The Undead Plague

    Ah, dear reader, I see that you have managed to find yourself a corner of the world to hide in.  What a very special corner indeed if you have managed to pick up this document so that we may become such special friends!  The introduction thingamabob that I’m sure you’ve plowed through during your descent to this, the first chapter, was of course written before our world’s little “issue”.  More specifically it was written in a wonderful little padded cell in a wonderful little asylum mere months before IT happened.  Ah, tears of longing fill my eyes as I reminisce about the good old days when all that I needed to entertain myself was small portion of dynamite and some scraps of imagination.

    This not being a novel of the graphical persuasion you can’t see the tears.  How sad for you not to be able to see raw human emotion at its most sincere.  You also can’t see the rather large grin that has spread across my face since I realized that nothing much has actually changed.

    In a way I was tailor-made for this Brave New World that we live in.  I loved the act of snuffing the life from some poor sap that I happened to watch walk down the street while in the right kind of mood, but I didn’t actually get any enjoyment out of knowing that I had killed someone.  In fact, if we’re being completely honest with each other, pal o’ mine, and I know that I’m safe with divulging my secrets to someone such as yourself, there were times that I even felt a little guilty about it.  It was the act of murder that made my pace quicken and my day brighten ever so much.  The results of the act, however, were always a separate issue entirely.

     See what I’m saying?  Clear as mud?  Excellent, let’s move on.

   Oh, but this world that we live in now, how glorious it is!  I can ply my craft in so many ways, both oldie but goody ways and brand new innovative ways, without the taking of a single human life!  In fact, I’m often in the company of honest-to-goodness real live human beings and they not only seem to usually enjoy my company, but they also praise what I do.  How mind-twistingly superb is that?  The people that I spend my time with appreciate the depth of my artistic talents and even encourage me to expand my creative horizons.  In return for finally getting the respect and admiration that I so richly deserve (I say that in the most self-deprecating and modest way that I can) I don’t even think about making that special light fade from their eyes.  It hasn’t even crossed my mind a single time.  There are times that, while lying in bed at night, I can almost convince myself that this world was made by God specifically for me and no one else.

    I bet that you haven’t run across many people that were actually thankful for the undead hordes covering the surface of the planet, have you?  Ah, see, that makes me a rather special and unique acquaintance that you can be sure will give you quite a few stories to tell your grandchildren someday when you’re old and grey.  Well, assuming that some pack of zombies hasn’t eaten your face off before you have a chance to grow old.  If you already happen to be old, hey, congratulations, you’re doing better than about ninety-nine percent of the population!  Have a drink on me!

    I wish that I had more answers for you about how all of this started, friend, but just like everyone else I’m in the dark as to how this whole zombie apocalypse shindig got started.  Oh, there were those rumors on television about that secret laboratory in Iran that was trying to create some sort of super soldier and accidentally released the zombie virus into the public, and I’ve heard the whole spiel from the religious sectors saying that this is God’s way of beginning the Rapture like He warned us about somewhere in the back of the Bible (unless you‘re Jewish, of course, in which case you won‘t find the Book of Revelations no matter how hard you search your Bible).  I suppose that either one of those are possibilities.  My personal opinion is that it’s something manmade; I base this on the fact that I can’t believe that God would be cliché enough to send zombies of all things to finish us off.  It seems like He would have a tad more imagination than that.

    What is known is that the undead managed to bump off the world’s governments in just under six months once they got started.  They obviously didn’t plan to do that since they don’t seem to be able to even plan to change those rags of clothes they tend to wear, but when you have millions of friends backing you up and the ability to make even more playmates simply by transferring body fluid through biting or any other number of ways, you tend to make bureaucrats get the hell out of your way by default.  You probably know more details about it than I do since I was locked away in the nuthouse while the initial stages were taking place.

    The only reason that I didn’t rot away in that comfy padded cell is because the warden had a bit of a conscience.  He let us go free when the wave of undead suitors arrived to plant a nice toothy kiss on us.  I had always rather liked the guy although I was far too manly to tell him so; it really was a shame when he ended up sprawled on the asylum’s entryway floor.

    Well, if we’re being completely accurate, half of him ended up there, and the other half ended up going the way of cheap sushi.

    Most of the other patients attempted to run screaming and hollering out the front gates of the asylum, where they of course came face to face with the army of undead.  It was like a scene out of 300.  A small band of nutjobs, armed only with their soft-soled shoes and a whole basket full of crazy, stood strong against overwhelming odds.

    For roughly four seconds.

