Everybody else has officially abandoned this project and I had written this like last year and just left it rotting in my laptop. So I'm going to dust it off and just write about zombies on my own.
It had only taken two weeks for Raph to sleep through the night while people moaned and scratched at the walls outside. Usually he slept in a tin shed with zombies tripping into the metal, sending reverberations as loud as thunder through the room for the entire night, so sleeping in a drafty abandoned dance studio was a big improvement over his recent accommodations.
He wasn't used to terrified girls clinging to him, shuddering all night, face buried in his neck.
In the morning, he gave her a protein bar for breakfast and tried to distract her from the rotting body parts strewn across the parking lot by pretending he saw a hawk in the trees across the street. She actually saw several large birds swarming in the ditch, presumably gobbling up Miss Elsa or the girl's parents or some other deceased local.
They drove down the eerily abandoned highway in the late summer sunshine with the windows down. Raph leaned back with one hand on the wheel, the other out in the air, cutting through it like a knife. The air was warm and sweet as the last wildflowers of summer bloomed. The pleasant musty smell of a local lake filled the car and he wondered if they should stop for a quick swim or if the lakeshore would be filled with dead broads in bikinis bloating in the sun.
"What's your name?" he asked her, as he turned down the radio blasting Johnny Cash. Seemed like a good idea to know her name so he could scream it at her if he needed to warn her that something was about to eat her face off.
They passed through the suburbs and past a wooded park. Zombies stumbled in the shadows of the trees and the girl slid down in her seat.
"Don't worry. They don't move fast enough to get us on the road," he said. "So you remember your name or what?"
She pouted her lip and said, "My name is Shannon Elise Samantha Penelope Pennington-Darling. I call myself Shannon Darling because I used to not remember my whole name and I always ran out of magnet letters on the refrigerator. What's your name?"
"Raphael. I don't have a last name, but if I did it would be Hamato, I guess." No point keeping it secret anymore. Cruising down the street on a nice bright day, listening to the birds sing, while a few horses grazed in a pasture. He almost felt like a normal guy, a pretty girl in his car while he drove through the countryside, possibly on his way back from school shopping. He'd noticed most of the department stores said that school was about to start. Most people had probably dropped dead at Target buying discount pencils and tablets.
She tapped her ballet slippers in time to the deep-throated music. "You fight zombies a lot? I don't. I cry when they're around. You seem really brave."
Raph puffed out his chest and cleared his throat, pushing down on the gas pedal and watched the needle zoom up to 90 miles per hour. "Yeah, well. I'm a ninja. I've fought all kinds of weird shit. This is nothing to me. And you did okay last night. You didn't cry anyway..."
"That's because you were there and I could hold you and I know you're strong. Let's go to the zoo! I bet there won't be any lines. Last time I went this group of boys called me names. One of them asked to see my panties and my mother yelled at me because I let them."
He noticed a large sign that said Bedford Falls Zoo. Dozens of cars sat abandoned in the road and parking lot. "Why not? I've never been to a zoo. And don't do that shit! Guys are perverts. If we meet any guys, you tell me if they try that shit and I'll stab their eyes out. Okay?"
"All the guys are dead now though," she said, looking past the front gate curiously. "I hope they have penguins!"
They got out of the car after parking in the middle of the road next to a sign declaring that all cars would be towed after two hours.
Raph climbed over the gate in one leap and then cracked the padlock like a walnut with one hand. He smirked as he pulled the door open.
"Wow! That was good!" She clapped and hopped up and down.
After Raph did several unnecessary acrobatic displays to impress his new female companion, they finally passed a concession stand where a mutilated corpse lay protecting the till. He jumped over the counter and considered plucking cotton candy off the wall but wondered if it was contaminated. After looking around at the rotten corpses littering the kitchen behind the front counter, he wondered if it was safe for his little friend to be out in public at all. Could there be latent pathogens? Maybe Brian, as it said on the name-tag of the deceased, had licked all the cotton candy before croaking on the cash register. He jumped out of the concession stand and said, "We'll have some sandwiches when we get back to the car."
