Zom•boc•a•lypse [zom-bok-uh-lips] – noun. 1) Any of a number of scenarios involving the complete and utter destruction and annihilation of humanity as antagonized by any of the following groups: zombies, living dead, infected, ghouls, hell spawn.
Cut to: Exterior shot, Rooftop. A man stands backlit in the setting sun, his leather jacket zipped halfway up his chest. He wears a pair of aviators and puffs on a huge cigar. As the smoke rolls off, he holds up his M-1 Garand rifle and cocks it.
“I guess it’s time to hunt.”
He walks to the edge of the roof and pears down. Camera on: The horde of zombies splashing against the building. The man smiles and aims down at the crowd and squeezes off a shot. The .30-6 rips through three of the undead, pulling meat off the bone. He puffs, cocks the gun, and squeezes again. There go another three.
“Like fish in a barrel”. He scowls and laughs a deep, semi-pushed laugh. Cut to: Later, same. The sun is setting and the man’s cigar is down to a chew. He sits on a lawn chair and squeezes off more shots at the crowd of rags and blood below him. He sets down his gun and throws the stub of his cigar over the side.
“The hunt’s over…for now.”
“What hunt?”
He snapped back in an office chair. The leather jacket was gone. So were the aviators and the rifle. They were replaced by a white-collar shirt, square framed glasses and a cup of coffee. Instead of sitting on a rooftop, he occupied an office cubicle. A young man in the same type of garb stood looking over his cubicle wall. He shook out of his daydream and looked at him. “Huh? Nothing. What?”
“You just said, ‘The hunt’s over…for now,’ in this really weird, Batman-y voice. Christian Bale, not Michael Keaton.”
“I did? Are you sure?”
“Whatever, Rob. How’s it going, man?”
“Uh, good, Luke.”
“Alright, well, keep it up.”
“Will do, man.”
Luke strutted of with his pressed and starched shirt. His tall, slim physique. Asshole. Even his name sounded good. Luke. It was the name of a main character, not a fat best friend like Rob. He relaxed in his chair and the coffee in his Star Trek mug spilled over the brim and painted his shirt the wrong color.
“Ah, damnit.” Paper towels from the bathroom wouldn’t take out the stain, so he would have to spend the rest of the day looking like the guy without motor skills. Something like this always happened. Zipper down. Underwear showing. Coffee spill. It was Rob’s everyday work habit. He was supposed to spend most of his time copy-editing legal documents for corporation ABC or whatever. It didn’t matter which company, it was mindless work. The mindlessness transferred into everything else he did, his pants zipping. His coffee spilling. He was already preoccupied anyway. Contingency plans. Always have to be prepared.
Where are you going to go first? Gotta know, gotta be quick about it. How are you gonna get there? Roads will be pretty packed, people fleeing. Cars will be pretty much useless. Use a bike and bring a backpack if you’re gonna be hauling stuff back like ammo and guns. Go to the nearest Wal-Mart. Looting will probably be in effect so money will be pointless. Get some ammunition and whatever guns you can get your hands on. Bring it back to your house or apartment along with non-perishable food items. And damnit, don’t forget the can opener.
The phone rang that stock ring you always hear go off in big offices.
“Robert Parkins, Legal.”
“Hey Robert, it’s Gary Elliot.”
“Hello, sir. What can I do for you?”
“Well, Rob, I got the contract lease renewal for the restaurant place over on 9th and I found some errors.”
“Oh, well sir, I’m…really sorry about that.”
“Now, I understand there, Rob, that sometimes these things can slip under the radar and go unnoticed, but you need to know that this is what we pay you for.”
“Again, sir, I’m really sorry about that. Um, what was the error, if you don’t mind me asking, sir?”
“It was a quotation mark.”
“A quotation?”
“Yes, so you understand the ramifications.”
“I do, sir and I apologize.”
“Alright, John, just make sure it doesn’t happen again. Oh and get that to me by the 31st of April. We need our numbers in 2009 to be better than last year.”
“Right, will do, sir.”
The receiver cracked down, hard plastic against plastic. “The name’s Rob, asshole.” He said it an octave lower than his normal speaking voice. His boss’ face formed in his mind’s eye and it morphed into a slag, bloody, rag of a thing. A gunshot rang out and a .30-6 tore straight through his jawbone, leaving the face in an eternal scream.
