Ok, Who Got Bitten?

Note: This story sprang from a long conversation involving my friend Madison and I planning what we would do during a zombie apocalypse. If a stranger had passed by and listened to our conversation that day, they may have believed that we were well prepared for a zombie invasion. We told a story of bravery, heroism, epic one-liners and happy endings. This is not that story.

Perhaps I should start from before all the shit hit the fan. Maybe I should tell you about myself and my family, my life previous to this one, and maybe you'll feel sorry for me. Or, maybe even more realistically, you’ll just feel glad you’re not in my shoes.

I was a normal teenager. It sounds weird saying that, considering what just happened. But I was happy. Maybe I wasn’t popular. Maybe I had yet to be asked to the prom, or homecoming, or any dance to begin with, and maybe my nose was crooked, but these things in life seemed small and frankly petty when compared to my peaceful first world lifestyle.

I had two loving parents, a sister who I sometimes got along with, and a bunch of great friends who supported me. Life was pretty good, despite the clogged pores and teeth that were in sore need of braces.

I was a happy, contented eighteen year old with my life ahead of me to think about. I never did anything bad, never committed a felony, never did drugs.  Actually, now that I think about it, life was pretty monotonous for me. I’d either been too chicken or too lazy to do anything risky. What could you really do when you’ve been raised all your life in the suburbs where nothing changed and people sat outside in wicker chairs smoking blunts and drinking rotgut whiskey for fun because nothing ever changed. That stuff just didn’t seem very appealing to me.

Hell, I’d gone straight through the local elementary school up into the local high school and had known all of my peers my entire life— about half were pregnant and the rest addicted to something, be it crack, dope, pills, food, online shopping, you name it. So I can, without a doubt, say that nothing even remotely interesting ever occurred in this neighborhood.

While I could technically be classified as your average shitty privileged teenager, I have always had a fascination for zombies. Not a mere, fleeting fascination, oh no. A sick morbid curiosity’s more like it. I had all the zombie flicks, every Romero movie. Even the shitty ones— especially the shitty ones. I had comics and books and video games. I could tell you the history and evolution of the modern zombie if you had a couple hours to spare, starting with voodoo and ending with a rant about how the 28 Days Later zombies weren’t technically zombies but still secretly loving that movie anyway. I had a contingency plan in the event of a zombie infestation and would have built up a nice collection of knives by now but my father had disapproved of the whole thing and prevented me from doing so.

The point of all this is to show you just how unprepared I actually was. Even with all of this quasi-knowledge and stores of useless trivia, I was one hopeless individual when the time came to step up to the plate. And if you haven’t guessed by now, the time in question arrived unexpected and quicker than a knife fight in a phone booth.

It so happened that it was my shitty luck that I was lazing around on the couch working on strengthing my love handles when the biggest worldwide catastrophe ever experienced by mankind began... besides the invention of the mullet.

The beginning of the end of the world was a bright, beautiful day, actually. It began on a Saturday, my favorite day. The day after Friday and before Sunday, a day sandwiched in between those two other days that allowed you to stay up late and sleep in, a day I always looked forward to because sleeping is my favorite pasttime.

I wanted to spend the day hanging out at the house and watching movies with my sister, but she ended up going upstairs to take a nap. I was by myself watching that damned Marley and Me movie, the one about the dog that dies, and crying all the while. I seriously hate that movie, and words cannot express my disdain for Owen Wilson's acting career at this point, but this is a moot point. 

I sat splayed upon the couch ravenously eating Doritos while flipping through channels, trying to find some sort of entertainment that didn’t involve dead dogs, cartoons, or reality television. For some reason, perhaps guided by the very hand of God himself (or more likely that I'd accidentally hit the 7 button instead of the intended 4), I flicked to a news report which actually caught my interest and wasn’t a superfluous filler story about a local science fair and the kid who'd made a solar-powered hotdog cooker that was also a solution to global warming, judging from the story. We all know that kid, let's not pretend that we didn't hate him when we were in school with our lousy "Which toilet paper can hold the most water" project that was half-assed and not even a valid scientific experiement .