June 26

Alright, don't know where to begin with this.

Zombies...they're real. Or, at the very least, a very factual replication of a Zombie does, apparently, exist.

While there's still electricity and while I can still hop onto the Pita Pit's free wireless, I'm going to attempt to keep a documentation of our post Zombie days. I was going to write 'last days' but I'm feeling optimistic, probably due to the flask of whiskey that Bryndis keeps in her purse, a flask that, I'm sure, won't keep me optimistic for long, it's, by far, not large enough.

It begins...

We were at work, Stitches - Clothing for Men, when a lady came bursting through the door.

"Zombies!" she yells.

Can you fucking believe it? We all started laughing. Who would have believed her? Just a few days before we had a guy come running in claiming Jesus was just outside. Anything was possible in our neighborhood, it would seem.

So we're all laughing and then a car outside blows up. The windows rattle and our attention is pulled to the parking lot. People are running fucking everywhere, left, right and everywhere. Behind them are more people but these people aren't like the people you're used to seeing. Their skin is flayed and falling off in peels, eyes pushed out of their sockets and bouncing on their cheeks, and it's like they're learning how to walk. Stumbling over each other they still manage to grab people and pull them to their mouths.

We're all astounded, standing behind the plate glass windows, our mouths a-fucking-gape.

And Bryndis, pulling herself together, looks at this lady that's come bursting into our 'clothes folding haven' and sees that her arm is bleeding. Calm as hell, she asks. "What happened to your arm?"

The lady looks at her confused, for a half second, and manages to figure out what's going to happen next, before the rest of us do, and utters one word. "No." It comes out as more a question than a statement or demand.

Bryndis, with one hand opening the door and the other pushing on the lady's chest, shoves her back outside and then locks the door and closes the security gates and then turns to the rest of us. "Zombie Apocalypse, people, buckle up!" As if she's been waiting for this day the whole of her life.

Still, after the explosion, the bouncing eye, the dead people running around outside, the rest of us are standing still, taking it all in. As if the passage of time will sort out all the relevant information that we need to comprehend.

"Fucking Zombies, people?!" Bryndis says, looking at each of us, through her rectangular, librarian, glasses.

"But..." I start, about to say something lame like, Zombies aren't real. She walks up to me, matter of fact, and slaps the shit out of my left cheek, sending my brain rattling through my skull.

"Shit, Bryndis." I mutter, trying to keep my cool, in front of everyone else.

I can hear our boss, Paulo, snickering from somewhere.

"Man up, people are getting eaten out there. We need to secure this place, now!"

Everyone begins to run around checking doors and what not.

Macy, the new girl, sitting at the tuxedo desk, pipes up. "Where's Trix?"

Trix is outside, we all realize, at the same time, on a smoke break.

And as though she were being called, telepathically, Trix comes running down the plate glass windows, towards the door, cigarette stuck between her lips.

She gets to the door and smashes into it, thinking it was still unlocked. Her small body bounces off of it. She falls backwards onto her ass but is back up immediately. That cigarette still in place. She runs up to the door, this time stopping short of throwing her body into the glass, and begins to bang at it with her fists.

"It's too late." I find myself saying. "We can't take the chance."

So we all stand there, for a few minutes. With our eyes we each say goodbye to her. Trix was fun, we all liked her. She'll be missed. In retrospect, we stood there long enough, honestly, that we could have opened the door tens of times. I feel a little bit bad about that but we were all scared and nobody, really, knew what to do. Besides the way she was looking at everyone, that guilty glare, was a little uncalled for. It made everyone, totally, uncomfortable. It wasn't like we didn't feel bad enough about things, as it were, but now she had to go and throw her own stuff on top of it all? Bryndis and I began to close the gates on all the other windows, because we couldn't expect the glass to hold forever, and even then the gates would probably fail, at some point. But Trix just walks on the other side of the windows, mirroring us as we slam the gates closed, window by window, pleading with us to open up...or, at least, pass her keys through the mail slot, so she can get into her car. I think...that's reasonable, so I walk to her purse and begin fumbling around for them.

From behind me I can hear everyone gasp. Some Zombie dude has a hold of Trix's hair and is pulling her back. But, she has a good hold on the door handle and is refusing to let go. You can see the muscles in her forearms bulging and, quit honestly, I'm impressed. She's stronger than her little, lithe, frame would suggest. Quickly I run to the door, her keys in my hand, and I drop them through the mail slot, to where her feet would be, were they not in the hands of two other Zombies that have joined the struggle. Now, she looks like Supergirl, flying at the door, her feet up in the air and a whole herd of them, now, pulling her up, up, and away. She looks, quickly at the keys on the cement and then at me, then she's gone, pulled into the throng of Dead that are moaning away and pulling at her.

Then she's gone.

We all take a sigh of relief. It was way too uncomfortable a situation. You'd think that, in an Apocalypse, that you be warmed up to a scenario, like that, instead of just thrown head over fucking heals, like that.

Selma, our tailor, walks out from the back. "I closed the back door but I think someone there, in bathroom. Loud noises." By the way, I'm not being racist here, when she's stressed, her English goes downhill, and fast.

So the rest of us walk toward the back and now, we're trying to figure out what to do. It's been a few hours so, whoever's in there, isn't smart enough to open the door. It could only be a Zombie. WTF.