Zombie Apocalypse 101

My name is Paul.  I’m twenty-five years old, and grew up right here in Detroit, Michigan.  It’s the year 2050 and a lot has happened in the past week!  Not that I’ve been able to witness it all, or anything like that.  You see, I died a week ago today. Cut down by an angry mob in my prime.  You might be thinking to yourself, “Hey, this story Is a total downer already!  I can’t see where this is possibly going!”  Oh ye of little faith… There’s a catch!  I’m alive again!  Back in the flesh, baby!  Funny thing about the word flesh…  It stays on the tip of your tongue, doesn’t it?  Flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh… I seem to think about that word a lot lately…

Now you might be wondering to yourself again, and I must say, these questions are going to get real old, real quick if you keep this up, “Paul!  Bro!  How the hell are you alive again?”  The answer to that question, however, is a little more complicated.  You know how humans spent all this money and all these years exploring space, looking for intelligent life, while there were things in our own ocean that we didn’t know about?  Well one of those things we didn’t know about had just enough time to evolve into a parasite that can take over a hosts body, living, or recently deceased, as long as there’s a brain left to control.

Control is a weird sort of word in this case.  It doesn’t so much control you as much as it gives you this insatiable appetite for human flesh…  There’s that word again… flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh…

These things infested a few swimmers around the world, and spread like wildfire, multiplying and finding new hosts to rent out space in.

So here I am!  Recently deceased, back to life, but my skin continues to rot.  I still have my thoughts, but this lovely little parasite that has lodged itself into my head has taken away a tremendous amount of my motor skills, and has me on this never-ending quest to enjoy that elusive delicacy!  The flesh of a human being.  Flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh…  Loving that word right now!

So anyway, back to the story.  I woke up this morning... arose, rather, to find myself a little stiff, but in this really schnazzy suit!  I was looking around and saw I was in a casket.  This realization hit me like a ton of bricks.  Do you know what it feels like for your brain to suddenly start functioning again after it’s been dead for several days?  I’ll tell you.  It hurts like hell.  Think of the worst migraine you’ve ever had and multiply that about a million times, give or take a few thousand.

So I get up and rub out these kinks in my neck and back.  I go outside, and what do I see?  Only half of the city of Detroit on fire.  I know what you’re thinking, “But Paul, that’s like an everyday thing in Detroit!”  No big deal, right?  Well, this time it was a big deal.  The fires today were especially large, and today, they weren’t caused by a bunch of hoodlums!

I’m outside, and I’m looking around, and I think to myself, “Man!  I’m going to be killed again, because everyone knows that you kill zombies.”  Strangely enough, I wasn’t the only one.  There were thousands of people just like me!  All with different levels of injury about them.  You see, the thing with this parasite is, it still needs a good portion of an un-decayed brain in order to relay these impulses through your body.  Any brain will do, as long as it’s partially in tact.  I saw a guy, or a zombie, rather, chasing after someone who was clearly still a human.  This guy’s face looked as if it had been on the wrong end of a shotgun recently, but here he was!  Still out and about.  He was rather spry for someone with half of a face.  This overwhelming urge came over me to run after them, and to partake in his new fleshy treat with him, and so that’s what I did… Fleshy, fleshy, flesh, flesh!

I had never found it as easy to be a cannibal as I had today.  It was a satisfying meal, but wasn’t the greatest tasting thing in the world.  To be honest, it could have tasted like dog shit, and I probably still would have eaten it.

I spoke to the zombie who had caught up with this human.  His name was Dave.  We exchanged pleasantries, and decided to leave our leftovers as a hungry zombie population swarmed our latest conquest.

Dave was an average sized zombie, and had long, stringy hair on the side of his head that was still there.  He told me that before this infestation, he had been a truck driver.  An unfriendly man had put a shotgun to the back of his head as he was walking back to his rig one night at an abandoned truck stop, pulled the trigger, and made off with his truck full of brand new TV’s.   Of course, he probably didn’t have much time to make any money off of them, considering ninety-five percent of the population of Earth had been turned into a zombie only a day and a half later.