One o’clock ticked by and Rob ate Styrofoam tinted food and drank Styrofoam tinted soda. His physique resembled his habits: sloppy, unhealthy.
“You ever eat anything remotely good for you?” Luke stood over his desk, the smell of light ranch dressing drifting over the cubicle wall.
“You ever eat anything that used to be alive?” Rob chuckled to himself and chomped on a bit of his burger.
“Plants are alive, dumbass.” He turned and walked off to the Steno-cool to chat with the other black ties that sat around him. Rob sipped his drink and ate his food in silence and thought about the end of the world.
What weapon are you gonna use? If you had a choice, what would you get? Don’t say chainsaw, idiot. You gotta pick something practical. Are you gonna be able to rev that thing up, lift it to chest-level and swing it around with twenty zombies surrounding you? Of course not, pick something practical. Get a shotgun, a big ol’ bastard that shoots buckshot. That birdshot wide spray won’t do you any good against those big, walking meatsacks. Saw the barrel down about six inches and you’ve got yourself a close quarters kill-all. Then grab a rifle for long-range. Something sturdy, but light. Load it up and strap it to your back with the sawed-off shotgun in hand, and you’re a zombie-killing machine.
“Hey Rob.”
Rob’s head sprung up from his monitor, another legal document that needed to be edited. Quotation marks to miss. The woman standing behind him smelled like hand lotion; the kind that they market to have no scent, but really it does. Something like baby powder and sanitation. He knew who it was before he turned around. “Hey Carol.”
“What are you up to?”
“Just the usual. Copying. Editing.”
She gave a warm laugh and smiled at him. “Oh, you get me going.”
“You too.” He immediately regretted this. “I mean, well, you, yeah.”
“Hey, you want to go grab some lunch? There’s this café over on 6th that’s really nice.”
“Oh, well. I just ate, actually. I would go, though, if I hadn’t.”
“Oh, okay, Rob. Thanks. I’ll see you later, okay?”
“Okay. Bye.”
She smiled and walked away, her head sinking slightly as she disappeared around the corner of the cubicle.
“Damn.”
“Man, you completely sunk that boat. Titanic style.” Luke’s head popped over the cubicle wall and his arms followed.
“Why are you listening to our conversation?”
“Cause it was hilarious. And kind of sad.”
“I’m trying to work, Luke.”
“Is that what you call what you do over there all day? I heard that you missed a quotation mark on the 9th street lease. They’re thinking about handing that project over to me.”
“Lucky.” The sarcasm dripped off of his chin.
“Listen, Rob, you got to pick up your act or it might get ugly for you here.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m just saying, Rob.” His head dropped down behind the wall and Rob turned back to his computer. He mumbled to himself about Luke and him being an asshole.
“Stop talking to yourself, Rob.”
They held a wrap-up meeting near the end of every workday. In Rob’s opinion, it was a waste of time. Why not just send e-mails saying how he screwed up and how to fix it instead of dragging everyone in here? The meeting room looked typical. It was a light, non-violent color with a long wooden table for everyone to sit around and feel important. The rocking office chairs with the mesh backs. Ergonomic. It was a word that Rob didn’t know until he started working at the office.
“Good afternoon, everyone.” Rob’s boss, Gary Elliot, was a tall, lean man who ran marathons for fun. He rode a bike to work everyday and Rob thought about how he would be set when the dead came back.
“The end of the quarter is coming soon and we need to step up our game a little bit. It’s in our best interest to focus entirely on re-leasing our current holds. Also, this means that our editors need to be on top of everything.”
Damn. Rob was going to get reamed right in front of everyone. Not only does his spot almost at the end of the table make him look like an idiot, but Gary was going to do it once over.
“I’ve already spoken with one of my editors about mistakes on their forms,” he pointed at Rob and winked, “but I’m sure you guys will go for the gold.” All heads turned towards Rob. He slouched down in his chair and sort of saluted to everyone looking on. The wink was supposedly meant to be discrete, but it was the opposite of. He looked up across the table where Luke sat, almost at the front, and he gave Rob the same point and wink.
