Jimmy The Zombie
[Prompt Lost]
Little known fact you’d only know if you survived a volcanic eruption or a house fire – ash gets everywhere.
Ash finds its way into every nook and cranny of your being. If you walk out of a burning building, you will find ash in your pockets, your wallet, even in your ass crack. There’s no place ash won’t find its way to. It’s like sand at the beach, times 100.
If a house fire is bad, you can imagine what its like walking around an entire planet that has just gotten done bursting into flames. Ash is the new common denominator of all life on Earth. How the few living things left deal with ash determines whether or not they will remain a “living thing” for long.
Our solution is pretty straight forward: hop from survival bunker to survival bunker, using up their food, water, and air filters completely and then moving on.
There are three of us and we have never seen another living human being. Sometimes we see rodents, and thankfully for our stomachs on the road, lots of bugs. But the most we see of larger creatures is the ash itself. In that sense, the entire world’s biosphere is constantly getting in our way. Thanks a lot all you dead things!
However, the hindrance that the dead provide us in the form of their burnt up corpses is actually preferable to the only other dead guy we’ve met – Jimmy. We call him Jimmy, but of course, we don’t know his name. Dude must have been 400 pounds of pure muscle, larger than a fucking ox. Not sure why things turned out the way they did for him, but it sure makes things difficult for us.
Jimmy, if it isn’t clear – why the fuck would it be clear – Jimmy is a zombie.
We haven’t seen any other zombies, although presumably there must be others. At least, that’s what the movies would have us believe. But Jimmy, well, he’s definitely for real. He follows us from bunker to bunker, like a lost dog.
And that whole thing in the movies about the zombie’s weakness being the brain? Yeah, that’s bullshit. Whatever is powering Jimmy, it is not his brain, because we smashed that shit to mush months ago. All it got us is an even more terrifying monster to run away from.
Here’s how it goes for us. We nearly run out of food and water, pack up the rest, put on whatever air protection we can find, and then get ready to roam the burbs looking for the next prepper who never made it home from work on day zero.
And Jimmy is always waiting for us on the surface. We can’t shake him. He’s slow now, real slow since we shot out his legs and arms, but that fucker is tenacious. I guess there must not be many other scents in the post-apocalypse, because he seems to find our trail no matter how far we go.
So, when we’re ready to leave a place, we can safely assume that poor, half butchered Jimmy is gonna be laying, prostrate, on top of the trap door. We heave ho the door, fling him off and run away. Don’t need to go too fast, as Jimmy ain’t catching up any time soon. But, rest assured, next bunker we find, we’ll hang out in there for a few months and, when we come out, there Jimmy will be.
In some ways, it’s almost reassuring. I never thought I’d say this – fucking, of course not – but that gruesome meat bag of a zombie is kind of the closest thing we have to a new normal.
At some point, I’d imagine, Jimmy won’t be able to move anymore. He’ll just get stuck someplace, all mangled and alone, waiting to turn into nothing, just like the rest of us. Can’t say I feel sorry for him exactly, seeing as he’s dead already and whatnot. But I’ll sort of miss him when he’s gone.
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