I’m not talking, “Oh, gosh, that would be terrible.” I’m talking screaming like a prepubescent girl and running around in a fit of incompetence. I lose my normal heroic swagger, and adopt a more woozy, twitchy appearance at the mere mention of zombies.
OH GOD NOW I’M THINKING ABOUT ZOMBIES
I’m not a fool: I’m aware that zombies, at least in the traditional sense, are a near impossibility. A disease that controls the mind, reanimated corpses that hunger for human flesh? That requires such complexity it’s nearly impossible to imagine. A zombie that is truly undead, some sort of magical disease or condition that passes to those killed by zombies? I don’t believe in the supernatural, so that’s right out. Even the ‘rage zombie’ concept, such as seen in 28 Days Later or related films, where a human being isn’t necessarily dead, but simply enraged and aggressive without true consciousness is nearly impossible. Zombies just aren’t real, and that’s a fact that I can honestly say brightens my day every time I think about it.
Yay! The dead don’t walk the earth!
However, that doesn’t stop me from being afraid.
I thought about zombies again…
The fact that I don’t like zombies is well known among my closest friends, as well as my newest acquaintances. It’s practically an identifying feature of my personality. Brian Allman has zombie-phobia (I can’t find a technical term, though ‘ambulothanatophobia’ popped into some google searches)…Zombies=Brian looks like a squirrel on PCP, twitching and shivering while muttering to himself about acorns…or something.
The point of the metaphor being that I act like a baby and can’t handle it. Movies, games, unpleasantly detailed Halloween costumes, doesn’t matter. I get scared, freeze up, and consider fainting in a comically over the top fashion.
But, I’m not writing a diary, I’m writing a story. So let’s get to it.
A close friend of mine, who I’ll refer to as Big Ol’ Beardy, or ‘Bob’ for his privacy, enjoyed teasing me about my fear of zombies.
Though, teasing isn’t quite the right word. It implies mild taunting, or slightly frustrating jokes at my expense. His teasing went further.
Perhaps a sufficiently hyperbolic-but-accurate statement would be:
HE TORTURED ME with my fear.
My beard hates being tortured.
We lived in and belonged to the same undergraduate fraternity, and he regularly woke me with scratching at my door, or putting a zombie movie on the house’s television, and convincing me to walk into the TV room unaware. Time and again, no matter the seasons or reason, he found ways to make me uncomfortable and afraid, mostly because he seemed to find someone my size cowering from a make-believe threat to be absolutely comical.
As he once eloquently put it, “It’s like watching a Grizzly bear run from a poodle. Either pathetic or endearing, but not both.”
In 2008, he went so far as to dress as a zombie on Halloween, and chase me around, despite various threats I made of violence, until he placated me with delicious sugary treats, promises of food, and agreeing to put on clothing to look less zombie-esque, and more like a very pale and sickly lumberjack.
Thinking the matter settled, I engaged in my annual tradition of leading the ghost-story walk around campus.
As a note of background information, I’ve always enjoyed scary stories. Especially when they don’t include zombies. And, as a campus tour guide, as well as noted storyteller (*cough cough-bullshitter*) it wasn’t hard to come up with various scary stories from campus history, to scare and amuse whatever friends and friends of friends came along. But back to the story:
Every year, I walked around campus telling very common ghost stories and scary tales. I shared the famous “hook-hand” legend, tales of horrible suicide-hauntings, unsolved murders of unsuspecting coeds, and all the normal Midwestern urban legends that I could think of. All my various stories were told as I walked from building to building, and into the darkest and scariest recesses of campus, eventually leading to our final stop, the old cemetery just off campus, towards the abandoned quarry the school used as a nature park.
This particular night, against my better judgment, I thought of a perfect zombie story to tell. It would tie into the history of the school. It would include the death of unsuspecting innocents. It would conclude without any real certainty. And it would include the implication, though not confirmation, of the supernatural: I would tell a zombie story.
Approaching the cemetery, a streetlight flickering in the distance like in a classic horror movie, I began.
“Years ago, before the school was renamed, there was a nursing program that was taught in the old science building. It was a respected, expensive program that drew top-quality nurses and future nurses from around the country. As the program grew in quality and finances, it grew in numbers. As with all progress, there came a point when the teachers struggled to deal with the size of the program. Soon, the opportunity to find live subjects willing to be prodded and poked by nurses in training began to dwindle, in comparison to the rapidly increasing number of nursing students.”
The cold night air blew around us, as the last fallen leaves of autumn blew across the graveyard gate. I felt invincible, and ready to scare my friends with a spooky story.
“Though it wasn’t common knowledge, the university planned to open up a medical program, and became licensed to handle corpses, for training doctors, specifically, surgeons.” This, of course, was borderline true, and never included surgeons, but I doubted anyone care about the reality as much as the story, so I expanded the tale, to include grim details, such as the disappearing students, and the professors, desperate to find corpses or even live subjects to study.
This is the scariest I have ever looked in the history of ever.
