by Mark Clodi
"I drank hard, around midnight I remembered that I needed to get home. Only I was in no condition to drive, you know? I did anyway. Got pulled over three blocks from the party, about two miles from my house. The guy looked at me, knew I was drunk off my ass and said, 'It's your lucky night, we got a lot of fights tonight, so here is what we are going to do. I never saw you, you never drove. You get out of this car right now, put your car keys in your glove box. Lock the door, shut it and walk home. Come and get your car tomorrow. Unless you want to do this some other way?' Dumbass I may be, but not fucking stupid, I tossed the keys in, then, you know it took me awhile to figure out how to lock the goddamn doors, I had never done it manually before. The cop, he was a good guy, but he laughed at that, kinda made me mad, but I hid it, I didn't need no 'Tom Jones Whitebread American Cop' putting a beat down on my ass. Long story short I got home about one, my mom came unglued, but the walk had cleared my head a bit and the extra time let me make up a good cover story, same thing basically, but only I got off a little early hit my friends party, got a little drunk and got a lucky break. My mom was not happy, I almost thought she was going to go for the fry pan again and dad was already sleeping. Instead she just said to go to bed and stop making stupid decisions. That was the last time I saw her.
"Monday I had nothing going on, so I thought, I will stop making bad decisions, I will get up and find a job, make my family proud, make myself proud. I ended up sleeping all day, got up about two pm, watched a little television, all news crap, I switched over to a music channel and just chilled. I fired up my dad's old pc and checked my email, updated my internet blog, read a few of my friend's blogs and then hit some Grand Theft Auto New York City, a good game, well about seven that night I realized no one had come home, no mom, no dad, no little brother. My brother worked at the 'Water City' amusement park, usually the full day, ten in the morning until six at night, he had my parents old car and I was hoping he would give me a ride over to my car when he got in. They never came home. At eight I called my mom's work. Nothing. I had to look up the number for where my dad worked, I had never bothered him before. He worked at a foundry, and they were pretty good about letting him out on time every day too. No answer. I called 'Water City', could not get through. By nine I was scared. One thing that had to go when I picked up the car was my cell phone. I just couldn't afford an extra sixty dollars a month, not when I made such a mess of buying a car. So I called around to my friends, no one answered. You ever see that movie 'Twenty Four Days Later' I think it is called. Where the guy wakes up in a deserted city? That is how I was beginning to feel. I went outside. Everything looked normal, right? Only, no traffic. Now I live down a side street, we don't get a lot of cars or nothing, but there is a cross street a block and a half up that is pretty busy, a car every three or four seconds. I looked up there. No cars. I stood there and counted to one hundred and twenty. Not one car. Even at three in the morning on a Sunday a car will go by every ten seconds. At nine o'clock on a Monday night there should have been plenty of traffic. Something was wrong. I went back in and grabbed one of my dad's beers out of the fridge, then came back and sat on the porch. I popped it, leaving the door open, in case the phone rang. I sat there until almost ten thirty, when I finally saw someone coming down the street. You know it now, I mean you can see where this is heading. From what I saw on tv later, most everything started going to hell Monday, and I SLEPT through it. So much for not being a dumbass, huh?
