Z-Day: Prologue

It had been three days since the cell phone towers went down and I had last been in contact with my brother, Isaac. Isaac was a member of the 82nd Airborne in North Carolina while I was a freelance writer from Northern California. The plan was to start traveling across the country and meet up somewhere halfway between each other before heading North. It only should have taken a couple days of travel to hit the center of the country but the end of civilization via reanimated corpses made the journey slow and rather harrowing.

Being a geek I'd talked at length about the “impending” zombie apocalypse but I was as surprised as anyone when it actually happened. I'm a shut in most of the time, making a living by writing book, movie and game reviews for a few online publications. Up until a few days ago my life was simple, living in my small Sacramento apartment with my dog, Reggie, spending my time dicking around the internet, playing video games and getting shit-faced with what few friends could stand my ass. Even though I couldn't ever say with certainty when my next paycheck was coming or from where I enjoyed life. It was, as I said before, simple and straight-forward. There wasn't a lot of bullshit unless I passed out on the couch and woke up to the morning news. That always pissed me off.

Of course I'd be lying if I didn't admit there was something missing in my existence. I couldn't quite put my finger on it but everything was just slightly off. Just a few shades away from perfect, if you will. I didn't realize it at the moment that even though my only real social commitment was to an animal that often times preferred to sit in a corner and lick his own balls for hours on end my life was needlessly complicated. I felt that everyone's life was. Cell phones, the internet, the endless desire for more money, the smothering of a skewed society just made everyone a cock-eyed pile of shit, myself included. I'm very well aware of the fact that my very livelihood depended on half-retarded directors, producers and actors making movies and the so-called 'indie' artist putting out another self-serving, 'anti-establishment' turd on CD so that I could watch or listen and offer a 'well-informed' opinion that was no doubt influenced by whether or not I'd had to wait in line at the grocery store too long that day or if the douche-bags at McDonald's had gotten my order right or if I'd been able to pound a few shots of Captain Morgan before I had to sit down and write.

So, yes, part of me wanted the world to end. In hindsight I think that perception was blinded by the bad. You never really take into account what ravenous hordes of undead actually do to your thought process. After just a couple days you start to realize that unless the person is standing right in front of you there was a good chance they're dead and taking a trip to wherever this person or persons live to find out could very well end up with someone you care about (or yourself) dead.

It's a funny thing about death. It's such a big deal when everything's normal but when you come face to face with dead bodies littering the streets you used to walk when going to the store and you've been forced to kill without hesitation you start to lose touch with what you used to be. It's only been three days since the zombies came and death cast its shadow across the world. Only three days and I've already committed enough felonies and heinous acts to be imprisoned for the rest of my life. When you've had to stare into the lifeless eyes of a person you know and put a bullet in their skull to keep them from killing your best friend it does something to you. It alters your perception of reality. Makes you hard. Makes you almost forget the value of human life. If it doesn't, though, you're fucked. You see, after Z-Day reality changed. There's nothing left but survival.

Excerpt from the Journal of Dexter Collins