The Walking Dead: A Runner's Narrative
In an instant the sun goes supernova and the atmosphere is engulfed in flames. In an instant a comet collides with Earth, extinguishing eons of Evolutionary progress. In an instant the world's oxygen becomes toxic and the human race suffocates. Or maybe an alpha omega bomb detonates beneath the Earth's crust, sending fragments of our planet spiraling off into space. I guess most people hope that the end of existence would go a bit like that, but the human race wasn't so lucky. Nature fucked us big time. If it even was nature. Nobody knows (if they do, they're not talking). There's all kinds of theories out there, some more likely than others. It's the kind of stuff you talk about around the camp fire before you asleep. The way I figure is that it must have been some kind of experiment or something. Some Frankenstein virus gone horribly wrong, maybe. I guess this would all make more since if I started from the beginning, day 1.
It was the hottest summer I'd ever seen. I was at home watching TV when the power went out. I got out of bed and looked out the window to see if it was just my place or if the whole block lost power. That was the first time I saw one. Slow, stupid, and ugly as hell. I half thought it was some punk in a costume at first, until he sunk his teeth into Old Lady Dawson. She was a sweet old lady, makes cookies and always smells like mothballs. She was everyone's grandma, ya know? The best I could tell is the thing crashed his car into the telephone pole 9 hence the loss of power) got killed on impact, came back, and bit the poor old lady when she came over to try and help. Anyway, she was screaming so loud I thought my ears would bleed. I was going to go help her, honestly, but I froze up. Something about seeing an old lady get disemboweled does that to you.
That's about the time when I saw another, then another, and another. It's like the fuckers were coming out of the wood work. I had a sudden realization. "Get the hell out of there, man!" I'll admit it, I'm no hero. I'm actually more of a coward.
I yanked my suitcase out of the closet and filled it with stuff I figured would be useful during an apocalypse. Food, medicine, water, cellphone, laptop, and miscellaneous junk.
It took me about 10 minutes total to gather all this stuff, get dressed, and run out the door. I sprinted straight to my car, started it up, and drove off a full speed.
The only way out of town was over the Scottsdale Bridge (the downside of living in a city on an island). Naturally I headed that a way. I drove by a lot of messed up stuff on my way there. This thing spread fast, because less than 30 minutes after I first laid eyes on one of these things they were everywhere and they were hungry. That seemed to be all these things did was kill and eat, kill and eat, lather, rinse, repeat. When I finally got to the bridge, I floored it. I wanted to get the hell out of the city as fast as I could. I got about half way across when a heard an ear- rapingly loud boom. I looked out the window and noticed something's: 1. my car was falling. 2. Somebody had blown up the bridge with me on it. 3. I was hurtling toward Lake Nalahache at a million fucking miles an hour.
I blacked out about then.
When I woke up I was on the shores of the Nalahache, face down in the sand. I stood up and saw that my suitcase was lying next to me (weird, right?). I quickly opened it to see if there was any water damage. To my relief there was none. Everything was nice and dry. Except me, of course. I was completely soaked, but it actually felt pretty refreshing because of how hot it was outside. I looked around at my surroundings; thankfully I washed up on the mainland. I checked my watch and headed into the woods, to overwhelmed by everything that had just happened to even care that I almost got blown up.