Experiment Time
Alright. I am sorry to inform you that this is NOT another submission of the Luca/Ronnie/Beccah saga. I am, quite honestly, burnt out for the moment. That does not mean I am stopping the series, it means I need a mental reboot. So here I am with something I learned in creative writing classes that focused on marathon writing. It's a tactic in which you just write out any random short story that comes to your head. The further from your current track of thought, the better. So put some ideas in a hat and drew out the plot line of "Zombie Apocalypse." This will be my first zombie story, as it is not my typical genre of writing, and I will be writing this entirely free of edit (besides spelling and grammatical corrections) right here in the submission box. That's right, you're reading this in raw format. Oh, and I'll be honest, this isn't furry. The characters are all human.
Zombie Apocalypse
Paul hadn't exactly been the most accepted person in the world. He wasn't the best looking guy, he was an average C student, and his general capacity for unique skills and talents was nill. The only thing distinctive about him, in fact, was his unhealthy obsession for zombie literature. Paul Mathos was The Zombie Guy.
Unbeknownst to Paul, his "little" obsession was actually a very diagnosable symptom of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He didn't just write about zombies or talk about them often. Paul ran four amateurish web pages and ran full debates on an almost daily basis about how to deal with zombie invasions. He openly considered all kinds of zombies and debated survival tactics for each and every case. Intelligent, raving, fast or slow, he had the answers to all of it. Then again, once one spends a solid sixteen hours a day every day of his post-high school life on a subject for the much better part of a decade, one becomes an absolute expert on the subject.
Paul even enjoyed some moderate success as a writer the last couple years of the pre-zombie annihilation. He had several volumes on the matter, mostly guidebooks on survival and fiction pieces about how specific people survived their respective zombie hell. What his fans didn't know was that Paul had stockpiled several tactical shotguns, tens of thousands of rounds of ammo, an armored SUV, and a year's supply of food in his home. Not only that, his house had concrete walls and roof, bullet- and impact-proof windows, and his front and back doors were actually steel plates with decorative wood paneling in the front and back to hide the fact. His basement housed an entire water distillation system, his roof an array of solar panels as well as a hatch that could open and unveil a wind turbine. Every penny Paul earned from his success in the printing world was burned up on his little fortress in the middle of Miami.
What had once been a blessing veiled in a curse, however, soon became a hellacious torment. Paul had been sitting in his home, alone, for the past year of his life. Outside was all death and terror. His windows only looked upon the empty faces of a few dozen zombies that remained constantly gathered around his house, staring in blankly. Thank god they're slow zombies he always reminded himself whenever he occasioned a glance behind the curtains that kept their haunted faces from view. Mrs. Gutierrez, his next door neighbor, was now nearly unrecognizable. A year of Miami sunshine and storms, along with a Category 3 hurricane that slammed the area only this past August, had rendered her flesh to some tattered shreds that clung to her muscular tissue like toilet paper to the bottom of your shoe. And to think how often he spied on her from his own window as she changed in her bedroom. She was so young to be the wife of a forty-something businessman, and still had the nubile curves of a college student. Paul had stopped looking at her ragged face only about a month before, in mid-September.
Paul looked in on his massive storeroom that had once been fully stockpiled. Now only a couple weeks of his food stock remained. He had been debating with himself over and over about what to do at this point. Did he make a break for it? Did he ration the food to half-servings, cutting his calorie intake to 1000? Maybe 700?
It didn't take long for Paul to finally make his decision to execute his desperation maneuver. He wasn't going to survive here. The house was adequate for protection, but had none of the resources to continue supplying him with food. Plus the loneliness was just about to push him to breaking point.
Paul collected his food, several huge glass jugs of water, and did his cycle of preventative maintenance on the SUV in the garage. He replaced the battery with one from his stockpile that had been charged by the turbine only the night before, changed the oil and tranny fluid, checked tire pressure and integrity, and went through the motions for a dozen other chekpoints. He was ready.
Paul confirmed his checklist for the fifth time before locking the door between the garage and the house (which was also a metal-plate door), just in case he ran into a new stockpile of food he could sqirrel away to his home and live another year. He got into the SUV, locked the doors with several presses of the lock button (can never be too safe), and hit the garage door clicker.
Nothing.
