I'd like to give a moment to thank all the fandoms I'm in and tumblr. Without them I wouldn't be standing here today. I may have forgotten to mention the fact that my friends and I are in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. My three friends, John, James, and Piper, were on tumblr as well when the apocalypse started. All of us were huge nerds so naturally we stayed on tumblr 24/7. In all honesty tumblr was how we found out about the apocalypse in the first place.
Before I go on, I'm sorry it's just part of my system, here's how tumblr works. You sit there and scroll down your dash reblogging and liking pictures and gifs. You can also post your own creations if you want. This year tumblr included flower crowns, dad jokes, and a lot of surprise, bitch. That's it. That's tumblr.
The people of tumblr tend to stay on for extremely long amounts of time which is why no one knew about the apocalypse until they ran out of good food in their house. At least that's how the one person found out. Everyone else found out when the person posted it on tumblr. People read it, didn't believe it, looked outside anyway, saw zombies, then backed away from the window and grabbed whatever weapons they could find. For me it was a Winchester knife, my color changing toy lightsaber, and a replica of Gandalf's sword from The Hobbit. I didn't dare to go outside unless I really, really had to.
Posts about zombie survival and how to kill a zombie began popping up all over the website. Pretty soon tumblr was just a way to communicate with all the other zombie slayers. The people that messaged each other usually became friends and gave tips on how to keep completely quiet and hide from zombies at night. To keep zombies from seeing the light of laptops and phones and to minimize noise they hid in their bathrooms with weapons and food.
Piper, John, James, and I all communicated through tumblr and eventually everyone ended up at my house because it's in a very secluded area and if all else fails I have two cars that we can use to get away and find another place if necessary. I told all of them to bring as much food as possible because my supply was running low.
Piper was the first to show up at my house. Her mid-length brown hair was messy and her face was covered in dirt, zombie blood, and sweat. She stumbled in with a large hiking backpack full of food and supplies. Half of it, thank God, was food and the other half consisted of flashlights, her laptop, her laptop charger, her TARDIS blanket, and some clothes. In her right hand she held her replica of Thorin's sword also from The Hobbit.
"Well hello there," I smirked.
"What?" Piper asked.
"Noting," I continued snickering.
"You try going out and fighting those things, Reyna! It's not fun!" she snapped.
I thought about it after I shut up and looked at her. She probably hadn't slept for a day or two because her house was about fifteen minutes away by car. Now that I think about it I should have driven to all of their houses but that thought never occurred to me. I let her take a shower while I stood guard because the shower made lots of noise. It took me a while to realize that I had only seen one or two around here since the apocalypse began so I figured that they didn't really come this way. The city would be where all the people were. The city was also where all the food was.
When Piper got out of the shower and got dressed she came out of the bathroom and crashed on the couch in the living room. Once she was asleep I got on tumblr to find out where John and James were. James had taken refuge at John's house and they both hadn't left yet so I decided I might take one of the cars to go see if I could find them. I left a note for Piper, grabbed my replica sword, and wondered outside for the first time since the apocalypse started about a week ago.
I sprinted to the closest car in order to avoid having to deal with any of the zombies. Luckily the first car I came to was the fastest and nicest, a cherry red Ferrari. My parents had a lot of money so we had nice cars and a really big, nice house. Honestly I hated all of that. I hated being the rich kid. Sometimes I was grateful for it but most of the time I hated having so much money.
I was about to back out of the garage when I saw Piper running with her sword to catch up and come with me before I left. I was surprised she had woken up but then again it took nearly three hours to get James and John's location. I was somewhat relieved that she woke up in time to come with me because I really didn't want to go alone.
"You really shouldn't go out alone. It's a lot worse out there than it is here," Piper advised.
"Thanks for the tip. I really didn't want to go alone anyway," I sighed with relief.
"While we're out can we stop somewhere and get food? I saw what you have and it's not much. Between that and what I brought we won't have it for very long."
I thought about that offer. I was scared to go into the local grocery store and raid the shelves while all those things were out there.
"Sure, but let's wait until we have John and James to go with us. I'm sure the store is full of those damn things," I suggested.
Usually I wouldn't cuss or anything considering I'm not supposed to but when it comes to a life or death situation I'm pretty sure stronger words will be used than darn or frack.
"Good idea," Piper agreed. "Do you know what weapons that John and James have?"
"Nope, I suppose we'll find out when we get there."
