There Be Zombies Herein...Beware!

Greetings from the beach!

I have recently joined an AWESOME community of writers over at Chuck Palahniuk.net.

Soon after joining, I took a self assignment. This self assignment entailed being given ONE WORD and then writing a quick 1,000 word story based on said word. My given word was REGISTRATION. I was watching the movie Zombieland as I thought it over and that lead me to the theme of my story.

**EDIT** - I have since reworked it a few times and I am now clearly over the 1,000 word limit. I had intended to use this just as a short assignment but now I think it is going to go further. How much further? Time will tell...

If you are so inclined I would LOVE any honest feedback you could give me.

A word of caution...the entry IS about zombies and it is pretty gross. If such things offend, I would recommend you pass. But if zombies are right down your alley then please read, then let me know in the comments section what you think. Thanks, I appreciate it.

REGISTRATION

1

Dragging my ass into work every day for a job I dread is difficult. I know there are a lot of people who dislike the way they make a living for one reason or another. It might be a salary, or lack thereof, issue. Maybe they have co-workers they can't stand or a boss that drives them crazy. Perhaps they have a horrible commute through dense traffic or their chosen career may have turned out to be too much/not enough work for them to handle. These are all valid reasons to wake up in the morning and want to take a blow torch to the alarm clock. I know that feeling, more than most I think. I know it because everyday my job puts me into very uncomfortable proximity with the walking undead and all the delightful smells and bodily fluids that accompany them. I have been working for the U.S. Department of Zombie Affairs since its inception four years ago and let me tell you, it is no picnic. But considering how much the world has changed in the last five years things could be worse...much worse.

It was scary going there in the beginning. When the first cases of human zombification began to pop up around the globe no one really knew what to think. Armageddon, government conspiracy, global bio-chemical warfare…who knew? All we really knew for sure was that when the first grainy images, taken with shaky cell phone cameras, began to pop up on You Tube, we were all in serious trouble. The starkest, most disturbing images were of the children. The virus, playfully called the Romero Bug in certain circles, did not discriminate between the young and the old. Security video from day care centers all over the globe replayed the similar scenes, a flesh devouring toddler, its formerly adorable eyes now shot through with red, its newly grown teeth dripping with the unimaginable blood and gore of its unfortunate classmates, chasing after others in its desire to satisfy its new craving for human flesh. In some instances it was the teachers themselves who turned, dragging down their students one by one in a scene of unimaginable horror.

It wasn’t only the schools of course. All around the world; in banks, hospitals, little league games, business meetings, suburban homes and city streets, a small part of the population went, in seemingly the blink of an eye, from being normal, healthy members of society, to gruesome machines whose only thought was to grab the nearest human being they could find and turn them into a screaming smorgasbord.

For the first year the governments of the world, at least those whose elected leaders had not turned or, like the unfortunate prime minister of Great Britain, been eviscerated on live television (by the Queen Herself no less) responded to the crisis in the same way. Find the zombies and destroy them by any means necessary to prevent the spread of the infection. This was not particularly difficult to achieve because while a zombie can be described with many adjectives, stealthful is not among them. For that first year it was open season on the infected portion of the population.

Then something happened that changed us all.

A particular shot from one of those day care massacres that occurred in the early days of the initial infection became the seminal image that would lead to the eventual establishment of our department. The image was taken in Spokane at a Lutheran day care in the basement of a church. It shows an infected four year old girl, her blonde hair hanging around her once angelic face in ragged tatters. Her swollen, blood rimmed eyes stare out of the shot, looking savagely wild and achingly lost and confused at the same time. Her tiny body is partially covered in the shredded remains of what presumably had once been a beautiful flowered dress.  From her left hand dangles a stuffed bear, smattered and smeared with blood. The thumb of her right hand is inserted between her blood stained lips, in that universal sign of childish insecurity. Once this shot, taken by a SWAT team commander who put a bullet into the brainpan of the little girl right after snapping it, got into the hands of the media it was splashed across the cover of every major newspaper and magazine. Talk went in a day from how do we eliminate the zombies to how do we understand and even care for them.

