Zomtropolis Read online

  ·6: How it Started

  After I logged off from here last night, I sat for a long time on the worn out sofa in my living room, counting the shadows on my wall. The power’s out in my place. You might be wondering how I’m even typing this or getting this to you. I’m on a laptop and its battery-operated. I also have a couple spares so once this one gives out, I’m still in good shape. The Internet connection? Wi-Fi. That stuff’s still lingering on the air. The juice must still be on somewhere if I’m able to post this.

  I think today’s going to be a day of confessions. Or maybe tomorrow. Let’s see how many words I can squeeze out before I can’t take it any longer and need to take a break.

  Let me tell you about the day everything changed.

  It’s when it all began, after all, the madness, the death.

  The walking dead.

  It started

  ·7: How it Started Again

  Figures. Had something important to say and something went wrong.

  Was about to tell you about what went down that day when all of the sudden my screen went black and the computer shut off. Tried turning it back on again. Wouldn’t work. Wasn’t till later—now—that I realized the battery came slightly loose and I lost power. Probably from the way I was holding it, balancing it on my lap.

  Anyway, yeah, that day.

  It was a day I’ll never forget.

  It started off like any other. Well, mostly. I rolled out of bed around 10 (had a day off; used to be a donut delivery driver before things went to hell), hit the can then poured a bowl of Sugar Sharks Flakes and sat in front of the boob tube till I was done. I hate mid-morning programming. Nothing on but bad game shows and soaps. “Stories,” as some call them. Yech.

  When I was done my cereal, I dumped the bowl in the sink, went to the bedroom, got changed—white T-shirt and jeans—and for some reason wanted to double check my choice of attire so went to the window to see if the sun was shining. I hate light. Nowadays I wish I had more of it, but back then too much light always caused me headaches so I kept my blinds shut most of the time. I opened them, looked outside and was pleased to see a T-shirt and jeans was a good choice. The sky was clear. The sun was shining. A perfect day, something I needed because I was still hung up on Selena and, from what I heard, sunshine is good for your mood. You’re supposed to get a half hour or so of it on your skin per day. Something about Vitamin D being a mood-lifter.

  Anyway, I stared out my window, glancing down to the walkway leading up to my front door (I’m on the third floor). Phantoms of Selena and I taking our time walking toward the building filled the sidewalk, and if I let myself, I was able to lose myself so entirely in the moment that it was like being there all over again. Her hand in mine, her head leaning on my shoulder, the sweet scent of her strawberry perfume filling me and making my head spin.

  That’s when things started to go dark. Just past the rooftops of the houses across the street, shadows rose on the horizon. At first I thought a simple spring rain was headed our way and figured I had maybe an hour or so before the rain would hit my area. But there were no clouds. Just shadow. Couldn’t see what was causing it.

  Then just as suddenly, the shadow was gone and it was bright out again.

  The thundering echo of two zipcars slamming into each other a skywalk-length from my place made me jump away from the glass. I peered out, pressing my face against the glass, and caught a glimpse of the drivers hopping out of their vehicles in a mad panic–at first, seeming to check if the other was okay–then each quickly, still buzzing in the air via their anti-grav boots, holding out their hands palms up as if holding invisible barbells.

  Another accident, this time an airbus speeding from the sky and slamming into a white Honda hovering above a curb. The airbus’s passengers all ran out a minute later.

  Then everything changed.

  ·8: Hiatus

  You know what? Forget it. I was gonna do this big lead-in to what happened that day, get all dramatic, get your blood pumping and all the rest, but not anymore. That’s the problem with the world I live in: try and do something good and proper and instead you get blindsided with some stupid, unexpected situation and BLAM! Totally screwed up.

  Okay. I exaggerated on the “unexpected” part. Where I live, these days things are very expected.

  There’s a good reason why I haven’t written in awhile. I wanted to. Really wanted to.

