Humanity's Death: A Zombie Epic (25 page)

The hospital snuggled close to the east coast
and hot summer air tinged with salty sea blew into an open window.
The white curtains flapped with the breeze and little Rusty Ray sat
holding his momma’s hand. His mother lay on the hospital bed
drugged and dying, her eyes dark, hollow caverns of misery. The
final solution, or as the nurses called it, END OF LIFE MEDS. Rusty
always smelled her black and dying breath, that smell that meant
cancer’s victorious dominance over life was near at hand. The
cancer ate her alive, from the inside out, and there, with little
Rusty watching, as she rested her final minutes, a hospice care
worker came in to check every 20 minutes. She was in her forties
but looked eighty; her was body frail and pale; her smile faded to
a painful grimace. He’d watched her take her final breath; he said
a prayer as she died; he asked God to take her soul and put her by
His side.

But the pain of losing his mother was nothing
compared to what he felt now. Rusty Ray laid on a cold floor
shivering with blood dripping from his anus. Dried semen covered
his face like glaze from a Krispy Crème doughnut. The invasion for
the city was over; Duras and company were currently under artillery
bombardment.

Rusty now understood something he never
understood before: there is no God. There is no holy direction.
Only death, bloody, black death. All the sermons, the bed time
stories, ALL OF IT—lies. He saw his past now as a collection of
pointless dabbles, encounters that led him to this very
predicament. Rusty lay for a long time before a few soldiers picked
him up, took him out into the night, and threw his worn and torn
body into a nearby ditch. He splashed into the gully and lay
staring at the sky. His eyes black and without hope or clarity of
sight. The sun was rising in the East, a new day. A day without
God, without hope, without any meaning, rhyme, or reason. Lies, all
of it. Monstrous LIES!

Rusty Ray felt a powerful surge of anger pump
into his veins. There was a God. He was only angry. He couldn’t
blame God for this. He pushed himself up on one side and screamed.
“To God be the glory!”

An empty can of beans came hurling and cracked
Rusty Ray in his temple, cutting into his flesh. For a moment he
saw a flash of hot white, felt the hot blood dripping, tasted the
red power of life sipping into the corners of his mouth.

Then it was
1990, and a hot and cool wind whipped in through the open windows
of his father’s recently purchased Corvette. The red Corvette that
meant more to Daddy than living, breathing people. Even his
father’s love for the dead could not compete with that fucking red
Corvette. Black and tan leather seats, convertible top. His father
drove with his chin held high, his salt and pepper hair blowing in
the wind, his dark shades resting comfortably, his palm on the
gear—
Daddy
never believed
.

This realization hit Rusty like a ten-pound
hammer and he jumped back into consciousness. The soldiers were
gone. The sun now burned high above. His skin was burned and red,
with blisters forming. The puss pushed up from his skin like ready
to pop domes. In the distance, about thirty feet off the right,
stumbling and jerking down the road, was a horde of zombies; their
eyes bursting with death’s white glow. They stopped, and in unison,
sniffed the air; they smelled Rusty Ray.

He heard
their grumbling and smelled the rancid decay rising from dead skin
in gagging wisps of hot air. “
Daddy never believed! Daddy never believed! DADDY!
NEVER! BELIEVED!”
Rusty
screamed at the world, at his past, at everything he never
experienced, the boys and girls holding hands, eating shakes at
Buster’s Ice Cream; Rusty saw them now with absolute clarity; the
tan skin of the soon to be class of 01, the bully jock boyfriend,
with his shitty smears and big muscles. Rusty saw the world in a
way he’d never seen before. A world without a mystical force
controlling the heavens. No. Just a primal, sloppy mess. Rusty saw
it clearly. The evolution of mankind, the clear lack of a guiding
hand, the branching of this species into that, the spawning of new
and tropical life, the beautiful majesty unfurled upon his mind’s
eye.

He saw glory and wonder, insights that he’d
never before considered. He stood up and pointed a trembling finger
at the approaching horde. His clothing hung, tattered and bloody.
His face was dry as a desert with long lines of broken skin, like
dried up tributaries. His pants were completely missing. His white
Fruit of the Loom briefs still hung, mostly ripped and torn—a clear
rectal hazard zone.

