by Bryan Smith
Only super, super gross.
He’s naked. On another, more reasonably sized man, his giant fucking dong would look like a third leg. Seriously, that thing looks like it belongs on a horse, not this obese load of festering undead garbage. It sways like a fucking pendulum with every lurching step he takes. Jesus fucking Christ.
Big Boy looks at me with his blank, milky eyes and moans as he takes another step. Now that I’m out here, each of those steps feels like it’s shaking the fucking earth. That’s an exaggeration.
But only a slight one.
The guy’s giant man-boobs jiggle with each fucking step, sort of like the boobs of a Swedish bikini model, only way less appealing.
So, obviously, fuck that noise.
I turn the other way.
There’s an open door at that end of the hallway. A large potted plant has been placed in front of it to hold it open. Sue’s handiwork, I assume. Sounds crazy, but based on what I’ve experienced so far since coming out of my haze, what choice do I have but to believe it?
The first zombie in this direction is too close for comfort. His outstretched fingers are almost within grabbing distance. I duck and slip around him as he groans and takes another step forward. One of the dead fuck’s hands swings slowly toward me, but I elude it easily. In that moment, I may have all the strength of a desiccated dead kitten, but at least one truism from my previous experience with the risen dead remains the same—they’re slow as fuck and if you move fast enough, you can get around them easily enough. They’re only truly dangerous if you get caught off-guard or find yourself in a situation where they’ve massed into an impenetrable horde of rotting, writhing flesh. Granted, those things have happened to me before and it could be argued I only survived those experiences out of sheer dumb luck.
But I digress.
Back to live zombie action, already in progress.
The next undead bastard is about a half-dozen feet ahead of me. He’s a bit more substantial than the rather more waifish zombie I just eluded, but he’s not quite the lurching behemoth blocking the other direction. He’s about six feet tall and wearing the white scrubs of an orderly. There are several rents in the fabric of the white tunic, which is stained a deep crimson with a large amount of dried blood. One of his eyes are gone. There are more holes in his throat and in his cheeks. Somebody—some real pissed-off motherfucker, from the looks of it—took a knife to this dude and went to fucking town.
He reaches for me. His fingers snag the fabric of my jumpsuit as I attempt to duck and move past him. For a second, I panic. I’m thinking I’m about to be zombie chow for sure. The dead fuck pulls me closer. My terror gets the adrenaline flowing and I find I’ve got more strength remaining than I thought. Not much, mind you, but enough to lurch backward and avoid the zombie’s gnashing teeth as he tries to take a bite out of my throat. The shoulder of my jumpsuit tears and the sleeve comes off as I stumble away. Last I see of it, the zombie is staring in a confused way at the wad of fabric clutched tight in its hand.
Next up in the undead parade is a much smaller specimen. A girl. She’s tiny, thin as fuck—thinner than me, even, the poor fucking thing—and maybe a hair over five feet. She has stringy, lank blonde hair and the usual dead, empty look in her eyes. She’s wearing a thin hospital gown. The poor thing looks like she’s drowning in the garment. I’m guessing she’s a patient, like me, though probably from another wing of the facility, judging from that gown. She’s pitiful.
I almost feel sorry for her.
Until she lets out a growl and lunges at me. It’s like my dear old grandmother used to say, appearances can be deceiving, especially when you’re dealing with dirty, underhanded bitches. My grandma was a bit of a self-loathing misogynist. According to her, that description applied to most women. Anyway, this undead dirty bitch looks frailer than the rest of these things put together, but turns out she’s the liveliest of them by far. I shriek and backpedal away from her, stumbling and falling against the wall to my left. But she’s still coming at me. She’s got her hands on my left wrist. Her mouth is open and about to snap shut on warm flesh. In the last second before she can doom me to a bleak future as a drooling, flesh-eating ghoul, I knee her in the stomach and send her flying backward. More of that new, adrenaline-fueled strength at work.
But she comes right back at me.
“Goddammit,” I say, getting annoyed.
