Everyone Un-Died + My Gardener Bit Me: The Oral History of the Zombie Apocalypse

Headshots!

Kenny Lee, 35

Bartender

I got a job in a rebuilt bar in a rebuilt college town. They call it the Rebar. Don't complain to me. I don't make the puns. I just pour the drinks.

Not that college kids order a lot of drinks. I hadn't heard of this before, but they do something called "pre-gaming," which is when you get drunk before you go to the bar. The point being that bar drinks are expensive and you can save a lot of money by downing five or six or ten shots of Absolut Rasberri beforehand.

Apparently, tipping your bartender is so pre-Apocalypse.

There was also the issue of underage drinking. Pretty much all of the DMV's were destroyed by the robots, a silver lining if there ever was one, but it also meant that for the last few years, the state hasn't issued any official I.D.'s. Which meant I had no way of knowing for sure if someone was underage, but of course, serving someone underage remained a crime.

So I did what I always do: I decided to play it safe and didn't serve any patrons who even looked like they might be under twenty-one. Also, I wouldn't sleep with any woman who didn't show clear signs of menopause, because having sex with someone underage also remained a crime. Better safe than sorry, right? It actually worked out pretty great. I met a lot of nice mature women and I saved a fortune on condoms.

But you want to hear about the zombie, right?

Well, we'd all seen the news stories about the dead supposedly coming back to life, but we didn't think much of it. The local news clowns treated it like a joke and so did we. We didn't believe any of it until our local Sheriff — the most sheriffy sheriff I had ever seen (he wasn't riding a horse, but you could swear he was) — suddenly appeared on the TV to reassure us on the matter. He looked right into the camera and in his down-home, no-nonsense southern drawl promised us that the rumors that the dead were coming back to life were completely false. Or as he put it, "It's flat-out flummerdiddle, so don't give it no mind, y'hear?"

At which point we were all thinking the exact same thing: "Oh, shit! Maybe the dead are coming back to life!" Because nothing arouses your suspicions like when your elected officials tell you that everything is just fine. It's like when your doctor looks at your mole and says, "I'm sure it's not cancer." 

The topic of strange moles comes up a lot with the women I've been seeing lately.

After that, everyone was very shaken up. So much so that the college kids actually ordered drinks! And paid for them! With money! Which normally would have been a welcome change, but as they drank, they got more and more freaked out. Except for Nisha who was, once again, the designated driver.

I watched them spin out. It started as, "What if there really are zombies?" and quickly escalated to, "Of course there are zombies!" and then detoured into "What was that song? You know! That zombie song!" — after forty-five minutes of guessing, it turned out to be Werewolves of London — and then they really ratcheted things up with when someone asked, "So how do we kill them?"

Almost everyone agreed — Headshots! — for the simple reason that was the consensus in zombie films. But Arja, a Film Major (also known as lighting your parents' hard-earned tuition money on fire) — pointed out that zombie folklore has been around since the 17th Century, and it wasn't until George A. Romero's seminal 1968 movie Night Of The Living Dead that headshots became the thing.

[NOTE: Lucas wants you to all know that not only did he know all that, he can also recite from memory Ben's entire Beekman's Diner monologue. So suck it, Arja!]

This was not just a theoretical discussion. We were in a state that allowed people to bring loaded guns into bars. I mean, I'm as Second Amendment as the next guy — or as Gun Control as the next guy — depending on which next guy I'm talking to at that particular time — but I don't feel comfortable with a drunk person having guns in my bar. Hell, I'm not even comfortable with them having darts in my bar. I've taken a dart to to the nipple. Twice! The second time I came this close to getting nipple tetanus.

Incidentally, the age you're allowed to drink legally is the same age you're allowed to buy a handgun legally. Which is basically like trying to defuse a bomb while you're tripping on peyote. It's fun, but it probably won't end well.

A surprising number of them pulled out their pistols. There was a lot of serious hardware. Some of them had scopes and laser sights. It scared me but also ticked me off. They'll spend a thousand bucks on a gun and hundreds more on accessories, but won't pay eight bucks for a drink?

Millennials, man. I swear.

And then, from the back, there was a noise. A faint groaning. We all froze as we heard someone slowly approaching. The gun owners took aim, their hands shaking wildly from adrenaline and alcohol. After a few tense seconds, a figure emerged.

It was Buck, the most notorious pre-gamer of them all. It was rumored that he would drink an entire fifth of Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum before he showed up. On more than one occasion he had passed out on his way to Rebar. I hated him with a passion. But today, seeing him was a welcome relief, because he wasn't a member of the living dead, just a cheap-ass drunk.

Buck was totally oblivious to the red dots dancing around his head. I was struck by how much, in his thoroughly shit-faced state, he looked like a stereotypical zombie — the glassy eyes, the slack jaw, with the slow, awkward, shuffling steps. All that combined with the low lights in the bar made it pretty fucking creepy.

I turned to the group and said, "It's OK, he's not a zombie!" Unfortunately, they didn't hear that last word because they had already opened fire. None of them hit Buck in the head. In fact, none of them hit anything. Well, I mean, they hit stuff. Lamps and bottles and the fish tank, but they missed Buck completely. The only casualties so far were the rainbow fish — Jaws and Sushi, who were flopping around on the floor — and I wanted to keep it that way.

As you know, I don't like to get personally involved in, well, anything, but I just couldn't help myself. I ran over to Buck and stood in front of him, shielding him from the drunken mob. I shouted — I had to shout because everyone's ears were ringing — "Stop it! Just stop it!"

Someone shouted back, "Get out of the way, Barman!" and I shouted, "It's late, you're drunk and you don't know what you're doing!"

And that's when Nisha raised her gun and shouted, "I'm not drunk." And she shot Buck square in the forehead — I hadn't taken into account that Buck was a lot taller than me — and Buck fell on his back. I knelt next to him. He wasn't moving. He wasn't breathing. And also his brains were spattered all over the wall.

I shouted, "Who's going to clean that up?" And then I realized that wasn't really the issue. So then I shouted, "And you killed Buck!"

And Nisha was all, "'Cause he's a zombie!"

"He was just drunk!"

"All I know is that when I shot him in the head, he died!"

Arja piped up, "Must be one of the post-Romero zombies."

"Everyone dies when you shoot them in the head!"

"Including zombies!"

"Buck isn't a zombie!"

And that's when I felt teeth clamping down on my ankle. "Well, I guess he is now."