Zombie Apocalypse

[beejazz]

"Shit!" Sam looked at the truck, then back again at me. "Isn't it just our luck? It's the first time in months we've had any fuel and you fucking total my truck!" His eyes bulged, "What the fuck were you thinking?" Bill and Sarah stared on from the back of the truck, disinterested.

"It wasn't my fault," I protested, "I couldn't just hit him!"

"Hit who? We're miles from anywhere! You gonna tell me a pedestrian just happened to be taking a stroll on an abandoned highway in the middle of the fucking desert?"

"Go ask him yourself," I replied, pointing off to the side of the road.

And there he was, shambling around, staring dumbly at the orange sky. It was a pitiful sight, really. He was an old man, well dressed, with salt-and-pepper hair. He walked the way I've seen some mental patients do. They stand there, shambling, not so much because they want to go anywhere as because they want to remember where their legs are. It was like that.

Sam stared at him for a second. After a couple of minutes, he forced out a weak "zombie."

It was at this point that Bill saw fit to respond, "Bull. If that was any zombie he'd be on us by now. You remember well as I what the doc in the cage said. They know what's us. And when was the last time you saw any zombie move so God damned SLOW? They aint like the movies, you know."

Sarah replied, "You can't possibly be telling me that that's a person. He'd have died before he could walk all the way out here. If he didn't starve, the zombies would have gotten him."

Sam had forgotten me for the moment. "Maybe it's like what we learned in biology. Like about how sometimes species mutate, and sometimes the mutations are inviable?"

Bill jumped back in, "But zombies don't starve. It's been how long now since this started, and we're still seeing our fair share of 'em in the city. You think they need this food to..."

I wasn't even paying attention to them anymore at this point. Somehow, I was too fascinated by the image of the old man, whose gray silhouette swayed metronomically against the phosphorescent sky. It was downright hypnotic.

Then it stopped. He turned. Made eye contact. It was all over.

In a flash I was upon him. My knife was in his ribs. My teeth were in his shoulder. My foot was between two halves of a split shin. I was tearing him limb from limb, consumed by the most blinding of hatreds, tearing off great chunks of flesh and forcing them down my throat.

And through it all he laughed. It wasn't a cackle, or a shriek, or some kind of maniacal thing. It was the sanest, purest, most jovial laugh I've ever heard.

I don't remember clearly how it ended. But it did. I slaughtered the man. The others pulled me off of him. Sam left on a bicycle and came back with another car from somewhere. We went home... But in a way that night will never end. I will always feel the flesh melting off his bones. I will always feel the sudden release of his throat collapsing under my thumbs. I will always feel that slight resistance of the lone rib as I pulled it off the cage, and the ease with which I crushed his sternum with it. And I will always hear the laughter.

Sometimes, in my dreams, I see his fetid corpse lying by the side of the road. He is laughing at me. He still finds all of this to be genuinely funny.

[SA]

Intriguing... but frustratingly ambiguous.

[beejazz]

What's ambiguous? The writing or what the fuck just happened? The latter's supposed to be. I could use some constructive critisism on the former.

Hell, I'm curious to see if and when you contribute. That'll be something. After all, you're more the writer than I am.

[SA]

I've got nuthin'.  The first part's really good.  I enjoyed it.  But the wtf moment isn't really the good kind; it was more an anticlimactic wtf than a "whoah, wtf???"  I want to know why he ATE A ZOMBIE.

[beejazz]

That not really zombie. That horrible hypnotic old man. I mean, since when do zombies laugh?

And more like half-ate.

But, yeah, I know what you mean. I may do a follow up that explains why that was necessary.

[DeeL]

Beejazz, you are a better writer than you give yourself credit for.  I like the additions you made to the cast, and might even borrow them for a later piece for myself if you don't mind.  

But... whoa.  

As of the line 'It was all over.', I am officially intrigued.  All I've got to say is you better do a follow up!  This I gotta see!

[beejazz]

Thanks man.

I've got a vague idea for my follow up, but I may have to wait until characters/setting get more developed to flesh it out (hint-hint).

