with a gross-ass spray tan instead of green skin. Okay, so I sort of lied when I said I didn’t know shit about superheroes.

  As I sit there gawping at him with blood running down my face, he gestures at me, waving his hand around like he wants me to get out of the Phil-mobile so he can better let me know what’s on his mind. I’m pretty sure I already know what that is and I’ve got pretty much zero fucking interest in doing what he wants.

  He hits the glass again. I can tell it’s gonna shatter soon, but I still don’t move. I’m thinking I should get the passenger side door open and make a fucking run for it because otherwise this monster masquerading as a man is gonna twist me up like a pretzel. I picture him tearing off my arms and slapping the bejesus out of me with them.

  For starters.

  I’m about to start scooting across the seat when the situation outside my window suddenly changes. The guy screams, but this time not out of rage. He’s in pain. Serious fucking pain. Some kid, some crazed-looking little girl, has popped up out of nowhere and latched onto one of his arms. She sinks her teeth into the meat of the forearm, gives her head a twist, and tears loose a chunk of flesh.

  He screams again and staggers away. The girl is still clinging to his arm as blood pours out of the wound. The musclebound freak is waving his arm around and flinging the demonic munchkin about like a fucking ragdoll, but he can’t shake her loose. This is fucking amazing. I’m kind of hypnotized by it for a moment. The zombie girl is fucking this big dude up.

  I kind of want to laugh.

  Serves you right, fucker.

  The guy keeps staggering around as the zombie kid tears another chunk out of his arm. This continues until his feet get tangled up in something in the street and he topples over backward, landing hard on his backside. Given the size of the man, I’m shocked this doesn’t trigger a fucking earthquake.

  I take a quick look around. A white van is behind me. From the looks of it, the van’s front end and the Phil-mobile’s rear end have had an intimate encounter of the violent kind. They are kind of smashed together. This doesn’t look too promising. So when I hit the gas and my car can’t pull loose from the van, it isn’t too much of a fucking shock.

  Meanwhile, the overall situation on Wexler Avenue is deteriorating at an alarming rate. There’s a lot less of that oblivious shit going on. Everywhere I look, douche-lords who were arguing with each other minutes ago are now eating each other. I see people running around in all directions, looking like a bunch of dumb chickens with their fucking heads cut off. There are bodies scattered across the street now. Dead fuckers with blood-smeared faces are digging in the guts of some of them.

  I’ve got no real desire to head out into this madness, but I’ve got no choice. The Neon isn’t going anywhere. Also, the goddamn thing isn’t exactly an ideal shelter for riding out the zombie apocalypse. The undead are multiplying fast. If I stay in the car, they’ll swarm over it and drag me out. I’ve got to get moving again, but it’s gonna have to be on foot.

  Goddammit.

  So, I open the door and ease myself out. I have to do it gingerly because I’m still in pain from the collision and, guess what, I’ve gotta piss pretty fucking bad. In fact, my bladder is again almost at that ready-to-fucking-explode stage of things. This kind of crept up on me while the world around me was going to shit.

  I feel the urgent need of it with each fucking step I take away from the Neon. I’m whimpering and holding my legs together as I shuffle into the middle of the street. It’s not too dignified, but then neither is what I do next.

  There’s a lot of fucked up shit happening all around me and it’s getting worse all the time. People are dying everywhere I look. Screams are filling the fucking air. The streets are running with blood. It’s like I’ve entered some inner circle of hell. But this bladder situation is gonna spell my fucking doom if I don’t do something about it soon, preferably right the fuck away. Obviously, I don’t have time to look for a motherfucking bathroom, so what I do is, I unzip my pants, take out my wang, and take a leak right there in the middle of the street.

  Picture it.

  Panicked motherfuckers zipping by me in every direction. Up and down the street. Across the street. Right in front of me. Some are wandering around in a daze, but most are running like the hounds of hell are on their asses. Most of these people are too completely fucking terrified to take note of this insane thing I’m doing.

