[prep yourself for tomorrow's sequel]


ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE
BY MATT RODEN
*

I expect many of our first encounters with the zombies will be the morning after the initial rising. They will rise at night and probably some cemetery workers or policemen or some kids making out in a car will die. That's inevitable and kind of necessary for later mistaken identity hi-jinks, as they become zombies and start to form the army of the dead. What will happen in my house is that I will come down stairs to breakfast and I'll probably have had a fight with my family the night before or something, about how I'll never amount to anything. So I'll be yelling in at them from the kitchen that I'm really sorry and then I'll get really angry at them for not talking to me and I'll storm into the dining room and say "Oh, Grandpa, I didn't realise you were coming to breakfast, what is that you're eating, black pudding?" and it is at this point that I will realise that he is eating human brains, which is almost as disgusting, and that MY GRANDPA HAS BEEN DEAD FOR FIFTEEN YEARS! I'll wheel around and see that all my family have been horribly slaughtered by the walking corpse of my former relative and he will launch at me and I'll have to take him out with whatever is in the dining room, like vases or maybe a family photo which I'll decapitate him with, yelling "You killed my family and now in an ironic turn a pictorial representation of them is killing you, albeit that you are already deceased!" Or something witty like that. By that time my family will have risen and after thinking they just want to hug me I realise that they are now zombies and I have to take them on in various locations around the house so as that various everyday implements can be used as items of destruction. I'd probably go at it with Mum in the kitchen because there are heaps of cool utensils, including a garbage disposal. I might keep a cleaver on me for later. I'd off my brother in the basement maybe, lop off his head with a badminton racquet or a ski and say "You always wanted my totem tennis pole! Well now you can have it, in the grave, you egg-sucking guttertrash!" And next door a lady will cover her son's ears reflexively at the sound of my modern day Michael J. Fox movie battle cries. She'll mutter about my behavior, and I'll never get a chance to explain, because she wrote me off as a youth from the start. Our family never really got on with them, and we sure won't be having any getting-to-know-you barbeques now that I've just chopped up the remains of my homicidal and decomposing family with a gardening trowel and matching pair of secateurs while bursting through the hedges and landing on their perfectly manicured lawn! I won't fight my Dad because he will run off to have an ultimate showdown with me in roughly an hour and a half's time, although it may seem like more real time is compressed into an audience-friendly format and the sun will have set and stuff by then. 

Anyway, I'll grab my Dad's car keys and drive off to cruise around the town to see if this is just happening to me, which of course it's not because, hello, apocalypse! I'll run down a few zombies just for kicks, and maybe a few bystanders if they get in the way or are slow or are wearing something stupid because no one's going to bust me. In fact right now one of those zombie cops is back at the precinct murdering all the other cops. At one point he will grab the Sergeant's brain and punch a hole in it and put sprinkles on it and dip it into coffee or blood coffee and then eat that. It'll be really gross but also funny, unless you loved the Sergeant or something. I know I didn't, he busted up Darren Silizilak's party last May. Try being a fascist with your brain covered in icing sugar, you pinko bastard! Sweet dreams...in hell! Ha ha ha. People can't tell you off for being too crazy because like I said: hey, apocalypse, cut loose already.

Anyway, I'll have a lot more run ins with authority figures who I totally rip up with a varying array of makeshift weapons -- my order of preference is a cleaver, then a baseball bat, then a machete, a chainsaw, a double-barreled sawn-off shotgun, and finishing with a homemade flame thrower, but more on that later.

Along the way I'll pick up some people to help me out and to provide contrast and someone for me to do witty one liners with. There will be: a big black guy who is really good in a fight with a club or a hockey stick or some kind of club/hockey conglomeration; a weedy English guy who is a coward and when in battle will surprisingly knock people out by bumbling into a pulley rope or by knocking out a scaffold support, whatever, he won't do it on purpose. There will be a totally hot chick in a torn singlet that I save and who gets a cross bow from a sporting goods store or a museum, whichever we have a fight in first. The chick will be all sass with me at first, but my bravery and the tension that can only occur when you are trapped in cramped, damp, smelly environments fending for your life will win her over. After that we will be a total kick ass team. There will also be some old dude who knows about zombies and will do a bunch of exposition before he gets killed. He'll give me a very subtle clue which I will ignore in the midst of yelling "I'm not leaving you behind, there's still time, we've got to get to the chopper!" but will later remember and use to stop the flow of new zombies. We'll drive around in a mad dirty jeep we steal from someone and later that night will kit out with rotating blades and stuff. The English guy will complain about stealing it but I will reply coolly as usual, using the death of a zombie as both emphasis and punctuation. "Scared we'll get caught? Dude (stab) the dead tell no tales. Now (punch) if it's not too much trouble (reload) could you pass me that Pepsi (shoot off head in a way that goes up in the end so that people know its a question, maybe if I shoot under his head to increase the trajectory?)" 

Now it's getting dark and we're all bunkered up somewhere preparing for the big battle. English is working on a counter spell or delive-ifying laser, depending on where the zombies came from and the girl is doing weapon assessment and the big dude's on recon. By this stage I'm on fantasy overload and I'm just yelling out movie quotes willy nilly, everything from monster films to 'Nam flicks to romantic comedies and Disney movies. Several zombies have been killed whilst I sing songs scored by Elton John, Tim Rice, and Peebo Bryson. Unfortunately "Hakuna Matata" is a voodoo chant that strengthens the living dead and the girl had to slap me to snap me out of it. This led to us kissing so it was probably worth the big guy losing his eye, and he looks cooler with a patch, and it gives me a better reason to call him Patch because before I was just going off this story that he reminded me of how a dog looks and also how a dog acts. I'm working on a flame thrower which I make out of tanks and hosing and a blowtorch, or maybe super soakers and a lighter. 

The zombies attack and we have this wicked huge battle that takes out several surrounding buildings and I see my Dad and fight him and the others have these periphery fights and English bumbles along trying to finish his spell/laser thing. Dad and I trade several barbed remarks and at one point I lose a finger or something, nothing with huge aesthetic repercussions, maybe a scar on my cheek which, when the bleeding stops and the scab falls off of its own volition will be received as rakish, and that makes me go berserker and the girl gets taken and I rescue her and we drive the jeep around and eventually English does the spell just as I kill my Dad with the catcher's mitt he gave me for my eighth birthday inlayed with the razorsharp poisoned Mexican throwing daggers he gave me for my ninth, and say "I love you father, I always will, I hope you find peace at last...six feet under, you dirt-munching braineater!" and then me and the girl kiss and then English tries to kiss the big guy who punches him out and as we all laugh at his homophobia I throw my medallion in the air and yell "YEEHA" and then we drive off into the sunset and I say something about battles and wars and how I just can't wait to be king and then as I drive off you look at the ground and there is a hand that bursts out and clutches around and its Sissy Spacek coming back from the grave of her career and some writing appears and it says "The End...Or is it...We can only pray...under the earth you smelly-arsed, maggot-faced deadbeats! Eat this!" and then later I'll get drunk at the pub for free even though it's a Tuesday because, come on, I just stopped an apocalypse, give me a break already! GROOVY! Yeah, woo-ooh! 
*

Please realize that this piece was 
provided by an Australian.
 

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*

LET IT BE WIDELY KNOWN THAT

thisbe n. is reading in boston this friday (10/4) here
and next tuesday (10/8) here

lindsay r., steve d., claire z., donnie b., ben b., & david b
are reading at this haypenny thing in detroit on october fifth

& sarah b. and shauna m. are reading at
this pboz thing in brooklyn on the sixth

& there's this huge thing in philly a few weeks later.