Paul cursed. The batteries were dead in the clicker. He got out, unlocked the door, and repeated the entire process again after replacing the batteries. Checked his list five times, hit the door lock several times, and then clicked the garage door opener.
This time, it opened. Paul placed a pair of sunglasses over his eyes as the sunlight from this Miami morning flooded the room along with several zombies. They moved slowly, much moreso than when this entire debacle started. Somehow, Paul had a lot of trouble believing these slow undead creatures could overwhelm all of human civilization. Perhaps there was more to this infection than he thought. Either way, he didn't have the equipment to analyze the virus, nor the gall to face a zombie one-on-one. His obsession was limited to fantasy. Now that he faced these horrendous creatures, it was a much different story.
Pulling out of the garage, Paul realized something first and foremost about this apocalyptic world: it reeked. He'd gone through so many images of what the zombie apocalypse would look like, but the rotten smell that wafted in through his air vents painted what he saw in more vivid a way than anything could ever have done. He hit the recirculate button, praying for some relief of it. Still it continued to permeate everything. Miami may have had the best weather for future survivle, but the reek of year-round summer on dead and decaying things was very evident to him now.
Paul decided that he would try the local grocery store first. But when he arrived there, he found himself staring at mostly useless rubble. The roof had collapsed inward over half the store, perhaps from a twister from one of the summer storms or the hurricane that swept through. Grabbing his shotgun and locking a fifty-round barrel onto the bottom of it, Paul wondered in silence what the name of that hurricane would have been. He put the car in park and attached the keys to a chain that was worn around his waist like a belt. He manually unlocked the latch on his door, taking one last scan for zombies. He wasn't going to get caught off-guard on his first time out, he swore to himself. Part of him didn't even want to go. But the urge to find something in the rubble was very alluring.
Stepping out, Paul relocked the doors and slammed the driver's door home. The reek outside was even worse, and he pulled up his undershirt from his armored jacket to cover his mouth and nose. His boots clinked lightly with each step, the knee-highs draped in chainmail armor. They were heavy as sin, but at least no ankle-biting zombie would crawl from some hole and bite his leg.
As he approached, Paul spotted two zombies staring down into a trash bin. They looked up, hearing his approach. He looked around again. Still mostly clear. He wanted to keep it that way. Pulling a pistol with a silencer on it from a holster on his side, he leveled it at the approaching zombies. He put one cleanly through each of their foreheads long before they could do their scrambling little shuffle to eat him. They fell to the ground like the wet, bloated sacks of rot they were.
Once inside the supermarket, Paul went to high alert. The caved-in half was too rubble-ridden to cross through to get to the stock area, so he had to keep to the dark side of the store. Long shadows were everywhere, the smell of rotten flesh as permeable as ever.
Paul slowly walked his way down the canned vegetable aisle, and found his target with a great amount of disappointment. The weather had gotten into this area, and all the cans had rusted and burst open. Some fresh cans could be seen amongst the maggot-ridden filth, but Paul didn't dare try to grab at them for fear of a bacterial infection. There were other deadly things besides zombies in this world, after all.
A sudden crashing sound made him whirl, and Paul barely noticed the stinging scratch that was incurred as his thigh scraped against a broken shelf, the jutting metal actually getting through his heavy jeans to give him a good scratch. Even with his racing heart, he realized he'd have to fashion a better set of chainmail. Besides his hands and head, his thighs were vulnerable. He didn't like that.
Going towards the sound, Paul was suddenly surprised by the sight of a dozen or so zombies approaching the aisle he was on. But panic didn't grip him. No. He was prepared for this. He'd done the breathing exercizes, the shooting range, the silly incantations he whispered in his head to clear his mind.
Pulling the trigger and cocking the shotgun in rapid succession, Paul watched as the heads of each of the zombies disappeared into clouds of red and gray matter. Blood splatter was not a problem. Most of their blood streams had long since dried and coagulated into hard vessels of black.
Paul decided his time was up here. He would find another store, much further north perhaps. He had a stockpile of gasoline that would get him clear up to northern Georgia, if he wanted.
Outside, Paul dispatched three more zombies with the same ease. But more were coming. The gunshots were like a beacon for them. He quickly got into his SUV and hauled himself away as quickly as he could.
