Before the End...
The year was 2021, the month was October. I don’t remember the specific day, though I’m pretty sure it happened over a weekend. It was cold outside, I remember that--I remember the thunderstorms exemplified just how shitty the world was becoming. Thunder and lightning overhead, screams down below; a chorus of chaos in tandem with each other. That’s how it all started, with the screams... At least, that’s how it started for me. I didn’t know what was going on around me until it was already happening to everyone. When I finally caught on, I didn’t know what to do or where to go. I was lost, confused, and more terrified than I’d ever been in my life. I was a different man back then...
I don’t think anyone was ready for the end of the world except for maybe the paranoid people with bomb shelters in their backyards--but I doubt even those people would’ve bet on an undead apocalypse. We’d all seen the movies, but to actually believe something like this could happen was just… for a lack of a better word, stupid. Back then the idea of a zombie was best left for Hollywood and video games and nerds in their mom’s basements. I grew up watching the classics, playing the games--it was almost as if the universe was preparing me in my youth, even though I had no idea, I just wanted to have fun watching a guy get his brains eaten...
Let me tell you something... there’s nothing fun about watching that now. Nowadays the word “Zombie” strikes fear and panic in my heart. They never truly scared me back then, watching them safely from my sofa on the television. When the dead started coming back to life for real, that’s when the fear became real too.
There isn’t many of us left now. The dead have taken this world from us. Even though we breathe, and we eat, and we shit... those of us living aren’t truly alive anymore. We’re all just waiting... waiting for our dying world to finally catch up to us, and swallow us whole.
