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.