Several hours had passed, and Paul was still making his way north. It was difficult getting along, and he abandoned the freeways rather quickly in favor of side roads. The pile-ups and backups were just too immense for him to get by in his SUV.
It was well along US-27 that he started to notice something rather unusual. The traffic jams he had to navigate around were gone. Ruined hulks of cars were shoved to the side. Human habitation? He wondered. As he went further, now just north of the area that marked the parallel at the north side of Lake Okeechobee, Paul was convinced of it. A huge sign was painted in crude letters by the side of the road:
"Walk like a zombie,
die like a zombie.
You don't get
another warning."
Paul was encouraged. And when he drove up to a gateway blocking 27, he was downright ecstatic. That was, until, he got out of the SUV. The place looked long abandoned. The doors were hanging slightly ajar, the sentry post was empty and half-collapsed. He sighed, deciding he'd drive on through and get further along before taking a rest somewhere relatively safe. He got to the giant doors that blocked the roadway and gave one a little push.
Paul didn't expect a trap.
Suddenly, he felt the ground beneath give way. He realized only too late that he was standing on a conspicuously carved square of road.
Hitting a slide that curved gradually back to level, Paul found himself thrown into a small room with metal grating for a floor. The walls had no corner; it was a perfectly cylindrical room of solid concrete. A missil silo, he quickly realized as the hatch that threw him in here closed shut with a loud clang.
"Prepare for inspection," a voice suddenly said, crackling over the radio. The voice was dry, harsh, and weathered.
"What inspection?" Paul croaked, shutting his mouth quickly. Did he really sound like that? He hadn't spoken for a year, at the very least. His voice felt so unused and wretched.
A smallish door opened to his side, and there was a set of small bars blocking him from reaching inside or doing anything. He heard a faint sniffing sound from the dark hole that opened. What it was, however, he didn't realize until he heard loud, frenzied barking with several snarling growls thrown in. A dog! He hadn't heard one in so long. He was almost crying with gratitude. That was until the little hatch closed and the voice came back on.
"Inspection failed. You are to be terminated immediately."
"Wait, what!?"
"You are infected. You will be executed."
"You depend on a goddamn dog!?"
"You'll watch your language, stranger. And that dog was trained specifically to sniff out zombies and those infected."
"But I haven't been bit!"
"You have a scratch on your leg. Obviously the bacterium entered your blood that way."
"You can get it that way?" he wondered aloud.
"Yes. Our research shows the bacterium can survive for a long time without a host, and is nearly impervious to most disinfection practices."
"Most? What does work?" Paul asked, his curiosity piqued. The voice took a while to respond. The operator may have been perplexed by the curiosity. After all, Paul was just told he was going to die. Who wondered about scientific principles in the face of death? OCD was a bitch like that.
"Fire," the voice said flatly. "Do you have a denomination?"
"What?"
"Your religion. What are you."
"Oh ah... Catholic I guess. That's what I was baptized as, at least." Paul felt his stomach churning. The prospect of death was much more real now. "What are you going to do?"
"Read you your last rites. Then you will be executed."
Paul swallowed hard. His heart was pounding now. He had to think of something--anything--to stall this madman until he could talk to someone more civil. "You ah... Don't you have to be a priest to do that?"
"I am a priest."
Paul began to sob. "Please, Father, don't do this."
The priest went on with his ministrations. Somewhere down below him, Paul could hear some sort of mechanism being manipulated. Even through Paul's building level of hysterical crying, the man who called himself a priest continued in applying first Penance, as if Paul was unable to do so himself--and that was probably true. Once the voice over the intercom reached Viaticum, Paul was rocking in the corner. He couldn't think of what to do. His mind was racing, but all that kept coming up was useless zombie trivia. His panic and anxiety only led to a deeper level of his OCD. He couldn't get away from it.
Finally, the priest spoke directly to Paul again. "Anything you want me to say over you as your soul is admitted through the gates of heaven?"
Paul only sobbed, muttering something about accuracy and its importance when dealing with running zombies.
"Alright, then."
"Please! Wait!" Paul managed to croak.
"What is it?"
"I don't want to die!"
"Neither do we."
The faceless priest pressed a button in his control room. A column of fire filled the launch tube that once housed a massive ICBM, burning the infected man inside up at several thousand degrees. He didn't hear a scream. He never did. The fire roared too loudly.