CHARLIE DEAD and the So-Called Zombie Apocalypse: Chapter One

CHARLIE DEAD and the So-Called Zombie Apocalypse

Chapter 1: Who Is That

The first day of the school year always was a horror show. But today Charlie Dunlap wanted to scoop out his own brains and splatter them all over the blackboard. On the board, etched in lightning bolts of chalk, was a brief writing assignment. It was supposed to be an icebreaker. Seemed innocent enough at first. Charlie was invited to jot down his name and share a few details about his home, his hobbies, his favorite books-oh, and one more thing:

How has your world changed since the Zombie Apocalypse?

Apocalypse. Sounds almost quaint, the boy thought. Like some dusty artifact from an earlier time, maybe an old jack-in-the-box with a busted crank.

Charlie bit his lower lip. He twiddled a pencil over the sheet of lined paper in agitation before beginning.

"You always hear people say that such-and-such is 'the end of the world as we know it.' But what then? Is everything supposed to just stop?" he scribbled. "That's a neat idea. A nice stab at closure. And not long ago, I guess, it must have seemed almost comforting... but it's a fantasy. Life goes on. So does death."

And then there's the in-between, Charlie thought, shaking his mop of shaggy brown curls. He dropped the pencil on his desk and rubbed the ache that was developing just above his dark eyebrows.

When the plague had struck about three months earlier, in-between had suddenly become the new routine for lots of people. The pattern was easy to recognize: Within three days of infection, they turned. First came the hoarse cough, the fatigue, the fever. Next, convulsions followed by paralysis. Finally the vacant stare, the trail of drool, the absence of any breathing or heartbeat. And then, before the flesh even started going gray, reanimation.

They'd been so damned hungry at first. Rabid, as it came to be called. Like the stampede to the cafeteria for late-period lunch.

But at least Charlie had gotten some warning. He'd had a premonition that something was about to go terribly wrong-like a bright siren blaring in his mind, telling him to take cover. A short while later, the mad howling and pounding outside the apartment door had told him that he'd locked it just in time.

For weeks, like many other survivors, Charlie had hunkered down in the chilly husk of his home. Power, out. Phones and Internet, down. Outlook, dark. It was as if a great hood had been pulled over everything, immersing the world in blindness.

The newspaper, finally up and running again, said last week that the "zombie plague" had spread to every corner of the planet over the past three months. Quite a few people were flat-out dead. Among the living, many questioned what they'd hung around for. An estimated third of the remaining global population was now in-between, what the monster movies of yesteryear had called the "walking dead." Again, almost quaint.

Had Charlie's world changed since the rise of the unliving? Let's see, the boy thought.

"For starters, since my whole neighborhood has been turned into a war zone, a lot of the people I used to know apparently are either dead or deranged," he wrote. "On top of that, thanks to recent events, my former best friend here at school is not speaking or even making eye contact with me anymore. And after combing through the pages of The Washington Day for weeks for any hint of news of my mother's whereabouts, I recently learned that D.C. authorities officially count her among the missing dead."

Again Charlie dropped the pencil on the desktop. His hand was shaking.

He couldn't help thinking that there'd been signs beforehand-a remark from his mother, a tone in her voice, a shadow in her expression-that had indicated something awful was about to happen. If only he'd recognized the clues, maybe he could've done something. And if he paid attention now, Charlie suspected, he might be able to spot the signs before something similar happened again. But then, it was always happening again. It never stopped happening.