I stood up to make sure nothing else was lurching my way, then crouched again and continued untying the old man’s shoes. These things could really be anywhere. That was almost my critical moment where one mistake lead to death.
And even in the wake of this close call, I had to get all neurotic deciding if I wanted the old guy’s socks as well as his shoes. It felt really gross, but I decided gross was better than cold, sweaty feet, so I took his socks too. At least his shoes didn’t have any foul, unwashed odor. It could’ve been a homeless guy with a colony of toe fungus.
I checked my surroundings again, seeing no one, and then loaded two more shells into the shotgun. This gun wasn’t really working for me, because if I got knocked out every time I fired it, I was gonna be pretty screwed. But it sure felt better than a kitchen knife and rocking chair runner!
Ahead of me, 690 began rising above the city on a bridge, and this bridge looked safe and unoccupied. The 81 exit and Townsend Street exits both veered down to ground level in the midst of the city where I could see bodies shambling amidst the backed up traffic. Fuck. That.
I opted for the relative safety of the two-lane 690 bridge, hoping I wouldn’t get trapped up here. I had the high ground, and nothing stirred ahead or behind. The West Street exit was just ahead. Sixty feet below, I saw mobs of dead people moving through the city streets. None of them even noticed me--they were just wandering along, looking straight ahead and lurching. The lurching gait was the most horrible part…human marionettes.
I thought they might be curable, like Hershel, that idiotic veterinarian in The Walking Dead. I figured there must be some way we could reverse the plague with just a few more doctors to figure it all out. Kinda like AIDS, right? In the 1980s, everyone thought there was a cure for AIDS and was searching for it, and 30 years later, there’s still no cure.
ZIDS--The Zombie Immune Deficiency Syndrome! That made me chuckle. ZIDS was like AIDS, only more unstoppable. Because it wiped out governments--or at least it made them all scurry into their underground bunkers and wait for the surface to clear.
Think about it, though--if that zombie’s hand was still warm and he’d been trapped under that car for who-knows-how-long, then it stands to reason that he is still alive and not actually dead. This could definitely be cured.
I was getting really hungry all the sudden. The duffle bag felt so heavy, and I felt weak to the point of collapse, and light-headed. I needed to get off at the next exit and look for food.
But, a weird thing happened on the bridge. A car door flew open and a guy jumped out. It startled me and I fumbled to get the shotgun off my shoulder, but the duffle bag interfered.
The man was disheveled and unshaven, with that ragged, homeless look about him. “Are you alive?” he shouted, pointing a pistol at me.
“Yes I’m fucking alive,” I screamed back, throwing up my arms. “Jesus fucking Christ, dude, point that somewhere else!”
I stood there at gunpoint for several long seconds while he stared at me with crazy eyes. I’d already spoken, but for some reason, this guy was totally paranoid and couldn’t fathom that I wasn’t a zombie.
“Alright, I want your gun,” he said finally. “Set it down.”
“Oh come on, man!!” I said.
“Do you wanna get shot?” he shouted, his eyes wild. “Just set it down and step back!”
“Okay, alright, I’m gonna do this real slowly,” I said, imitating cops on TV or something when a gun is pulled on them. Movies were really the only frame of reference I had for all I’d experienced in the last few hours.
I lowered the gun, suddenly very afraid as I realized that one slip of his twitchy finger would put a bullet right through me. There was something really off about this guy. I stepped back, and he sorta scooted forward and grabbed the gun, then scrambled back toward the car.
“Sorry, friend, that’s the breaks,” he said, setting the shotgun in the car. “Everything’s gone wrong.” Then he stopped, eying me. “Leave the bag, too. I want your bag.”
I didn’t argue, just let it fall and felt sort of relieved to have that weight off of me.
“Now step back,” he said, still pointing the pistol at me. I took three steps back and he skittered up, pistol never leaving me as he dragged the bag to his car and tossed it in.
“Listen, man,” I said, “do you have anything I can eat? I’m weak from hunger. You just got a ton of good stuff from me, the least you can do is give me some food.”