It didn’t take long before I got over the fact that Dave’s brain was partially hanging out of his head and that one of his eyeballs were barely hanging on by a nearly detached optic nerve.  He was just another zombie like me.  We roamed through the city together, looking for more humans, and talked about our newly found fascination of the human anatomy.

Both having watched our fair share of zombie apocalypse movies in our time, we were ready for a heavy resistance, full of military men, and renegade humans with a lot of stored up firepower, just in case something crazy like a zombie infestation went down.  But we were met with none.  Days passed, and there were no gunshots.  No sounds of tanks coming down alleyways.  No sounds of airplanes or choppers overhead.  It was just us and our zombie thoughts.  These parasites had spread so quickly that there wasn’t really anyone left to mount a resistance.

We encountered plenty of other zombies during our travels, but none of them seemed too friendly.  We decided it was best to keep our distance. 

We were both getting hungry again, and those little insistent voices in our head kept whispering to the two of us… “Flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh.”  After having walked aimlessly through the city for two days straight, the voices grew louder, becoming more and more demanding with each passing hour. 

I turned my head to the side and proceeded to pound on my ear.  “Get out of my head you filthy bastard!”  I said out loud but to no avail.  I shrugged my shoulders at Dave, who reached up and scratched the air where his scalp should have been.

I was immediately overcome by the urge to feed again.  I realized that I had only had one meal since my rebirth as a zombie.  The dried blood from our conquest still tinged my hands and chin.  Zombie hunger was certainly a different sensation than human hunger.  Our stomach didn’t growl, and the acid didn’t churn.  We were satisfied in body, but were never satisfied in mind.  There was always the urge to feed.  It never went away.

A few more days of nothingness passed by.  Our zombie brethren were dying off like flies around us.  Their flesh was steadily decaying and falling idly on the streets around them.  I noticed that Dave and I were falling into the same affliction.  Bits of flesh were hanging loosely from my arms and legs, some fell to the wayside.  My companion Dave was even worse.  His right arm was hanging on by a thread at this point.

We looked out onto the horizon, wondering if this sunset would be the last we would see.  Upon further inspection, we realized we had come to the outskirts of the city and saw a wooded area.  It was then that we realized that even the wildlife around us had been afflicted by these parasites.  We both lay down beside of the nearest tree where our hunger overcame us.  The short friendship that Dave and I had shared was over, and our bodies slowly deteriorated into nothingness.  The rest of our zombie population would soon follow.  The parasites that had created us had apparently not evolved enough to understand the concept of survival of the fittest.  Their insatiable appetite was ultimately the bane of life on Earth.

So here I am, back at square one.  Dead, alive, and then dead again.  All in the blink of an eye without any time to adjust.  The world is empty now, a spinning blue ball of nothingness.  Plant and insect life have become the dominant species.  The world as I knew it, both as a human and as a zombie had been blown to the wayside, and we had made way for a new era on Earth.

Project Number Two: Zombies!

I asked a friend of mine for a suggestion on what I should write about, and no sooner did I read the words "zombie apocalypse" did I have an idea!  I sure hope you enjoy the read.  I'm sorry that the ending is kind of a failure, but I got caught at a point where delving into it any deeper would have turned my short story into a 'too long to be fun anymore' story.

Either way, hope it's a fun read!

The Smart Bunny

Having grown up in the deep south, I’m no stranger to all sorts of critters.  The ones here come in all shapes and sizes, colors and IQ’s.   IQ is the important statistic for you to remember in this story.

Now a lot of people believe that the larger the animal, the larger the intellectual capacity of that animal.  This, in fact, is not the case.  Down in my neck of the woods, it seems as though the larger the creature, the less intelligent it is.  After a century or more of modern automobiles, deer still manage to stand in front of one, barreling down the road, spelling nothing more than impending doom.  Even most of the humans around here can hardly speak in proper English, which brings me to a very important character in our story.  He goes by the name of Dudley Farrow.

Now Dudley isn’t exactly what you could call the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I guess that’s what happens when your mother and father are as closely related as second cousins.  No one knew that but Dudley and myself.  He always hung around, and confided in me to keep some of his deepest, darkest secrets.  You’re the only person that I have told his secret to, but you seem like you’re trustworthy enough.  The great thing about having big, dumb friends, is that they are as loyal as a dog.  That’s not to say that I take advantage of Dudley’s friendship at every chance I get, but it sure is nice to know that the option is there.

