A Zombie Tale

A piece of fiction by Timothy Goss

This is how the world will end.….
This is how the world will end.….
not with a bang, but a whim­per. — Author name unknown

I woke up and looked around my bar­ren room,it was dark and the blinds were closed tight block­ing the sun from enter­ing at all. I fum­bled out of bed and grabbed my lime green ipod and a smoke and headed out of my room. I slip the ipod on and crank up the vol­ume as Cheap Trick fills my ears,deafening the moans from out­side. I pull back the blinds and slide the glass door open and step onto my 2nd floor patio. On the ground below,they mass..a sea of rot­ting corpses glar­ing up at me with eyes the color of frozen meat grasp­ing upwards not real­iz­ing that I am beyond thier reach. I light my smoke and sit down on a lawn chair, it was one of a set that my wife pur­chased for us months before. I still have her’s setup and on the chair I have a pic­ture of her and our son. They were vis­it­ing fam­ily when the inci­dent hap­pened. My brother in law, being a cop made sure they got to a “safe” zone. They are safe and with fam­ily.. I am here alone,cause I had to work. Draw­ing deeply on the cig again, I reach behind me and grab a empty glass bot­tle and toss it at a name­less corpse below,shattering on impact the corpse looked around for a few sec­onds then resumed its mind­less grasp­ing.

It’s not that bad actu­ally, I have enough food for a few days here and some stored in the apart­ment next door. Access­ing the apart­ments on the sec­ond floor was sim­ple.. made a block­ade on the stairs which even the most nim­ple of per­son would have a hard­time with. The sound on my ipod began to dim.. I should recharge this soon.. I stand and make my way back to my bedroom..and slid back into bed.I woke up to a strange sound, my phone was actu­ally ringing..I grabbed the phone and clicked it on. “Hello?” I asked “This is the Par­adise vil­lage school dis­trict” the voice responded on the other end… I threw the phone across the room.. I hate auto­mated mes­sages! the phone broke as it smashed against the wall.. a few sec­onds later, it dawned on me.… if the auto­mated mes­sage came through that meant the phones were work­ing still! the dis­cov­ery turned to despair as I real­ized I broke my only work­ing phone.… I stood and stretched,an anger build­ing inside me.. I destroyed my only chance of mak­ing con­tact with the out­side world.I decided to go back to bed,sleep is my only activ­ity I have left.

I could barely sleep at all, I dreamt of my wife and son being ripped apart by a horde of rav­en­ous corpses,I could hear her scream as they removed her innards..its not like it is in the hor­ror movies, its a gur­gling sound a liq­uidy slop­ping sound. The images flash in my minds eye when I close my eyes,people run­ning in all direc­tions scream­ing as the panic & fear over­takes them. I find myself star­ing out from my patio as the day slowly becomes twi­light and still they mass below sham­ble to and fro glar­ing at me..as if they were say­ing “soon.. you can­not last longer…soon you will be what we need..you will be one of us, we have all the time in the world..do you?”. My Ipod lost it’s charge hours ago and I have no real way of charg­ing it..my son took his charger when he went with his mother. I light a smoke and look up at the sky and won­der, is this part of his plan? is this some sick test? as if he answered, I hear a thud against my door. I stand and make my way to the door, I press my eye against the peep hole and strain to see what made the noise.. It was my wife..or what was left of her.…her skin was ashen and her jaw was slacked. her lips were blood encrusted,as where her hands as she slammed them against the door. trem­bling, I reach for the lock remem­ber­ing what my brother in law said when he called “there was no time to save them” he muttered..as I slamed down phone break­ing it.. The phone cut deep into my hand as it splintered..but the wound doesn’t bother me much… My wife is home…soon my son should be also..then we will be a fam­ily again.… as I turned the knob slowly I smiled as I said “wel­come home…I missed you”.… I threw my arms around my wife hug­ging her close I barely felt her teeth bite deep into my neck.…. then the world went dark.…
“reports came in today from Par­adise Vil­lage, were the police and the national guard dis­patched a horde of the undead. As the police searched the sur­round­ing homes, they came across one apart­ment with 3 zeds found within. They were sit­ting on the patio star­ing out.