Hanging Out

Killing time in a bathroom from... a different perspective.

The floor of the bathroom  has exactly 123 gray tiles, 97 dull green ones, and 19 missing ones.  I know that because I've been here for about three and a half hours.  I wish I could say it was the burrito I had for lunch.  It probably has more to do with the rope I'm swinging from.  Yup.  I committed suicide... well I tried anyway.  Doesn't work so well for... for people like me.  I wish I could untie the knot... hell I wish I could move!  I can't breath.  Can't speak.  Can't move anything but my eyes.  All I can do is hang around and count stuff...  hrm...  I haven't counted the dead spiders in the corner yet...

"AKUJI!" someone yells.  Hrm...  someone's looking for me.  Hope they find me.  Anything to relieve the monotony.  "You in here dude?"  He was closer now...  hang on is that-?  "DAVE!"  Yeah.  Its Tucker.  The door opens.  Finally. "Oh there you are.  D****t Dave, I could have told you that wouldn't work."  I heard the sound of a knife being flicked open, and I felt him sawing at the rope.  With a snap I crumpled to the floor, and I found myself staring up at a mottled green face.  His long, hippy hair was falling out in patches, and some of his cheek had torn away, revealing eerily white and shiny teeth.  "That looked painful dude," He said, carefully outlining the brutally obvious. " Can you move?"  I rolled my eyes.  "All right, just wait a while.  You should be coming out of rigor mortise in an hour or two."  He groaned as he heaved my petrified corpse off the ground.  "I'll drag you (oof) in front of (yerg) the TV dude."  He said as he dragged me out of the bathroom.  "Let me (huff) know when (whew) you get hungry."  He let me drop, leaning on two points of the couch cushions.  Luckily my neck was pointed down from the hanging, or I would have been staring at the ceiling.  Tucker flipped on the TV to one of the Bond flicks with Sean Connery in it.  Figures.  The un-killable man.

Zombies aren't new.  They've been around since World War 2, but they were rare.    There were rumors of experimentation in paranormal warfare being commissioned by Hitler.  The real epidemic blossomed two years ago when some unknown terrorist group started sending contaminated hate-mail to politicians.  Autopsy subjects had a bad habit of waking up and running away, so we still don't know much about the disease.  What we do know is that it is spread through contact; the sort of contact that hurts.

Here's where I found myself two days ago:  It was just me, a baseball bat, and a pack of zombie dogs. I crushed skull after skull, wielding the pine bar like a samurai sword.  I whiled away the hours in a flurry of fur, blood and splinters.  Bones splintering, blood splattering across the pavement.  When I thought I'd slain them all, I sank wearily down onto a nearby park bench.  I was dialing the Infection Management Company, so they'd send a cleanup crew in hazmat suits to scrub away the carnage, when I felt a sharp, searing pain in my ankle.  I looked down and saw a decaying chihuahua clinging to my left leg.  I swatted it with the baseball bat until it relinquished its grip, and then I punted it across the street like a bony little football.  Its head came off before it hit the pavement.

I bound the wound in a daze.  My life was literally over.  I was on the other side of the war.  I wasn't a comrade anymore.  I was the enemy.  I  limped home and treated the wound. I went to bed, praying with every scrap of hope I had left that I hadn't caught the disease.  I awoke around noon, and the warning signs were as clear as day.  My breathing was shallow, yet I didn't feel lightheaded or wheezy..  My head was alternating between pain and numbness.   My fingers were twitchy, and my joints were stiff.  My body was changing... dying.  I was becoming a zombie.

I thought about most of the zombies I'd seen.  Cruel demons with unending hunger.  Demihuman beasts slamming severed heads against brick or concrete, like a monkey trying to penetrate a coconut. I couldn't just let that happen.  I couldn't sit by and wait for my mind to dissolve.  I cracked open my laptop, ancient but faithful, and typed a message:

To:  All Contacts
Subject:  Goodbye

There's no easy way to say this.  No way to sugar coat it.  I got bit.  All the warning signs are showing up.  The way I see it, I have two choices.  I can stay here, until I zombify, lose my mind, and wind up murdering my friends and neighbors, or I can make my way into zombie territory and kill myself, or die trying.  I never notarized a will or nothing, so you'll have to divvy up my stuff yourself.  I don't have the time to think about it anymore.  I have to go... no telling how much time I've got left.  Gotta start walking.

