Young Writers Society

A little less than fifty years ago, an awful pandemic spread across the world. It was called the Diorbites 49-XK3 virus, otherwise known as the Zombie disease. People everywhere were dying and then coming back to life, feasting on the brains of the unaffected and creating a terrible cycle of madness. The government tried to control it with militant power, but unfortunately most of their soldiers either ran away because they were cowards or got their guts ripped out by the powerful flesh-eaters. Finally, the government decided that the only way to protect the people was to put them into fallout shelters where zombies couldn't reach them. It was believed that zombies couldn’t dig holes. They were right about that, but unfortunately that plan is also failing because the oxygen supplies of most of the shelters are running out and so they have to reveal some of their parts of the shelters. And the zombies are becoming so powerful that people have reported seeing them rip through steel.

Some people, like me, believe that the reason why they are becoming so powerful is because the government made them that way. It is said that when the first pandemic was known, it was somewhat controlled by the government and kept hidden from the public for a little while. They hired some necro-scientists from around the world that hypothesized that they could control the zombies’ hunger for human flesh by injecting them with certain chemicals. The man who was the driving force behind this idea was Dr. John Arthur Hopkins. He was an odd scientist who had a reputation of being a strange person who used odd tactics on his patients. He once prescribed cat piss to an ailing old man who was being consumed by his gangrene.

He was treated like a leper. No one ever spoke to him or asked for his services unless they really needed to.

Of course the injecting of chemicals into these zombies was an unorthodox method because they were still people. But anything was being done to keep the flesh-shredders from public eye. But what the scientists didn’t know was that their chemicals were doing strange things to the zombies’ bodies. Each time they injected the zombies with the poison, the scientists got no visual or superficial results-- and this state occurred for several months. Yet within those zombies’ eroding muscle tissue and DNA, a change was occurring. No one knew that the chemicals they injected into them were actually working. It turned out that chemical they were giving the zombies was turning them into super-powerful man-eating monsters with the slight ability to think as opposed to what the actual use of medicine was supposed to be. And thus, we come to realize that the zombies probably had a slight idea of what they were doing as they tore out the hearts of small children.

John Arthur Hopkins got the butt-end of his own experiments. In our history books it says that John Arthur Hopkins went into the Ductus Laboratory and tried to perform one his daily tests on the first known man who was infected with the disease. He was apparently charting some data on a clipboard when out of nowhere, the zombie who was once known as Carter Pinkins but was labeled Necroman One, turned into the Incredible Hulk and squeezed little Hopkins' head like a grape. And that zombie escaped from the lab without missing a few “bites” on the way (aka all of the other scientists on site). He ran towards the cities where he terrorized all of the poor little civilians. He was an unstoppable creature; no bullet or grenade could hinder him. After catching his few bites, however, he disappeared completely.

But the people he bit didn’t wilt away like everyone hoped they would. Instead, they “came to life” and bit their friends, family members, co-workers etc. And then those people bit their children, grandparents, mothers and fathers, and the list still goes on. And now here I am, Zaiina the Zombie Slayer, as informally called by my friends. I am heading out to kill Mr. Pinkins, who I call the Head Zombie. Many believe that I am just a big dreamer but they don’t know me. I'm not doing this for fun, I have to do this. He and his gut-sucking minions killed my family—and I saw it happen. I was only eight years old. I am now haunted by the gory images every night in my sleep. Sometimes I am calling out for Momma and Daddy, and Timmy, my older brother. Or sometimes the zombie gets me instead. Then I wake up, back into this everlasting nightmare we call reality. I am still living with my deadbeat uncle, Gustus and I am still sneaking out of the shelter to slay zombies, all the while waiting for the day of my ultimate freedom: the day I kill the Head Zombie. And until that day, I am stuck here, slaying and chopping off decaying arms and limbs for practice. But I won’t be here for long.

***

Combat boots, tattered cargo pants, and a dingy white tank top is what I wear above ground. I forced my weight on the heavy circular metal door that protects my city from the zombies and leads to the outside. I am soon welcomed by the cool and smelly afternoon air that reeks of rotting flesh. To me, it smells like roses. Any other person would tell me I was crazy for thinking that, but when you smell that smell, you know it's going to be a zombie feast tonight. And I don't mean a literal feast, that'd just be disgusting. I mean that my friends and I are going to beat down the undead.

“Patrick, pass me an arrow.” My friend, Patrick gives me one of the sharpened wooden sticks we call an “arrow” which still works just as well except just aren't commercial grade.

