5 days...5 days was all it took to lose everything. To our credit the experts gave us three. First it began to rain, not at the start of the five days, but 30 days before that. It rained non stop, day and night week in and week out. It rained till it seemed nature went crazy, then people went crazy, then it seemed the whole damned world wanted in on the crazy party. Then one day the rain just stopped. You'd think the people would have rejoiced but they were too sodden to muster any kind of glee, that and the fact that the rain stopped, but the clouds never left, they still haven't. Nobody's seen a clear blue sky or a starry night in I'm not sure how long. Well the ground was nice and soft, good for digging, and that's what the Old Ones did, dug right up under our feet. Some people call the old ones the First on account of the fact they came up, so to speak, on day one. Here's a question for you. How many people have died and not been properly buried. Slaves, natives, soldiers, a good chunk of missing people. The answer is a literal hell of a lot. Well, they all dug their way on up. Everybody agrees we could have survived that. The Old ones were slow and rotted and sometimes fell apart from a stiff breeze. They were easy to kill, too easy. Any battle plan that actually works is most likely a trap, Well every person on earth missed this trap. Every human on earth most likely has seen or heard of a zombie, so people were ready prepared, giddy even.and the zombies made it easy. They milled about sure they'd try to bite you if you got to close, but they spent most of their time digging. Digging for what you say, well people found out on day two. Turns out zombies like to congregate. They will bash their way too each other if need be and form up like a flash mob. A zombie will walk right off a roof if there is a mob of them on the street below. Speaking of below, turns out them zombies were digging for for more of their kin. In grave yards and cemeteries around the world the number of zombies were doubling and doubling again in hours. Wouldn't it take the m a long time you may ask. Well the zombies underground weren't just laying there waiting like proper dead folk. No they had been digging towards each other underground, worse yet the ground was soaked, making the digging really easy. And them holes flooded, and the zombies floated ever closer to the surface. When The old ones showed up, the Grave born zombies were already bunched together in massive writhing heaps underground, and with a little digging from each side, the undead would hit unholy paydirt, and with a gush of fetid water and stiff limbs the world had a crisis on its hands. That was day two and the world could have survived that, had they not had their heads in their collective asses. Clues had abounded for the they had assumed the dead were ghouls, literal cannibals. Eating their own who fell. That's why they had congregated in the grave yards, the tv talking heads had said, easy meals. At the end of day these masses started making their ways to populated areas. These newer dead were different, some were dried hard like cordwood, most however, were swollen with water and gas. Bloated horrors of waddling filth and corruption. These Grave born dead were different. Better preserved, they moved with more intent that the old ones. Waddling, plodding, and jerkily shambling, these hordes moves towards every populated area close to whatever graveyard they had been lain to rest in. Still law enforcement, with the help of the military and every person who had who had been secretly waiting for the zombie apocalypse these hordes were fore the most part held at bay. Then day three came, and people started getting sick, real sick. Water had flooded most cities, people had too. And any doctor will tell you that floods plus people equals sick people. People started to overflow the hospitals. But against all these odds humanity could have prevailed. With the armed forces holding the lines and citizens doing their part, day three could have been the the end of the apocalypse, not mankind. But that didn't happen, nope, not in the least. You see people had seen zombie movies and had read the same books. Everybody knew people would get sick and go to the hospital, turn everybody there into zombies and boom the end times. So people, in their own selfish sense of self preservation started executing the sick. The military and police, holding the lines, could not move in enough time to stop the massacre. Day four was hubris day, or doomsday, either one works. Turns out people were wrong on three accounts. First there wasn't a zombie plague, waves of sicknesses were just the result of too many people in too small a space. That was strike one, strike two were that people who died from anything would came back, strike three was something everybody had taken for granted. Head shots didn't kill them, well not enough, anyways. Now blasting an old one would shatter it to pieces any of the others may lose something like sight or hearing they'll move slower clumsier or wander aimlessly. They won't usually stay down though. But zombies don't need their human brain, or even their mammalian one. It's the lizard brain, the one that runs on instinct and impulse. The one that's really hard to hit, yeah that one. Well anyways, people went around executing anybody with a runny nose and fever and don't you know it, you have a bunch of the angry dead running around. Well humans had triggered the same disaster they tried to avoid and panic set in by the end of day four, the United States was in ruins Now you'd think the soldiers would have noticed the headshot thing but a rifle shot will put down anything on two legs, and once they fell most were just crushed into oblivion by the masses behind them. The few who were able to regain their footing were so banged up they could have been another bloody face in a sea of death. The armed forces, who had held death itself at bay, were caught between the massed ranks of the old ones and grave born, and the frenzied assaults of the freshly risen. They died, the cities died, the whole world died. There were clues, signs, the whole time. Reports had been coming in. Zombies twitching after being killed, body parts flopping after being dismembered. But they were attributed to bad shooting or plain not knowing just how long it takes a zombie to...die, so to speak. People didn't want to accept that those beyond death were a little farther beyond death than they wanted them to be. Humanity died because in the end, things just didn't happen the way we said it was supposed to happen. Life's funny like that you know. You grow up thinking things are gonna happen one way, then life throws you a curve ball and smacks you down. All the way down. The lofty dreams of childhood crash into the harsh realities of life. Some of us blame God. Some, each other. Most blame the government. That closed out day four. Day five saw the few survivors surrounded by teeming masses of howling, moaning undead. A good bit of them were sick, having luckily figured it would be safer to wait everything out. Lucky being subjective by the way. Being sick with scarlet fever and surrounded by flesh eating corpses is hardly anyone's definition of good luck. The ragged remains of soldiers, policemen, and survivors stumbled away from their former posts intent on devouring the pathetic few living who remain. Diary of un