"Anyway this fat, white chick comes walking down the block, she has a t-shirt on, some sort of concert shirt, like 'Bare Naked Ladies' or something like that and these green stretchy shorts, no shoes, one of her fucking knees looks like it is missing, I mean totally not there, she was limping along, this fat chick and I was like, "Oh Shit!", thinking she musta come out of a car accident or something, I ran in to call 911. Well this fat bitch slowly trudged in after me, you know how it is, I tried to tell her to sit down, she was hurt, lay down on the couch or floor, I mean she is the only person I had seen in hours and she is hurt. She came right for me opened her mouth, it was all red and bloody inside and she was attacking me. I tried to be 'nice' thinking, hey she is fucked up and hurt she does not know what she is doing. But she kept coming, and coming and coming. I hit her in her flabby belly, that blow ripped half her shirt off, disgusting man, totally gross. I am an ass man myself and her jumbo sized flabby titties did more to freak me out than her trying to bite me. I ended up shoving her away onto her ass and I ran into the kitchen. I yelled at her to stay the fuck out of my kitchen or I was going to brain her. She came in anyway, I grabbed the cast iron skillet off the stove and slammed her up against the head, not as hard as I could, I mean I still didn't want to kill her. She barely hesitated before grabbing me, I slid backward and let her have it again, but she just kept on coming. I…I…I started whacking her full on, finally something just snapped and she stopped moving. Funny, huh, I mean here I had this half naked, dead white chick in my kitchen and I am thinking, 'I just made another dumbass move. Oh Lord I am going to prison for this for sure.', when actually for the first time in two years I had done the right thing. I got scared then, went out and looked to see if anyone had seen what had happened." Kevin laughed, "I hadn't seen anyone since the night before in a goddamn city and I am worried that someone happed to be walking by on the side walk and notice me killing a woman in my kitchen. The coast was clear, I shut my front door and dragged the white girls body into the back yard. We have one of those crappy storage sheds in our back yard, I opened it up and took her body in there, it barely fit, man that shed is crammed full of all the shit we never needed, but could not get rid of. I could barely get the door closed. Again I looked around the backyard and made my way back into the house. There was blood all over the kitchen, not the red, 'Oh shit I just cut myself' kinda blood, but nasty black stuff, like half dried. I spent until midnight cleaning that shit up with the bleach out of the laundry room. I went back into the living room and turned on the news, fully expecting to see a swat squad being broadcast live outside this black guy's house, my house, you know what I mean? And I was not let down about the live coverage, this was only a few hours before the stations when off the air, they were showing people attacking other people here in the U.S.A., the reporter called them zombies and said one bite was fatal, you had to hit them in the head, destroy their brains and they stopped moving. They named a few places to go, to gather for help. I think they said Coors Stadium. Then I saw the light, I was not going to spend my life in prison the chick I killed was one of them! I went back in and got another beer while I thought about what it meant that my brother and parents had not come home.
"I cried as I watched the news. I mean I knew, then I just knew my family was gone and the last contact I had with my dad was when I headed off to work and he told me not to hot-rod, watch out for the cops, my brother I hadn't seen since Saturday and, of course the last contact I had with my mom was seeing the look in her eyes when I told her the lie about being pulled over by the cops. Not a good ending man, not a good ending at all.
"I must have fallen asleep in front of the television, the next thing I knew I was waking up to static about five in the morning. I turned off the tube and stumbled upstairs into my own bed. I didn't wake up again until I heard them in the house, not zombies, looters running from zombies. Sounded like white guys, white guys with guns. I am not too happy being around anyone with guns, but white people with guns make me more nervous than most. I am not some hardened criminal or 'gang-banger', sure, sure I did the show for the ladies now and then, but never in real life, I wanted to live and do something with my life not die over a handful of mind rotting stamps in an alleyway somewhere.
I heard them break in the front door, heard them make some plans while they rifled through my house for anything they could use, then heard them being attacked by a mob of zombies. The power was out, so I don't know what time this was on Tuesday, probably still in the morning, close to noon. They almost came upstairs, then
one of them said something along the lines of getting trapped with no way out and I heard them running out the back door into the back yard. I ran through the house to look out the back windows and saw three of them climbing over my back fence into the neighbor's yard. The zombies, they could not climb the fence. I heard more inside my house downstairs. So here I am with a full bladder, twenty zombies in the back yard and who knows how many on the first floor. We lived in an older house, it was pretty cool, two stairways one, with a door, leading into the kitchen, coming down near the back door and the basement stairs, and the other stairway in the front room. We had kind of a balcony overlooking the living room, kinda nice, but small and it made the living room look larger than it really was. I crept down the hall to the balcony and looked over it. Packed man, it was just packed full of zombies. They did not see me, I know that, but you get that many in one place and they start spreading out, some were coming up the stairs. I backed off slowly and headed into my room. Upstairs only had four rooms, three pretty small bedrooms and a bathroom, the balcony was not much of a room, ma kept knick-knacks there, all sorts of crap my dad was always threatening to toss out. He had his television; she had her loads of knick-knacks. In my room I shut the door and just grabbed the bed and heaved it over in front of it. I didn't know what else to do. Grabbed my dresser and put it on top of my bed, then shoved every other thing I could get up onto the bed. I went into my closet, grabbed clothes, a light jacket, took the fifty bucks I had managed to save over the summer and my spare car key and opened the window. By now they, the zombies, were doing the zombie thump on my door. Believe it or not it was starting to be pushed open too, and the whole fucking floor was creaking pretty bad, it was an old house, like I said.
