I remember the morning this all started. It was a Tuesday. A heavy, stinking hung-over Tuesday morning. God, I hated this city. The endless-traffic, over-population, arid pollution. It used to be a great city. The old Malton. The city of our dreams. The city me and my new wife would raise our kids in. Not anymore. Malton had hardened and soured. The air was like diesel fumes and urine. With everything gone to shit I didn't think things could get any worse. My wife and I fought constantly under the stress of living in this hell-hole. I didn't even tell her I had gotten laid-off from the shitty desk-job that barely paid our bills. With the house about to be forclosed on, she left with our 5 year old daughter. A note on the fridge explained this all to me, among other vulgar expressions of how much she hated my rotten guts. Bourbon ensued. Rage. Despair. Desperation. Nothing mattered anymore. Everything that meant anything was gone. Fueled my alcohol and anger, I reached for the handgun I kept in the nightstand. My wife always hated it, but for some reason it gave me comfort on this bleakly-reeling helluva morning. The sun was coming up. The sound of annoyingly peppy morning birds, and the stench of sun softening tarmac crept through the cracked windows of our squallid shithole house. I loaded the .45 with shakey hands, and slid it into my coat pocket. This ugly Tuesday morning I would fire my ex-boss -with a hail of hot lead. I practically fell out the front door, leaving it wide-open. I began stumbling down the city streets toward my office. I was sweating. The warm morning breeze felt cool on my soaking forehead. I fingered the trigger of my concealed weapon, it was cold and anxious. And I heard sirens. I kept my bloodshot eyes to the ground as 3 blue and white Malton City Police cars sped down the street in a flashing, screaming flurry. I needed to get to the office. The signage of my office building loomed in the distance, laughing at me in contempt. "NECROTECH ENTERPRISES"... What the hell was it anyway? Some kind of "medical-science-lab-something". Hell, I'd pushed papers there for 5 years and I never knew what it even was. Never asked, never cared. I turned my back to the street, into the step up doorway of some pub. The sign in the window said closed, but I wasn't. I reached into my inside breast-pocket and pulled out my flask, emptying its wicked contents down my throat. I stumbled somemore down the road choking a little on my swarthy libations. Tuesday morning... Bob, my old boss will be sitting in the break-room, his small, weasely eyes peeping from behind his thick glasses; Sipping his coffee, talking shit on who ever the poor bastard was, now that I was gone, not doing shit... And he would look up and see the last thing he would ever see... ME. With a gun in his face, and a smile on mine. (Sorry Bob, might wanna take off that fancy tie, you jerk-off! 'Cuz its gonna go from cornflower blue to brain-matter pink here, real quick. heh heh heh.) And I'd wait until he cried into that coffee, begging, feeling as hopeless and helpless as I felt. And BANG! HAH! NECROTECH my ass! Five freakin' years and for what?! To get "laid-off"!? To lose my family?! to lose every hope and dream and shred of dignity?!!! Then I'd throw some things around in the office to get everyone's attention, and put that shiney, smoking pistol to my temple, smile at all those back-stabbing, lying, monkeys, and empty the contents of my head into the slave-driving time-clock beside me in a lovely mosaic of bone and blood. Not, however, before I visited Peg. That lousy bitch with the annoyingly upbeat and flowery "this-is-my-job-and-it's-a-monday-and-I'm-so-happy-to-be-here" voice. BANG! All of that...
