A wealthy suburb filled with mini-mansions. There are no cars on the streets, no people outside and little to no noise. The sound of a dragging foot breaks the silence. A zombie walks by, not chasing anything, just wandering the streets.
The narrator says that everyone is suddenly gone.
The narrator wakes up in a fancy bed inside one of the mini-mansions. He gets up and searches room-to-room. He finds no people, a thing he’s clearly not used to. He’s frustrated.
The Narrator pours himself a bowl of fancy granola cereal. He tops it off with almond milk.
At first he thinks it was the terrorists. But that didn't make any sense. How could they get everyone else, but not get him?
The Narrator turns the TV on and flips through the channels. There’s no live programming on. It’s either pre-programmed shows, test patterns or static. He turns the TV off.
Then he thinks it's the Rapture. He knew he wasn't going to Heaven, but maybe most other people were. That didn't make any sense, either. Most of the people he knew weren't going to Heaven, either, and all of them were gone, too.
In his bedroom, the Narrator puts on an expensive track suit and matching basketball shoes.
Then he thought it might be some kind of disease. Maybe it was that bird flu he'd always heard so much about. Or maybe SARS. Or that disease that killed all those people in that Stephen King novel. But if that were the case, how come there weren't any bodies? And how come the hospitals weren't flooded?
The Narrator grabs a set of car keys and goes into the garage. He gets in a Lexus and leaves his house.
Driving through the neighborhood, which is empty: no cars, no pedestrians, no kids playing in yards.
Then he thought it was one of those George Romero-kind of things. But where were the living dead? And why weren’t there a bunch of people hanging out at the mall?
The Narrator scans the radio, but can’t find any live stations, only programmed playlists, static and useless emergency alerts. The voices on the radio tell everyone to stay home, but provide no further details.
Then he thought he was dreaming. Or in a coma. Or in some kind of government mind-control facility or something like that. He couldn't rule one of those out, except for the dream thing. He knew he wasn't dreaming, because he already woke up. If he were still in a dream state or a coma or some kind of Matrix-style mind control thing, he never figured it out. At least not before he died.
The Narrator drives home and parks in the driveway. He goes back inside.
He says there isn't really much to tell. He actually lasted only about four hours in the brave new world.
The Narrator kicks off his shoes and leaves them in the middle of the floor. He looks around shamefully, but no one is home, so no one sees or cares.
He tooled around the house for a few hours listening to music, eating, shitting, shaving, showering and getting ready.
He grabs a beer from the fridge and takes a sip. He goes to his bedroom again, to do the shitting, shaving, showering and getting ready he talked about.
Dressed in a suit, the Narrator drives the Lexus down an empty expressway.
He was only on the road for about two minutes before he figured out that something was going on. He noticed not one single car on the road, not one pedestrian on the sidewalk and not one animal in the sky or in the grass.
The Narrator sees a crashed car in a ravine to the side of the expressway. The railing is crashed through and smoke comes from the car. He drives past it without slowing down.
He decides to go to work. He speeds up as he drives away from the wreck.
The Lexus parked, the Narrator heads for the building’s front door. The modern architecture of the building makes it hard to see the building’s entrance, but the Narrator knows where it is. From outside, he sees no people walking around or sitting in any of the lobby’s chairs.
Nobody was there. Or so he thought. He opens the door and goes inside.
The Narrator scans an ID card and exits the lobby and enters the labyrinth of halls and offices. He stops by a large secretarial desk. A nameplate says it’s Mary Atteberry’s desk, but it’s empty.
He checked Mary's desk, but she wasn't there, obviously. He stopped by to see Steve and Jimmie. They weren't there. either.
He passes by several offices. They’re all empty.
Then he went by Wilson's office. That's saying something. He hates Wilson. He wouldn't stop by Wilson's office if it were the end of the world. Well, maybe in that situation, since that's what happened. But no other time. It really would have to be the end of the world for him to stop by Wilson's office. He did it. Wilson wasn't there, either.
The Narrator heads to the elevator bank and pushes a button to go down.
He decided to go down and check in on the maintenance people. If they weren't there, he figured he might as well take the day off. If they weren't there, that meant that nobody was there. They never got the day off. Hell, he thinks they were forced to work on Christmas. So he figured he'd go see if anyone was home. That was the last bad idea he'd ever have.
He gets in the elevator and the door closes.
In the subbasement, the elevator doors open and the Narrator steps off.
The elevator worked fine. He didn't know why he thought it wouldn't. Everything else had worked that day. The elevator did, too.
He walks down the empty hallway, looking for anyone. He doesn’t find anyone.