"After getting dressed I had a hard decision to make. You'll laugh, no you will, but I stood there for thirty seconds while the floor creaked and the zombies were pushing open my door trying to talk myself into peeing on my floor. I mean I was not coming back, but you grow up your whole life pissing in a toilet, not on your floor. I had to go, I had lots of beer in me wanting to get out. You ain't laughing? Yeah, maybe it ain't that funny, but it is to me. I ended up choosing my closet, a good decision, cause while I was whizzing I took a last look around and saw the bat from, like, eight years ago when I played little league. I took it with me and got to the window as the floor started to sag. I was half over the window sill, no problem there, I had climbed out onto the tree probably fifty or sixty times when I was younger, when the floor collapsed, just the floor for the most part. You know how weird it is to see your four walls there, hanging over empty space and your floor just gone. Dusty too, the dust that came up hid everything from view. I thought my momma cleaned house real good, but so much dust! She would have been appalled, that was one of her favorite words when describing the latest thing I did wrong, appalled.
"Anyway, here I was one leg out, one leg in and my house is collapsing, the walls were moving, like they were gonna give in. They didn't, at least not while I was there. I grabbed for the tree limb, which seemed smaller than I remembered it and hoped it would hold me up so I could get to the main part of the tree and climb down. The zombies, zoms, were all twisting around in the main room, maybe a couple of them died, I really couldn't tell. There was a couple down on the ground out front of the house, I thought they might come at me right away, but they didn't notice me climb down and onto my neighbor's porch, they were too interested in all the movement inside the house.
"I got across my neighbors porch without anything seeing me, then moved to where it met up with the fence to his backyard and hopped over it. I crossed the yard and jumped over his back fence and headed out onto the street on the other side of that house, so I had two rows of houses and fences and stuff between me and all the zombies anyway. I didn't really know what to do, so I moved up onto a nicer looking porch and sat down on a chair I found there. I was just sitting there when I hear this barking inside, a dog. I look in and see this little mutt at the window, barking at me, then turning and barking at something inside the house, then at me, then it runs away from the window. I stayed real still, I figured a zombie was in there and maybe it would not notice me with the curtains and me not moving any. No luck, an old woman started attacking the curtains, then the window. It was an old house, old windows, single pane and stuff. I know all about it, cause about five years ago my old man had to replace all the windows in our house, they were cracking and cold in the winter, so he paid to get double paned ones installed, and has bitched at the cost ever since. So she hits the glass and breaks through it, cuts her arm up real bad, no real bleeding, just that thick blood like tar oozing out of her. She had an old lady robe on, pinkish and a bandage on one of her arms, like she had been bit there or something, I figure that is what killed her anyway.
