Passengers

Passengers - Part One

     I just stepped out for a moment, to take a leak.

     Yes, I know it’s the zombie apocalypse. I know that the safe(ish), comfortable world we’d all taken for granted has been replaced by a never ending nightmare in which the living dead roam the world, feeding on the living, but there are some things one just does not do in front of your wife and fourteen year old daughter, and taking a leak is one of them. I stepped outside, therefore. Just for a moment. I would go behind a bush, do what I needed to do and get back in before they even knew I'd gone. When either of them needed to answer a call of nature I would go with them, standing guard with the gun while they did their business. I should have had Angela go with me, to cover me with the gun, but dammit I'm a man! A man should be able to take a leak without needing a woman to stand guard over him, and I would only be a minute. And so I went alone, and that's when the real nightmare began.

     It's not like I didn't take precautions. I took the gun, I stood in the doorway for a couple of minutes looking and listening, making sure there were no creepy undead horrors in the vicinity. Turned out I didn't spend long enough looking and listening, because just as I was zipping myself up again the thing came out of nowhere. I'll never know how I missed the smell of the thing. As soon as it was upon me the reek was everywhere. The acrid reek of rotting flesh mixed in with something extra, some even fouler stench unlike anything else the world has ever known. Something unique to zombies. Something that reached in through the nostrils and down to the most basic, most primitive part of the brain to warn it that something unnatural had come. Something that should not exist in any sane world. You smell it, and your body reacts instinctively. An urge to run, as fast as you can, to simply get as far away from the thing as you possibly can.

     It takes a real effort of will to overcome that urge, but you have to because they can run faster than we can. They don't shuffle along, dragging one leg behind them like in the cheap horror movies. If you come across one, and you will, your only chance is to face it and fight it, and if there’s more than one, coming at you from different directions, then you've pretty much had it.

     This time there was just the one, but it was right there, right on top of me before I knew it, and both my hands were busy, zipping myself up. I reached for the gun in my belt, but it had grabbed my arm and was biting me before I could do anything. The pain as its dirty, yellow teeth broke through my skin was unbelievable, but what was worse was the knowledge that I was infected now. Even if I fought it off and killed it, I would become one of them before the day was out. I fought like a madman even as I cursed myself for my stupidity. How many times had I told Angela and Julie to never go off alone, to always take someone with them to keep them safe! And then I go and ignore my own advice because I didn't want them to see me peeing. What an incredibly stupid reason to die!

     The thing was dressed as a traffic cop. His uniform had been half torn off by whatever violence had killed him, a road traffic accident by the look of it. He’d probably tried to stop the wrong person, back when everything had just started going to hell, and he'd been run down by a man more concerned with getting his family to safety than with obeying the laws of a vanishing world. One arm was broken, but that barely handicapped him as he bore down on me, knocking me to the ground, his teeth gnawing at my arm and his good hand clamped hard on my right wrist. My last action as a living man was to reach for his belt, thinking that I could use his own gun against him, but his holster was empty. Then his teeth reached for my throat instead, tearing through skin and severing blood vessels, and I saw my own blood spraying out across his face.

     I died then, but I didn't lose consciousness. By some unholy miracle I remained fully conscious and aware as the thing continued to feed on me. There wasn't enough meat on my neck for his liking, apparently, because it tore open my clothes and ripped my stomach open. The pain was dull this time, and continued to fade as by body continued to die, but the horror was far greater. My eyes were still open and I was able to watch as it pulled out long loops of intestine and pushed them into its mouth, chewing greedily. Is this what being dead is like? I wondered. No heaven or hell, just being trapped in your own rotting corpse for the rest of eternity. At the time I couldn’t think of anything worse, and I look back on that naive innocence with a terrible sense of loss.