He makes all of our weapons. Since we were shoved into this shelter, he has been making weapons. He says that he likes to make things but I think the real reason he does is to keep himself from going insane. He lives with his ailing grandmother. She lies in bed all day and cannot move. Patrick, a thickly built yet muscular boy, has to carry his grandmother around their quarter when she needs the help. I’m not saying that his grandmother is a bad woman, but she is very pushy and picky. And I don’t think Patrick can handle her anymore.

“Thanks.” I look into his eyes while saying it. He was a strange looking boy. He had skin that was a beautiful ebony color that glistened when sprinkled with water or oil. It seemed like each day his skin would get darker. I thought that this was really strange since we spent most of our time underground, and although we came outside often, we were in Oregon/Washington D.C. . .There was rarely any sight of the sun. Another strange thing about him was his eyes. His eyes were a striking blue color that resembled the water in Costa Rica. I had known what the water was like in Costa Rica from a brochure I had borrowed from my friend Cassie, who, before the invasion, was planning to go on a trip there with her family. I had never seen water that blue before and I thought it was beautiful.

I brought my arms up and pull the arrow and string back and pointed it toward my target: a zombie was about 20 yards away. I released my grip and the arrow shot the zombie right between the eyes. It fell backward and we saw it squirm a bit until it finally stopped moving. Cassie, my cheery and upbeat friend, squealed happily and high-fived me for my accomplishment.

“That was cool! Lemme try.” She said. I gave her the tools and she turned around. Before I even saw her release the arrow, a zombie that was about seventy yards from us had an arrow lodged in its chest. Its zombie juice squirted everywhere and it fell to the ground.

“Damn, Cassie. That was quick!” I exclaimed.

“I'm like Speedy Gonzalez—whoever that is.” We all laughed heartwarmingly. I found our picnic basket and took out three bread rolls and gave one to Patrick and Cassie. We had obtained this food from our dinners the night before and we also stole some of it from the kitchen. But before we ate, we heard a very distinct and all too familiar sound…

“Do you guys hear that?” Patrick asked. I nodded my head slowly. I was feeling terrified for some reason and Cassie looked like she was a little afraid too. Patrick’s expression was grave. It was like the kind of expression he got when talking about his father.

“Yeah.” Cassie replies. “It sounds almost like the--”

It was the sound of a horn that was released whenever a zombie invasion was happening. The loudness/severity of the sound depended not on how far away you were from the person making it, but from the number/level of zombies that were attacking.

Yet too soon, too soon it had happened. Zombies were instantly cornering us. We had a little bit of time to get back since they were about fifty yards away, but Patrick had brought all of his weapons out with him that day and some of his tools to build more because he heard the forecast on the level of zombie invasions the night before (which was low).

“It's going to take us hours to pick all of this up!” I screamed. It was a bad idea because after I had said it, I caught the attention of more of the zombies. They tilted there poorly supported heads into my direction and ran even faster than they were running before.

“Crap.” Cassie cursed as she was shoveling all of the nuts and bolts she could into an impromptu marsupial pouch she'd created with the bottom of her shirt. Patrick was tossing his tools into the food basket. I grabbed as many guns and arrows and started running. Cassie and Patrick followed. We ran as fast as we could but the zombies were catching up quickly. The zombies we were in our area typically had short bursts of energy that made them stronger for a while until they suddenly breaking down and collapsing. It was sort of like adrenaline. Fortunately the door was only a few feet away. I got on the ground and pulled the metal knob expecting the door to fly open. But it didn't. I tugged and pulled but it still didn't budge.

“What's going on?” Cassie shouts.

“I can't get it to open!” Instantly, she drops to the ground next to me dropping all the tools from her pouch and tries to help me pull the handle. Then Patrick joins in. We stayed there, steadying pulling yet getting no results from putting so much strength on the door.

“It's not going to work.” He says. “We need to try something else.” That was when he began to bang on the door.

I grab his arm prompting him to stop. “Are you out of your mind?!” I said through gritted teeth.