  Anyway…

  Enough screwing around. Here’s the deal:

  I logged onto my computer the day after I wrote you last and was about to type my first sentence when this stupid banging on glass jolts me from my thoughts. I live two floors above street level so I wasn’t surprised when the windows to my apartment were free of anything that might be causing the disturbance. That means whatever it was was coming from downstairs. I didn’t even have to leave my apartment to know what was going on.

  I opened the window, peered down and, yup, sure enough, there they are.

  Zombies.

  A whole platoon of them.

  Yes, they’re real. I’m not joking. I may be a lot of things but there’s no way I’d try and slip you a fast one by stating the dead are walking when in reality they’re not. That’s not something you joke about. Ever.

  The whole crew of them, with rotting faces, hands—even their clothes—are standing around the front of my building, banging against the glass as if they thought they could get in. They’re not smart. They’re not strong. They’re stupid and slow. The only thing that makes them dangerous are: a) when there’s a whole bunch of them; and, b) when they’re hungry.

  The stories are true. The myth is real.

  Zombies eat people.

  So what did I do? I used to just get in my closet, shut the door and wait it out, fearing for my life. Nowadays, I’m more proactive. I can’t stand the noise. That was one thing I hated about the “world of the living,” by the way: the noise. The constant bickering of people, the racket of early-morning rush hour, the incessant blaring of tele-ads on those massive screens that are on nearly every street corner.

  Ridiculous.

  Anyway, there was no way I was going to let those dead guys down there ruin my peace and quiet, so I went to my utility closet and pulled out my secret weapon: an old Louisville Slugger coated in razor blades. It was easy to make. Just dunk the bat in a bathtub filled with glue then roll it in razors like one rolls cookie dough in Smarties. The thing’s lethal.

  It was just what I needed.

  I threw on my boots, not paying any mind to the fact I was still in my boxers and white tank top, and stormed downstairs to face them head on.

  At the bottom of the stairs, they stood on the other side of the locked dual-paned door, looking at me. One fat slab of a dead guy lunged forward, bounced off the glass, shook his head, then tried again. After bouncing off the second time, he seemed to get the idea, so just stood there as if waiting for me to open the door.

  That’s exactly what I did.

  ·9: Cutting Dead Flesh

  Cutting dead flesh. There’s nothing like it.

  The guy looked at me just before the bat came down, his eyes doing a little dance that said, even despite his dead brain’s lack of intellect, that he knew what was coming. The razors lodged themselves into the front of his skull, remained wedged in for a moment, then tore out on the follow-through as I yanked the bat downward. Blood spilled out from the front of his head along with pieces of bone. The zombie staggered forward a step then fell on his face.

  The others surrounding him didn’t pay him any mind and came at me, arms outstretched, their palms open, seeming to be just itching to get hold of my shoulders, head, body, whatever.

  I shoved my way through them, rounded them from behind, then took a chunk out of the back of the head of a short woman—about 5’2”—skull, hair and all. She fell. Same with the little boy who tried to gnaw a piece of my ankle like a dog on a soup bone.

  The droning cries as the rest of them tur
ned in their place then started toward me reminded me of the sound that seemed to be coming from my own heart as of late, one constantly aching and dripping with the memory of Selena and images of a better day.

  But Selena was dead. She had to be. Most of the city was dead. I could have been the only one left for all I knew.

  Another dead guy lunged for me, his bulky shoulders and thick arms displaying veins as thick as gardner snakes, which meant he must have hit the ’roids pretty hard in his former life. I slammed the baseball bat into his skin, the blades at its end slicing into the veins like a knife through sausage. Blood leeched from the veins. The wounds didn’t faze him. I came back around and took the bat to the side of his head. His neck broke. When I pulled the bat free, blood and brain came oozing out. The guy dipped to the side then fell over.

  The dead kept coming at me and for a brief moment I considered letting them take me. If you’ve ever lived with depression, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The apathy gets so strong sometimes that anything you’re doing, anything you plan to do, anything you dream to do just ceases to matter.

