[I walk up the dusty Arizonan street with directions from a local. With the starless nights and wild animals roaming around, it's no wonder the people still living here are terrified of being struck in the night. The town's police force is armed with a multitude of everything they can get their hands on. I've seen them with .22's, hand rifles, machine guns, swords, even some at street corners leaning on chainsaws. The house I'm looking for is really just a trailer in a plot of land. A large dog barks as I approach and step inside the thankfully air-conditioned trailer. The elderly couple who owns the house welcome me inside cheerfully. The man of the house is named Henry Stevens, and his wife's name is Georgina. I sit down and they begin their story.]
We never expected there to really be zombies, we both thought it was just some sort of fad the kids were into. Our own granddaughter had an obsession with all sorts of movies and games for all of that kind of stuff. So we didn't think much of it when we heard about some sort of zombie apocalypse over the news, we just thought that it was some new gory kid's game.
You mean you didn't even pay attention when newscasters were yelling about it all over the news?
Hey, don't think we didn't notice all of that. But they had those kinds of video game commercials on all the time. How were we supposed to know these ones were any different? Besides, we thought that if anything came after us, Wolf would take care of it.
Who?
Wolf is our pet dog. You probably heard him barking outside. We found him out in the desert, he looked like he was part wolf, hence the name we gave him. He was never very wild, though very protective and dominant if strangers ever came to calling. We thought if anything actually DID come our way, he'd just take a bite out of it and whatever it was would just get moving away.
You were never afraid? When did you finally see that this was all true and not just some video game ad?
When we saw it with our own eyes! We were in town, it was a flea market day. Georgy here was looking at some pretty earrings when some asian guy comes whoopin' and hollerin' down the street like he'd just sat on a cactus. I looked behind him, and some guy was all twitchy and jerky following him through the market. My friend who was running a food stand, Mike, he stepped forward and tried to make the peace, see what was wrong. But when he stepped out, the guy just bit his shoulder and tore a chunk of meat right out!
Did the man chasing your friend have anything in his mouth before?
If he, or, it, did, I didn't notice. All I knew was, this was no kid's video game. I grabbed Georgina and we got to our car fast as we could. Lucky for us even folks like us can out-walk a lurching zombie. We got to our car before the panic really sunk in. The first thing we did was go home and pack up what we had. Radio, food, photo albums, dog bed-
You were going to take Wolf with you?
You didn't think we would just leave him did you? Naw, if I did that Georgina would beat the skin off me. We packed up all we could in out pickup and drove to town.
You were going back to the place you first saw a zombie? I thought you had realized by now-
I know what you're thinking, we're old, not stupid. There was another town nearby, and news doesn't travel that fast out in the open desert. We grabbed some supplies, some smart-ass kids asked us if we were goin' on a second honeymoon. I just yelled at them about the zombie over in the next town. They just laughed and jeered that we were just running from our own death.
I had known those kids. They were the kind of groups who smoked dope on the corner and busted people's mailboxes with a baseball bat from a pickup truck. Now I look back, it probably would have saved us a whole lotta grief just to have left right then and there.
The zombies came?
[This time Georgina, who had been silent this whole time, speaks up and relates what she thinks]
Only one, and the kids just thought he was one of the town drunks, they always roamed around the streets when trying to get over a hangover. Henry sped off before it even came within five blocks of us. I put my head down and hugged Wolf's head to my chest as we heard the screams of those kids in the distance.