His eyes did that crazy thing again, like cat eyes. Reminded me of Shakes with the catnip mouse dangling from her mouth.
The guy got back into his car, without a word, and I suddenly realized how sad he was.
“You’re just gonna hide in a car?” I couldn’t help but say.
“Don’t even try anything,” he said as he rolled the window down. “Just keep walking and I’ll let you live.”
“Are you serious? You just took my gun and left me out here to die, and now you’re gonna hide in a car? Like the fucking zombies won’t find you there?”
“NPR said stay inside. The National Guard will be here soon. You can probably find an unlocked car somewhere.”
I snorted. “Like every single car backed up right here, you mean? Man, no one’s coming. That gun you just stole belongs to a cop. I was just with him when he and his buddies got turned. Did you look down into the city?”
The guy sat there peering out at me with his scared little eyes. I shrugged and walked past the car, then heard something hit the ground behind me. I turned and there was a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos near my feet. Not the shitty little bags either; it was medium-sized.
“Thanks,” I said, picking it up.
“Good luck,” he said.
I wolfed those Doritos down, and I swear nothing ever tasted so good. My alertness returned as I made my way into the nest of backed-up traffic. But really, how could a bag of nutrition-less chips make me feel alert? Was it psychosomatic?
When I was a few car lengths past the guy, I glanced back and still saw him watching me. I flipped him off for stealing my gun and trading it for chips. He probably felt like quite a stand-up guy for giving me the chips. Fucking douche.
Out of all the survivors you could possibly meet in a situation like this, I’d met some crazy cop who runs head-first into a dark garage full of goddamn zombies, and some schizo lunatic who’s brilliant plan was to hide in his car and steal guns from anyone who walks by. That guy’s not even an archetype in any zombie film, anywhere. Who becomes that fucking guy? I’m an absolute coward, but I look like Jackie Chan compared to him!
Chapter 20: Now
When I open my eyes, I can see the room. I’m leaning on the woman…I recall her name is Marsha. She’s asleep and dim light filters in around curtained windows.
My first thought--she’s butt ugly!
For some reason, she’s wearing tons of makeup. Who the fuck wears makeup after the apocalypse? This boggles my mind. Then I think about how I used to wear deodorant and my watch for a while until Team Doyle ribbed me too much about those things. That makes me look at her with a bit of tenderness. She’s alone out here, holding onto the things that made her comfortable, and there’s no Team Doyle to make a fool out of her for it. She has a big, gold crucifix on her neck, too, and it’s hilarious that anyone is waiting for Jesus to save us.
Marsha looks like those women on dating sites who cake their faces with makeup thinking it makes them look younger when it really makes them look old and sad. They all try to be cougars--guess how I know this? I went through a period in my early thirties where I was meeting these types of strangers off the internet--lonely, horny, older women. They were all alcoholics and had no self-respect at all. A couple of them invited me to their houses and started making out with me almost right away, their mouths a mixture of alcohol and ashtrays. Most of these women try not to use condoms either, but I wouldn’t let them near me without protection. I basically wanted to kill myself after those experiences. Somewh
ere in that time, I decided I would rather masturbate and wait for the right woman to come along than have actual sex and feel that way ever again.
I started jogging during that time in my life, but I only went jogging at night when no people were around. I hated jogging in the day as cars drove by. My first two were daytime jogs, and I knew people were laughing at me. A car of teenagers yelled ‘Rocky Balboa’ out their window as they drove by. I felt like I was on display to every passing car, like being the scrawniest guy in gym class and put on the ‘skins’ team. I’m sure Coach Tyminski did that on purpose: he was a sadistic prick with a bushy power-tripping-douche mustache, like all those types wore. I mean before the shitpocalypse happened. What are they hiding behind?
It’s amazing I think about this kind of shit. My mind just wanders. I don’t even feel like I really live in this world. I’ve got this part of me just waiting for everything to go back to normal, and in the meantime, in this little movie I’m acting in, I’m joining militias, falling in love with beauty queens, learning how to shoot guns, abandoning my buddies on Team Doyle, and running from the walking dead.