But I never made it there. Within 20 steps of the office, a man, one of the lab techs from one of the sub-levels, almost knocked me over, hitting me like a brakeless freight train, running out of the building like he had hell on his heels. He had blood on his lab-coat and horror on his face. As he hit me I buckled and twisted, and as I spun, everything got really quiet. My heart pounded in my ears as the realization hit me. Something had happened in the streets. An accident involving motorists, seemigly, but there was more to it. As the men met, arguing,one man lurched and and tore the others' throat out with his teeth... ending the man's initial attempt at "ASSHOLE!" to final scream, with a fast, gurgling sound and a fine red mist. His head fell backwards like a broken pez-dispenser, a back cow-lick hitting between his shoulder-blades. The rest of him buckled and went down with his attacker on top of him. The attaker looked dazed. On drugs probably, biting at the gaping tear of the mans neck. And then he looked right at me, like a vandal caught red-handed. He stood up slowly and awkward, rearing up like an animal getting ready to give chase. I pulled out my pistol, holding it up, obvious. I turned slowly and began to speed-walk away, pistol ready. The city was in some kind of insane, murderous, panic... Was there a riot going on somewhere? A few people were running around the streets. Something was wrong... There were broken shop windows, empty cars in the streets, their doors wide open... and blood. Somebody inched out of a shop, fiddling with their keys to feebly 'lock-up'. 3 frantic attackers raced from different locations on top of him. They tore him to pieces, his desperate screams muzzled by the blood churning into his throat. There was smoke in 3 locations in the horizon. People were screaming somewhere... and gunshots... The gun in my hand was slippery in my sweaty palms. I felt a little more confident though my mind felt as if it had snapped. Maybe it had... but I kept walking. Dizzy from the muggy heat and lack of booze. Looking up, I saw a carreening white cadillac fly through the next intersection slamming into the concrete steps of a Police Dept. about a block away. The car caught fire on impact and a few people ran from the direction that it had come from, to help, I thought. Untill the commotion around the driver turned into short shrieks and the windows went red. And then, the car burst into a fireball and black smoke, with a deafening crack. I ran to the burning wreck, surveyed the damage. Anyone that had been alive around the explosion, wasn't anymore. The air stunk of gasoline and burning rubber and burning flesh. I ran past the flames and into the Police Department. A mustached cop approached me from behind the counter. there was blood in that 'stache and around his mouth. Something was wrong with his eyes. I told him that people were dying outside and asked what the hell was going on and he just kept walking toward me, grabbing at my coat. I put my hand forward to keep him back, but he didn't respond. I threw him down and asked again, yelling. He moaned and acted as if he was going to BITE my ankles. I kicked the back of his head, face into the marble floor. I felt the bone in his nose and cheeks crumble under the blow, and some of his teeth left bright red trails as the skidded across the floor. I reached over him to collect his piece, and spun on my heals to leave. Three people were pounding on the station doors when I turned around. Burnt and blackoned. One of them smoldering. The attackers from the explosion outside, moaning and smearing blood on the glass. What the hell was this, I thought. I held the cop's pistol, made sure it was loaded and safety-on, and slipped the barrel-end into the waist of my pants. My mind was realing. I looked out and saw a woman and her small child being attacked by a group of similar psychos. They were screaming and crying. Almost instictively, I kicked open the doors, knocking over the weirdos that were streaking the glass. I yelled at the attackers to stop. Pulling the .45 from my pocket, I fired a warning shot without thinking. They stopped and the woman and child ran, screaming. Now they were all looking at me. Those bloody, glassy-eyed loons... Coming closer. The 3 behind me at the Police Dept. were up again, too. I looked closer at these freaks... They were like vagrants from hell. Like some bad movie... Dirty, torn up, bloody, incoherent, relentless... I recognised Joe McCoy, an ex-coworker. He was a sharp 22 year old intern at the office. Very promising. I admired him. But now, he was all messed up. Bloody. Ragged. Vacant. He stumbled toward me like he was drunk, or retarded, or... dead? What the hell was going on here?! All these people looked DEAD! All this, and they were closing in. Fear hooked into my heart and lungs. Panic turned my blood electric. I felt insane! The world spun, and I started shooting. POP! Head-shot... one went down. POP! Miss POP!POP! Shoulder to neck, that bastard spun and gargled before he fell. I started to adjust to the guns accuracy and continued. I opened up their heads like vesuvian melons, painting anything behind them in red particle of brain and bone. THEY WERE ALL DEAD! and if they weren't, I would arrange it. I didn't want to shoot Joe... poor Joe... The first bullet broke his lower jaw in half at the chin and tore the lower-right quarter of his face away. I hesitated as I looked into his lifeless eyes... He took last two steps, toward me. I pointed the barrel of the pistol, almost touching the bridge of his nose, between his eye-brows. I looked at the ground as I squeezed on the trigger, but I could still hear the remainder of his skull hit the ground a few yards behind him, like a wet rag, before he slumped in front of me, bleeding brains on my previously unshined shoes. What was this? The world had gone to hell and all that made sense was that I was here to claim it. And suddenly... everything that I hated about my life disappeared. All the bad things melted away and I felt light as a feather. Zen-like. Euphoric. Everything that had mounted to this moment was trivial. I shot my way to the safety of a gas station bathroom. I locked the door and went to sleep.I was out of ammo and out of strength. Hungry. Confused. Something in me died that day. But something emerged reborn. To this day I have forgotten my past life. The man I used to be is dead. My wife and little girl made it outside the quarantine. They are safe and I will see them again. But until this is over, my name is DarbyCrash, and I kill zombies. See you in the streets.