  Even killing zombies.

  Even surviving.

  The moment passed and I caught a glimpse of my old self again, the one that wanted to live. Sure, it might have been what they call “survival instinct,” or perhaps it was the adrenaline taking over. Regardless, I took out a few more undead before coming to the conclusion that I wasn’t going back upstairs anytime soon. The dead had blocked the entrance to my place. They’d stay there until I was either dead or one of them.

  I only had one choice.

  I had to run.

  ·10: Running

  It didn’t take long for my thighs to begin to burn. I was never an athlete by any stretch of the imagination, but I was never an out-of-shape loser either. I don’t know what I weigh now but last I checked I was sitting around 170 pounds, and at 6 feet, I have the advantage of long legs. Gaining distance between myself and those shamblers was the easy part. Maintaining that distance was another issue altogether.

  I’m out of shape. Fine. I’ll admit it, and ever since the city fell apart, navigating around its streets has become more of a challenge.

  Lungs beginning to ache, baseball bat growing heavy, I rounded an alley some 10 blocks from my place. Perhaps there I could take a breather and wait things out. Nope. At the end of the alleyway, about five undead had their backs to me, and judging by the way they were hunched over and slightly bobbing up and down, they were feasting on something. Just seeing them made my jaw clench and my blood boil and I instinctively increased the grip on my bat. Just to club them one good. Man, what a thing. But they were five and I was one and for some reason I was interested in living again.

  So I ran elsewhere.

  I just ran.

  ·11: The City

  The city was called Comptropolis, the idea behind it being endless streets and towering buildings, a complex of wealth, opportunity and freedom. The poor shmoes who designed this marvel of architecture had no idea what was coming. No one dead. Now we got zombies, just like every other city in the world.

  I’ve taken to calling this place “Zomtropolis,” instead. Fitting, I think.

  As I weaved my way down the motorwalks, dodging crashed hover-cars, airbuses wrapped around traffic poles and emergency vehicles scattered everywhere like a spilled bucket of Micromachines, I couldn’t help but think back to how the city used to be before all this mess started.

  There’s not a single building in the city that’s less than forty stories high. I remember aerial views on the weather network and how, from that high up, Comptropolis used to almost look like a computer’s motherboard, all blocks and spires and shiny metal things. Hover-cars used to fly up and down the streets some ten feet from the ground, something vehicles had been doing for the past ten years or so. And though those were cool, it was the airbuses that people loved because airbuses actually flew-flew and the airspace above the city was theirs. Brilliant inventions, I think, and it cut the commute to work down to less than half.

  At night, everything was Vegas, all lights, sounds, the laughter of people riding the motorwalks up and down the city streets, the honking of horns, go, go, go. After the dawn of the Internet era, companies and investors had looked to new avenues of advertising once the Web got overcrowded with ads for nearly every webpage out there. So, taking an old idea, they billboarded everything—lampposts, traffic lights, hover-cars, airbuses, the overhead train, the sides of buildings. Two-way mirrors took on a whole new meaning as buildings were constructed with two-way windows, the interior side for looking out, the exterior for video and audio ads for whatever product was being pushed. I sometimes wondered where they got the money for this stuff. Billions were spent—and not just here, everywhere—and my only conclusion was that through some miracle those in charge just wanted to update and upgrade the globe.

  So much for good ideas because now the buildings were dark, the two-way windows dead and without power, smashed and useless.

  There was no one to buy anything any more. (I, for one, am grateful money is a thing of the past; never was rich to begin with.)

  The baseball bat suddenly weighed a ton and, unintentionally, I allowed its end to hit the ground. The jagged blades covering its end caught on the motorwalk and the bat jammed into the ground, its butt-end slamming into my stomach, sending me head over heels to the ground. Panting and lying on my back, dizziness sweeping my skull, the endless blue and white of the sky seeming something like a dream, I considered staying there and resting up before moving on.

