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Behind These Eyes
(© Chris Bay)

Page 1

It was raining the night I officially died, I know, it sounds awfully cliché like some garbage Hollywood movie that has no real plot but oodles of special effects. Unfortunately for me that’s the long and the short of it, maybe it was just my time. I was never a religious man, too busy with the task at hand to worry about heaven or hell but I, like everyone else, always wondered what happened. Was there a heaven? Did the big bearded guy upstairs stop in for a chat? Did anything happen at all? Maybe you just lay where you happen to fall, unable to move, staring out your eye holes until someone comes along, pushes your eyelids shut and seals you in darkness forever.  I was praying not to go the way I did, I think all of us survivors were praying not to go the way I did, but how often does the man upstairs answer our prayers anyway?

The events leading up to my death polarised people, the god botherer's prayed for mercy and clung to their bibles even tighter in the night, everyone else abandoned hope and god believing it was too late for his help because we were already in hell and just waiting for the devil to show up. I realise the futility of my actions, this autobiography that no one will hear, but I have to do something to keep myself sane, well, as sane as anyone can be these dark times.

I would like to think I made a difference in my time on the planet, that I helped make someone else’s life just a little better. Besides I have to do something to keep the horror of what’s happened at the back of my mind. If only people could hear me now, babbling to myself like some crazed homeless person you see on the street, begging for change and having an argument with the invisible man. I suppose for you to understand what’s happened and where I’m at now you would have to understand how I got here in the first place.

No-one really knows for sure how it all started, by the time you were sick it was far too late. Some say modern medicine went too far, breakthroughs outpacing research. We were so busy trying to give old geezers a hard-on and keeping ourselves from catching colds we never stopped to think about the consequences. Others believe that it was a terrorist attack or some new weapon that escaped from a government lab. Someone somewhere through their own arrogance or ignorance managed to create zombies. Shambling, brain eating, chaos causing, shoot’em in the head zombies.  I never in my lifetime thought I would have seen it or even believed it had I not witnessed the horrific events unfolding with my very own eyes. They looked like they had shambled straight off the pages of some horror novel, skin falling off, wide eyes, the whole nine yards.

Almost everything ever written about them was correct, who would’ve ever guessed that some schmuck behind a typewriter could’ve actually gotten something right. One major problem with the newly risen dead, is that they can do alot of things a living person can except that they are dead silent. They don’t moan, groan or even wheeze. They lacked the motor skills to use a gun or drive a car but they could climb, they could run and swim or they could stab you if one of them happened to have something in their hand. I heard stories of a former Olympic high jumper trying it inside a house and caving his own head in trying to jump after someone. You could always tell the old zombies, the ones made in the beginning because they were different. They seemed to move just that little bit faster and last that little bit longer, like the virus somehow got weaker or did more internal damage for every generation of infected. The newer generations did less and shambled more, they could barely run and this latest batch can’t even seem to do that.

Of course it wasn’t zombies in the beginning it was the flu or a cold or some other benign winter aliment. Once the virus started to spread and I call it a virus because no one actually knows for sure what it is any more, what we do know for sure is that there was no way of stopping it. The outbreaks spread like wildfire from most major urban centres outwards. It was airborne and spread very quickly, one cough on the train or a sneeze on the air plane and everyone on board was now a carrier. It appeared as the common cold, same symptoms and same time frame. No one was the wiser until people started dying quietly in their beds instead of getting better and by then it was far too late. The actual period spent dead was short 10 to 15 minutes at most before the return trip to the land of the living. People were told it’s just a cold go home and sleep it off. They forgot to mention give it to your friends and family. No one knew the true horror or the situation until it was far too late. Not only was it airborne, it was blood borne too and could survive for days outside the body, like hepatitis C and the Flu mated and had some bastard offspring. Everyone was warned of massive outbreaks of colds and flu like ailments, then they were warned of mass hallucinations, after the hallucinations a warning came of mass hysteria then the final warning was run for your lives.

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Genre:Living Dead
Type:Short story
Rating:7 / 10
Rated By:57 users
Comments: 3 users
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