At Least He's Not On Fire: A Tour of the Things That Escape My Head

by Philbrook, Chris

  My name is Adrian Ring. I lived what I would now call as only a moderately successful life. I was happy, but I had pretty low standards. I had a girlfriend, I had a small condo downtown, I still have my cat (score!), and I have thus far avoided being eaten by the undead. Surprise! There’s the twist in the story. I fucking love horror movies. Like seriously. I watched well over a thousand of them and always used to plot and plan should zombies ever rise from the dead and take over the world. Irony in all that is that when the shit hit the fan it happened so fast that any kind of plan would’ve been almost impossible to execute.

  I was at work the night it started. I used to work third shift at a private school as a dorm supervisor. It was out of the way up in the hills outside of downtown, and only had about 100 students. Over 100k a year to attend. Very elite, very snooty, and basically the best job you could ask for. I had 9 hour shifts where I basically just made sure the kids didn’t run away, and had their needs taken care of. Most nights I would do maybe an hour of work. I spent the rest of the time fucking around online looking at stupid videos and screwing around on the big ole f-book. God I wish I could update my status right now. Something really witty like “hasn’t been eaten yet, so is pretty stoked.” Or maybe something like, “wishes he grabbed more bullets when he raided the gun store in town.” I dunno. Something cool.

  Anyway, I was at work when it all hit. Working nights meant I was totally alone aside from the three other overnights and the sleeping kids, so when I checked the news websites and saw the few updates about “zombie hoaxes” I laughed. After a few hours more and more popped up on other websites, but I didn’t take it too seriously. After all Halloween was coming up soon I figured it was some kind of stunt to promote a new movie or tv show. It wasn’t until the morning when half the day shift people didn’t show that I really realized something was up.

  I went home as I normally do, and nothing seemed amiss. I called my girlfriend on the short drive home and we chatted. I asked her about it and she basically said she thought it was a hoax or some stunt. She was still half asleep though, so who knows what she really saw or heard on tv. Plus she was getting ready for work herself. She was gone by the time I got home, and I never saw her again. I think she was killed at work, or maybe on the drive home from work. I’ll never know. The cities are far too dangerous for me to attempt to go to, and to be honest, as much as I loved her, it scares the shit out of me when I think of getting eaten alive. If you can read this babe, I love you.

  I went to bed after watching a few minutes of the news and eating a banana. I can still remember the weird vibe on the good morning shows. Kinda tense, but sort of laughing it off. I can still remember the look on the dude’s face as he reported it, kinda like he was waiting for an “april fools!” to pop up on his teleprompter. Never came I guess. So I went to bed.

  I slept pretty good until about 3pm. I remember distinctly waking with a start, jarred awake. It took me a few minutes to piece together what actually woke me up, but the second gunshot kinda solved that riddle. It came from outside my window in the condo complex and I knew instantly something was very wrong.

  My curtains are taped right to the window frames to block out the light, so I pulled on my gym shorts and hustled downstairs to look out the glass slider on the back side of the house. The action had ended by the time I got down there, but about thirty feet from where my place is I could clearly see a dead body laying in the parking lot. Have you ever seen someone take a shotgun blast to the head? Its horrible. There’s no head left to speak of, first off, and secondly the body just empties the blood out of what’s left of the head. More of a neck by that point really.

  The body, a woman incidentally, was kind of laying towards my place, kinda downhill, and the blood was running into the mulch at the foot of the pine tree right behind my place. I’ve seen dead bodies before, I’ve been around violence plenty of times, but this was weird. It was in my neighborhood. You know, your sanctuary? I imagine the way I felt looking at her head-stump empty was a lot like watching your house burn down, or coming home to realize your house had been broken into. I felt violated. Anyway, I grabbed my sweatshirt, my cell phone, slipped my sandals on and sprinted out the back, dialing 911 as I went. I tripped over a root from the fucking pine tree and ate shit on the way, but I got there.