  But the groans that began to materialize on the air told me I’d better not.

  ·12: Time = Meaningless

  One of the things I noticed about the nature of time ever since the zombies came was that it no longer held any meaning. Living alone with only my back to watch had set me on a very open schedule. Day and night, though still separated by blue and black skies, were a non-issue. I slept when I was tired. Stayed awake when I wasn’t. No job to go to anymore. The boss and my co-workers were either dead or walking around dead. People took want they wanted when they wanted it, and those of us still alive, it seemed, preferred indoor life.

  But time also had a new meaning when around the undead. See, movies and books and video games prepared us for it—kinda—helped us get lost in the moments when the dead came around and tried to kill you or the heroes in the stories. Only one habit was practiced when you watched on your projecto-screen the dead coming for the living: survival. It didn’t matter how long it took or which way it took you.

  Same thing happened lying there on that sidewalk. I heard their low, raspy moans. I saw the sky above. My thoughts raced and yet I could think through each one clearly: get up and run; get up and fight; lie there and die; lie there, fight a little, then die some strange heroic death after one last stand.

  So what did I choose?

  I got up and fought.

  Getting to my feet was the easy part; the adrenaline pumping through my system took care of any effort getting up that quickly might have took under normal circumstances. My head swooned a touch, my only thought locating my bat. There it was, off to the side a few feet, lying there like a sword begging to be plucked from a stone. I grabbed hold of the handle and felt its power surge through me.

  Eyes level, I saw the dead approaching, a whole group of them, at least a dozen, the mass of dead flesh, gray and decayed stepping steadily toward me, their eyes bloodshot and dreamy, transfixed on me, their next meal.

  I took a few steps back as I leveled the bat. Then I set my feet shoulder-width a part and wound up like a star hitter waiting for the pitch.

  Closer. The dead came forward.

  When the first one—a burly old broad with shoulder-length, dust-covered blonde hair—reached for me, I swung the bat hard and swift into the side of her head. Her neck snapped, the flesh along one side tearing from the impact. I came up from the other side, cracked her skull, ripping the blades thro
ugh her flesh, and watched her tumble to the side as blood leaked from her ears.

  An old man came in from the left and tried to grab me with his no-longer-functioning robo-arm. I brought the bat down on the apparatus just as a little kid who appeared about eight years old wrapped his arms around my waist and tried to take a chunk out of my stomach. I brought the butt-end of the Louisville down into the top of his head, shoved him away, then drove the bat between his legs like that Tiger Woods guy from years ago.

  More zombies appeared. Lots more, coming in from each side, making their way around the smashed hover-cars crowding the street.

  I got out of there.

  The dead tried to run after me, most of them falling over as they suddenly tried to propel their legs faster than they could handle. Some stumbled a few steps then started walking regular pace, seeming to think they’d still be able to catch up with me. Nothing doing.

  I ran home.

  ·13: Home Again

  So I’m sitting here, writing all this stuff out for you, my body still lined with a sticky film of sweat about an hour after this all occurred. I can’t even remember why I went outside to begin with.

  Wait. Let me check.

  Right. Needed some peace and quiet so decided to bust some heads. Got a little carried away, I guess.

  My hands are sore, achy, and if I stop and just let them “sit” for a sec, I can still feel the flesh and bone tingling from smacking those zombies with the slugger.

  It feels good.

  Before, just as I was approaching my apartment, I was partly delighted yet disappointed to see only a handful of the dead standing outside my building. Despite how tired I was, I want to take out a few more.

  Overpowering another life, yeah, that’s what it was about. More like overpowering an unlife, but still. You do it once, you’re left in a state of shock, wondering what just went down and it’s even possible for you to kill someone else. Do it again, it suddenly becomes about survival and self-defense. Do it a third time and it becomes a game because you realize that what you’re killing isn’t a person anymore and whoever they were had check out a long time ago and all that’s left is a skin-and-bones piñata without the candy inside.