  But there’s this one dude. He comes running down the street from the direction of the plane crash. He’s weaving in and out around and between the zombies and leaping over the bodies on the ground. This is a kind of young guy in a business suit. He’s in this flat-out run, his red tie fluttering in the wind over his shoulder. The speed he’s managing is pretty fucking impressive. Probably one of those motherfuckers who runs marathons.

  As I continue to drain my bladder, I think about how being fit like that is probably gonna be a huge advantage for this guy in the zombie apocalypse. I’m kind of envious and even a little self-conscious. I try to remember the last time I did exercise of any kind.

  It’s, uh, been a while.

  Anyway, this guy gets closer and is about to go zooming by me, but then his eyes kind of flick my way and he happens to notice what I’m doing. This look of disgust crosses his face, like he can’t believe this outrageous thing I’m doing, even with all the other completely fucked up shit going on all around us.

  I swear I see real outrage in this motherfucker’s eyes. It hits me that he’s sort of looking at me the way I looked at the zombie bum outside my fucking mother’s house. With contempt. And, hey, I guess I am doing something pretty bum-like, but these aren’t exactly ordinary circumstances, you know?

  I’m about to yell something defiantly crude at him when the distracted bastard runs headlong into a shambling zombie. The zombie grabs onto him and takes a big bite out of his neck. The fitness-minded indignant citizen screams like a banshee as a fucking geyser of blood jumps out of the big hole where part of his neck was a second ago.

  So, one way of looking at it, I sort of murdered a guy with my dick.

  But, whatever, he was an asshole, so fuck him.

  By then some of the undead types are starting to head my way. In fact, you could kind of say they are motherfucking converging on me.

  From every direction.

  Luckily for me, these aren’t those fast zombies like you see in some of the newer movies. They’re not banding together and scaling walls in the blink of a fucking eye or anything like that. I think I can probably thread my way through this shambling mob if I just get moving. My bladder isn’t thoroughly drained, but I’m feeling a lot better. Good enough.

  So, I tuck my dick away and start running. I do a shuck-and-jive thing like an NFL receiver to get by one of the nearer ones and then I’m out in the open again. Relatively speaking, of course. There’s still a shit-ton of imminent fucking danger all around, but I’m no longer the focus of semi-organized flesh-eating bastards. That’s something, at least.

  As I run down the street, I remember the phone in my pocket. I dig it out and pull up Crazy Sue’s number, hit the call button. There’s no way I’m getting to her place inside the time limit. She lives several miles from where I stand. Under optimal conditions, it’d take me a while to get there on foot. In the midst of all this swirling carnage and chaos, it’ll probably take hours. Commandeering another car isn’t a viable option, either. I wouldn’t be able to steer it through the congestion. Maybe it’ll be different once I get on the other side of that crashed plane, but I’ve got no real confidence on that count.

  George is doomed. Not for the first time that morning, I kind of want to cry.

  I don’t really expect the call to go through, figuring the system is overloaded with all the panicked people trying to call relatives or em
ergency services. And at first it seems like I’ll be right about that. There’s nothing but silence coming from the phone for a space of seconds. When it does start to ring, I figure I’ll get an “all circuits are busy” taped message.

  But I’m wrong.

  Sue picks up and goes, “Phil! Where are you? You sound out of breath.”

  “I’m on Wexler Avenue,” I say, dodging a zombie cop as I hop up onto the sidewalk to circumvent one of those multi-car pileups. “And I’m sort of running for my fucking life.” I pause a moment to suck in some air. “Look, some crazy shit is happening in the city. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. There’s no way I’m getting to your place in time, but I’m on my way, I fucking swear. Please don’t hurt George.”

  “I know all about it. It’s all over the news. I won’t hurt George, I promise. I just want you to get here, baby. I’m scared.”

  This almost causes me to take a spill as I veer back into the street, it’s so surprising. She sounds not only scared but actually concerned for my safety. In fact, she kind of sounds normal and not crazy at all.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” she says, voice choked with emotion. “I’m so sorry.”