Dudley, like a lot of other young men in the south, loves to hunt.  A tour through his home is certainly not going to be enjoyed by any sort of animal lover.  His home is a veritable who’s who of stuffed woodland creatures.  Everything that was anything at one point or another, hung proudly on his wall, in these ridiculous and obscene poses.  Dudley would swear that these poses all looked ‘so natural,’ but anyone with more than a half of a brain could see otherwise.   Sadly enough, I had the opportunity to meet most of these animals that Dudley had hanging about his home about a week before they ever made it there.  My home was conveniently between Dudley’s favorite hunting grounds and his home, so anytime he managed to end some creatures miserable existence, he made sure to bring the corpse by my place in the back of his truck to tell me his war stories while I pretended to ‘ooh and ahh’ at his prize.  Some of the stories Dudley would cook up would make you think that he had just come home from ‘Nam and that he had somehow managed to take out fifty slant-eyes  with no more than the little plastic toothpick out of a Swiss Army Knife. 

One day, Dudley came by my house and welcomed himself inside.  He found me sitting on my couch watching television, and beckoned me outside to see what he had killed.  Something about today was different though.  Dudley looked perplexed and concerned.  Well, to be honest, Dudley always managed to wear a confused look on his face, but this day, he managed to wear it extra well.

I drug myself off of my sofa, and proceeded to the door, a little more interested in Dudley’s conquest than normal.  I trotted out to his truck, and peered into the bed to find three rabbits, two of which looked entirely normal.  The third, however, had a massive skull.  It must have been twice the size of the others.  Dudley had told me that he had planned on eating these three, but upon inspection of the one with the unusually large head, he deduced that it must have had some sort of disease, and it would be better if he just threw her out.  I nodded in agreement, partly because I didn’t know what else to do, and partly because I probably wouldn’t have eaten it either if it had been up to me.

I went back inside, and resumed business as usual, but I couldn’t help but to think of what sort of life this female bunny must have led.  I decided to name her Marie, after Marie Curie.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with Marie Curie, she was a physicist who was a pioneer in the field of radioactivity, who died from aplastic anemia, which was almost certainly contracted by her exposure to radiation.

*       *       *

Today started off as another normal day for Marie the bunny. She awoke whenever she pleased, and slowly slid back into her state of crippling depression.  Marie had a brain the size of a planet, but no one around her to indulge her in thought.  Her ideas were wasted on the likes of the other rabbits in her general vicinity.  Marie’s thought processes rivaled those of Albert Einstein, and she had in fact, unbeknownst to all of mankind, become the most intelligent creature on the planet.  While she did all of the things that ordinary rabbits do, Marie had ideas about life, science, and mathematics, bursting from her skull constantly, and she had never managed to find a way to turn these thoughts off.

In keeping with rabbit tradition, Marie had a bunny partner, who was just as simple and as ordinary as any other rabbit in existence.  He, however, has no name.  A creature that insignificant, without any kind of intelligent thought process doesn’t need a name.  He and Marie had already had twenty baby bunnies together.  Each one, Marie hoped, would get some sort of her intellect.  She had only agreed to mating because she had such high hopes for her children.  She longed for another creature to communicate with, but when all of her children were born just as any other rabbit had been, she decided that her intelligence was a disease, and that her skull was the size that it was because of a massive tumor.  This, however, was not the case.

Marie had been around humans and modern day civilization enough to assume that she needed medical attention.  And while doctors in a hospital wouldn’t be receptive to giving medical attention to a bunny that just waltzed through their front door, Marie had thought of another kind of doctor that she had heard humans talking about… a veterinarian.

This day, Marie decided, was a fine day to fix all of her problems.  She decided that she would hop into town, and sneak inside the vet’s office, posing as the pet of some neighborhood child, who desperately needed a tumor removed, and upon having her surgery, she would be just like every other bunny, and wouldn’t be burdened with such thoughts as the ones that plagued her day in and day out.