    I, only the other hand, was not really made of Spartan material and had ignored the main gate.  Instead, I opted to explore the private parking lot reserved for asylum employees.  There I found a car to hotwire (Hotwiring Cars 101 is a required course during the first semester at the University of Psychopath) and drove into the nearby town.  The entire town was pretty much abandoned by the time that I got there, and it was relatively easy to rummage around the abandoned homes for new clothes and a modest stockpile of supplies to go with my brand new 1976 Chevy.

    My first real up close and personal encounter with someone of the zombie persuasion was when I accidentally kind of sort of on purpose kicked in the kitchen door of a house while in search of food.  I came through the now-splintered doorway and there he was, standing on the other side of the breakfast table and looking right at me.  A good portion of his skull was missing and his lone remaining eye swiveled wildly in its socket.  It was something of a shame, really, because all that gore had ruined the rather expensive Armani suit that he was wearing.  Such a finely tailored garment adorning such an ill-mannered brute bordered on being offensive.

    Okay, fine, you dragged it out of me, I’ll fess up.  I was indeed a bit frightened at this point.  Earlier that day I had been perfectly content leaning against my cell’s soft walls and waiting for my daily mixture of blue and purple pills.  Now I was standing smack dab in the middle of the end of days and surrounded by the living dead.  To make matters worse there was one of these fine folks not ten feet in front of me and he seemed to be taking far too much of an interest in my admittedly tasty-looking flesh.

    I really needed a hug.  And not the kind of hug that this gentleman would be only too happy to provide me with.

    I set my jaw and stared this abomination right in the eyes, erm, eye.  What was there for me to be afraid of?  He was a rotting corpse brought back to life to devour human kind, sure.  But I was a fucking serial killer!  When I was arrested a couple of years back all the papers said that I was ruthless and cold and twisted.  I had a reputation to maintain, dammit, and some undead freak wasn’t going to show me up!  This was my yard, and I’d be damned if some rotting puppy was going to come in and get rid of me, the Big Dog.

    As he began to lumber towards me, slowed a bit by the fact he was trying to go through the table instead of simply around it, I looked around the kitchen and got a sense of my surroundings.  Hadn’t I always loved kitchens?  So many sharp objects to poke with, so many blunt objects to thump with, so many hot objects to burn with.  The average home’s kitchen was a playground for someone of my particular brand of creativity.

    In the time it took me to blink I had over a dozen different ways figured out to make this zombie rue the day that he ever stepped foot into my kitchen (although the odds were pretty good that I had probably stepped into his kitchen since he was already inside the house, but who’s keeping track).  None of these options really called to me, however.  They all seemed so…mundane.  This was the first time that I was going to be killing someone that had already been killed, and I wanted to mark the occasion with something special.

    Then my eyes fell on the cordless blender sitting on the counter within easy reach and bingo, we had a winner.

    The zombie didn’t seem to be able to move very fast.  It propelled itself with an odd cross between a walk and a shuffle, its arms stretched out towards me and a constant moaning sound emanated from what used to be its lips.  I struggled to remember why I had felt threatened only moments before.

    I allowed it to get almost within arms reach before I shattered the thin plastic casing of the blender and jabbed the blades deep into the empty eye socket.  The moaning seemed to change almost from a statement to a question, but then I flipped the On switch and the sound stopped completely as its brain was puréed.  I turned off the device and whistled a few bars of “You Spin Me Around” while I went about my business of searching for food supplies to take with me to…well, wherever the hell I was going.

    The few newscasts about the Crisis (remember when the news stations were calling the zombie apocalypse a “Crisis” like it was on par with a hurricane or a stock market crash?) that I had been allowed to watch in the loony bin had talked about how the undead didn’t seem to have any coherent thought process, just a compulsion to kill and devour the living.  The zombies didn’t seem to communicate with one another and barely registered that others of their kind were around them.  The news anchors had also heavily emphasized that they were rather slow and easy to outrun, and that a calm retreat was the best way to handle an encounter.

    Well that was all fine and dandy, but retreat to where?  If the swarms were all around, where was there left to flee towards while screaming like a three year old girl?  To complicate matters, even if I managed to find some semblance of a safe shelter, the time would eventually come where I would have to emerge back into this fun world of slaughter and carnage if for no other reason than to acquire more supplies.  Besides, was I really the kind of person that would just hunker down in, say, a bomb shelter when there were so many opportunities to ply my wonderful craft?  As I navigated my Chevy over a series of speed bumps (read that as “undead”) at the outskirts of town I put my always present but never dull mind at work on the problem.