  And it’s crazy, I know, but in that moment all the unpleasantness and weirdness that passed between us is sort of swept away. Maybe this crisis is exactly what Sue needed to get grounded again, to come back down to the real world with the rest of us.

  “It’s okay,” I tell her, figuring she’s apologizing for threatening my hamster. “I knew you wouldn’t really hurt George.”

  I knew no such thing, but I wasn’t about to say that.

  “That’s not what I’m apologizing for.”

  I frown. “Uh . . . really? What, then?”

  She sighs. “The zombie apocalypse. I knew it was coming. I should’ve warned you. We could’ve gone off somewhere to ride it out together.”

  I almost laugh. “Come on, you couldn’t have known about this in advance.”

  Except then I remember the rain of frogs incident.

  Hmm.

  “But I did.” Her voice is soft, full of what sounds like genuine regret. “I did and I didn’t tell you. I’m so fucking sorry.”

  Again, I almost make the mistake of laughing off this obvious delusion. Probable delusion. But I know that’ll only piss her off and I don’t want to risk losing this rarely encountered semi-rational version of Sue. At least not until I’ve safely recovered my fucking hamster.

  “Okay. So . . . how did you know?”

  “Satan told me.”

  Okay, so maybe semi-rational isn’t exactly the right word to describe Sue’s current state of mind. Neither of us says anything for several seconds. This is partly because I’m still kind of occupied with the whole dodging zombies and trying not to get bitten thing, but it’s also because I don’t know what to say to this Satan business.

  So, then she says, “You don’t believe me.”

  Statement of fact, not a question.

  Yet another multi-car pileup is dead ahead. This time the wreckage is spread from one side of the street to the other and there’s no way to go around it. So, I climb up on the trunk of a black Mercedes and start to crawl over it. The trunk lid is warped wreckage and I struggle to keep my balance as I keep the phone to my ear and inch forward. There’s a scattering of shattered safety glass on the trunk. My grasping hand closes on some of the fragments a few times, nicking the flesh. Blood dribbles out. I wonder if the fucking zombies can smell it.

  There’s a heavy-duty Ford pickup truck wedged up against the other side of the Mercedes. Inside the truck bed is a dead guy. Like, totally dead, not zombie dead. It’s a tubby dude in a plaid shirt and jeans. He’s got a bashed-in skull. I see globs of what I’m pretty sure are brains. My stomach does that knotting up thing again.

  “So,” I say to Sue as I climb into the truck bed. “You had a talk with Satan and he told you the dead were gonna rise.”

  “That’s right.” She still sounds subdued compared to her normal self, but there’s an edge in her voice now. It’s a tone I’ve heard many times before. Usually it means shit will be hitting the goddamn fan if I don’t watch what I say. “I talk to Satan all the time. We’re friends.”

  There’s a baseball bat in the truck bed. An aluminum one. The fat end of it is smeared with blood and brains. That this was the instrument of the plaid shirt-wearing hick motherfucker’s demise is obvious even to me. What’s not so obvious is why the bat was left behind. Why, in the middle of the goddamn zombie apocalypse, would anyone ditch a perfectly good weapon? Unless, of course, that someone found another, even better weapon. It’s the only logical answer. Not that it matters. The bat is mine now, goddammit.

  I pick it up by the handle and crouch down in the truck bed a moment, hiding from the zombies and whispering as I try to wrap up this conversation with my crazy ex. I need to be done with it so I can focus on the fight ahead of me.

  “Friends, huh? So, what, do you get together for coffee once a week to catch up and chat? Or is this more like a voice you hear in your head?”

  There’s a long pause.

  I hear the moans of the dead things as they shuffle about in the street. I also hear the wet, smacking sounds of their feeding. The thing I’m not hearing as much of anymore is the screaming. This is pretty goddamn disturbing. It tells me the zombies are winning. Another thing, all those moaning sounds . . . they’re getting louder.