How are you gonna keep the zombies out? You can’t just lock the door when they come ‘a knockin’. If you live in a building or apartment with stairs that lead up to your door, get everything you need inside and knock out the stairs. Zombies can’t climb very well so knocking the stairs out will ensure that the dead can’t reach you. If your house or apartment is on ground level, get inside and barricade everything you can. I don’t mean pushing a table in front of the door, I mean break the table down, and nail it to everything that isn’t yourself.
Four o’clock. The men upstairs stopped checking what their employees looked at on the internet around this time because they had already left. Rob had a pretty strange search history that he deleted every day: How to saw off a shotgun barrel?, M-1 Garand Rifle, Disease Breakouts. Today, it was bladed weapons that work well in close range combat. Results: Axe, Machete, Short sword, Bolo. Rob clicked on the last one and a page sprang open. He whispered the description he found on the page to himself.
“A bolo is a Mexican machete with an inverted blade. The blade was designed to make the cutting of vegetation in a swifter and more powerful fashion than an average machete possible. Damn. I wonder how much one is.”
“You look at the weirdest shit.” Luke was back and leaning over the compartment wall. Rob quickly minimized the internet window and spun around.
“What?”
“What do you need a bolo knife for?”
“I don’t. Why would I?”
“Dude, I just saw the page you were on. I don’t care what you were looking at it for, I was just wondering.”
“Oh, it’s just a hobby.”
“Do you have a normal hobby, like scrapbooking or cooking?”
“You scrapbook?”
“No, I uh. No.”
He walked away, scoffing and muttering under his breath. Rob turned back to his computer and laughed. Victory. The bolos were back on the computer, and he started looking up prices and statistics. Would he need a longer handle? Could he afford a sharper blade? Should he get the optional hand strap for safety and maneuverability?
Cut to: Exterior shot: Day. The undead crowd around the door to a building. Their moans are the awful soundtrack to this hellish nightmare. The door bursts open and Rob steps through, his leather jacket sprayed in a fresh coat of blood. He raises his arm, a massive bolo knife in hand and walks into the crowd.
“The butcher’s special today is…dead meat.”
The bolo comes down and lops off the heads of two near by zombies. His other arm comes up and a sawed-off shotgun erupts. More zombies explode, their wails ceasing, their already dead bodies dropping to the ground. The horde converges on the hero and he continues his assault; the bolo cuts limbs and heads from bodies, the shotgun tears them apart. One by one, they all drop.
As the sun sets, he takes out a cigar, flips it into his mouth, and lights it. The smoke puffs out and he places a pair of aviators over his eyes.
“I guess we’re outta fresh meat.”
The bus that Rob took home was always overcrowded and stuffy. The air upon entering always forced itself up his nose and reminded him of hospitals. There were so many smells, it was hard to identify any of them, let alone the bad ones. Rob got on and stood in the middle of the isle and held on to the support rail above his head. He thought about what he was going to do when he got home, and how he was temporarily handicapped to only one arm. Would he pick the shotgun or the bolo to carry in the other? Which one would offer an easier range of motion? Shotgun, definitely. He began to question whether he should have ordered the bolo or not. He thought that you can never be too prepared and that the bolo was a good choice, and reasonably priced too, after the accessories. Only $79.99 without tax. He’d bought worse on a budget. Besides, when the zombie hordes come raining down on humanity, he’d be the one lopping off heads.
Rob’s apartment was nicely decorated, well adorned. He made a reasonable amount of money at company ABC, or whatever, and had enough to put into nice things. He opened the door and shut it behind him, sure to lock it and flip the deadbolt. He threw his keys into a bowl on a table near the door and plopped onto the sofa. He loved that sofa. It was the kind that you just sink into, and for a second you think that you might just drown in the cushions. He flipped on the TV and scanned for a minute, but got bored. None of the crap that was on was any good. The only thing he ever watched was the news.
How do you know when the zombies have risen? Quick, it might be happening right now. At first, they’ll call it a “minor outbreak”. Some disease or something. The news will report on a disease you’ve never heard of and the small amount of people that it’s affecting. Don’t listen. If you haven’t heard of the disease before now and there’s an outbreak, get your ass to Wal-mart and back because you’ve got a zombie uprising on your hands. You would have definitely heard of a disease before there is an outbreak of it. One case, and doctors write textbooks on the thing. If you ever hear about “Dog Fever” or “Bat Cough” going around, don’t think; just shoot whoever’s got the symptoms.