[DeeL]

Light...
Dark...
Light...
Dark...
The intervals of light and dark were the only thing that changed in the prison.  Not that Beth knew it was a prison.  The only thing she knew was hunger, now, but since it had never been sated it was right to say that she was locked away from happiness.  All she really knew was hunger.  
The light meant she was hungry in the light.  The dark meant she was hungry in the dark.
She wasn't utterly without memory, but the hunger kept her memories fragmented, crippling her thoughts and self so profoundly that the syllable Beth would have meant nothing to her.  Bits of memory surfaced and were gone, never really rising above the darkness of her hunger.  If she could have seen them, she might have known...
...known that six years ago, she was alive.  A girl of eight years, going to a nice school (a public school, but still nice), with nice friends and the best parents a little girl could hope for.  Then the day came, just a couple of days after the sky turned white for a while, when everyone was rushing and the children like her who went to school met a teacher in the hallway who told them that school had been cancelled and she should go right home.  
She tried, but then a naked man had run in and started bellowing with a strange voice.  She ran, but he grabbed her and bit her and she screamed and then the teacher had hit the naked man in the head and pushed her into a room.  The room was a file room for the school secretary, and it had a lock on the door and the teacher had told Beth to lock it and she had and then she had heard screaming and then it was quiet.
Beth's arm had bled, and she had ducked under a desk.  She had heard noises and quiet outside, but she had kept the door locked.  She wasn't foolish; sooner or later, someone would come, or if she got hungry enough she could dare to venture outside when it was quiet.  But before she could make any such decision, she had gotten cold.  Colder and colder.  And sleepy.  And stiff.  The last thing she saw in her life was how pale her skin was.
And the next thing she saw she didn't recognize, because she couldn't recognize anything except hunger.  Her life was over.  Her forever had begun.
And because she could recognize nothing but hunger, she couldn't unlock the door.  Nobody came, and she would never see a reason to break a window or try a doorknob.  They did not meet the hunger in her, and her thoughts were never sufficient to the task of fulfilment being outside.  What she knew was what she could see.  There was paper.  There were cabinets.  And there was hunger.  She could see better in the light, but she couldn't see the difference between one light and another, one dark and another.
She had become a Pop-up.
That was what the long-term survivors called people like her, people who had been bitten in the early days, before they knew what the bite could do, and then hidden themselves away in closets, cellars, attics, whatever bolt-holes they could find until the trouble blew over.  And then so hidden, they had turned.  And then they couldn't get out.  They stayed there, in whatever bolt-holes they had found until someone found them.  It didn't matter how long they had been locked away, the second they saw a living person they lashed out, trying to bite.  Popping up, the worst kind of surprise.  Uninvited.
Light.
Dark.
Light.
Dark.
In the light, she tended to move, but in the dark she stood still.  Even at eight years old, she was habituated to standing and walking, so she didn't sit or lie down.  She stood.  When it was light, she shuffled hither and thither.  She retained enough awareness to not bump into the walls, but otherwise she was utterly aimless.
Like all the walking dead, Beth did not decay.  The bacteria that caused natural disintegration did not propogate through her tissue, but her flesh also did not renew itself.  Her constant movement served the purpose of keeping her lymphatic fluid flowing through her body, but her blood pooled into her legs.
Light.
Until one day, when the lengthy walking took its toll, and her blood began to weep its way out of her feet and ankles, leaving her white as bleach.
Dark.
Then she was at her most dangerous, no longer weighted down by her blood she could move like lightning.  At this point, she was a dasher; the fresh zombies were only as fast as a very fast live human, but dashers were sometimes clocked at over thirty miles per hour.  It didn't usually last long; after running for a while, the dasher's dead tissues would begin to abrade and tear.  Feeling no sense of pain, they would endure multiple sprains and breaks before their speed was gone forever.
Light.
But Beth was never to run so fast.  Standing and walking through the reek and growing filth of her cast-off tissue, her skin began to fatigue, like soft metal, and break.  Then her lymphatic fluid began to leech out of her.  And she slowly, slowly entered the last stage of the walking dead.  Dessicated and darkenening from those few microorganisms that could grow on and under her skin, she became a husk.  With only the marginal remnants of senses left, and her skin and bones turning dry and stiff, she became less of a threat in some ways, but far more in others.  Slower, but quieter.  Before, she might have vocalized when excited.  But her lungs became even stiffer and less mobile than the rest of her, and the only sound she could make was the faint rustle of her papery flesh.
Dark.
But her tooth enamel remained hard and functional.  A threat.
Light.
It was light outside.  She sometimes heard noises from outside, but they didn't mean much to her.  This light, however, was accompanied by a noise she could still hear, and understand.  Voices.  Food.
She was still.
The voices travelled.  To the hallway.  Toward the door.
She shuffled over towards the door.  
The door opened, and she began to tumble towards the opening, but in the years since Beth had closed the door, shelves had weakened and timbers had been gutted; as the door was opened a section of the lintel fell.  Suddenly, she couldn't see outside.  Neither could anyone outside see in.
Something stirred in the dusty light.
Beth watched it as closely as her gummy eyes could manage.
Then the door fell away, and she saw the food.
She tumbled foward again, and bit -
-and bits of memory stirred and flowed in the ruin of her mind, and she realized she was almost naked, her clothes being little more than shreds of moldy cloth.  That wasn't how she liked to dress - her color was pink!  Everyone knew that!  She remembered how she had picked it two years ago -
"FUCK!  POP-UP"
"It's got him!  It's really getting him!"
"GET IT OFF ME!  GET IT OFF!"
"I wasn't there!  I'm sorry!"
Hands grasped at her.  She tried to shrug them off, but her own arms had lost most of their strength.  She was pushed away from her food, but she was still nimble and quick.  She twisted down, biting into the hand that had her -
- and her favorite ride at the fair was the Discus, a huge frisbee-shaped ride where they didn't strap you in, they just let you spin around on the enterior surface like a centrifuge, and it was fun to stand on the wall like that, with her father at her side, and the music blaring -
"Shit!  Shitshitshitshitshit!  Get it-"
"Break the head!  Hit it!"
"I CAN'T!  NOT HERE - OUT OF THE WAY!"
One of Beth's brittle legs snapped under the weight over much bigger assailants, and she went sprawling.  There was no pain, though, and even though her head hit the ground hard enough to reduce a living human to unconsciousness she moved with all the coordination remaining to her to get at a nearby ankle.  It was food, it was delicious as she bit into it -
- and she remembered Rob who was in her grade and he helped her collect shells when that was a project and their parents were friends and one day she had let him touch her panties and she had thought it would tickle -