The horde
inched closer, jerking this way and that, growling under the humid
July sun. Then Rusty’s mind jumped again, back into a dark recess
of his mind. There was his mother and father. His father’s eyes
were glued to a new Laser Disc system. 1988. Little Rusty saw the
television. The Nightmare on Elm Street played vividly. His father
drank a bourbon and scotch and watched Freddy butcher young girls.
The room was dark, save the glow of the TV. Every few seconds his
father would smile. His nearly broke into tears of joy at the sight
of Johnny Depp’s guts spraying out of a pristine white sheet hole.
His mother sat in a Lazy Boy, with a Walkman playing the sounds
of
Carmen
(the
bringer of such tunes as “Comin' On Strong”, “The Champion”, and
the unforgettable, “A Long Time Ago...in a Land Called Bethlehem.”)
Her eyes were closed and her hands folded neatly in her lap. A
cancerous lingering of cigarette smoke trailed towards the ceiling,
where it moved across the room like a misty nightmare. His father
cackled and finished off his drink and poured another.

The world came back into view. Rusty stood, half
naked, his ass blistered and raw and shriveled like a sun burned
red raisin. The horde nearly upon him, their stenched bodies in
direct view. “Daddy never believed!” He screamed at the hungry,
growling faces. “DADDY! NEVER! BELIEV—

The first one took a deep bite into his right
shoulder. Its dark green and yellow teeth dug into Rusty’s burned
skin. Hot blood filled the hungry creature’s mouth with oozy
pleasure. The zombie wore a tattered green hemp dress with a blood
stained peace symbol. On the back of the shirt said: LOWCOUNTRY JAM
FESTIVAL. Another one grabbed his left arm, then the brunt of the
horde came in, stumbling, yet fast, quickly taking Rusty down to
the ground. Hands tore into his belly. They pushed their arms deep,
removing organs, making deep sucking sounds, and chewing with great
lust. Rusty screamed and screamed. Horrible and fatal cries that no
one heard, save the dead.

Chapter
Ten: Professor Mary Jane

1
One hour before the attack

Mary Jane sat drinking a hot bottle of chardonnay.
Not top shelf either!

Fuck!

She hates this fucking goddamn world! She thinks
as she chugged the bottle hard, turning it up high letting the wine
course down her throat.

She sat alone in her room. A room that once
belonged to a young hipster now roaming the world as a zombie. She
knew this because of the pictures she found when she moved in. He’d
been a lanky fellow with a ridiculous looking artsy goatee and
slick black hair that looked like something out of Grease. No
doubt, he thought it a real hip thing to do, dressing up his hair
like he lived in the 50s. Hipsters never made any sense to Mary
Jane. Rich kids. She always graded them down. Always. No matter how
good their paper may have been.

But, tonight, drunk and high, she sang to
herself. Soon enough her world would turn upside down; but right
then she drank for the Old World. She sang. She sang some more. Not
a jolly tune. Not a tune at all. Just a sound that wreaked of wine
and depression. What’s left in this shit hole anyway? More
depression than wine. That’s for sure. Jesus. This wine is
disgusting. But so is everything. She hates it all. She hates Duras
to. She hates them all. She wants out. She wants out of this
dreadful excuse for a city-state. The ancient Sumerians would laugh
at their pathetic attempts to save Western culture. Oh and the
Greeks! What would Aristotle say to a fenced in hell hole that is
forever surrounded by roaming dead men?

No. She doesn’t hate Duras. What a lovely
evening they just had. Plus…

Where can could she go?

But She did want out. She wanted to go back in
time. She wanted her students back. Their cheerful faces, even the
hipsters. She wanted research grants back. She wanted the summers
off. She wanted to be called professor again.

Her husband, with his little round belly. Her
son. Her little boy.

A tears rolled down her face.

Now she just sat. Drunk and stoned. Her whole
life is now nothing but drunk and stoned. Weed and drink. That’s
it.

Sex with Duras.

The hated task of caring for the needs of people
too dumb to care for themselves. She wished they would all die.

She turned the bottle high. Down it went.

Oh god. When will it all end?

