GOD. FUCK. DAMNIT. I DID IT AGAIN. SHIT.

So for my creative writing class I had to write a story of a character I made up meeting a zombie for the first time. So that happened. Anyway, I kinda liked it so here it is under the cut

Allow me to describe for you the first time I encountered the undead. It’s a moment that sticks with you, not just because of how terrifying it is, but because of how often you’ve imagined it before. And how wrong you were each of those times. You see, I’d always imagined that someday I’d run into some slow, sniffling, mostly-dead-but-not-really mass of rotting tissue in a dark alley, slowly cutting off my only escape and dooming me to a final five or six minutes of pure terror before it eviscerated my sorry ass. Or, if I was feeling particularly confident that day, I’d imagine how it would feel to run into that same situation and beat the living shit out of it. Well, non-living shit. You get the idea.

           I’d imagine it cutting me off in the alley and slowly ambling toward me, my resolve hardening as the threat grew closer. Then, if I was feeling romantic, perhaps there would be a distressed, scantily-clad, damsel behind me, relying on me for her defense. Naturally, this fantasy would progress to me absolutely brutalizing this poor undead bastard, somehow without ruining my hair, and then the aforementioned damsel would be so impressed by my stunning display of masculinity and martial affinity that she would demand that I make love to her right then and there, undead corpse (is that superfluous?) notwithstanding.

           And then I would wake up and remember that, considering who I am as a person and the women that I typically keep company with, this situation would probably be reversed. Whatever woman was unfortunate enough to babysit my useless ass would go re-murder the creature while I hid behind a dumpster, taking solace in the fact that I wasn’t the only trash in the alley and letting out a few super-manly squeaks whenever a piece of the undead getting its shit kicked in happened to land near me.

           But, surprisingly enough, neither of these things is what happened the first time I met an undead. For one thing, we met at the Wendy’s drive through. On the other hand, I honestly didn’t realize what it was until I’d literally touched it. Now, I recognize, and freely admit, that I’m a grade A, FDA-approved dumbass. But this might’ve been the single dumbest moment of my life. Actually, I take that back. That thing with the C4 in the fireplace probably was (shut up, I needed to hide a birthday present). But this was the second dumbest moment of my life.

           As I said before, I was in the Wendy’s drive through. You’d think that a literal zombie apocalypse would close down Wendy’s, or at least the drive through, but you’d be wrong. Living dead in the streets? Fuck it, let’s get a frosty.

           The zombie had apparently had the same thought, and I ended up stuck behind him (them? Does gender carry over into zombieness? I kinda doubt it. I mean, I guess I could’ve asked them for their preferred pronouns but I don’t know how to spell argghghhgughghugh very well. Shit I just did. Ok, I don’t want to type that every time I refer to it. Or try to figure out plurals and possessives and all that shit. Fuck it, I’m just gonna use them. Or it. They/it can eat a dick-shaped brain if they don’t like it.) So here we were. Me, in my ’97 Toyota Avalon, in line for a Baconator and a frosty. The zombie, just standing right by the window doing nothing while a tired teenager who wasn’t getting paid enough to deal with this tried to convince it to go away. Now, I had the windows up and had some music on (Here I Go Again by White Snake. What? I’d had a shitty day and needed some motivation to go on. You try listening to that song and not getting motivated. Hell, it almost motivated me to order a chicken sandwich instead of the Baconator. Almost.), so I didn’t hear any of this. All I saw was delicious beef and bacon, and some stupid fuck standing in my way. So I honked. A lot. And when that did nothing, I did what any rational human being would do: I kept honking. Because I’m a problem-solver.

           After about thirty seconds of honking, my attention span was stretched to the breaking point and I decided to get out of the car (pro tip: NEVER GET OUT OF THE CAR EVER YOU STUPID ASSHOLE) and confront this idiot standing in the way of my impending lunch. Now, I’m not normally a very aggressive person, but when I get hungry, things change. Snickers had it right. So I walk up to the thing in my way, and with all the confidence of a 22-year-old who’s never punched anything before, but has played about 300 hours of Tekken, I grab the figure’s shoulder and say, “Hey buddy, why don’t you AGHH OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT!!?”

           I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Wow, that was an unexpected way for that sentence to end. He went from bluster and belligerence to abject pants-pissing terror in the space of 3 words.” To which I would reply with: 1. You clearly don’t know me very well, that happens about once a week. And 2. Let’s see you almost eskimo kiss a zombie and not freak out. Quit judging me. Asshole.