As a nervous freshman girl squeaked audibly I was affirmed of my success, and continued my tale. I told of how a budget had forced the professors to cut their spending on hiring volunteers for nurse training, and I told how paperwork backups prevented cadavers from being ordered for the nursing students to work on. I told a long tale of deception and graverobbing, that ended with a grotesque corpse, found in the basement wearing nursing student clothing, and a note that said, “Thanks for digging me up, it was cramped in the box,” and I told the frightened listeners how the murderer was never caught, and the missing body never discovered. And, with all good ghost stories, I ended by telling my audience that no one in the school admitted it, but every 16 years, a new female student was found, in the graveyard, with nursing school scrubs, and the same scared face. None of it was true, but late at night on Halloween, far from the safety of our dorms or houses, we felt nervous. But, my fear-mongering accomplished, we all walked home for a late night Halloween party, ready to ignore the minor fright we’d shared at the graveyard, thinking about zombies, and all the famous tales of Halloweens gone wrong.
Bob, though, had heard my story, and decided that perhaps my early zombie scare earlier that night wasn’t quite enough. My story inspired him to bring a little fright of his own. He hatched a plan to leave me quivering and scared, on Halloween night, in front of the same people who I’d managed to scare with my story, and he planned to do so at the most embarrassing possible time, when I was confused and in my underwear: He would scare me awake after I went to bed.
Flash forward several hours, I was tired and headed to sleep. I sluggishly crawled into my lofted bed, turned my lights off, and was unconscious without an inkling of the devious plan Bob had hatched.
There was a knock at my door. I didn’t wake up.
Another knock. Like a rock, a slept.
He made a deathly moan, a wheezing exhalation that was accompanied by clawing at the wood of my door.
NOW, I was awake.
The bedhead means I was sleeping. In case it's unclear.
Thinking it was another prank, I called, “Shut up and go to bed.” My voice was nervous, and obvious high pitched. This seemed to feed Bob’s fire because he clawed harder, and made a deep growling sound in his throat.
I, like any normal person, hid under my covers, because it’s a well-documented fact that the undead, as well as monsters from under beds and in closets, are unable to penetrate cloth barriers, when used to hide your head.
PROTECT ME, BLANKET OF HOPE
Not hearing another response, Bob became even more amused, likely aware of my current fright. So, he cracked the door open, and with a quiet hiss and grunt, slammed a hand on top of me, pulling the covers away.
Without a pause, I jumped out of bed. I rolled from my lofted perch, catching Bob’s face as I fell, and slammed down on top of him, before jumping up and proceeding to kick him in the stomach and head, as quickly as I could.
Between the pain-filled grunts and cries of “Oh, GOD STOP, WHAT THE HELL BRIAN, STOP, IT’S ME” I made out Bob’s distinctive chuckle, and I realized what had happened. I helped him up, turned on my lights, and grabbed my covers from the floor.
I turned to face Bob, and he stared at me, a slightly inebriated grin on his face.
“You kicked my ass!” he said, surprised.
Also shocked, I responded with a confused head tilt, and yelled, “I THOUGHT YOU WERE A ZOMBIE!”
“That was hilarious,” Bob laughed, while massaging his likely bruised gut.
Still breathing quickly, my heart pounding, I continued yelling, “I WAS GOING TO KILL YOU.”
Bob, amused at my continued fear, bent over laughing.
As my fear subsided, he asked, “So…we’re good?”
I nodded. “Actually,” I responded, “I almost peed for a second there.”
Bob doubled over, now using both hands to hold his bruised gut. “It’s better than being zombified,” he gasped out between coughs and a cacophony of laughter. I closed the door on him, ignoring the coughs and laughs being sputtered in the hall.
I went to bed, contented. Despite my fear, despite the tiny droplet of urine I had squeezed out in utter-mind-numbing-heart-palpitating-terror, I felt good.
I realized something very important.
If the zombies ever rise up and return from the dead, or become diseased killing machines, I won’t just freeze like the earlier mentioned scared squirrel. I won’t just cry, pee my pants and get eaten.
I’ll cry, wet my pants…and then kick the zombie in the nuts until it stops moving or I do.
Take that, Zombies! (Pants-wetting excluded)
You really aren't awake yet. You never are until at least your second cup of coffee, and this is only your first. You're having a hard time getting your eyes to focus. But it certainly looks like there's a man in your front yard, crouched down on all fours, gnawing at a leg.
ReplyDeleteA human leg. Definitely. It's still wearing a sneaker. And a sock.
The man gnawing on the human leg suddenly stops chewing, as though some sound disturbs him. He slowly looks up from his meal. His eyes don't blink, and they seem to be too large for his face. His mouth hangs open. Drool and blood trail down his chin.
You've heard about the outbreak in Millbury, of course. You just hadn't thought it was as serious as the eleven o'clock news made it out. They get hysterical about everything. A couple of inches of snow, and it's THE SNOWPOCALYPSE. You can't really be blamed for putting their ZOMBIEPOCALYPSE warnings in the same category. Boy who cried wolf, right?
But it seems the newscasters were at least a little right, because there's a zombie chowing down on a human leg in your front yard.
Shit.
http://www.choiceofgames.com/zombies/index.html