  She was dead, of that there was no doubt. Her head was absolute demolished. She was wearing a garish flowery pattern shirt that looked a lot like the kind of shirts that a pediatric nurse would wear. She definitely had pants that looked a lot like those greenish scrub pants you see nurses wearing. I made my decision. Headless shotgun woman had been a nurse only a short time ago. At that point I realized my 911 call wasn’t going through. Getting the all circuits’ busy bullshit, which instantly set off my oh-shit radar. My groggy ass brain finally started to put two and two together. The zombie shenanigans from last night may not have been a hoax.

  I don’t own a gun. My girlfriend was kinda twitchy, and she had a little bit of a temper, and I really didn’t want a firearm around that cocktail. It was far too foreseeable to see me getting shot because she thought I was a robber or something. So no guns. I did however own a few very high quality swords. Competently made and purchased at a few nerd festivals over the years. I really didn’t want to grab a sword and just go driving around on the outside chance that this was just a random shooting, but I knew I had to get the fuck back inside one way or the other. If this was a random shooting, the random shooter was still pretty fucking nearby and I was not in the mood to get head-stumped myself.

  So I ran inside. This time I did not eat shit on the root from the pine tree, and made it inside like an Olympic sprinter. I do remember being really pissed at myself because I left the slider open and my frigging cat Otis was sitting right on the fringe watching me the time. I didn’t want him to get out, as he’s an inside cat. He’s a Maine Coon, so he’s a beefy guy, but I woulda been pissed if he got hit by a car, or shot by a psycho with a twelve gauge. Seems like a reasonable concern considering the prior events, right? Whatever dude. I love my cat. He’s my homeboy.

  So by then I’d tried dialing 911 like 4 times. I had the number for the police station already in my contacts so I called that line, and I got their automated response. The emergency choice just routed me to 911, and I was right back where I started. At that point I knew shit was bad. Can’t be a coincidence. I hit the tv on and there it was, the EAS message. You know that irritating noise you hear when they’re testing the emergency system? And very fucking rarely is there ever an emergency. I mean I guess in the midwest when they get tornadoes, or in the south when a hurricane is coming it’s more relevant than here. All we ever get is shit like “emergency snowstorm warnings,” or shit like road closures or accidents.

  I’ll never forget the message from that day:

  State and local agencies are reporting widespread attacks on citizens across the region. Authorities are advising people to stay inside, lock their doors, bar their windows and only open doors for known friends and family who respond intelligently.

  That was it. No mention of a virus, aliens attacking, zombies, vampires, or any such nonsense. I mean, I know now after having seen it a few hundred times we’re dealing with zombies, but that message had no info at all. For the astute horror fan though, that’s when I knew it was “on.” You know, as in “it’s on like Donkey Kong.” I tried calling my girlfriend, both on her cell phone, and at her work extension, but no dice. I’m pretty fortunate in that I don’t panic, like, ever. I’ve got years of experience dealing with violence, and I just don’t lose my cool when the shit hits the fan. I’m the kind of dude you want making decisions in dangerous situations. Enough about me, I’m writing history now. More about me later when I have less to write about.

  I knew she was dead. Or at least, damn close to it. None of the channels would work so I grabbed my laptop and fired it up. After connecting to my network I went to all the news websites and immediately found out I was
right. Picture after picture after cell phone video after news broadcast. All showing the zombies. Of course, no one had the fucking balls to call it like that. People were calling it everything but. Theories abounded everywhere I pointed the mouse. But I knew. You could see it. They were dead already, and didn’t attack others until they’d passed on. I knew I needed to know a few things immediately about whatever it was that was doing this, so I got all scientific, and went to the CDC website.

  They were on the ball, thankfully, and had the info as best as they could, already up. I needed to know a few things specifically:

  • Transmission. How did it get transmitted? According to the CDC transmission occurred only via bite. Scratches did not seem to pass along the sickness/curse/virus/evil. Further, they had confirmed that the illness did not spread to non-human victims. Apparently a farm in Pennsylvania had all their cows eaten by the zombies and they stayed dead. (Of course later on I realized that this was somewhat wrong. You see by that point I don’t think they had realized that anyone who died and didn’t get their nugget wrecked immediately would get back up, seeking out flesh, being a general motherfucking nuisance to the living. But, I worked with what I knew at that point)

  • Did they eat flesh? The CDC confirmed that yes, they did indeed eat the flesh of the living.