“It's the only way it'll open up!” Then I let go of his arm. He was right. We weren't going to have any luck by attempting to force the door open. Cassie and I joined in. We banged and screamed at the door, hoping that someone would hear us. The zombies had reached the point where our picnic had been set up just a couple of minutes ago. We were going to die here, I thought. Then, something unprecedented happened. I cried. Tears were streaming down the sides of my face and I was sobbing and heaving like a baby. Cassie stopped banging for a second and gazed at me with awe. Immediately, she reacted by standing up straight and calling a death wish: she grabbed a bow and arrow and started shooting at the zombies. Patrick did the same thing as Cassie and picked up a gun with his left hand. He used his left hand to shoot at them with a gun while using his right hand to continue to bang mercilessly on the door. There we were, shooting at zombies and me, crying. Was this what it would be like when I met the head of all zombies? I would just cradle up into a ball and cry my eyes out? No, by the time I'd be into a ball formation, the zombie king would have already eaten my eyes, so I wouldn't be able to cry. So this is the end, I thought again. I just sat there, waiting for the end until suddenly the door swung open, almost knocking Patrick and Cassie over. They hurled me inside the shelter and I landed face-flat on the unforgiving concrete floor and blacked out.

Suddenly I snapped back into consciousness. Cassie was helping me up. I was facing the dark hallway that led to our quarters but I whipped my head around to the door and caught a glimpse of a zombie before it slammed shut. And before I could even register what was happening, I heard a low-bellowed moan and saw Patrick on the floor clutching his right leg. It was badly damaged with a deep scratch wound that had blood gushing from it. Then I panicked.

“Patrick!” I screamed. “Oh My Gosh!” I clasped my hands over my mouth and started hyperventilating.

“Cassie!” I screamed. “Patrick is bleeding, do something!” She looked at me with a look of disgust. Without saying anything, she wrapped her arms around Patrick from the back and attempted to drag him down the hall.

“Aren’t you going to help me?” she said after struggling with him for a couple of minutes. I was afraid of dragging him back to our quarters because I knew the amount of trouble we would be in if we got back. The adults would freak if they found out we were outside the shelter. He was already out of consciousness and that caused me to panic even more. I was about to abandon my fears and scream for help when suddenly a small girl with wild orange hair appeared out of nowhere. She crawled toward Patrick in an awkward fashion, as if she were a dog, and curiously sniffed and examined his wound. Then she crawled into a vent in the wall I hadn’t noticed before and came out with some gauzes and what looked like sutures and a healing ointment. She then dressed up Patrick’s wound carefully and delicately. Cassie and I were astonished as the small girl performed a surgical procedure on Patrick.

***

It seemed like hours had passed when the girl had began to fix Patrick, and I was beginning to get worried about the blood loss Patrick was suffering from. There was about a pool of blood with a diameter of three feet surrounding the girl and Patrick. But she didn’t seem to notice it; for she was sitting in the same position she had been in when she first began performing on Patrick. Finally, Cassie exploded and began yelling at the girl.

“Don’t you think that’s about enough?” she inquired pressingly. But the girl continued squeezing the tube of healing ointment on Patrick’s wound. Fortunately, he had stopped bleeding, but I wasn’t so hopeful because I knew that an infection could catch him at any time.

“Hey,” said Cassie. “Don’t you hear me? Excuse me?” I could feel the tension and annoyance in Cassie voice increasing, which indicated that she was getting more annoyed by the second. This was one fault of Cassie’s; although she was usually a cheerful person, she had an awful temper and sometimes it was incontrollable. But I decided to step in anyway and calm Cassie down because she was inching closer to the girl and looked like she was about to hit her.

“Cassie, let her do her job.” I said with slight assertiveness. I didn’t want to impede her right to ask questions but she needed to slow down. She whipped her head towards me and glared. I challenged her by giving her a “you-need-to-calm-down” look and tilted my head a bit to the right. We stared at each other for several seconds. Then she blinked at me and I could see that she was reevaluating her motives. Finally, her tenseness calmed and she went back to being cool and collected, but I could see that she was disappointed. She backed away from the girl and returned to sitting against the wall and waited for the girl to be done.

While Cassie pondered in her own thought, I studied the orange-haired girl myself. I had never seen her before and I was sure of this because I knew everyone in our bunker. This was possible because we did not have a lot of people in our bunker. When the first invasion happened, most of the people in my city had been devoured by the flesh-eating mongrels. And those people were the ones that lived in the central city. The rest of us, however, were “saved” because we lived toward the rural yet poorer parts of the city, and it took a longer time for the zombies to reach us because we were farther away from downtown and less coagulated. And I knew most of the people in the bunker because they were my neighbors or my distant neighbors or my schoolmates and teachers.

But I had never seen that girl before in my life. I focused on her hair. I was starting to ponder her origins. I knew that she couldn’t have been the unseen child of any of my former neighbors; none of them had orange hair. Nor could she have been an adopted child. When we had our home and I, a functioning family, we were surrounded by some of the most conservative neighbors in the world. They all believed strictly in male-female fornication to produce children and detested divorced couples. My neighbors were strict, but thankfully my parents did not adhere to their neighbors constraints on people, for they were always loving and forgiving of all people.