Goodbye.
-David Akuji

I clicked 'send' and rose from the chair.  I took one long last look at the place I called home, and left my house for the last time.  I wandered the city in a straight line. Once or twice i was approached by zombies.  They didn't attack me.  They were intrigued by my lack of fear, I think.  I didn't even look up.  I was dead inside.

I was deep in zombie territory when I finally looked up.  The place was decrepid.  The asphalt was chipped and cracked, like a lizard shedding its skin.  There were lights on here and there, flickering eerily.  Half eaten corpses and stray bones decorated the sidewalk.  I used to live around here, before the government sectioned off this part of the city as quarantine for early zombie patients a couple years back.  I kept walking, the scarred pathways familiar in my mind.  I came upon my old high school, half of it reduced to rubble.  I walked past the movie theater I had taken my first date to.  The lights in the 'coming soon' posters still worked, which was comforting in spite of the blood splattered across the glass.  I kept walking, passing landmark after landmark of my memories, reliving them.  I came full circle when I found myself standing before the house I had grown up in.  It was scarred by time, but mercifully devoid of blood and corpses.  What a wonderful place to kill myself.

I found an exposed pipe in the bathroom ceiling.  A good and thick one.  I went and found some rope in the tool shed out back, and set to work tying a noose.  Next thing I knew, I was gritting my teeth and falling.  Then it all went black.

Sean Connery was using the last of the gadgets in Q's grab bag when I finally got some feeling back in my face.  I groaned, experimentally flexing my jaw.  It was sore, like someone had given me a good right hook, but functional.  "Urgh"  I managed to cough out.  My voice was as rough as gravel.  Unsurprisingly, hanging myself hadn't been exactly healthy for my vocal cords.  Tucker poked me, experimentally.  Apparently he'd been sitting next to me, watching the movie.

"Can you move yet?" he asked.  "Try an arm."  It felt like I was trying to move in some bizarre hybrid of Jell-o and steel, but I managed to lift my arm about an inch.  I had a feeling that this was going to be a very long day.

It turned out to be a Bond movie marathon.  I sat through You Only Live Twice, Live and Let Die, and Tomorrow Never Dies before I could actually move all my limbs.  I turned to Tucker.  He had dozed off... or died.  It was hard to tell.  His shaggy hippy hair draped over his green tinged face, hiding the hole in his cheek.  He was lean, as most zombies are, completely devoid of body fat.  His clothes were secondhand, tattered, and dirty.  I poked him in the forehead.  "Dude,"  I said.  "Are you alive?"  I sounded like I had been chain smoking for fifty years.
"No."  he replied groggily.  "Awake though.  Want food?"  I nodded, secretly dreading my first meal as a zombie.

Author's Note

I think I've got it pretty well polished.

Reviews

[torments_scribe]

This was awesomely entertaining. I loved the sarcasm and attitude of your characters. Even though they were zombies, they still spoke and acted like real people. Very interesting premise and whether intentional or not, oddly funny. I'll be back to read some more :) The chapter title was ingenious by the way. Very witty!!!

[Alskar]

This is truly excellent. I love the engagement of the opening paragraph, and this really grips you with the unusual yet brilliant idea that zombies are coherent, intelligent creatures who sit around watching Bond marathons, versus the insane blood-thirsty type so often seen. The idea of terrorists sending infected mail to the government was unique and plausible. I only have a tiny complaint- the email to his family was too dismissive, I'd imagine if this was a guy in real life it would be a bit more emotional, given that he will never see his family again.

[Tasha]

Wow even though I'm not into the whole zombie thing, this kept me reading the whole way through. I liked it a lot and you couldn't have picked a better title. Great work.
♥ Ta'Shandra