  • Were the undead/sick/ill/terrorists that ate flesh more or less dangerous than a normal human being? Once again the CDC reported that the ill were slow, had diminished capacity for thought and reason, and were hostile to other human beings as well as animals. They were uncoordinated, couldn’t move much faster than a clumsy trot at best, and showed no ability to communicate, or to make plans of any sort.

  • Where did it all start? How close was I to “ground zero?” The CDC had no fucking clue. They said that there were about ten dozen simultaneous reports from all over the world. Plus or minus a few hours, which globally speaking is pretty fucking simultaneous. As best as I could figure, I was about a two hour drive from the closest outbreaks on the eastern seaboard.

  • Could they be killed, and if so, how were they killed? According to the CDC (by now my most trusted source for news regarding the current and ongoing Zombie apocalypse) any significant damage done to the brain would drop them again. So Romero, dude you were totally spot-on. Fucking A brother.

  So there it was. Despite the fact that even the CDC avoided calling it a “zombie outbreak” or the “apocalypse” I fucking knew. Well, at the very least, I wasn’t about to risk it. I grabbed up my phone and tried to make a few more phone calls, but no joy. All circuits still busy. So, I formulated my plan.

  Mom lived about a mile away, right near downtown, right near the schools, and I knew I would swing by her place to see if she was okay. I had a few friends who lived right around town too, and I wanted to check on them. More importantly though, was a long term survival plan. My condo was shitty in terms of a place to hole up, so I needed a place to go. I knew almost immediately I would come here, back to the school. It had everything.

  I would get guns, some supplies, food, and then head to the school. Ride it out from there and see what happens. As you can tell, I made it here in one piece. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Unfortunately my guilt over wasting this gas has finally reached its boiling point. Plus I’m getting really fucking tired and I need to lock the upstairs down so I can sleep soundly.

  I think for my next entry I’ll talk about the trip to get here. And what I found when I did.

  Until next time Mr. Journal.

  -Adrian

  September 27th

  Hi Mr. Journal. I think it’s all starting to get to me. I did not have a very good week here at all. Nothing bad happened, which is awesome really, but I think spilling my guts last Tuesday opened up some fucking epic wounds I had really forgotten about.

  I’m sitting here with tears welling up in my eyes as I think about the fact that I did not go and at least try and find Cass. Cassie. Just typing her name is hard for me to do right now. I sat here looking at this blank white sheet of pixilated paper for almost an hour just trying to think of something to write about but I couldn’t. All I could think about was the fact that my awesome goddamn plan that day didn’t include at least trying to rescue the woman I should’ve married.

  I mean, I’m alive, and that’s good, but it all seems pretty fucking pointless without her here. Like, why do I even bother to make myself dinner when she’s not here to tell me how bad my cooking is? We were together for so long and I just don’t know why I didn’t ask her to marry me sooner. Fear of commitment? Wedding was too expensive? Was I afraid her parents would say no? Shit I don’t know. And it kills me I never will know. My mouth is bone dry right now. I can’t even swallow.

  I’ve sat in bed, snuggled up with Otis and just laid there thinking about this. I’ve been so busy getting this place safe from the zombies that I haven’t had time to really think about it until now. She has to be dead, right? She was never the “survivor” type. She lost her goddamn mind when there was a spider in the house, I can’t envision her keeping her shit together when people are dying all around her, then sitting up and attacking her too. My most frequent delusion about her death is that she died in a car accident trying to get out of the city. You know, she would’ve taken the stairs to get out of the building, ran to her car, dodging the undead’s awkward lunges. I can see her starting her little car, backing out into the street, and then getting creamed at an intersection by some fucking asshole in a giant SUV trying to do the same thing as her. In my guilt filled vision she not only is killed instantly, but is either decapitated, or is so mangled that she can’t get back up as the undead.