But where did she come from? I came up with a list of conspiracies in my head, like:

ØA runaway from a never-heard-of orphanage located in the more obscure parts of my town

ØA mechanically engineered robot built to help people that got loose from one of the governments facilities or

ØA zombie

I was about to come up with another reason of where I thought she’d came from but

I heard banging on the metal door and I flinched. I stayed close beside them and we moved further and further into the darkness of the shelter with Patrick and my screams echoing through the halls.

Patrick was put into a hospital the instant we got into the bunker. Everyone asked us how it had happened and we couldn't lie because they'd already determined what type of wound it was-- a type two zombie scratch. All of the adults were extremely disappointed when we told them we had been above ground they told us that we had to stay confined to our dorms for two weeks. Patrick has to serve his sentence after he heals. It really isn't fair. It's not like they bit him and he was terrorizing us all, and biting off our flesh. I won't get to see Patrick or Cassie for two weeks.

When I got into my unit, my drunken uncle Gustus started to yell at me. It was sad how he tried to discipline me through his garbled words that fumbled together. His balance was off too. He couldn't hold himself up for more than two seconds. He had to clutch the arm rest of the tattered sofa.

“Wuts your proh-blim?” He said. “You, goin' outta there and tryna getchorselves killed?!” His speech was slow and careful. I could tell he was trying his best to pronounce each word. Here was my drunken uncle trying to teach me a valuable lesson.

“Youno I try to raise you kids an' all ya doos is gives me hells.” He teetered backward but quickly regained his strength. My uncle did not complete the fifth grade so his grammar is off too.

“Why don't you go back to drinking your fermented apple juice and leave me alone?” I spit.

“Now yasees? Thas' why ya moms died. She not, never raised ya right.” That struck a chord in me. I stared at his dilated pupils for a moment. Then I stormed into my room and slammed the door. I heard angry footsteps that attempted to follow but then I heard a large crash. Of course he would fall to the ground before he even gets out of the living room, I thought.

“And my drink is made outta grape juice! Not no apples!” His muffled scream echoes through the door. I bring my knees close to my chest and then I wrap arms around them, hugging them tightly.

There's no use in crying now. What would that bring me? Shame? Hope? It definitely won't bring my family back.

***

The moon had shone through my window. It was bright and beautiful. It felt like I was staring into the milky white parts of an eyeball. The moon really fascinates me. I love the mystery beyond it. It reminds me of when we are sometimes in class and we read stories about how the natives, way back when Pragma was still an unknown world, would tell tales about how certain animals would to climb to the moon, or how the Greeks believed that there were faces in the sky. It's all really fascinating.

I could escape. I can leave right now. I thought. I sat on my bed for a few moments questioning what consequences would come after this. They aren't going to catch me this time because I'm never coming back. I thought again. I glanced at the clock on my ceiling and read the time. It was only one in the morning. I made a mad dash for my arrows and laced up my boots. I grabbed an old knapsack I used for books and dumped them all over the floor. They hit the ground with a thud. I didn't worry about making a lot of noise; Uncle Gustus was way beyond passed out and the walls and floors surrounding us were definitely sound proof.

I had to hop over Gustus because he was in the middle of the floor and walked into the kitchen. I tossed a few pieces of fruit into my bag and a small loaf of stale bread. We didn't have much food in our dorm because Gustus didn't work and I would always eat the food they gave us at school. Besides, I wouldn't need very much anyway if I wanted to get this over with quickly.

I looked around the dorm for other things that might have been useful for me. We didn’t own much; Gustus rarely worked and I was never at there to keep and treasure anything, so figured that there was no point in keeping things. I did have a few children’s books located in a tattered, make-do bookshelf we had gotten from the rations. Each person had one bookshelf. They knew that none of us would stay sane if all we were doing was living underground, trying to make it to the next day. The funny thing about man is that even if he has all the food and water in the world to himself, he can still go crazy if he doesn’t have some form of entertainment. That is how weak man is. He unconsciously thinks that he can make it through anything but one tiny blip and it’s all over. That is how we all got into this mess, anyway.

I had suddenly remembered that there was one thing that I kept that I did once treasure. It was a storybook that my parents had read to me every night before they were killed. It was a book of all the classics: Peter Pan, Treasure Island, and all those other adventure stories. Each page was always something new and every night would be another adventure to look forward to. I could travel somewhere else in this world or not this world at all in those books. Peter Pan was my favorite.