Rob’s alarm went off at 5:30 every morning. It was that awful EHH EHH EHH EHH that even when you hear it in commercials and movies, you still want to punch it for waking you up. He slapped it off and rubbed his eyes open, forcibly telling them to see. He had fallen asleep on the couch again, not really paying attention to anything. Rob picked himself up and wondered over to the fridge. The kitchen floor was cold and his feet refused to feel after a minute. In the background, he heard someone speaking in an easy tone of voice, but forcibly enough to make out what he was saying. He had left the TV on last night after he fell asleep.
“…people who have recently traveled to Mexico and even some of the southern states are urged to see physicians to make sure that they haven’t contracted the disease. So far, the total number of deaths due to the illness are in the very low state, but how quick the disease spreads is yet undetermined and may cause the number to go up.”
Rob became plastered to the man on the TV, the local newscaster relaying the recent events. There was a disease spreading, a death toll, and no name as of yet. Could this be it?
“Once again, there has been an outbreak of “Swine Flu” in the United States with Mexico being the epicenter and source. The lethality of the disease is unknown as of yet, but there have been recorded deaths in New York and some of the southern states, and especially in Mexico.”
Rob stopped moving. He stared. Swine Flu…he’d never heard of that. What the hell is it? There was that bird flu thing, but it’s obviously not the same or they’d have mentioned it. Swine Flu, what a crock. No such thing.
“If you are experiencing fever, sore throat, nausea, coughing, or vomiting, seek medical attention immediately.”
They had to be fake symptoms. The real thing has got to be death…then coming back. Zombie outbreak. And he was ready.
Rob ran for the closet in his room and flung it open. Paper fell to the floor and spread out, but he didn’t care. He reached to the back of the closet and felt something large and metallic. His hand wrapped around it and pulled it out. The ancient M-1 Garand had been given to him by his father when he was 12. He’d never used it. Underneath the gun was a box of ammo, which he took out with it. Inside it, he found the .30-6 rounds and laid them out on the floor. Now what? It occurred to him that he had never loaded a gun before, let alone the rifle that sat in his lap. The box contained no directions on the matter, only the ammunition and a small black, rectangular object. Rob picked it up and looked it over. It was hollow on one side and he guessed that this was the magazine clip that held the bullets. He began putting the bullets in the clip and got seven in when he realized that he was doing it upside down. He turned the bullets around and fit eight in. They seemed to be in the right position. The gun weighed around ten pounds when unloaded and he felt the weight as he picked it up. It was dusty and slightly dirty and he wondered how to clean it and whether it would still fire without having regular maintenance in the last eighteen years. Flipping a lever on the top of the gun, the chamber sprung open and locked there. Rob fiddled with the clip until it slipped into the chamber and stopped with a click. He smiled and pulled the lever up and pushed forward.
“Locked and loaded.”
Rob didn’t own a leather jacket or aviator sunglasses, but he did have a cigar. It was summer a few years ago when he stopped in the tobacconists on 11th street to buy one for just such an occasion. He grabbed it from a shelf in his bedroom, got dressed and walked back into the kitchen. The red light on his house phone was blinking and he pressed the button that activated the voicemail.
“Hey, Rob, man, it’s Luke. Hey, listen, I was wondering if you could cover for me today and get some of my edits out cause I’m not feeling too good. I’ve spent all morning over the toilet. I think I might have picked something up when I went to Cozumel last month. Anyway, thanks, man. I owe you one.” The machine beeped and clicked and Rob smiled. He took the cigar out of the wrapping and chomped off the end like he’d seen in the movies. It took him a minute to find a lighter in his apartment, but when he did, he put flame to the cigar and puffed out some smoke.
“Looks like I got a zombie to kill.” Rob put on his work jacket and opened the door. The TV was blaring footage of the sick in Mexico and he thought about the poor bastards that were going to be there when those people woke up. He checked the chamber on the rifle to make sure it was loaded, and with another puff of smoke, he was gone.
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