And her mouth was trickling with food, but she was being heaved back into the file room, and the door was pounding and then a section of wall collapsed and she was trapped under a section of shelving and she had seen the very last food she would ever see.  She lay where she fell, as she always would, her reeling senses calming over the next few hours until there was only hunger again.
Hunger would be all she would ever know again, but then there was no longer any she.  No longer any 'know'.  There was only the hunger.  There would only be hunger, down through the long slow march of years, as the dessication and deterioration continued until mobility was gone, form was lost, even the tooth enamel splintered and fell away.  And at last, the blindly groping root of a blackberry bush would slowly penetrate the delicate remnant of her brain case, extinguishing what little there remained of Beth.  
But that was long to come.  For now, she had a day to get through.  Then a night.  Then another day.  
Light.
Dark.
Light...

[beejazz]

Oie...

[SA]

The life of a zombie.

Never have I seen it put in such clear perspective.

Bravo.

[Túrin]

VERY nice. This thread still delivers. More please! :D
Túrin

[Wensleydale]

It stared at me, beyond the bars. It watched me - what I had once been, what I would never be again. It watched. Another of them had given me meat, earlier. An arm - some of it was left on the ground. Nothing edible, though. But this one - this one was cruel.

I could feel it... feel it like a taste in the air - something that I'd not felt in a long time. Not a scent - a feel. I felt drool - not that it was real, but more what remained of my imagination. Something - something lost...

I looked up. Probably he would start the sprinklers again, soon. And again, I would be drowned - lost to thought, unable to sense. There was no way I could defend myself - nothing. The bars protected him. I could see a slight film of something on them - something that I had left there when I flung myself at it. But above - a vent - small, but large enough. The hunger came ag-

I was crouching, bloodstained, over a flesh-stripped corpse. The hunger was sated - for a short while. But I could feel others around... somewhere.

And I was hungry....


(Presumably it's okay if I add something...)

[DeeL]

Sure Golem, go for it!  That's why it's a thread, not a blog.

Which raises the question - should I make a blog out of this?  Something to seperate the story from the commentary...

[Wensleydale]

The storyline so far seems to be (with my addition), doc in cage questioned, dream happens, people from bunker go to city, doc escapes...

[beejazz]

Wait... what?
When did doc escape?