Horror 100 Volume 2

The Zombie Killer

My name is Shawn Clyde, and if anyone is reading this, I'm already dead. I'm corpsified. Six feet under.

You get the idea.

Technically, I'll be laying in the bed I plan to be in when I swallow a few year's worth of pain pills, but it all amounts to the same thing. I know this may seem strange in such a time of renewed hope and opportunity as we now live in, but you see, that's kind of the problem.

I guess I'm not making a whole lot of sense. That's probably because I started at the end of my story. So let me try this again from the beginning.

My name is Shawn Clyde, and when the zombie apocalypse struck, I was ready. Don't for a second think I was some kind of badass or anything like that, at least not yet. No, I was just a nerd that still lived with his parents at twenty-four, but I had seen every zombie movie ever made. I'd seen every TV show, played every video game and read every book or comic ever created on the subject.

So when I was ordering a hot dog outside the stadium at a high school football game, and a guy came shuffling up with ripped clothes and grunting and started biting people, I was the only one that didn't panic. It was something I had always known was going to happen eventually. I ran away while everyone else moved in to help. As I pulled out of the parking lot in my beat-up old pickup, I saw the people that had been bitten turn on the ones that came to help them. It was a bloodbath.

Didn't these idiots know how this sort of thing worked?

I made a quick stop by the neighborhood grocery store and bought a couple carts full of canned goods. Sirens screamed in the distance when I was throwing the groceries into my vehicle. I hurried home and locked all the doors and windows. My dad was a gun nut, so I grabbed all the weapons I could find from their cabinets or shelves in the garage and loaded any that weren't already. I then placed them at key locations around the house. Next, I used the stack of old lumber in the basement to board the windows.

I was rather proud of myself. I already had a safe place to hide while everyone else was just starting to realize what was going on.

When I had done all of this, I realized it was a couple of hours past the time my parents normally got home. I felt sick. No, it was worse than that. Somehow I knew the zombies had got to them. It was devastating. I just sat in the living room and waited for hours.

It got dark outside, and I heard people screaming nearby. I peeked out a crack in one of the boarded windows and saw dozens of zombies shuffling down my street. The way they moved and their moaning and grunting was exactly what I'd always expected, but it scared the crap out of me anyway.

Right at that moment, something thumped against the front door to my house. The doorknob rattled, and then I heard a soft scratching sound. I crept slowly up to the door and peeked out the peephole. My mom and dad had finally come home.

But both of them were zombies.

I couldn't stand the thought of either of them leading lives as mindless undead, so I did the only thing I could think of. I grabbed my dad's shotgun, threw the door open, and blew both their heads off. Then I closed the door and hid in the dark as other zombies tried to get inside, drawn by the sound of the shotgun blast. They broke the glass out of the windows and pried at the boards, and I'm pretty sure I pissed myself, but eventually they gave up and shuffled away.

The next day I made a run to the local hardware store for some supplies to better fortify my house. As I'd always suspected, the zombies were less active during the day. I still had to put a few down, but it was easier in the light of day. The zombies weren't smart, and they were so absurdly slow. I think that was when I started to enjoy killing them.