I sidestep as she gets close and grab a fistful of the hair at the back of her head. Her momentum helps as I smash her face into the wall. She’s still flailing. The one blow’s not gonna be enough. I pull her head back. There’s a wet red smear on the wall. It’s a bigger and darker smear after I bash her head against the wall a few more times. Honestly, I kind of lose count how many times I bounce her formerly pretty face off that hard surface. This is more frustration boiling out and seeking release through the most immediate means available, which happens to be pulverizing this dead chick’s face. I feel kind of bad about it for a fraction of a second after I finally let go of her and her limp body drops to the floor.
The feeling passes in record fucking time, though, because another living dead bitch is almost right up on my ass. This one’s a middle-aged woman. Or was a middle-aged woman. Whatever. She’s plumper than the girl whose face I’ve just turned into fucking mush. I wheel about and bump her away with the thrust of a bony forearm. She falls over on her ass. I hear brittle bones break. Good. Hip bones, her pelvis, something like that. Bottom line, she’s not getting back. There’s one more zombie standing between me and that open door. I freeze for a second when it hits me who it is—Dr. Ramsey, the head-shrinker who was primarily responsible for my care when I first came to this place.
The scum-sucking bastard.
He’s attired in his usual pretentious douche-lord outfit—a beige suede jacket with patches on the elbows over a blue button-down shirt, a thin red tie, and faded blue jeans to make him look more like a man of the people rather than the overly educated, snooty cocksucker he actually is. Topping it off, a pair of wire-rim glasses designed to kind of remind you of John fucking Lennon. You’ve seen guys like Dr. Ramsey before, I’m sure. The universities of this nation are overrun with this particular strain of self-consciously quirky vermin. It’s a look that’s supposed to say, “Hey, look at me, I’m a fucking egghead, but I’m also down-to-earth and relatable. All cute and bangable co-ed babes may now commence forming an orderly line outside my office door.”
A-hem.
I digress. Again. It’s possible I have some unresolved issues related to my own brief and inglorious experiences within the halls of higher learning.
Anyway, once the shock of the moment passes, I can’t help laughing. “Ramsey, you living dead fuck. I’m gonna enjoy this.”
I wind up and kick him in the balls. Then I frown, because this has no effect whatsoever. Well, that’s not precisely true. He does stagger back a couple steps. But he doesn’t fall over and he doesn’t howl in pain. Of course he doesn’t, because I immediately realize I’ve made the mistake of still thinking of Ramsey as human. But he’s not human at all anymore, even if he looks it. He’s a fucking zombie and, not being fucking alive anymore, doesn’t feel pain.
Ramsey comes lurching at me again, but I’ve learned my lesson and this time I duck under his outstretched arms and make a dash for that door. I turn around as I get there and survey the hallway behind me. The remaining zombies are closer than I expect. I grimace. A shiver goes through me. Yeah, they’re slow as fuck, but they’re not exactly standing still either. If you fuck around like I just did with Ramsey, they can catch up with you faster than you’d imagine.
I kick that potted plant out of the way, slip through the doorway, and throw the heavy steel door shut. I’m in a stairwell. It’s empty as far as I can see, which is obviously fucking awesome. No zombies in the way means no immediate danger and that’s nice after my close calls in the hallway. That’s the good news. The bad news is I kicked that big plant out of the way with
a bare foot. I look down. Sure enough, I am unshod. That means I’ve got no shoes on my goddamn feet. My toenails are long, downward-curved, and quite gnarly-looking. They are the feet of a fucking caveman. Gross.
Super, super gross.
I stand there grimacing in pain with my back against the door for several moments as I wait for the worst of the pain to recede. When it does, I hobble over to the edge of the next set of stairs going down. Again, nothing down there I can see. Maybe the universe is finally cutting me some slack for a change. Before I start down the stairs, I take a look around to make sure I’m not missing any angles here. There’s another set of stairs going up. I want out of this fucking place and see no benefit in going that way. But there’s a big window behind me, presumably with a view of the grounds of the facility. Figuring it’d be a good idea to get a lay of the land before I do anything else, I hobble over to the window and take a peek outside.