They aren’t really my buddies. They’re like the football players in gym class treating me as their mascot and thinking I’m too dumb to see I’m being mocked.
Why am I suffering from high school angst in my 30s after the entire population of humanity was wiped out? And why are the other survivors treating me like high school jocks bullying the skinny kid? All that says a lot about human psychology: our fragile minds try so hard to feel better than someone else.
Dorks like me have forever dreamed of wiping out the entire human species so we could be happy. We’re at the bottom of the pecking order, and we hate it here, but there’s no way up, even in adulthood. Go to the gym? Lift weights and play basketball and make myself watch sports? Nah, we’d rather kill off all the sports guys with a zombie plague instead. I know it was one of us who started it—it had to be! Some brainiac egghead working in a secret government laboratory by day and immersed in Bioshock by night. Maybe these weren’t even zombies, they were the first Splicers!
I have a secret confession about those Columbine guys: I thought they were awesome. I was 20 years old when they did their little massacre, and I immediately understood why they did it, and I felt admiration for them. Of course, I just heard about them at college, and I instantly romanticized them into vigilantes who walked around killing every bully in the school. And who really knows, maybe that’s exactly what they did.
My face is kind of ugly, and I got picked on too much to ever feel good about it. I was called “Horse” in school because of my elongated face. In tenth grade, we had this Nazi-sympathizer psychopath teacher for history class, Mr. Ingrisch, who told our class about Horst Wessel, some Nazi who got killed and used as a propaganda piece by Joseph Goebbel. That was the end for me--everyone started calling me “Horst” and it was all over the school.
I have black curly Jew hair and crooked teeth. I’m not Jewish, but when I was a kid, everyone thought I was and called me names. It was really traumatizing, but those kids are all dead, and somehow that doesn’t even make me happy. You’d think it would--I mean, if you trace my entire miserable life back to the moment that it probably derailed, when I became doomed, it was most definitely Kinne Street Elementary and the little pack of vicious trailer-trash bullies who tormented me whenever I left my house.
There was one kid in middle school who got it worse than me, and he actually was Jewish and his parents made him wear a fucking yarmulke to school. Who the fuck does that to a kid in a trashy Italian neighborhood in upstate NY in the 1980s? I hope, somewhere in this godforsaken hell, Manny (Emmanuel) Goldberg is out massacring every little zombie wop shithead who gave him a wedgie at Kinne Street school.
So yeah, here’s Marsha with her sunken-in cheekbones and Bassett Hound wrinkles down her face. Marsha who is not Natalie Portman. Marsha who reminds me how pathetic I am. Marsha who wants to bone me. Why’s she wearing so much makeup? It makes me think of Charisse and her eyeliner.
Charisse, like a dream in my arms, in that briefest moment, I had everything I ever wanted. It slipped through my grasp. How would I ever get her back? I wasn’t worth the last shit I took if I didn’t try, but goddamn I would need an army to get her out of Mavmart!
Marsha stirs but doesn’t wake. She reminds me of an older woman who used to flirt with me at Hills Department store when I was a teenager. Rose was a wrinkly lady with a smoker’s cough and trashy teased hair. The funny thing is I started having fantasies about her, since no one else was showing me any interest. All the girls my age looked through me like a window pane. I was the janitor, which is basically the same thing. Rose worked in kid’s clothing and got really forward. She kept saying things like, “Hey, Sam, you look good in those tight jeans,” looking right in my eyes and smiling, or saying, “Hey, Sam, can you rub my shoulders for me, I’ve got a cramp right here?” And I’d rub her shoulders and she’d scooch her butt against me. It turned me on, but I was so afraid to admit that. I would just turn my hips away or step back so she wouldn’t notice the stiffy. She was about 45 and I was 19 or 20. A real life cougar, before Sex and The City made cougarism trendy.
