Living Hell

Sweet Sacrifice

I slowly open my eyes. It's only 5:00 am but I'm up just before the sun hits the threshold of the horizon line. I stare out at my battered old shack of a home reminiscing in the holes on my roof the day the Earth seemingly stood still slowly for a few moments as the hunger of a new game unfolded. Some politician hired a scientist to 'accidentally' leak the virus, but we somehow knew that this living hell was coming. I stare out through the hole in my roof and ironically find it peaceful to realize how the madness had already taken place. There had been so many shootings and violence in the news it didn't really seem like it was going to get better anytime soon. I notice the stars still blinking their way through the sky slowly fading out in a magenta colored sky slowly lightening up.

The more I think about the life I had before the apocalypse the more I appreciated the fact that it came through. My life was already a whirlwind of who went to jail, got shot or pregnant. The same narrative always circled around town until it became so normal to hear depressing stories that we all stopped caring for them. We stopped putting the faces and names to those people we once knew and loved. I reach my hand up to the sky to catch the last few stars as they leave me. I want to grasp them to take back all of the violence that ever happened. But alas I can't and heave a sigh as I stand up, considering how peaceful the silence is, how it's power ignited the apocalypse and ultimate destruction of society.

I ponder on that thought that silence is what killed us all but was necessary to keep what little sanity we had left. The silence now always rings out, as I stand up and stretch in one story house I found while wandering throughout the countryside. I look around and forgot that this place is ranch style home. I always call the house I find my new home because throughout this crazy journey of life I have had so far I discovered that home is where the spirit lies. I can't help but imagine the folks who lived in the house before me. How they had dinner or decorated their house. But now every place is empty and silent, rubbed with the rabid blood markings of limbs staining life as we knew it.

I always make sure to take time to walk through every household. I imagine every detail of the life that used to be there and include the stains of these houses as though they are each an article of clothing stained with blood. I noticed some dead human and zombie corpses in the houses and checked their bodies to see how they died. There were some tragic cases I stumbled across as I wandered throughout the states. Like the couple that died side by side, the wife was a zombie and the husband was a human. I found it strange that they were holding hands but then I noticed that the wife stabbed herself in the heart to stop herself from killing her husband. I came closer to the wife's corpse and saw tear stains down her face with blood slowly crying out of her mouth. A dried pool of blood marked the floor as though to state that it happened here.

I then slowly walked over to the husband and saw he too had a tear stained face but I noticed he was crying tears of blood. This man's brain continued to leak blood from his ears as I crept in closer to examine how he died. I tried not to get too close because I noticed a bunch of maggots started to invest their time from the inside of his body. As soon as I caught a whiff of this dead body I knew what killed him. To confirm his cause of death I look to my left and right and notice an empty bottle of stain remover. It's very ironic that he drank the entire bottle as though a chemical would give him easy access to fix this problem. I slowly returned back to the middle of the two corpses and noticed how they both had been reaching for one another's hands and just barely held one another's hand. I felt that I saw a new side to humanity seeing how even death didn't even tear them apart.

Remembering the biracial couple, one human one zombie, I couldn't help but sigh and think that even in this darkest hour there are still small pockets of hope and humanity that some folks have. I wish I could stumble across more but the more I saw the zombie corpses the more I realized how many had killed themselves. I think some of them realized that they were indeed the monsters, the bad, the 'other'. I couldn't help but shake the feeling that some of them still had conscious thought and were able to assess the situation. Instead of living with burden of their own existence, many killed themselves. As much as I want to feel bad for them, I also know that not all of the zombies were aware and had this innate desire to kill.

I always keep thinking to myself if the zombies were created to be violent or if they learned it from somewhere. My gut tells me it's probably a combination of the two, but when I was crossing the mountain range, I came across some locals who had an interesting theory. Many of the locals said that the docile and violent zombie divide comes from the values they had before they were turned into a zombie. One of the locals said they thought that the spirit within them ultimately decided if they were able to have higher conscious or if they were going to seemingly endlessly kill other zombies.