I backed out of the garage and pulled out of the drive way. While I was doing so Piper ransacked the glove department and found my Beatles 1967-1970 album. She put it in the CD player so that Strawberry Fields Forever was playing softly in the background as we cruised quickly down the highway. I tried so hard not to look at anything except for the road but I couldn't help but quickly glance at some of the zombies that were walking along the side of the road. I looked in the mirror and saw some of them following us. Considering that we were in a car and they were walking extremely slowly I knew I shouldn't worry about them but I did.
I looked closely and found some familiar faces. I saw some of my other non-blogger friends near the store that we were going to raid later, fantastic. I really hoped that they would be gone by the time we came back through in about an hour. I looked over to see what Piper's reaction to all of this was but of course she was sleeping. I didn't object to it because if we ran into a situation where we needed to fight or get away then she needed as much energy as possible.
A Day in the Life was playing when I eventually pulled up in John's driveway. I knew there would be some zombies in the yard that we would have to kill so I woke Piper up just before we pulled up to the house. There were quite a few more than I had anticipated so Piper and I grabbed our weapons and burst out of the car. To be honest things could have gone a lot worse than they did but then again they could have gone way better.
I guess John and James heard us pull into the driveway because as soon as we burst out of the car they burst out of the house, John with an axe and James with a crossbow, to fight along with us. There were only about ten so we didn't have to do too much work. We were doing perfectly fine until the music in the car went from barely audible from inside the car to blasting so loud that it could be heard from a mile away.
"Shit," I heard Piper mutter under her breath.
I forgot about the fact that the DVD player was broken and tended to play even after the car was turned off. It also turned the volume up or down whenever you didn't want it to and now would be one of the times I really wish it hadn't turned up because the zombies were attracted to noise.
"Get in the house! Go, go, go!" John yelled.
Everyone was running inside but someone had to get that disc out so I ran to the car and pulled it out. I looked up out of the back window of the car and saw a huge herd of the things coming straight for the house. I didn't even bother to shut the door or put the disc back into the case I just took it and ran full speed to the house. Of course being a klutz I managed to trip and fall, impaling myself in the process. It was only my arm but the blood made the zombies come toward me faster. I got up and ran the last few feet to the house and collapsed inside. I passed out before anything else could happen.
When I woke up my left arm was burning and I was sweating like crazy. I was on the couch which surprisingly wasn't covered in blood. When I sat up I looked at the door which was boarded up so we couldn't get out and they couldn't get in. The doormat that said "Brooke Residence" was gone. John was probably glad because he always tried to get rid of it. In fact all of our families had doormats with our last names on them. Piper's with "Endler Residence", James's with "Tenner Residence", and mine with "Wakefield Residence" on it.
"Reyna!" I heard Piper almost scream as she ran to me to hug me. "We thought you were going to die! Thank gods James thought to look up how to fix your arm. You lost a lot of blood. Are you okay?"
I wanted to say that I wasn't okay. I wanted to say that my arm was burning and I was freezing. I wanted to say that I felt like I was dying even though we all knew I was. Most of all I wanted to ask Piper why she would be using the Percy Jackson version of god but the words wouldn't come out.
"Be quiet!" John whispered.
"Sorry."
"I don't feel so good," I muttered.
John ran off to get a garbage can which I threw up in shortly after he handed it to me.
"It's okay," Piper said as she rubbed my back, "its better out than in."
"God are those Spaghetti rings?"
"Uh, yeah you were in and out for a week and feeding you seemed to keep you quiet. Those things are still out there you know so we had to do something."
"We need to go get some medication for her. Her arm is getting infected and it's killing her. John and I will take a quick trip to the store to see if we can get some painkillers and something to keep that infection from getting too bad. Piper, you can stay here with Reyna and keep her safe until we get back," James explained.
I couldn't believe that I'd been out of it for a week. For James and John's sake I hoped that most of them had cleared out of the area. I put the garbage can on the ground because my stomach felt fine now but I still felt like I could pass out asleep for another week. The shuffling of John and James getting ready to go out is what kept me awake. They both took extra knives just incase because you never know what might go down with zombies walking around. Knives would also be handy if their other weapons are dropped or forgotten on the way there. Although if you end up forgetting your weapon when you go outside in the middle of a zombie apocalypse then you were probably going to die anyway.
While John and James were getting ready to leave Piper was taking the boards off of the door. It was easy to tell that John and James had reused the nails for the boards because they were bent at the tops. I was trying to get off of the couch but as soon as I moved my left arm I let out a small squeal as pain surged through my body.
"Gag her and get a sling," I overheard James whisper to John.
John left the room and came back with a bandana and the sling he had to wear when he broke his arm. He walked over to James and handed him the items. James sauntered towards me while rolling up the bandana then stuck it in my mouth and tied it tightly around my head.