Marsha reminds me of Rose—same skeletal face, smoky voice, wrinkled-up lips. Both of them seemed to have nice breasts. Anyway, I never made a move on Rose, but I did have tons of shameful fantasies about her.
I find my eyes drawn to Marsha’s crotch. Her legs splay open, and her cargo pants fit her a bit tightly there. I feel myself getting horny and consider giving her my two-minute surprise. I’m sure it will get better over time, if she wants it again. I always built stamina in the past and girls were pretty understanding about it.
Then I start wondering why I’m so horny and thinking about sex at a time like this. Is it some biological failsafe kicking in to save the species during extinction? Or am I just my normal perverted, desperate self, unchanged even in the face of species annihilation?
“Do you like what you see?” Marsha asks.
I jump, realizing I’d been staring at her crotch. Before I can answer, she cackles loudly as if trying to summon a horde of zombies to the house.
“You’re a kinky guy, Sam, I can tell,” she says. “Smart, lanky, awkward guys. You know what they all have in common?”
“What?” I ask.
“Big cocks!” she guffaws while my face burns red. “I’m serious. I don’t know what it is about tall, skinny nerds--I had my share of them at the bowling alley.”
“Lower your voice,” I say, shuffling over to the window to peek outside. The street is almost deserted, except for two distant figures. “There’s two of them out there,” I report.
“How far away?”
“One’s in the backyard of a neighbor across the street—she seems to be walking away. The other is up the street, heading this way.” I pause, squinting to see better. “Actually, that’s not a zombie. It’s a guy holding a rifle.”
“Oh shit!” Marsha says, coming to stand beside me. She peers out the curtain beneath me. “Don’t let him see you.” She throws the curtains wide open to let sunlight stream in.
“What the hell—!” I duck down while she runs to the dining room and throws open those curtains. The man is about eight houses down—too far to notice any of this. He wears a silly looking straw hat, like a scarecrow would wear, and he’s smoking a cigarette, strolling in a leisurely way. “What are you doing?” I hiss as Marsha scuttles back toward me on all fours.
“If the curtains are closed, he’ll know someone’s in here.”
“What if he’s friendly?”
“You can’t take chances,” she says. “Too many gangs around here, scavenging for food, and…” She trailed off.
I see the look in her eyes. “Oh, rapists you mean.”
Marsha says, “There’s guys out there who will rape you too, you know?”
As the man draws closer, I notice his long coat is pushed back behind the two pis
tols holstered at his belt. He’s an older black guy, with a slight hobble in his gait.
“It’s a black guy,” I whisper.
“Not good,” she says.
Chapter 21: Then
I felt naked without the shotgun, trapped on this bridge over the city. It was very dark, and the traffic jam of silent cars provided plenty of cover for any lurking zombies.
Could they really be zombies, I wondered? It was weird enough that we lived in a technological age that resembled the Buck Rogers of my youth—Bluetooth, jetpacks, space stations. But zombies? What kind of moron would even think it’s a technologically good idea to create such monsters? Monsanto, Halliburton, or the US Government--it really couldn’t be anyone else, right? At those secret echelons of society, the murky, clandestine operations of billionaires trying to rule the world, it wasn’t even implausible to think they’d create zombies, and that some “mistake” would unleash it on the public. But imagine THE guy who first decided to fund that? He built a lab, furnished with state-of-the-art equipment, hired teams of chemists and biologists, and told them to create a virus to make people into zombies. Didn’t anybody raise their hand and say, “Uh, sir, all due respect, but why would anybody ever want to create that?”
No. The answer is money talks, and everyone who doesn’t listen is unemployed. To keep my job at the University, I had to constantly suck academic cock, publishing bogus articles in peer-reviewed journals to make our staff look relevant. That’s low-end whoring compared to what people in the corporate-funded social sciences or physical sciences had to do. Because most journals allow authors to suggest who should review the paper, and everyone in academia has a very strong interest in scratching the nuts of their fellows. Science, like politics, business and religion, is just another circle jerk.
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