Sunday, April 4, 2010

Zombie Leftovers: For Jessica DeTomasi

This is the first piece I've written for my Creative Writing: Intro to Fiction class. I plan on making it a full-on short story eventually. I guess you're just going to have to deal with the foul language from now on.


Madison Valencia carried a shotgun. She carried a machete. She carried a sewing kit, a scalpel, a blue moon tattoo on her wrist, and two-hundred-sixty-five-home-made-third-degree-burn skin grafts across her body. She carried her father's last name and, after the incident, it had become who she was. After Madison Square Garden burned, she ditched the first name; after she had come home one afternoon to find her gray, deteriorating father smothered in blood and advancing on her from the sunlight filled kitchen; after she had loaded a round into the barrel of the shotgun and feebly stuttered, "I-I-I'm doing th-this bec-c-cause I-I-I-I-I love you," ; after she had blown his fucking brains out. That was when the outbreak had turned into an epidemic. And because of globalization-because of the Internet and airports and fast food restaurants, because of oppression and censorship and because the government could never quite wrap their heads around the fact that Reaganomics screwed the working class-the epidemic had turned into the apocalypse. So, Valencia: Valencia was all she had left, the identity she struggled to maintain, the childhood memories she desperately clung to-but after a teenage daughter has to blast the mindless gourd off of her own father's decayed body, it's not so much about reflection anymore than it is about survival.

Valencia stood poised on the hill watching the city burn below. The skyscrapers engulfed in flames stretching toward the red and black sky, ash rain falling all around her like leaves in autumn or flower petals at a wedding-this was Hell, and it was beautiful. She fingered the matchbook in the pocket of her leather jacket. This was her doing. This was the world now: fire and murder and constant movement-collaborating with fellow survivalists in urban regions and travelling alone through sparsely populated lands. New York had burned; Chicago had burned; D.C. and New Orleans and San Francisco. Every major city was a now crematorium. She carried the weight of thousands of tons of bricks and concrete and shattered glass and the dead and dying dreams of a young idealist. She carried a sketchpad, drawing pencils, crumpled song lyrics, headphones. She did not carry an iPod. The crackles and pops of the dying embers of a city reduced to ash and rubble were her lullaby.

In Seattle, she had stolen a leather-bound copy of the Necronomicon from the public library before she had torched it. She kept it in her backpack. On cold nights, she would take it out and thumb through the pages and look at the India ink script on the thin, yellowing pages. She carried the words, but she never read them- Lovecraft's fantasy was nothing like reality. At the same time, it was everything. Corpses reanimated. She carried the incantations, but she had lost her imagination. There was no magic left in the world. There was no magic; there was just a virus and a lot of people got sick and before she knew it she was alone and there were zombies everywhere. There were fucking zombies everywhere. She carried the virus exceptionally close. She collected tattoos. It was dangerous. It was stupid. For every zombie that had come close to killing her, she checked for tattoos. First was her father's. After his brain had been successfully destroyed, she carved the Celtic cross from his arm with her scalpel and stitched it over her heart. She was no surgeon. She gagged at the sight of blood. Her first patchwork-her father's cross-grew infected. It oozed pus. If she moved wrong, the skin would tear and bleed. Her skin around it had begun to gray. The virus was slowing eating through her flesh from the outside in. After she learned about cremation, after she had burned her first town-her hometown-she thrust the blade of her machete into the flames, allowed the metal to glow white-hot, then held the burning steel to her infected wound, cauterizing it. Over the past two years, of the thousands of zombies that she had destroyed, she had collected two-hundred-sixty-five tattoos, but her father's was her favorite. She was her own Necronomicon, bound in human skin and inked in blood. She carried the natural cycle of life and death externally, but she carried oxygen in her lungs and blood in her veins and perseverance in her spirit. She left destruction behind her.

But destruction meant survival. Survival meant life. Her father had once told her to cherish life, for life is beautiful. These were only threads that Valencia could knot together anymore, the only understanding that kept her human: if life is beautiful, then destruction must be equally as beautiful. She turned her back to the blazing city and walked away. She did not look back.

2 comments:

  1. For some reason, this short makes me think of Clive Barker. P.S.- Rule #1 in a zombie apocalypse: Use your head - cut off theirs.

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  2. Wow! This is really good so far, I can't wait to read more!!!! You have a great usage of detail, I could actually imagine this in my head. Scary/awesome!

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