I Will Fight

Day 1

2:35 a.m.

I'm not sure why I've taken to writing. It's a historian's sport, something people do when they know someone else will read it. No one will read what I write. My words will die with me, just like the rest of humanity.

But still I write.

I never imagined this would be how the world would end. I wasn't a brutal skeptic before the apocalypse, nor was I one of the radical doom preparers either. It came slowly, at first. The disease tested the human population, tasted it, taking a few, a curious temptress. Then when it liked our flavor, it struck. Waves of people fell. We watched them on the news, near our homes, in public, as neighbors, within our own families.

It was a carnal thing. Their bodies decayed first. Of course death claimed them afterwards. Death would have been a blessed thing. Death would mean discontinuance, an end, salvation, mercy. But we weren't that fortunate.

You'd watch your love ones fester away. The compassionate ones sat at their bedsides and held their moldering hands. The cautious ones kept them in quarantine, or behind locked doors. The smart ones ended their lives when the infection began.

Everyone has their own sob story. Survivors could flood the earth with their teary recollections. Would a flood be better? It would wipe out all the brain hungry creatures. It would take the survivors as well, but sacrifices have to be made, don't they? Wouldn't it be better to die drowning than at the jaws of one of those inhuman beasts?

Zombies. That's what they call them. I never thought I would live in a world where zombies existed. But then again, I never thought I would be the one to bury my father, to shoot my mother, to hack apart my brother. I never thought I would torch my neighbors house, or loot a grocery store, or be forced to eat rotting flesh.

I was one of the ones to hide in the house. I boarded up the windows. I fitted the doors with locks. I sealed myself into my own coffin.

I stopped with the radio broadcasts, the graphic news segments, the army of blog posts. I kept myself in silence. I didn't want to hear anymore of it.

I found a bucket of bleach in my house. It would be so easy--pop the lid, take a sip, end it all. It would be painless. I wouldn't have to look into the bottomless eyes of one of those monsters. I wouldn't have to feel their teeth rip into me, their decaying hands on my skin.

I remember I reached for the bleach bucket. My hands came around the handle.

But something inside me said otherwise.

I dropped the bleach and picked up a gun. No more hiding. I would fight.