She set out.  It was a hot and sticky day with no breeze in sight.  Marie was hopping through a clearing with nothing but a glaring sun overhead.  Her head burst with profound ideas about the sun and the other distant stars.  She managed to shake these thoughts out of her head, but they were replaced immediately after by thoughts of the species of plants that she was passing by.  “Soon,” she said to herself, “all this will be over, and I will finally know what it is like to be happy.”  No sooner did these words leave her bunny brain, she heard a very loud noise, and less than one-hundredth of a second later, she was met by a piece of metal, which tore straight through her chest, leaving her dead on contact.  This was about the time that Dudley walked over to retrieve her body and end a rather long day of hunting.

After her body had been shown to nearly everyone in town, Dudley and his wife Grace decided that it would be best if they did not eat this rabbit in particular.  They assumed what she had assumed when she was alive, that her unusually large head must have meant that she had some sort of disease and would be harmful if consumed, and that was not a risk that Dudley was  not willing to take.

This may not have been the path to happiness that Marie had been hoping for, but it worked just as well.  Marie had no disease, and her body had been wasted.  Dudley and Marie, no matter how drastically different from one another, both made the mistake that millions of people do on a daily basis.  Just because someone is different from everyone, or in this case, everything else, doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with them.

-uninspired.scribe

My First Project

Yesterday, I was speaking to a friend of mine.  I told him about my new blog, and what I had hoped to accomplish through it.

I was ready to start writing on here, but had come face-to-face with the problem that prompted this project in the first place.  WRITER'S BLOCK.

I proceeded to ask him to give me a prompt that I could just write a short story on, but he was not able to come up with something on such short notice.  After talking for a few minutes, he gave me a brilliant idea.

A week or so beforehand, he had recommended a book to me called Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut.  One of the characters in this book was a writer who went by the name of Kilgore Trout.  Mr. Trout wrote a ton of novels, and  the ideas behind them all were totally ridiculous.  In the book, all that was said about these novels were the title, and a very short description of the story.  My friend suggested that I take one of these fictional novels and turn it into a short story, and that is exactly what I decided to do.

I found a synopsis online on one of his books called The Smart Bunny. 

This is it!  "The leading character was a rabbit who lived like all the other wild rabbits, but who was as intelligent as Albert Einstein or William Shakespeare. It was a female rabbit. She was the only female leading character in any novel or story by Kilgore Trout.

She led a normal female rabbit's life, despite her ballooning intellect. She concluded that her mind was useless, that it was a sort of tumor, that it had no usefulness within the rabbit scheme of things.

So she went hippity-hop, hippity hop toward the city, to have the tumor removed. But a hunter named Dudley Farrow shot and killed her before she got there. Farrow skinned her and took out her guts, but then he and his wife Grace decided that they had better not eat her because of her unusually large head. They thought what she had thought when she was alive--that she must be diseased."

I certainly hope that you enjoy my take on this story. 

My Plight

Writer's Block:

A condition that every writer experiences.  From the most inspired artist, capable of painting vivid and exciting pictures with their words, to the most amateur. The writer of the most mundane and stodgy works. Everyone, at one point or another, experiences the dreadful writer's block.

Unfortunately, over the course of several years, I have become that drab and lackluster writer, unable to conjure up any sort of interesting  tale to spin in my spare time.  I used to be creative.  I used to be that inspired writer, who never needed a jump-start.  I had ideas that flowed from my skull like a river bursting through a dam, liberated from the one thing that has held it back for a hundred years.

These days, however, that same river has dried up, and has left nothing behind but an arid wasteland, it's inhabitants praying for rain.  That's where this blog comes in.

I have decided that I have come into this creative drought, because I have refused to put my thoughts onto paper for so many years now.  I plan to use this space as a creative outlet.  Hopefully I will become my own muse through this experience, and can once again become a prolific and resourceful writer.

My end goal for this little project of mine is to break through this writer's block,  and be able to sit down and write the novel I've always dreamed of writing.

I'm not here trying to win the sympathy of anyone, nor am I concerned with getting readers.  If you happen to stumble upon this blog, I hope you can find some enjoyment in my struggle and maybe even offer me a little insight.

Let me be the first to thank you in advance.  To all of my critics, I have but one thing to say. "Let's get started!"

-uninspired.scribe