  And closer.

  Fuck.

  “I’m not stupid,” Sue says.

  “I know you’re not stupid,” I tell her. “In fact, you’re one of the smartest people I know.”

  This isn’t some fucking lie I’m telling her to keep her calm. It’s the truth. Sue is very smart. Thing is, sanity isn’t exactly a requirement for intelligence.

  “You and your friends call me ‘Crazy Sue’. You think I don’t know that?”

  There’s nothing I can say to that. She does know it. And she knows I’ve called her Crazy Sue now and then myself. Okay, maybe more than just now and then. I don’t feel too good about it right then. She sounds hurt. I never expected that.

  She sighs. “Whatever. I love you, but I don’t care what you think about this. I’m not delusional. Satan is real. He talks to me. And he did tell me this would happen.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Yes, you are,” she says, her tone sharper now. “But it doesn’t matter. When you get here, I’ll prove what I’m saying beyond any fucking doubt. And, Phil?”

  I sigh. “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry about threatening George. I was upset.”

  This brings an unexpected tear to my eye. “It’s okay.”

  “It isn’t. I don’t want to lose you.”

  “You won’t,” I tell her.

  The weird thing is, I kind of fucking believe what I’m telling her now. It’s crazy. I’ve spent so many months working up to this breakup thing and here I am, on the verge of patching things up with her.

  “Look, crazy lady, I do care about you, you know. You scare the shit out of me sometimes, but you’re also kind of awesome. Let me see if I can get to your place alive and then we’ll have a long talk about all this shit.”

  Something thumps against the side of the truck.

  There’s a loud moan.

  Followed by another thump.

  “Phil?”

  “Yeah?” I say, dropping my voice even lower.

  “Was that a zombie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you safe?”

  I hesitate a second, then say, “Not really.”

  “Hurry home. Please.”

  I nod like an idiot, as if she can fucking see it. Then I say, “I’ll try. I will, I mean. I’m gonna hang up now.”

  “I love you,” she says.

  I frown, still feeling sort of mixed up about everything, but I sort of have to say it back, don’t I?

  Fucki
ng right I do.

  “I love you, too.”

  I hang up the phone and tuck it back in my pocket. After I take a big breath to calm my ass down, I stand up in the truck bed. Then I realize two things at the same motherfucking time.

  I have to piss again. Badly.

  Also, the street is full of goddamn zombies.

  In that instant, I’m not totally sure which issue is the more pressing of the two. That sounds sort of insane, I know, but you need to remember that this moment and the end of my night of epic overindulgence are separated by a very short period of time. My last drink before passing out might have been less than a fucking hour ago. So just then it hits me that my bladder might keep on feeling overburdened despite frequent drainings for some time to come. The idea that my need to take a fucking leak every few minutes might be the make or break factor in whether I survive the motherfucking zombie apocalypse is a bit of a bitter fucking pill to swallow, let me tell you.

  Okay, you want me to get on with it and stop blithering on about urine issues. I get it. But, hey, maybe you could stop being such an impatient twat? You ever think of that?

  Of course not.

  Because you’re a self-centered cunt-waffle.

  No offense.

  Point is, this is my story and I’ll tell it how I need to tell it, so shut the fuck up already and listen.

  Where was I?

  Right.

  Okay, so right on the heels of this initial double whammy realization is an even bigger mindfuck. You’ve probably even guessed what it is already. That’s right, I’m talking about that conversation I’ve just had with Crazy fucking Sue.

  Like, what the fuck happened there? Did that howling lunatic of a woman zap me with some kind of hypnotizing hoodoo sex ray over the fucking phone or what? Because for those few minutes, all of my completely legitimate issues with the lady seemed so much smaller than usual, maybe even borderline silly and selfish.

  But before I can give this any extra thought, I realize one of the zombies is on the verge of making it up into the truck bed with me. Obviously, this solves the immediate issue of taking a piss versus cracking some fucking skulls.