He crouched down in front of me and whispered in my ear, "I'm so sorry," before putting the sling around my neck and picking my arm up to put it in the sling.
Immediately I pushed his hand away with my right arm because it hurt too much to move my left arm. I was screaming through my gag and Piper turned around to see what was going on.
"Piper, John, hold her down please. Reyna, you have to be still. I'm sorry it hurts but it has to be done so you don't give away that we're here okay?" James instructed.
James laid me back down on the couch and Piper and John held me down so he could put my arm in the sling. I kept screaming and fighting because the pain was too intense to bear. Finally James got my arm in the sling and he helped me sit up. I was sweating still and Piper brought me some water. When she got back James and John were gone. She looked through the peephole in the door and could see them running to the car.
The zombies weren't paying much attention to them I guess because they were moving too fast. The door to the car was still open but luckily there weren't any in the car so they could make a fast get away. They closed the doors, backed out of the driveway onto the road, and were soon out of sight.
I got up off the couch with Piper's help for no actual reason except to walk around. She had to help hold me up because my legs wanted to give out but other than that I did fine. I wanted to walk to the peephole to see what was going on outside. That was the stupidest thing I could have done.
Looking out in just the small area I could see through the peephole there were at least twenty zombies lumbering around and I'm sure there were a lot more surrounding the house. I decided that it was probably a very good idea to keep quiet since the door wasn't boarded up. The windows were boarded up but since they were glass they would probably give in before the door but hey it's always good to stay quiet in a zombie apocalypse.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw something move and it took every part of me to keep myself from screaming. I turned toward what moved and it was just Piper grabbing her laptop and headphones. Apparently since the start of the apocalypse she'd been watching a lot of The Walking Dead for advice on zombie killing and survival.
"How have you been keeping your laptop charged?" I asked bewilderedly since the power went out three days ago. It seems a lot happened when I was out of things.
"The day they found out about the apocalypse, John and James raided the ThinkGeekwarehouse. I mean it is only fifteen minutes away." She replied. "Since almost no one in the area is on tumblr as often as we are the place was still packed full of stuff. They grabbed a solar powered backpack that can charge things, a pocket chainsaw, some random putty stuff, lightsabers for all of us, a bunch of knives, swords, axes, a book about how to build Lego weapons, and some other unimportant stuff like tablets that make bitter stuff taste sweet."
"Oh yeah, sounds like something they would do."
I thought about it for a while and realized that we would probably last for a while, especially if we had lightsabers and Lego weapons. I also thought about the fact that we currently had no Legos and I hadn't seen the weapons. My thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door.
"There's no way they're back… yet," I told Piper.
Before I could say yet John, James, and one of my other friends, Hazel McArthur burst through the door. I knew Hazel because her dad started McArthur Plumbing, the company that I worked for. Hazel was forced to work there but she enjoyed it because she was never really required to do anything other than take calls. That's what I did too.
Hazel, being very short and skinny had used her size to her advantage and was hiding somewhere that the zombies, or walkers as mentioned in The Walking Dead, wouldn't find her but was relieved when James and John found her. Her tan skin was covered in scars and her brown hair was a matted mess. She was skinnier when they found her than before this giant mess started but I assumed it was because if there were walkers all up in that store then she wouldn't really be able to leave until someone came to rescue her.
"So…" Hazel muttered awkwardly, "do you guys have any food?"
"Well, yeah," John replied. "Come on. The rest of you, board the door back up."
John and Hazel walked off into the kitchen while the rest of us boarded up the door. The walkers were already trying to get into the house.
I took the bag that they had brought back from the store and looked to see what they got. The first thing I saw was rubbing alcohol and I knew I'd be getting the gag back in my mouth. I found some Advil, some water, some Dr. Pepper, and three bags of dill pickle chips. I set the bag back down as John and Hazel were walking out of the kitchen.
Hazel had a can of spaghetti rings in one hand and a spoon in the other. It wasn't that difficult to tell that she was desperately hungry by the way she was eating. As she scarfed down the can of spaghetti rings John, Piper, and James came to a consensus.
"It's not safe here we need to go somewhere else," Piper said.
"That's obvious," Hazel said as she pointed her spoon at the door which was about to be broken down. "If I were you I'd be speeding up the decision. We don't have gas or time to waste."
I remembered how my house had almost no zombies, was very large, in the middle of no where, and why I had come here in the first place.
"We can go to my house!" I exclaimed rather quickly.
"Well then grab everything you can and get ready to have the fight of your life," James ordered.