The government set up the U.S. Department of Zombie Affairs to do just that.  I work for the Zombie Registration division of the department. We maintain a database of all infections that occur within the borders of the United States. The virus that causes the transformation is very fast acting. Average time from first infection to total onset is about fourteen hours. Scientists in the research division of our department are still uncertain as to the origin of the Romero Bug. Five years ago it just appeared, suddenly, violently, and without warning on every continent of the planet. The “first wave” as they were called, the initial infected, remain the only ones who turned with no warning. Every other infection has occurred as a result of the virus being passed on through the bite of an infected individual.

That first year was the worst. For a while there it seemed as though the epidemic was going to wipe us out completely, that our world would be reduced to a few thousand zombies strangling each other for the few remaining scraps of the human race. But we were able to bring ourselves back from the brink and keep civilization as we know it moving forward…with a few major adjustments.

The Department of Zombie Affairs was set up to not only protect the general public from the infected, but also to care for and treat them. Although the inescapable truth is that they hunger for human flesh and will stop at nothing to get it, there has been evidence, starting with that little girl in that Spokane day care, that most zombies do retain some shred of their former selves, some scrap of humanity. While no zombie has yet been found to be able to speak (something to do with the infection hitting the speech parts of the brain particularly hard) we have files and video of zombies drawing and painting, playing the piano, playing video games, and even writing, although the small handful we have seen who actually write words on paper seem to be re-writing something they had already written from their pre-infection days, mostly old school papers and assignments that had lain dormant in their brains for years. We have records of the infected engaged in other seemingly mundane things as well, but the point is that when they turn, they don’t turn completely, 100%. An afterimage of their humanity somehow remains intact.

So, instead of slaughtering as many as they could find, which was their modus operandi for that first year of the crisis, the government turned to containing, caring for, and studying the infected population of the United States.

The law now states that whenever an individual, for any reason and regardless of age, sex, race, or religion, turns from being a regular, living person and joins the ranks of the undead, their family, if they SURVIVE the transformation (which quite often doesn’t happen) has the responsibility of notifying our office. A clean up and extraction team is immediately dispatched and the captured zombie is then transferred to one of the ten large holding facilities we have set up for the infected around the country. Unfortunately, this first contact from the infected’s  family usually fails to happen as the family members are being quickly digested  to feed the zombie’s freakishly fast metabolism.

If a family does not for some reason report that a family member has undergone the change, we will move in a team as soon as we are notified by a neighbor, local police, or local media (usually a combination of all three). As part of my responsibilities in the Division of Zombie Registration, I lead several such teams into scenes of utter death and destruction. Into houses where the remains of the infected’s family are strewn about the place like confetti. Not a single creature in the house has survived, not even the family pets. First the zombie has to be cornered and subdued. As you can imagine they never go quietly, the combination of blood lust and confused terror makes a cornered zombie a very dangerous beast to tame. On top of that, the governmental guide lines we are required to follow, to treat the infected with as much dignity and respect and as little violence as possible, makes the job all the more difficult. Many a first response team leader has lost his job or gotten demoted for being filmed acting in abusive or cruel ways toward the targeted zombie. The ACLU has even set up its own zombie affairs department to protect the rights of the “life suppressed” as they are called.

After the infected person is safely subdued in a non lethal and humane way we then have to determine the name of the victim, who they were, what they had done for a living, who they had contact with, their blood type, and a laundry list of other information.

Then the zombie has to be loaded onto a truck and driven to one of the ten relocation centers. We do not fly the zombies as they are insanely afraid of heights. The first, and last, attempted flight to a zombie relocation center ended rather poorly as the zombies on board went berserk after takeoff, thrashing around and bashing their heads into the walls of the plane until they gashed a hole in the aircraft that eventually brought it down. The screams of the pilots as the security doors were breached and the infected poured in to feast on them were particularly horrifying.

Zombie capture and registration is a process that can take weeks and if something goes wrong and the zombie somehow slips free and starts attacking the team, well then now we have even more new zombies to register and contain, creating more work and frustration for ourselves.

It is a tremendously difficult job and it is a great struggle to continue doing it but not solely because of the difficulty of the work or the risks involved.

It runs deeper than that.

I struggle with it because last week…I had to register my own brother.

COMMENTS WELCOME!!!


(And HAPPY FOURTH!)