  I think thinking of it that way makes me feel like it’s better that way. At least if she died that way she isn’t hurting anyone else, and at least that way I will never have to worry about seeing her disintegrating body shambling towards me someday. Man I hope that never happens. I don’t think I could take seeing that. Seeing her beautiful face all ashen and bloody, teeth bared, slowly clawing at the air as she comes toward me.

  Just typing that makes my fucking skin crawl.

  There’s this enormous part of me that says I should go get a truck from the maintenance barn and make my way to her work. For closure. I know I won’t find her, at least, I know I won’t find her alive. I think if I did find her car smashed to shit in an intersection I might feel better about myself. About my decision that day. You know at least I could say that I was right about not going to try and find her. She was probably already dead by the time I even knew what was going on that day. There was no chance that I could’ve saved her.

  Then the little prick inside me says; “Adrian, but what if you find her dead, walking along the road, slowly making her way home, slowly making her way back to you?” And my ambition to go get closure just dries right the fuck up. I think that little prick, that little voice inside me is my cowardice. I never thought of myself as a coward. Really. I’ve waded into some pretty dangerous shit in my 34 years on this planet, and not once did I give it a second thought.

  Why the fuck did I give up on her so easily that day?

  Fuck you Mr. Journal.

  -Adrian

  September 28th

  Mr. Journal I’m profoundly sorry for my outburst at the end of the last journal. Good sentence right there. I think a few of my English teachers just rolled over in their graves. Well actually a few of my English teachers probably just burped up the entrails of a few of my math teachers, but you get the idea. Sorry surviving English teachers, that was pretty tasteless.

  Pun not intended.

  I feel better about myself today. I think yesterday’s journal entry was cathartic for me. Finally admitting out loud that I failed myself and Cass that day has relieved me of some guilt. I actually slept pretty good last night for the first time since my first journal entry. I’ve been restless for a long time, and it was really rejuvenating to get a full 8 hours of sleep. Otis can sense my troubles too, and i
t has had him on edge. He’s been largely avoiding me for a few days now, and finally this morning he actually came up to me as I woke up and looked for some attention. Apparently he can figure out when I’m emotionally capable of giving him some affection. I am so thankful he’s still around.

  After I gave him his love this morning I had a bit of a startle. The campus here is pretty fucking out of the way. We’re at the end of a country dead end road in a small town, miles from anything even remotely looking like civilization. There are maybe fifteen houses along the five miles heading up the hills to get here. Our campus is surrounded by water. There is a lake all along one side of the property, and the lake has a river draining down the hill we’re on that skirts the other side of the property. Shit, you need to cross a bridge to get here. It’s as close as you can get to an island without needing a boat. Hence part of its allure as a last ditch place to hold up. I parked two of the transport vans we used to use to get the kids around use on the far side of the bridge and there’s no way anything can get across. Someone could climb across the top, but the zombies are far too stupid to put that plan together. Living people would need to get out and cross on foot if they were coming to visit.

  I hate using my guns now. A: It’s a waste of ammunition, B: we have an archery range here, and arrows are reusable if I do it right, and C: guns are loud, and could theoretically draw unwanted attention. Anyway, when I went out to check the campus for dead folk, lo and behold there were two zombies shuffling and milling about on the far side of the vans. I don’t think they knew I was here, but honestly, I didn’t ask them. It took me three arrows to hit both of them in the head and re-kill them, so to speak. My first shot just thunked right into the dry, empty eye socket of the first zombie. He dropped like a bag of wet laundry. My second shot sailed pretty wide right, not sure why, it felt good when I let it go. But, third time’s the charm, and I hit the other zombie squarely in his brainpan. I sat still for a bit, waiting to see if there were any other undead dudes on the other side of the bridge, and after a bit, I crossed carefully and retrieved all three arrows. All three were fine for use again.