The next five minutes were spent gathering food, supplies, and other various things such as weapons and throwing them into backpacks. All of us grabbed our weapons but John made me give my sword to Hazel because of my bad arm. Hazel was also given the task of looking after me and protecting me while we ran to the car. I kind of felt angry because they thought I was hopeless just because I had an injured arm. It would be healed in about a month but until then I was going to be seen as the hopeless puppy and I wasn't going to have it. We got ready just in time because as we were heading to the door to leave the door burst open and walkers poured in.
John and James were at the front of the group and started hacking away as many as they could. All of us backed up so that we actually had room to fight and the twenty walkers that were in the front were the only ones to come in. John and James took out most of them and Hazel and Piper took out the rest. We darted to the car and hopped in without another glance and drove away as fast as we could except we were going the wrong way.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"The ThinkGeek warehouse," Piper answered. She was the one who ended up driving and I don't know why. She was a really bad driver.
I was shoved in the back between Hazel who was on my left and James who was on the right. John sat in the passenger seat.
"Why are we going there?" Hazel asked, bewildered by the fact that we needed to go there again.
"Oh," John replied, "We forgot to get Legos for Lego weapons."
"Of course."
The way Hazel sounded showed she wasn't surprised at all. In fact, no one was. John and James forgot stuff all the time and it was always us who had to remember for them.
The car ride there was silent and we saw almost no walkers on the way there. We all got out of the car and got into formation with James in front, John and Piper on the sides, and Hazel and me in the back. We walked through the warehouse which clearly hadn't really been raided at all. We wondered around for a while and Hazel and James actually wondered off. They came back with boxes of Legos and Lego sets that we could use to build the weapons. In the mean time the only thing the rest of us found were more of those solar powered backpacks, which each of us grabbed so we could have one of our own, and more weapons that we stocked up on. We were about to wonder out until we passed the area where the food and drinks that they sold were kept.
Hazel was the one who spotted the many cases of energy drinks, astronaut ice cream, dehydrated marshmallows, and other types of food which could be very important later on. We took off our backpacks and stocked up on as much canned bacon, candy, food, and energy drinks as possible. The guys, being guys, scavenged all the idiotic food such as the Ghost Pepper Super Hot Candy Balls, Insanely-Hot Dried Scorpion Peppers, Ghost Pepper Jelly, and Chocolate Covered Edible Bugs. The only sensible things they got were the canned bacon and energy drinks. Hazel, Piper, and I grabbed the canned bacon, as much caffeinated stuff as we could find, different types of chocolate products, and as many tins of mints we could find. Piper had grabbed three Plan-B Evac Sling Packs before we left so we shoved those full of mints, energy drinks, and canned bacon as well. When we finished packing our backpacks so full they would hardly close and grabbed more than we could carry we left and ran out to the car. That tactic would have been okay if we hadn't been in the middle of a god damn zombie apocalypse.
When we left the warehouse we figured out that we had attracted some attention from the zombies. There were only a few but we all had our hands full and couldn't get to our weapons. Being very terrible thinkers under pressure, none of us actually thought to drop everything we were carrying to fight them off. Instead we simply darted to the car and hoped for the best. Obviously that was the worst possible idea in this situation for so many reasons that I couldn't list them all if I had a week.
The main concerns were the fact that I could hardly walk so running was a bit difficult, it's hard to run when you're carrying an over abundance of stuff in your arms, and if a walker gets close to you, you either have to run off course or stop and kick it. Finally Hazel realized that there weren't that many to kill off in the first place and decided that it might be a good idea to drop what she was carrying to kill the few walkers that were coming towards us. She took out Glamdring, the proper name for Gandalf's sword, and hacked off all the zombies' heads before anyone else could do something about it. Hazel was still using my sword even though she had picked up the replica katana of Michone from The Walking Dead while we were raiding the warehouse. At least we knew where we could go get supplies if we needed it. I had a feeling that there would be a team going back out to gather more when we got back to base.
We approached the car and threw all of our stuff in the trunk then piled into the car with the same seating arrangement as before. The car ride back wasn't as quite as the car ride there because we actually had something exciting to talk about other than the fact that we were actually surviving a zombie apocalypse. To be honest I didn't think that I would have even survived a day but here I am, still surviving.
It took us about twenty minutes to get back to my house but when we got back there was nothing for us to fight. It was a relief to be able to casually walk into the house without having to do a quick check for walkers. By now John's house was probably flooded with walkers and there was really no hope in going back to get anything from there. We most certainly weren't planning to go back there. The thing we least expected to do was fight off intruders.