Diary of a Teenage Zombie || ONC 2021

Still rescue day, oh my!

I know I left you on a bit of a cliff hanger there, but I'm still so shocked at what happened. Plus, I took a break for a feed, soz.

So anyway, I pulled back the curtain, and guess what we saw? Anyone? No? Well, I couldn't tell you anyway because we were both knocked out cold-well, I was, so I assume Meg was too.

When I came to, someone had strapped our arms to a couple of hospital beds and I had no idea how much time had passed. Across the room from us, Tiffany and Charlie were in the same predicament. Unfortunately, they also had needles in their arms that were connected to IV bags that had some sort of murky yellow solution in them. They were both unconscious. I'm pretty sure they weren't dead-at least for now, anyway.

Meg was still out to it, but luckily for us there were no needles in any of our limbs. I struggled with the restraints, trying to free my hands. Someone had removed my splint so my wrist was back to being a floppy old sausage-mmm, sausage. Perhaps I could wriggle my useless lefty from the leather cuff.

"I wouldn't bother trying to struggle. You won't be getting out of here anytime soon." A voice from behind the curtain told me.

"Who's there? Show yourself you coward," I said with authority.

A floppy hand waved at me from behind the curtain-what the? Holding the other end of the severed arm was a guy wearing a white lab coat and glasses. I was so confused, because this guy was a zombie.

"Lol, just kidding. That's not actually my hand. This was Rodger, he was from the old folks' home down the road. Oh, and I'm Murdock by the way, but everyone calls me Doc. Get it? Mur-doc."

Ok, now I was super duper confused. I couldn't quite believe what I was hearing. This comedic genius was the feared and ruthless Doc? Surly not! At any moment I was sure Ashton Kutcher was going to jump out from under the bed and tell me I'd been punked. This was just too... weird.

"You can't keep us here. Our friends will come for us and then you'll wish you'd never been born, you son of a bitch."

The jackass just stood there laughing in between bites of poor old Rodger. Is everyone totally loopy round here?

"So angry, and I hate to burst your bubble, but no one will be saving you. I'm afraid you've been out for a few hours now and all your friends have gone home."

What the hell, Jack and Archie!

"They'll be back," I told him with all the confidence of an anti-vaxxer at a conspiracy theorist conference.

"You keep telling yourself that if it helps you sleep at night," he mocked.

Self-righteous prick!

"I don't sleep, so, huh!"

"You will once I'm finished with you."

I didn't like the sound of that.

"What have you done to Tiff and Charlie? Are they alive?"

"Na, they didn't even last ten minutes," he said laughing.

"You creepy bastard, I'm going to kill you!"

"Ah, she speaks. I was wondering when you'd inform us you were conscious." The Doc waved Rodger's arm at Meg, who was now awake and furious.

"You're going to pay for what you've done!"

"Oh, relax. I was only kidding, they're fine. I've given them a sedative to stop their incessant wriggling and now I'm pumping them full of a healing serum-which I like to call; feel good juice. It's brilliant stuff, but alas, I can't take the credit for that one. Just randomly came across it while nosing at your dad's files, Meg. A sneaky one, that one."

"What are you talking about? What are you doing to them?" I asked, not sure I wanted to hear the answer. And how does he know she's Meg?

"Why healing them, of course, so then I can use my cure without them suffering a slow, painful death. I thought that was obvious?" He looked at me like I was a complete idiot.

"But why? I enjoy being a zombie. I was always a bit of a misfit before, but now I feel like I've finally found my place. Plus, not needing sleep is awesome and human flesh is so freaking yum!"

"You're the exception, I'm the rule and I want my old life back. And frankly, being a zombie sucks balls."

"You're obviously not doing it right," I said in a snarky tone. "Because frankly you're a douche!"

"And you're a toser who's about to become my crash test dummy, quite fitting really, I must say."

"I wish Judy were here, she'd kick your ass into next week!" The Judinator wouldn't have taken this shit lying down.

"Judy? As in Dr Judy Dudley?"

"Yes, and because of your dickhead men, she's dead."

"Oh, that's good news. She's the reason we're in this mess to start with. Her and her bloody paranoid tendencies."

"You're lying. She'd never start a zombie apocalypse!"

"I'd hardly call it an apocalypse, more like a failed zombie Coup d'état, but I suppose I can't lay all the blame at her feet. She was the one who switched her antidote with monkey piss, though."

Shit! He's even crazier than I thought.

"Don't look at me like I'm crazy! I was so close to a vaccine for the jungle virus that had broken out in South America, but selfish Judy didn't believe me when I said our concoctions combined could actually be the answer. Then when I tried going behind her back, I found out later she had swapped her serum with bloody monkey piss. She thought it was a great joke." He looked mad now.

"That does sound pretty funny." Meg chimed in, laughing at him.

He narrowed his eyes at her. "Oh, it was when I got so mad that I jabbed her with the shit. Unfortunately, there must have been something else in there, because voilà-the first zombie was born."

"So, really, it was all your fault?" I asked, super casual.

"No, dammit! It was her fault. She was just jealous of my superior doctoring abilities."

"I'm pretty sure it's still your fault," I said, an innocent smirk spreading over my face.

"Right, that's it. That's enough out of you." Oh, man, he looked about ready to explode.

Then the asshole pricked me in the arm with a needle and as the world went blurry and Meg's cries faded, I drifted into a weird nightmarish sleep.

I dreamt the Doc injected me with that murky yellow healing stuff and suddenly my hand felt all weird and tingly, then my ear, then my eye. Then the tingling stopped and my ear was back where it had once been. My hand stopped flopping around and I could see properly again.

But then I woke up, and that same sensation of feeling whole again didn't end with my dream.

Word count: 1172
Total word count: 15,786