2 January 6th, 2020
How do you even begin telling a story like this one? Do I start off in school? The decorated walls full of drawings from kids that had no idea what was going on? What about the butterflies I felt when I walked next to my childhood crush down the hall? How about... right as school ended.
Yes, right as school ended, I heard some words that were appealing to any 11-year-old kid. From a long-time friend named Cody.
On our way out, toward the buses that would take us home for the day, Cody and I slowly walked out of the building, saying goodbye to all of our favorite teachers for our '2-week break to slow the spread'.
We happened to walk right beside Miss Love, one of our favorite teachers and held onto her sleeve to slow her down.
"Miss Love! Thanks for not giving out any homework for our break!" I yelled out to her.
She seemed lost at first, and then perked her head up and smiled, patting us on our backs.
"Of course! Use this break to relax and stay as healthy as possible, alright? Make sure you eat your fruit and vegetables, and you listen to your parents. Got it?" She crouched down to our level and made eye contact as she gave us one of her classic old lessons we heard all the time in her cluttered classroom.
Cody and I nodded, leaving the building at last and walking into the bus, already full of kids.
We were just in time as it began to start up in conjunction with the other buses in front leaving.
"I'm going to play so many video games over break!" We heard others shout as we moved to the back of the bus.
"That's right, what do you plan to do for break? I was thinking we should start another survival world in Minecraft. We could play it until our sick break is up and see if we can beat it," I proposed the idea to Cody.
"Sure, sounds good to me. Do you want to get everybody else in on it? We could make a castle or something," He added to my suggestion as we both sat down in the sticky grey seats of the bus.
It finally started moving as we began searching on our phones for our friends to text and get in on the idea.
We both weren't part of very rich families, so waiting for our phones to load against the weak signal and the moving bus took us until the halfway point to finally get a message sent out.
The message got out and we were met with a ton of agreed messages, friends already starting up their consoles, and getting ready for the longest night of gaming in our entire lives.
The bumpy bus ride, full of obnoxious kids talking about drinking over break, finally came to a close after six more minutes, and I walked down the path to my house, saying goodbye to everybody, and wishing them to stay healthy.
The houses down my street were fairly middle-class. They were all one-story buildings, with the exception of one house on the corner, and barely big-enough backyards at the end of each house. Personally, my family had a pool, which took up 80% of the backyard.
But... that's not what the reader wants to hear as I write in this notebook, you don't want to hear what life is like before everything went to shit. That's too bad because nothing matters if you can't remember how good life was before the first zombie started to walk the streets of Michigan.
We played Minecraft, a game about building with blocks and using your imagination to create things even Legos couldn't match up with. We played all night, my mom bringing me food and everything... it was perfect. We stayed up until four in the morning, just trying to build a castle.
It wasn't until the day after, when I woke up, that things started to change.
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I woke up a little in the afternoon because I stayed up so late. When I went upstairs, the windows were covered and blocked with drapes, and all lights were turned off.
"What's going on?" I asked, climbing the steps up the basement from my room into the living room.
My house wasn't anything special. As I said, it was a first-story building with a basement that spanned the entire surface area of the house. The walls were classic blues and reds and oranges that merged into each other, leading into the kitchen. Like I said, nothing special.
"We were told to cover the windows... I was confused as well, but look," Dad said, pointing outside through a tiny slit in the drapes.
My Dad... well, I shouldn't describe him, not in a few sentences. Because I couldn't. My Dad, Charlie Weiss, would be the reason I made it this far. You can't summarize a person like that in a few sentences... you can't with any of my family or friends. I'll save the explanations, but you should know that he was a living legend.
His head was buzzed and he had stubble on him, showing the signs of aging, but not too much. In fact, he was only 34 back when I was 11.
We looked out of the small opening behind the dark grey drapes, looking at the afternoon sun beating down on a man standing in the middle of the street, looking around.
The army was there, clad in their weird-looking jeeps and trucks that blocked both the entrance and exit to our subdivision. It looks intense, watching them go back and forth and looking at the soldiers holding their guns up, pointing at the man.
"What are they doing?! Are they going to shoot him?!" I asked out loud, peeking more of my head out from the slight opening in the drapes.
"Is he a criminal or something? What are they doing..." Dad said, repeating my question in the same curious tone.
"Put your hands up and walk towards us!" A voice on the megaphone picked up from the exit of our subdivision. When it did, the man standing in the middle of the street turned around at the megaphone and started walking closer to it.
He was walking at a shambling speed... not even putting his hands in his pockets or yelling back. He was just walking. There was no bulge on his tight pants indicating he had a weapon, yet the army was still skeptical, watching over him closely.
As a mere child, I didn't understand their unsolicited aggression. This man was unarmed, just walking toward them. Maybe that man needed help.
I hadn't even gathered my thoughts or my final theory before the voice on the megaphone picked up again. At this point, all neighbors were watching through the slits of the opened drapes.
That man kept walking toward the soldiers. Dad must've caught what was about to happen because he closed the drapes and led me away from it.
"It's probably not important, let's just let them handle it," Dad suggested. He walked into the kitchen and turned the light on, going to make some lunch for everybody.
"What was wrong with that guy? Is he on the news at least?" I asked next, walking into the living room and grabbing the remote.
Mom walked in from the hallway and took the controller from me, turning on cartoons instead of the news. I really wanted to know what was going on with that man in our street, so I took one last look outside of the drapes, watching him walk even closer to the army at the end of our street.
That man, walking at a shambling speed and with no definitive sources of danger on his character, walked up to a soldier and grabbed his face.
That widespread panic even confused me at first, but it wasn't until I saw blood spurting from the soldier's arm and the bullets start flying that I understood the gravity of what was happening.
The man was shot in the head almost immediately, bursting it open like a blooming flower drenched with that red, viscous liquid that now stained our street.
"Woah! They just shot him!" I called out.
From the window in the kitchen, Dad watched what was happening right along with me, and threw his hands up in confusion, claiming that they shouldn't have done that.
The soldiers surrounded their bitten friend. I had heard about these kinds of biting attacks on the news, but it was mainly in the form of bath salt click-bait articles from those crazy people in Florida. This, however... was different.
I knew what zombies were at this point in time, I knew what they were capable of in many forms of media that I watched... and the first thing I naturally thought of wasn't the bath salts. It was the thought that this could be the start of something terrible... something like an apocalypse.
Nobody took the threat of walking zombies seriously. You could outrun them and defuse any attacks almost immediately upon contact, but when there's enough of them, that is dangerous.
One man might not be dangerous, but if more of them grouped up to attack, it could be the start of the end of the world.
