Page 4

The ensuing contact can be likened to an egg cracking. I can feel and hear the body flip up and over the roof of my car as I spin out of control. Somewhere in the mess of images in front of me there is the sound of a gun going off and I’m immediately hit in the face with that feels like a burlap boxing glove. The car completes an entire 180-degree revolution as it slams into the highway divider punctuated by the heavy crack of plastic and metal. The car skids what I think is backwards for probably forty feet as sparks shoot out of the side, then stops abruptly as it hits something else.

"Fuck!" I mumble as slide the car into park, turn it off, and throw my body out of it. I look behind me and see that I’ve hit a car parked on the side of the road. I reach back inside the car compartment and turn on my emergency blinkers and look down the road in the direction I came. Nothing. Blackness.  I look back at my car, which is officially my mom’s, and lament over the damage done. The entire right side is probably wiped out. I go and inspect the back, where I came in contact with the other car. My trunk and his hood are meshed together in a modern art masterpiece. I check the driver’s side seat of the car, there’s no one in it.

"Fuck!" I mutter again, producing an echo. I reach into my pocket and pull out my cell phone. Apparently, I’m still in the dead zone. I look back along the road again and see where my tire marks are made in the snow, that’s when I realize that I actually hit someone, and there’s a good chance I might have killed him. The snow has created a light fog that mixes well with the darkness to promote a videogame like sense of dread. My car’s headlights only penetrate so far. I feel as if they are the only light out here.

I tread softly, and then realize at the speed I was going the whole thing must have taken at least five hundred feet to occur. With that I start running back in the direction of my car tracks. "Hello? Hey! Are you alright?" Running back the direction my car came from, the accident doesn’t look as bad, likely because of the length that it takes to walk through it on foot. "Mister, are you okay?"  I can’t see anything, then I see where my car tracks make a crescent shape, and in the middle of the crescent is an enormous patch of blood.

There’s a gap, then a lot more blood and marks in the snow where the body must have rolled, then I see it. A body slumped facing away from me. One of the arms is off, and I don’t see it anywhere. Instantly tears fill my eyes and my arm goes up to my face. There’s a slowly growing puddle of blood beneath his body, the ribcage seems to be where it’s originating. "Sir." I softly mutter. "I’m sorry." I choke back some tears. With that, his body budges.

"Oh Jesus! Hey, are you okay?" He responds with a slight groan, he uses his remaining arm to try to push himself up. "Holy shit! Don’t do that, just lie still! Don’t move!" When he pushes himself up, his rib cage splits along the side and pulpy brown organ tissue spills out on the ground. His intestines unravel themselves and spew out as they would from a crushed caterpillar, somewhere inside him something is ruptured, because blood coughs out of his side like a smoker’s cough. "Oh fuck! Don’t do that!" I say, as if there’s a chance he’ll survive now. In one corner of my mind, it makes me think of the crazy things people do when they’ve sustained horrible injuries, such as try to put themselves back together.

Much to my surprise, he doesn’t simply fall over. He keeps trying to get himself up. He puts pressure on his left leg and the bone snaps with a gut-wrenching crunch, then it splits through the skin like an enormous pimple being popped. Even after all the conditioning from movies by Lynch, Cronenberg, and Romero, I throw up anyway, then start running back to the car to get the bottle of water I keep in the glove box. I wash my mouth out, drink someone, and get back out of the car, wondering what the fuck I’m supposed to do next.

I hear a load groan, presumably from the guy. I look into the back seat and the first thing I see in my clear director’s box is Dawn of the Dead, the ultimate edition. "He’s a fucking Zombie!" I spit out. My brain mindset immediately changes, as if the situation is accepted. Romero’s movies have always been favorites of mine, and Zombies have been my favorite movie monsters since I before I can remember. After watching the documentary on the 28 Days Later DVD, the idea of Zombie like creatures coming around has never been far from my realm of reality.

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