To hell with it! Tonight she drinks alone.
Tonight she is free. Tonight the dead win. Tonight she cries a tone
of solidarity with those dead fucks. Fuck them all.

She walked to a mirror and spoke to her
reflection. “I warned them. I told them about Holocene Extinction.
Did they listen?”

She threw the empty glass bottle against the
wall, causing it to shatter. The little shards of glass fell to the
floor like in a slow motion movie scene, and she watched them
bounce for a moment, then…

…She fainted to the floor and drifted.

2

She was back in the classroom. It was only days
before the virus killed humanity. “The Holocene extinction is the
predicted 6th period of historical mass extinction marked by rapid
loss of biodiversity largely caused by humans.”

Around twenty young eyes stared back at her.
Some of them were clearly high, others clearly hung over; others
alert and taking notes.

“Humans are killing off species thousands of
times faster than nature creates them. The current rate of
extinction across species is one thousand times that of the
background rate before humans began altering the globe and
thousands of times faster than the creation of new species.”

She spoke to her class with real concern. She
knew that something was coming. She felt it in her gut and between
global warming, the large number of species dying off, the threat
of super bugs that are resilient to antibiotics, and the inability
for humans to come to terms with the amount of destruction they
ensue—she knew something major was in the air.

It was a simple matter. Humans had to go. Nature
wanted people gone, so that’s what it made happen. She never
imagined the horror that was to pass. How can a person imagine
people would die and reanimate like some shitty horror flick?

She had a family. A husband. A son. The whole
American dream. A house, a two car garage, and two cars to
park.

“PS4 mom! Fuck! Don’t you know?”

“Make due.”

“With a PS3? Really? Dad! Mom is trying to force
me to live like a stone age peasant! Do something!”

She was back at her house. Soft crème carpet
under her feet. Mahogany trim on the walls. A large brick fire
place with a large picture of her family, her included, hanging
above the hearth. She wore her silk dress to the photo shoot. Mark
said she over did it. But he would. He never took off his Oxford
sweater or any one of his thirty or more Polos.

In walked Mark, his Oxford sweater clinging to
his pudgy belly.

“Your son has lost his senses, Mark.”

He chuckled at her and then spoke, “You just
don’t know what these kids need hun.”

“Oh?” Her hands were on her hips, trying to act
serious.

“The boy is simply trying to keep up with the
social trends.”

Her husband was the head of the Sociology
department. How she ever fell in love with a sociologist she was
not quite sure. She met him her senior year. He had worn an Oxford
sweater, even though the temperature was around 75.

She was standing by the vending machine, staring
at the candy hooked in the metal coils. He’d walked up and started
babbling about how food choices are influenced by
socialization.

She'd always hated sociology, such a mind
numbingly waste of brain energy. But, that day, Mark’s idiotic
naive intellectual fat face, clean shaven and smelling of expensive
aftershave, and those cobalt blue eye…

“Yeah mom! I need to keep up with the social
trends. Don’t you want me to grow up and be a fine member of
society? I can’t do that without a PS4!”

“Oh Jesus Mary of Lucifer! Take him to the
store, Mark!”

She wasn’t much of a mother though. By default,
scholars are almost always shitty parents who raise snot nosed
brats. Her son, a thirteen-year-old with an addiction to video
games and Red Bull was a fine example.

She just didn’t have the time to put into proper
discipline, so the boy did what he wanted and she always caved and
Mark seemed to get a great deal of joy in giving his son anything
he ever wanted. Nurture and love, that’s what a boy needs, said
Mark. A proper socialization.

The contradiction never seemed to bother Mark.
The fact that his son had zero real friends never made him worry at
all. Postmodernist sociology is what he called his specialty. He
believed that in the new age of consumerism, digital communication,
and global connection, the traditional definition of friendship was
inadequate.

His soft voice explained, “You have to
understand the concept of hyperreality, which creates the
simulation of reality for modern day kids and many adults. Playing
video games, watching movies, and so forth creates simulations that
are more real to them than what you may consider to be true
biological reality. For example, while kids are fighting the
perceived enemies in their video games, it creates in them a
feeling of power and control, of being the hero. Not that I would
expect a biologist to care too much about sociology.”