    The first conclusion that my brain came to was that I would need to track down other human survivors.  There was safety in numbers and having a few chums around would open up more opportunities for not only safety, but playtime as well.  This would mean that I would have to swear off the murdering that had always come so easy to me, but that wasn’t a problem.  I genuinely enjoyed the company of other people even when I was known as the Raincoat Killer (point in fact, it was a trench coat and not a raincoat, but leave it to terrified witnesses that barely escaped with all their limbs attached to get such an important differentiation incorrect).  And besides, it’s not like I wouldn’t have a chance to employ my skill set elsewhere.

    My second conclusion was that I needed to be smart in how I went about meeting folks.  It’s not like I could hop on Facebook.  I knew that the public’s attention span was right up there with a fruit fly’s so I wasn’t really concerned about someone recognizing me from my rather public trial.  The end of civilization as we know it can be a tad bit stressful, though, so I knew that most people wouldn’t really be thinking straight and thus would make some bad choices.  I didn’t want to get accidentally shot by some Joe Schmoe who panicked and thought I was a zombie, for example.

    I also didn’t want to hook up with people that were, well, there’s no nice way to say this, but people that were absolutely fucking retarded.  Other people being stupid and getting me killed wasn’t exactly high on my priority list.  So I needed to find people that I could count on and that could count on me.  I’m pretty sure that took the states of Alabama and Mississippi right out of consideration.

    Third, I would need to get my hands on some weapons more substantial than those that I could find sitting around the kitchens of the world.  Actually, I corrected myself, I would need to find both weapons and equipment that would allow me to survive on the move if necessary.  I had no idea how long I would still be able to find gas for my trusty car, but inevitably I would end up on foot.  I would need something to carry supplies and weapons and other odds and ends, like a backpack or a duffel bag.  The easiest place to find such a thing would be one of the large superstores that seemed to dot America’s landscape like puss-filled boils.  I figured that those would be something of a buffet for zombies right now, though, as people tried to stock up themselves, so that was out of the question.

    Ah, but what was this!  On the dashboard of my completely legally-obtained Chevy sat a GPS unit, one of the fancy kinds that allowed you to search for different kinds of restaurants and stores as well as get directions.  Keeping one hand on the wheel, I keyed in a search for the nearest sporting goods store and was pleased to see that I was only a couple of miles away from one.  As a bonus it was located away from the main town roads.  The streets were beginning to become cluttered by abandoned vehicles and the shuffling forms of the undead, meaning that it was probably a good idea to get off the busier streets sooner rather than later.

    I still hadn’t seen another living person since Leonitus led his men into battle back at Shaded Grove Asylum and I began to wonder if anyone else had actually managed to escape.  If it turned out that I was the only person still alive, I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.  I would be proud of being better than the rest of the population of the planet, of course, but I would also feel downright embarrassed to be part of the human race.

    I reached the sporting goods store, aptly titled John’s Sporting Goods, and pulled into a space near the front of the parking lot.  Notice that I made it a point to park in a space as opposed to next to the curb, and also note that the space was not reserved for the handicapped.  Just because society had collapsed didn’t mean that I should ignore proper driving etiquette.

    I got out of the car and looked around.  It was relatively silent in the parking lot and the only zombies that I could see were quite a distance away and not heading towards the store, but to be on the safe side I popped the car’s trunk and rummaged around for a moment before producing a tire iron.  I knew from experience that a tire iron isn’t nearly as hardcore of a weapon as cop dramas would have you believe.  Better than nothing, though.

    John’s Sporting Goods was abandoned; not even John himself walked the aisles.  The store had already been picked over by looters and fellow survivalists, but I managed to find a large hiking backpack underneath a tipped over display and a long length of rope that I figured might come in handy.  I glanced longingly at the display case that, according to the sign, had once housed any number of guns, but those were of course all gone and the shelves were devoid of any boxes of ammunition.  On a whim I walked over to the door marked Office and eased it open.

    Ah, John, THERE you are.  Apparently John wasn’t a Catholic since he had put a pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.  I tell you, some people just aren’t cut out for the undead rising from their graves and wiping mankind from the face of the Earth.  The pistol was still gripped in his hand and, since Johnny Boy would have a hard time aiming it in his condition, I liberated it and checked the clip.

    There were still five shots left.  I rummaged around the office for a few more minutes and managed to find a small carton containing bullets in his filing cabinet.  All in all it had been a fine shopping experience, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the thoughtful staff of John’s Sporting Goods for really going that extra mile and blowing off their heads to help me find exactly what I needed.

    I returned to the car and found that some of those zombies that I had spotted off in the distance were now a lot closer than they had been when I went inside the store and were headed my way.  Time to be going.  I got back behind the wheel, gunned the engine, and headed off in search of a good time.