literature

Not a Zombie Story

Deviation Actions

shufflng's avatar
By
Published:
362 Views

Literature Text

      People have settled into the city.  A few of them know that the zombie apocalypse is upon them, though the apocalypse will only be justifying their last twenty years of paranoia, not that anyone will call them on it after the dead rise up half-rotten and with a hunger for flesh.

      Preparing for Z-Day is easy enough to do.  Junkies are just as dangerous as the undead and they're everywhere in this strung-out part of town.  Hollywood has had a grip on the old zombie concept for too long now, contagion concerns are now as available as a big mac and just as stale as their super-sized french fries.  Making fall-away staircases is easy enough and just as safe as a normally nailed in stairway to people paying more attention than your average drooling ankle-biter.  The economic climate used to be enough to distract people from protecting themselves.  The legistlative boom of Homeland Security's neo-McCarthy's movement put the average citizen to sleep.  No one thought more than for a moment that they'd benefit from a 12 gauge Worthington with a free session of lessons.  The shiny, slick ads for L.A. Noir, Dior, or the latest medicinal steroid (they're called vaso-dilators on the tube) glosses over the concern for the living dead with concern for the status maintenance.  The first generation consumed by zombies are going down smelling like the finest toilet water, which should make them easy to identify for those of us who don't get rolled over with the first wave of teeming flesh and snapping jaws.

     This story is not about Z-Day.  This is just an account of the lives of a couple of people trying to overcome the peculiarities that come with a post-apocalyptic city setting and just trying to live the ordinary lives they had before worldwide disaster reset their priorities.  Claire used to love watching television.  She had assimilated it into almost every facet of her life.  She spent more time watching television and collecting trivial information to share with her friends than she spent actually sharing the information.  With the recession she had knocked her regular work down to part-time, as abundant as she could find, but wound up watching TV more than she went to work.  The news of the Z-virus outbreak was immediately put to the masses through the cable lines.  It was covered first as an informercial at four in the morning, which in retrospect might not have been the best way to go about it.  The majority of the television-watching public were busy drooling through Ambien-dreams counting golden arches two-by-two.

     Carl is an insomniac and happened to be in his classic trance when the infomercial came on early in the morning after Z-day.  He would recall later that it was the quietest outbreak he'd ever heard about, considering its importance, but this was mitigated by how few outbreaks had occurred in his lifetime.  As the hour-long commercial flashed back and forth between mid-city shots of the walking dead as they slowly covered the streets with their shambling, pitch-black frames and a call center with three rows of telephones and receptionists.  Not surprisingly, the call center was pretty dead at two o'clock in the morning.  In fact, the entire time Carl say in the cool blue glow of the infomercial not one of the telephones rang.

      A couple of weeks after Z-Day, Claire was flipping to one of her favorite channels when suddenly her cell phone rang.  She plugged in her ear buds and poked the smartphone screen, unaware how much like Judy Jetson she looked at that very moment.  Her cat, Buttons, had gotten into the nip stash and gone crazy earlier that day.  The mirror that normally hung on the wall was one of many victims to the subsequent whirlwind of fur.  Sometimes Claire's boyfriend Brad would call her and when she looked straight ahead after answering the phone she would notice the funyun that had crawled unnoticed into her hair before she embarrassed herself.  With the mirror knocked down she had no way of knowing about the family of cheerios which had woven their way into her gnarly auburn locks.
      "Hello," she said to the far wall.  With the earbuds in her ears the sound of her surroundings were suppressed.  A faint hum of life pulsed around her, throbbing deeply around her ear holes.  She had never noticed the hum before, nor the deep throbbing, since when she said hello she would normally hear a response.
      "Hello?" she said again, her face furling in concern, some of the cheerio family falling from their follicle-gripped prisons onto the floor.  They bounced almost noiselessly on the carpet.  Claire didn't notice their descent whatsoever.
      "Hm," she said to herself, unplugging her buds.  She prodded the touch-sensitive sensors on her phone to disconnect the call.  "Ooh, cheerios," she said noticing the fallen donuts of grain and honey.  Swiping her headphone cord aside she scrapes the floor with her curled fingertips, pulling the trio of cheerios into her palm and popping pieces of black gravel.  As the honey-covered bits of grain smashed between her teeth she uttered a quick groan of appreciation.  Her attention finally returned to the television, which had stopped on the local news station, just in time to see a ragged grey form catch the head anchor and rip his larynx from his throat.  The broadcast suddenly cut short and Claire's screen was covered in jagged static.  She never watched television again after that.

      It's hard to explain why a public-outcry about the zombie outbreak didn't occur, especially here after the fact.  Hindsight is 20/20, but we're still standing with our noses in the foul end of the fallout.  Before we point fingers at the dastardly corporations, who are certainly to blame, we need to make sure we get to where we're going without having those fingers chewed off by the wall of living dead.  The army always thinks they're ready to battle the hordes of hell, since they treat their human enemies this way in the first place.  The classic shoot-first-ask-questions-later response reduced a good portion of downtown to rubble.  From the circling B-57's the rubble looked like lego bricks smashed from the main building in the wild flailing of a child having a temper tantrum.  Not very many people get such a perspective.  Those who do don't pay it much mind.
Chapter 1, intended to go toward the [link] challenge. My word program is limited so I'm not a hundred percent sure how far along the requested girth this has whittled down my future requirements, but hopefully I've left myself enough room to continue my elusive, elaborate social commentary until I make it all the way to 50,000. Anyone with any notion of assistance or criticism, you are welcome here. Let me know what I've left behind, let me know what more you'd like to see. Let me know what scenes you'd like to see Claire or Carl in next, they just might make up Chapter 2. Love you all, good night.
© 2011 - 2024 shufflng
Comments0
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In