"She is coming through at me and her robes get caught up in the glass, old lady titties. I tell you this undead stuff is bad for sex, I have images I will never get out of my head and why is it every undead woman who comes at me has to show me her titties? Anyway she about cuts one off coming through the window at me, I swear a nipple hit the porch before she was done moving. But she was caught. Old windows, old drapes, stuck solid to the wall and her tangled up in them so she about cannot even move by the time she gets halfway through. Plus the dog is hitting her from behind, I can see her moving as it bites at her, though what could that little piss-ant dog really do? Meanwhile I just kinda sat there watching it all happen. I got up and took the bat to her head, I was not going to leave her there, you know, in case someone else came by. With her dead I was going to go find another house, except for that dog. I didn't want to leave it in the house all locked up, maybe able to get out of the window, maybe not. I forced the front door in and the damn thing came at me! I fended it off with the bat and looked around the place, no more zombies running around at least. I shooed the dog outside and shut him out, but then he kept barking at the door. Fuck. Noise does seem to draw the bad guys too. I talked to him and tried to calm him down then let him back in. Nope, little bastard still came right at me. I ended up whacking him with the bat, not hard enough to kill the little dope, but he backed off after that and let me sit down for five minutes. My car was two miles away, but this old broad, she probably had an old person car. I could use that to get to my car if I could find her keys. Heck maybe she had a caddy or something and I could just use that to go….where? Where was I going to go? It hit me then that I didn't have any place to go. Not to a shopping mall to hold up like those guys in the movies, that didn't end well for them, you know? I figured I would have to just get out of town, if the old lady had a full tank I would take her car, if not I would drive over to my car and drive it into the mountains. I went to her fridge, she had a sweet tooth, cake, coke, and more of the same in her pantry. I looked around at the door to her garage and found a note-board with her keys on it. I popped open the door and looked at her car. An old Buick, like a nineteen eighty Buick or something, a nice car, a boat, and probably fast enough, but it didn't look like it had been driven in awhile, one of the tires was flat. I went and grabbed a coke and a couple of twinkies from the pantry and headed into the garage. It had an automatic door opener, and I found an air compressor under a tool bench in the back of the garage. Hopefully the tire had a slow leak. Now I am not a mechanic or anything, but I can handle changing the oil and checking my tire pressure. I found a pressure gauge in a little nook on the tool bench, behind a load of old lady stuff. I plugged in the air compressor, a lot of noise but I wasn't sure it would work or not, it was old, but the power was still on at her house. It worked, loudly, forty seconds of loud noise to get the tank full again. Meanwhile I checked the tires, they all needed air. There was a can of 'fix a flat' behind all the junk, I pumped that into the flat tire then filled it up to pressure and then I went around and topped the three other tires. After this I went back into the house and grabbed the rest of the six pack of coke from the fridge, the box of twinkies and a bag of chips and headed back
to the car, leaving the door open so the dog could get in and out after I left. I hopped into the car, turned the key and it started, no problem. I adjusted the seat and hit the garage door opener. Zombies man, four of them, two little kids, I knew one of them, a man and a woman. The man seemed, weird, he looked at me, his eyes were not all foggy like the others and he when he gestured for the others to get out of my way, the started moving slowly off the drive. He came at the side of the car and raised his hand, he had a tire iron! As he swung for the driver's side window I gunned it, and killed the engine, fortunately by moving forward a few inches I had done two things, first I made him hit the place between the driver and rear passenger's windows, so he hit metal and did not break the glass, and I had also moved forward far enough to get onto the slope of the drive. I pushed it into neutral and coasted to the bottom of the drive and into the street, I turned down street and kept rolling until I hit the end of the block, where I had to stop, put it into park and start it up again. Scared the piss out of me, him using a tire iron. If he had not ordered the others out of my way I probably would have gotten stuck on their bodies, and I know he told them to move, I just know it.
"The car continued to hiccup for a bit after that, but after another three blocks it started to purr like a kitten. It had a good three quarters of a tank too, so I didn't have to go back for my car right away. I decided I would scout around a little, see if I could pick up one of my friends and then maybe, go get my own car. I headed over to Scott's place, one of my buddies. The way was pretty clear, I was on back streets though, I had not tried a major street yet. I get to Scotts and his house is trashed, no bodies, but broken windows, blood on the front door, next was Jerome, his place looked good, but the front door was open, the screen was shut, but the door was open. I sat on the street and honked three times. That brought them out, oh yeah the whole zombie neighborhood. Jerome was missing an arm, he came to the door and could not get through it, his parents had installed a security door there with bars, if he had just pressed the lever he could have gotten through it. I sped off and decided to go get my car now, not later and get the hell out of town now, not later. I hit Pecos and a traffic jam of destroyed cars. I backed down forty eighth street to get to a secondary street and made good progress towards the highway, my car was just on the other side of it, but as I got closer to the highway I kept running into more and more cars.