Shannon was satisfied and they passed a group of gorillas in a large grassy enclosure. He wondered what they had been eating to stay alive and then noticed that the silver back male had a large femur in his hand, which he waved around like club. Then he pounded his fists on his chest and did several unnecessary acrobatic displays for his female companion. Raph felt his cheeks heat up and took a few steps away from Shannon. "So you like monkeys? They look pretty dumb to me. That's stupid how he's showing off for that girl like that."
She didn't pay any attention to him and pointed excitedly to the penguin house and skipped towards it, bloody tutu flapping in the breeze. He plodded after her, grumbling about stupid apes when he heard gutteral moaning and the familiar slurp of zombie flesh sliding off onto the ground. Shannon ran back to him at a full run, then jumped behind him as he took a fighting stance. He sighed and turned around to face her. "They run at a snail's pace. Go climb that tree to be safe."
The zombie had hardly gotten the door open by the time she had taken off her ballet slippers and struggled into the bottom branches of a tree. He casually walked to the penguin hut and pulled the door open. At least twenty zombies stood in the dark room, most of them standing idly, but a few snacked on penguin bones, their black and white feathers strewn about the room. One of them had an employee's body held in its hand as it gnawed on its torso. "Oh, shit!" he backed up and thought of his tactics for a split second before deciding to run in at full charge, slashing and jabbing randomly at them as his method of attack, which wasn't any different from his usual method of attack.
After fifteen minutes of yanking limbs off of zombies and holding back a wretch from the overpowering smell of decay, he dropped the severed head of what looked like it had once been a young school teacher or some other respectable woman and dropped it on the ground. He slid in a puddle of wet flesh, blood and pus and eventually made his way out of the penguin hut. Shannon still clung to the tree branches.
"Wait!" she yelled, holding up a hand for him to stop. "You're covered in blood! Are you hurt! Don't be hurt!"
He bristled up and stood a little taller. "I'm not hurt! This is zombie blood... oh yeah... wait... I need to find a shower. Come with me, but stay way far away from me." Oh, fuck. Where did zookeepers put their showers. They must have them to decontaminate baby animals or something.
After half an hour looking up and down the zoo for a door that said Employee's Only, Raph found a faint red glow coming from inside the monkey house. He held up a hand for Shannon to wait behind him and she put her finger to her lips as if imitating his gesture for quiet to herself. Poor kid, he thought. Life must be hard at the best of times for somebody like that, let alone in a zombie apocalypse.
There were no monkeys in any of the glass walled enclosures that lined the walls and he thought it was a little odd. Maybe the lions had gotten to them all. The idea of all those big powerful animals trapped in small cages with no people outside to feed them made his heart hurt a little. Kept in cages because they scared mankind and now the enemy was gone. They should run free like they were meant to.
He quickly forced open the Employee's Only area and found a small shower and an area to decontaminate employee's after touching animals. He quickly jumped inside and scrubbed himself raw with the sanitizer until his skin ached. There were no towels and he left the Employee area dripping wet.
Shannon stood waiting for him, her hands around her waist. "You want to go now? Are the penguins okay? Should we take them with us to protect them?"
"Uh..." He rubbed the back of his wet head. "Yeah they're fine. They had a zombie to eat so they looked pretty happy to me. Let's go look at the lions and tigers."
The big cats paced angrily in three small concrete paddocks, back and forth, back and forth. The lioness gave a distressed roar that shook the pavement. Shannon grabbed his arm. "They look mad. They want to eat us!"
"Yeah, I bet they do!" He looked for a door and wrenched it open. "They'll find their way out eventually. Come on." The tiger paced and then stopped as it felt the wind and smelled the warm flesh wafting past its enclosure. He pulled her along by the hand towards the reptile house. They would be safe after they got through the door.
Presuming it wasn't full of zombies.
The glass enclosures holding the reptiles were all empty too. Maybe nearby residents snacked on them all during the twilight of civilization as mankind went into near extinction. Or maybe some do-gooder had released them all during the chaos.
Shannon tapped on the glass of a snake enclosure and squinted at a gnarled branch that had once been home to a boa constrictor. "They're all gone. I bet they escaped when the zoo people stopped feeding them."
Raph heard a quiet scrape behind a door painted in grassland camouflage at the back of a very large lizard display and motioned for her to be quiet. There wasn't much to be done besides look threatening at the glass as the doorknob turned and the door opened.