8 Days Later - A Carefully Crafted Piece....

2

Chapter 2 - The Film's Plot: Jim

Jim was a bicycle courier living in Deptford, England who got struck by a car while working. The collusion and impact of the car was so great as to inspire a coma in the now-unresponsive Jim. Prompting worry and concern in his parents.

Until he woke up.

Thinking that he just woke up after a simple, complete accident involving a car, he was perplexed when he noticed that no one was in the hospital. "Hello, hello" didn't really seem to provoke much of anything in terms of a response, prompting him to get himself out of his hospital bed, removing tubes and intravenous connections from his body.

Missing his clothes, he put on hospital scrubs - for patients - and exited the room. Not just his room, he noticed, was empty. The complete hall was seemingly deserted. His calls of "hello, hello" didn't do shit.

At the downstairs area of the hospital building, he found a vending machine that was completely trashed, exposing its goodies on the floor and other places.

Thirsty, he got a Pepsi from the vending machine and drank from the can until completely empty. He got a plastic bag near the side of the vending machine, and used it to bring some more drinks with him in case he's thirsty.

He then left the hospital building.

Walking along liminal, abandoned London, he passes by abandoned cars, trashed areas, crashed vehicles. No people in sight. The sights were apocalyptic. It's like the people were there one time, gone the next. Because that is the case.

He passes by an abandoned, trashed bank, and - still confused but thinking that this is probably just some massive-scale practical joke - he takes the banknotes from the dirty floor - as much as he could find - and puts it in his bank.

He then just keeps on walking. Walking, walking, walking. It doesn't really hit him until some point that something is really off and wrong with this city.

To make sure of his suspicions, weirdly, he enters a church: churches are never empty.

He goes inside through the entrances and passes through church decor. He then discovers that all the churchgoers have all died. Suicide or otherwise. Maybe they knew that this was rapture: one way or another, they were not gonna make it. God's judgment or not, they knew - perhaps - they were gonna die. So maybe this was some sort of cultish mass-suicide. Kind of like Jonestown.

He said "hello," and to his surprise, two people rose up. They were disguising themselves as one of the dead to avoid zombies.

Then he heard a knock.

Curious, he opened the door, and there was the father. The priest. Deacon. Whatever. Except it wasn't. The priest was one of the living dead.

Confused, he tried to talk to the zombie, only to get "grrs" and "hrras" back. He was hungering for his flesh.

Finally convicted that something was clearly very wrong, the priest included, he smacks the priest with his bag of shit and ran away.

The two people ran along with him, and when Jim was getting chased by zombies, they helped him out. Throwing firebombs and molotov-cocktails at the zombies. After all, they can't feel the pain, but they can die of fire.

Then - to Jim's confusion - the two people blew up a building that probably had living dead inside of it.

They then had Jim follow them to take refuge at a street-side convenience store.

They then revealed that their identities were Mark and Selena. It was them who revealed to Jim that a virus had reaped havoc in England, society had collapsed, everything's gone to shit, and that the best way to continue on living is to: never travel alone unless you have to; and never travel at night - again - unless you have to.

In a bit of denial - still - as well as a daze, he suggests they go to his parents' house in Deptford, to see if they're still alive. After a bit of negotiation, he got his way, and they were on their way to Deptford in the morning. After all, you cannot travel at night-time unless you have to.

They made it to his parents' house, and whatever excitement and hope existed in his human person then - as he tried to find his parents in his childhood house - vanished instantaneously as he found his parents. He found them, alright. Their corpses anyway. The implications were that of suicide through multiple sleeping pills and wine. Hopefully it was Cabernet. After all, if you're going to die anyway, you might as well do it in style.

He found a card beside them which read:

"Jim-

With endless love, we left you sleeping.

Now we're sleeping with you.

Don't wake up.

*kisses*"

A broken-down Jim, overcome with grief and sadness to the point of tears, was comforted by a reasoning Selena, who stated that "they went peacefully." And suggested that they "were lucky to do so."

Jim asked why it would be lucky, with Mark and Selena replying that their families weren't so lucky. Mark and Selena's families both went brutally, with the zombies marauding and massacring them in front of their eyes.

Still grieving for his parents, Jim stays up - in contrast to Mark and Selena resting - to remember the lives of his parents, glancing by a cookbook labeled "Mom's Favorite Recipes" and watching a film reel of recorded home video footage, all the while reminiscing all the times before the initial bump, before the coma, before the zombies.

Then before Jim knew it, 3 of the living dead ran through a window of his house, attempting to feast on his flesh. But not before Mark and Selena came to the rescue, saving Jim's ass, and killing all the zombies that were there.

A shaken-up Jim struggles to answer Selena's question of "were you bitten," before finally mumbling "yes." An injured Mark tries to wipe off the blood from his arm, but the cut was deep to the point where it was just bleeding out.

All three of these people agreed that if one of them got infected, no one should hesitate to finish them off before they could turn. After all, it only takes 10-20 seconds of Rage exposure to turn completely and become fucked.

Before Mark could reason that he was still fine - after all, I personally believe that it was a cut from a shard of glass, not a bite, since they rescued Jim just before the glass could all fall down and settle - Selena showed zero hesitation in killing off Mark as she butchered him.

Selena then asked Jim if he had some spare clothes, to which he replied "yes." To which Selena stated that he should get them, as they weren't planning on staying there. After all, Mark was a man of plans, when Selena believes that staying alive and surviving is as good as it gets.

They've been walking for a while, and while walking, Jim notices a light flickering from a faraway building, implying that they should go there.

Though skeptical, Selena agrees to go there, and when they arrived at the general vicinity of the building, Jim began to feel tired. After all, since his awakening from his coma, he had consumed nothing but Pepsi and Maltesers. Basically, all sugar. Selena expected this, and to cure his headache, she proposed more sugar, to which she asks "what's your poison," but with sodas.

Before Jim could get any, zombies climb up the shopping-cart ladder-barricade - because these zombies aren't really zombies, they're really, really angry people, which means that some have still got some brain in them left still - and rush to try to eat them. Selena runs and while Jim tries to catch up, it seems that his "internet influencer" meets "type-4 diabetes haver" diet has caught up with him, and not in a good way.

Although eventually, after bargaining with a little girl, Selena and Jim manage to make it to the room, with a riot-geared individual stopping the zombies from getting any closer.

After exchanging words over crème de menthe, Selena and Jim find out that these people's identities are: Frank; and his daughter, Hannah.