Gulp.
My view is of the rear grounds. Straight down, there’s a Dumpster adjacent to a door I figure is normally accessible only to employees. There’s also a parking lot and a couple dozen vehicles. Parking for employees, I reckon. Beyond the parking lot is a large green field. A tall chain-link fence separates the lot from the field. There are benches out there and some tables. Looks like a place where the hospital’s more manageable patients might be taken for daily exercise. And a bunch of those patients are out there right now. More are down there in the parking lot, along with several people wearing staff uniforms. And, you guessed it, they are all walking dead fuckers.
Goddammit.
This is obviously upsetting as hell, but there’s a bit of an upside. Yeah, there’s a lot of them, but not enough to form those impenetrable walls of flesh I ran into in the city that first time around. There’s space to run and maybe zig-zag my way through them.
If I’m fast enough.
Which brings us back around to the problem of my bare feet. Doesn’t take me long to conclude I won’t get far like this. All it’d take is one step on a stray nail to bring me down. And after that the zombies would be on me fast. Yeah, there’s some room to maneuver if I’m moving fast enough, but not much. Even one tumble would uncomfortably reduce my margin of error.
So, I decide to head up to the next floor instead. I grab on to the stair rail and wince as I heave myself up the stairs. In a few moments, I’ve made it to the next floor landing. Another door propped open by a large potted plant. Sue’s doing again, I suppose. Where she’s getting all these giant potted plants from, I have no idea, but whatever. Anyway, there’s probably gonna be more dead things through that door.
But fuck it.
There’s gonna be zombies practically everywhere I turn. I can’t let that sway me.
I heave another breath and go on through the door. To my deep astonishment, this one’s free of reanimated dead. There are no living humans in sight, either. The rooms ahead look empty as fuck. There’s what looks like an employee break room to my left and a small lounge area with a TV mounted on the wall to my right. The TV is on, but it’s showing only static. Hard not to take that any way other than ominous as all fuck.
The hallway beyond this area does not appear to be lined with cells. There are doors, but they’re not forbidding slabs of reinforced steel. Noting a red phone on a wall in the break room, I head that way and lift the receiver off the hook.
No dial tone. Of fucking course.
I let the receiver slip from my fingers rather than putting it back on the hook, because what’s the point? Sue told me it was happening again, but she neglected to fill me in on how far gone things had already gotten. The power’s still on, somehow, but everything else is falling apart. No phone service. Nothing on the TV. And from the looks of things outside, about everybody else is dead now. I tell myself this is one tiny corner of the world and things might be different elsewhere, but I derive little comfort at all from this because my gut is telling me something else altogether.
The first time was a dry run. We were all deluded into thinking the powers-that-be had a handle on it and the threat was over for good. No dice. This right here, ladies and gents, is the real fucking zombie apocalypse. And it’s looking like there’s not gonna be any way out. Not for me or anyone else in this rotten fucking world. Still, I’ve got to try. As long as there’s breath in me, I will keep moving forward. Because even after all I’ve been through, I’m still human. And mostly we keep going, even after all looks lost.
I pass through the break area into the hallway beyond. Right away, I see that a lot of the doors ahead of me are standing open. I pause at the first one and look inside. It looks like an exam room. In the middle of it is one of those cushioned exam tables with a roll of sanitary paper at the end. At some point in the recent past, a length of the paper had been stretched out over the table’s cushioned surface. At some point after that, the length of paper somehow got shredded and spattered with blood. My best guess is this likely had something to do with the two dead motherfuckers on the floor.
These guys aren’t zombies. They are for-real dead. Thank fuck. I’m still exhausted from the series of close calls that ensued after fleeing my room. Last thing I need right now is to tangle with dead fuckers again. Some kind of desperate struggle went down in here. Various medical exam tools are scattered all over the room. One of them is a scalpel coated in dried blood. It’s on the floor near the outstretched fingers of one of the dead men, a guy wearing the jumpsuit of a patient. The garment looks kind of like the one I’m wearing, only it isn’t coated in a disgusting combination of diarrhea, piss, and fucking puke. There’s some blood spattered across the front of it, but otherwise it looks pristine. And the guy looks about my size. I consider switching out my jumpsuit for the dead guy’s somewhat less sickening one, only it occurs to me maybe I don’t want to be immediately identifiable as an escaped mental patient should I somehow manage to get out of this fucking place.