           So yeah, the thing turns around and it’s a zombie. Right in front of me. About 3 inches from my dumb face. And this was honestly one of the most surreal moments of my life. It was like I was so scared I went all the way back around the spectrum to calm again. Like my body didn’t know what to do with this insane spike of emotion, so it just said “Fuck it. No emotions for you.”

           The zombie stood just in front of me. They were about 6 foot 2, just within the “kind of intimidating but not overly so” range of heights. They were wearing a large hoodie, which explains why I didn’t realize it was a zombie until I literally touched it. And its face was…weird. Like, really weird. Its mouth was open to a point that was unsettling without being obvious why. See, if it had been just slightly ajar it would’ve looked like someone breathing through their mouth, and if it had been wide open it would’ve looked like someone who was either really surprised or trying to catch some food in their mouth. Instead it was at an awkward in-between stage. Like the middle school of mouth openings. Like it couldn’t really decide what it wanted to be, so it decided to be half of all the things it thought was cool and that ended up being literally the worst choice it could’ve possibly made and all the other kids made fun of it and it had to sit at the lunch table all alone eating peanut butter and honey sandwiches on white bread and trying to pretend like it wanted to get picked last for kickball… sorry, what was I talking about? Right, the zombie. So its mouth was weird, we’ve established that. And projected a little bit. Moving on.

           Stepping back and taking in the whole face, everything just moved further down the uncanny valley. Their face held a blank expression, as expected for a zombie, but it’s hard to describe what kind. You see, there are several types of blank expressions. There’s the blank expression you have when you watch someone steal your parking space right in front of you. The kind of blank expression where you just sit there and blink a couple times, staring off in a random direction like you’re Jim in The Office and there’s a camera watching you. This is the kind where you have to take a second to process. To sit there and think, “Wow, did that really just happen? Does God really hate me that much? Is this payback for candy bar I stole when I was 9? Who knew God was such a petty bitch.” This is what I call the Angry Blank.

           There’s also the Confused Blank. This is the kind of blank expression where it’s your first day of college and you walk into your first class, all excited for this new journey you’re about to take and all the friends you’re gonna make, and you spend the first 15 minutes of class accidentally daydreaming about how great the next four years are gonna be and then you look up at the board and see a bunch of bullshit equations on the board and wonder what the fuck is going on, why are there equations in a first-year religion class, and then look around and see no one else questioning it, and then realize that you’re in the wrong room and this is a vector calculus course and your dumb ass could barely pass algebra 0.5 so you stand up and have to awkwardly step over about 13 seniors who are all trying to take notes and then the professor notices and stops talking for a second and you know he’s staring at you but you can’t turn around because it’s like you’re Frodo and the professor is the eye of Sauron and if you look at him he’ll steal your soul or some shit and you run out of the room and straight back to your dorm where you get on the computer and drop your religion class so you never have to go in that building again. That kind of blank expression.

           And there are a few other types, but they aren’t relevant here so I’m going to ignore them like I’m a GOP senator and they’re climate change evidence. The zombie had a strange mixture of these two blank expressions on their face, like they were angry and trying to process it, but then while they were processing the anger they forgot why they were angry. So now they were just walking around, angry, hoping to run into something that would give them a brain-blast or something and remind them of why they were angry.

           I took in all of this in about a second and a half, so terrified that I felt calm again, as I mentioned before. The zombie just stood there and looked at me, its dead eyes (both in the literal sense and the figurative sense) locked somewhere above my left shoulder, which was honestly the scariest part of the whole encounter. Either it was looking at something behind me, in which case I badly wanted to see what it was but didn’t want to turn away from the zombie in front of me because fear. Or it simply couldn’t focus its eyes on me and that was the best it could get, which is pretty creepy. We both stood there for a while, me not moving because I was afraid that its vision was based on movement like it was a goddamned T-rex and the zombie not moving because who the fuck knows? Eventually, the poor teenager working the window asked me if I was gonna order anything, drawing the zombie’s attention back to the window, and that was enough to break my reverie. I broke and sprinted the five feet to my car, got in so fast I slammed my head against the roof, possibly giving myself a concussion, and hauled ass out of that drive through, narrowly missing the zombie on my way out.

           I drove straight to the Wendy’s on the other side of town and ordered myself a Baconator and two frosties because I’d fucking earned them. I just stared death in the face and ran away like a little bitch. I needed the calories if I was gonna keep running like that. Endurance had never been my strong suit.