He got off and walked into the subbasement. This was a place he had never ventured before. Hell, he's a mid-level executive with a Fortune 500 company, what would he be doing hanging out with the maintenance people?
He walks through a set of double doors marked “Maintenance.”
He looked around and didn't see much. He went into the break room, the supervisor's office, the bathroom. Nothing.
He approaches another set of double doors marked “Warehouse.” He scans his ID and goes through the doors.
The Narrator enters the warehouse, which seems empty at first.
The last stop was the warehouse. When he opened the door, he almost immediately heard something crash to the ground. Sort of like a lead pipe falling to the concrete floor or something like that.
The sound shakes the Narrator’s nerves and he takes a step back to collect himself.
He calls out to see if anyone was there.
He looks around, but sees no one.
The minute he said it, he felt like an idiot. It was such a cliché thing to say. The exact same thing every victim said in every horror movie.
He steps forward.
He did what you might expect. Like all those horror movie victims, he walked cautiously toward the sound. He should've run the other way and got the heck out of there. Since he's been dead, he's realized that he would've been right to run away. He'd have still been alive. At least for a little while longer.
He makes his way in between shelves filled with widgets and parts of widgets. He doesn’t see anybody.
Truthfully, he was never really someone who was good in a crisis. He might've made it out of the office building, but he's sure one of the other things out there would've gotten him sooner or later. He usually froze like a deer in headlights.
He hears movement from one of the aisles and heads in that direction.
That's pretty much what he did when the thing came at me. He might've screamed. He didn't really remember. You'd think that when you were dead, you'd get to remember everything you forgot in life, but it doesn't work that way. If you forgot it, you forgot it. Maybe if he were in Heaven. But it doesn't really seem like they were telling us the truth on that one, either.
A zombie moves down one of the aisles in his direction. He doesn’t see it.
He rounded the corner to the aisle where he heard the noise. The row was filled with boxes and boxes of pipes and plastic pipes and connectors and the like. He guessed this is where they got stuff any time the plumbing had problems anywhere in the building.
The Narrator rounds the corner and scans the aisle.
The problem was that the thing waiting in the pipe aisle had heard me right before he had heard it. It was slow, but it had the complete drop on him. He was surprised and he froze.
The Narrator freezes. The zombie does not, it makes a beeline towards him.
Right after he turned the corner, it was standing right there. He doesn't know how to describe it. It looked sort of like one of those things from one of the Romero movies, but the make-up was much better. Maybe it was more like something from 28 Days Later or Resident Evil. Either way, it was ugly, bloody and it stunk to high hell.
The zombie grabs him and he starts to scream.
Then it grabbed him. That's when he knew this wasn't something from a movie and he knew I wasn't asleep. The second it touched him, his skin began to burn. Not like acid, either, this burn was like he was on fire. At the same time, it was like the coldest thing he'd ever felt.
Smoke rises from the Narrator’s burnt skin. His screams continue.
One thing that was like the movies was that the next thing it did was bite him. And it didn't just latch on, it bit him and held tight. And then it ripped the muscle in his left shoulder right off of his body.
The Narrator screams more and more loudly. Other zombies hear and slowly move towards him.
Really, you think you know the meaning of pain. You've sprained your ankle. You've broken your arm. You've had kidney stones. You've had something you got from some girl at a Portland convention that made your piss burn. But you've never known anything like the combination of your skin burning and a muscle being ripped from your body. He didn't know what you would've done, but he pissed myself. At least that didn't burn.
The Narrator weakly tries to move away from the gathering zombies, but fails.
Everything else burned. The thing let go of his arms, where it grabbed him at first, and grabbed him by the head. Then it bit his nose off. He's pretty sure he screamed again.
The other zombies surround the Narrator.
Tears rolled down his face and he shit myself. He'd feel embarrassed about it, but who really gives a fuck how you look when you are being eaten alive. The good news was that when it came back to take a bite out of the side of his head that ripped off most of my right cheek and ear, he passed out.
The Narrator falls to the floor, unconscious.
He never woke up after that, but he continued to feel pain for a while. Then he died.
The Narrator, now a zombie, climbs to his feet.
You'd think that his story would be over at this point, since the thing won and he's no longer part of your world. You'd be wrong.
The Narrator walks away from the other zombies. They ignore him.
The Narrator zombie bumps into the building’s front entrance. He pushes on the door and it starts to open.
He's dead, but he's not really gone.
He pushes the door open and stumbles outside. Several other zombies follow him.
He doesn't know how to explain it, but he knows why he hasn't moved on. My job now is to warn others. He haven't figured it out yet, but at some point, he will. He did not die in vain, and he will do whatever he can to make sure that others don't follow in his footsteps.
He walks away from the building and towards the city. The other zombies casually follow him.