That brings us to the other dead guy. He’s also more or less in the same size range as yours fucking truly, only his build is a bit beefier. Not fat, exactly, but definitely bigger than me, especially now I’ve involuntarily spent so long on the drooling vegetable diet. I won’t quite drown in this dude’s duds, but they’ll hang off me in a sloppy-looking way. However, looking well put-together isn’t a top priority, as you might have guessed. This guy is wearing a white lab coat over his regular clothes. It’s also got a generous spattering of blood across the front. Another fucking doctor. Beneath the lab coat, he’s wearing blue jeans, a white button-up shirt, and a tie. Thankfully, there’s a belt around his waist. At least I won’t have to awkwardly walk around holding the jeans up by the belt loops, which is the kind of thing that could impede the effective eluding of zombies to a perhaps fatal degree.
The dead doctor is sitting slumped against the far wall near a window. Splattered messily on the wall behind him is a combination of dried blood, bone fragments, and globs of stuff I guess are bits of the dead man’s brains. Clutched in his right hand is a handgun. It’s easy to guess the basics of what happened here. One of the doctor’s patients, this other dead guy, went zombie on him. The zombie nicked him several times with the scalpel. Or . . . wait, zombies aren’t really known for their fine motor skills. Using tools or things like scalpels as weapons is pretty much beyond them. So maybe this guy was still human during this altercation. Weird. I spend a few moments pondering why two living human beings would be trying to kill each other in the middle of a zombie uprising. One would think they’d put their differences aside and band together to fight the dead fuckers. Then I remember I’m in the fucking looney bin. The deeply damaged people warehoused here aren’t known for their rationality. The fight might have been over nothing at all, at least at the start. Crazy guy just snaps and tries to do crazy stuff. But the doctor’s got a piece on him. Bang, bang. It’s all fucking over. But the doctor knows the world around him is fucked. He doesn’t think he can face it. Or maybe he even feels remorse over killing one of his p
atients. Probably not, but you never fucking know.
So, he puts the gun in his mouth and BOOM.
Bye, bye doctor.
I kneel and grab the dead doc by his ankles, grunting and grimacing as I pull him away from the blood-spattered wall. Some of his gore-soaked hair sticks to the wall a moment before coming free with an audible ripping sound. The gun tumbles from the man’s limp, dead fingers and hits the white-tiled floor with a loud clatter. I cringe for a second, fearing it might go off and send a bullet ricocheting around the room. Doesn’t happen, fortunately, and I drag the doc closer to the center of the room.
Pulling the man away from the wall is the hardest I’ve exerted myself in forever. The doc probably weighed somewhere around one-hundred and eighty pounds, give or take, a rough guess based on what I used to weigh back in the good old bad days, which was a bit less than that. It’s a lot of dead weight for such a scrawny piece of nothing in rough shape to be hauling around. Before I can begin the grim fucking task of undressing the corpse, I need a few moments to catch my breath and wipe the sweat from my brow. As I lean against the exam table, I can feel the jackhammering of my heart. Seems to take forever to slow back to a normal rate.
Finally does, though, and I waste no additional time getting down to the nasty fucking business at hand. It’s gonna wear me out again, even more this time, but it’s got to be done. This is the perfect opportunity to at least somewhat improve the state of my person and maybe start feeling like a real fucking human being again. I’m not about to pass it up. That the chance has even presented itself feels a touch miraculous. But I know that’s bullshit. This isn’t divine intervention. If God exists, I’ve got to be the last person on the planet He’s interested in helping. I’m a scumbag piece of shit. I mean, come the fuck on. Even I know that. This is nothing but a fluke, a rare turn of good luck.