Chapter 1
I’ve been locked in this closet for the last three days. Well, I like to think of it as I’ve locked them out of the closet, it makes it easier to accept living in a five-foot-by-nine-foot room. I’m just lucky the janitor liked to snack at work. The place had a decent stash of chips, soda, and beef jerky when I got here, although it’s starting to run out.
It’s quiet most of the time, just footsteps stumbling back and forth in the hallway on the other side of the door. Of course, sometimes, they start banging on the door. The meaty sound of their fists hitting the aluminum might go on for hours or just a few minutes. I’m not sure if they get some whiff of me or if they just bang on random doors for whatever registers as fun for them.
What’s their reason for rattling my door? Can they even have reasons for what they do? They’re dead. They’re dead and they’re still moving. There’s nothing about any of it that has anything to do with reason.
“Ugh! I’m going to run out of trash bags and bottles for my shit and piss soon. I can’t keep living like this!”
Talking to myself, mostly in whispers, was probably more normal than it should have been even before being trapped in a closet.
I tie another trash bag closed with a few knots. I imagine that enough knots should stop the smell from getting out, but it never seems to stop much of anything.
The room reeks of the days and nights I’ve spent here. There are moments when I place my hand on the door handle and prepare to run out into the halls, ready to face their dead, slack, rotting faces - just to get a moment of air outside of this cramped room.
I’m not even a high-schooler. I’d been driving by the school, on my way to the bar when this all started. I mean, I’m in my thirties. I should be worrying about a 401k or filing some paperwork someplace, not hiding in a stinking janitor’s closet from hordes of undead teens dressed in formal wear.
How’d this become my life?
I pull my cell phone out of my pocket, turn it on, hope the creatures outside my door don’t hear it vibrate as it wakes up, and stare down at the screen. When the hell did it become my door?
“Still no signal, huh?” I whisper. “Is it because the world ended, or because I’m in a goddamn closet behind tons of fucking concrete walls. Why do they build schools like goddamn prisons anyway?”
I hear the meaty thump of a half-rotted hand smack against the aluminum door and back up against the far wall of my closet. If I can just survive long enough, I’m sure the army, cops, or someone will figure out how to stop these things, get the world set right, and get me out of this closet! I’m sure.
I’m sure.
I’m not sure at all.
I’m just bullshitting hope.
Oh, by the way, I should probably introduce myself. My name’s Tim. Like a lot of people my age, I’m between jobs, or self-employed, or whatever I feel like calling it on a given day. I’m just about as average as you can get. Not too tall but not short. I’ve got brown hair and brown eyes. I’m a couple shades darker than pale but only a couple. I’ve got the start of a beer gut, though I don’t drink too much beer. Mostly it’s vodka for me.
I’ve never liked zombie movies. I know. I know. I’m living in a fucking zombie movie, anyone still alive is now, I suppose. But let me tell you, those movies full of rotting people wandering around, eating everyone in sight have always made me shudder just thinking about it. So gross.
I had a girlfriend who was really into that sort of thing, though. Made me sit through just about every damn zombie movie she could find, including some really low budget zombie porn she managed to dig up. I have to admit, though, watching a zombie get eaten out by some porn actor was kind of funny. Zombie eats man? That’s just everyday around here. Man eats zombie? Now, there’s news!
The meaty banging on the door stops after a minute or two and I hear the feet shuffle down the hall. It’s never more than a few minutes before another shuffling pair of feet or a whole herd of those things wanders past. Couldn’t sleep through it the first night, but after I pretty much passed out the next night, it just became the normal sounds.
Funny how normal can change. One minute, normal is eggs on toast, a shitty car that you aren’t sure will get you places, and worrying about what you’re going to do to make rent. The next minute, normal is rotting teenagers trying to get into your closet to eat you alive or turn you into one of the undead. Life’s a funny thing, especially when the undead show up.
I wasn’t even sure I was going to go out the night all this shit started. I’d gone back and forth a few times but finally decided to shower, leave my stubble in place, put on a relatively clean shirt, and head out to the bar to try to feel like a part of the world for a minute.
This isn’t the world I wanted to be a part of.
Let me tell you about the day that led to this nonsense, at least my part of that day...
