Chapter 1: First Person Shooter

I got bit by a zombie.
You may be thinking that I brought it on myself, did something stupid, but I didn't. I don't take those kinds of chances. I don't take risks period. I'm just not that kind of person.
I saw a guy once, after all this started, I mean, when it got really bad, I saw this guy chasing a zombie with a samurai sword.
A samurai sword. Akira Kurosawa meets George Romero on the way to this guy's funeral. Needless to say, it ended badly, but for three whole seconds, he looked cool as hell. For three whole seconds, the human race stood up and seemed to be saying Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Cool as hell, chasing this zombie down the street, blade flashing in the sunlight. Three seconds.
Three seconds and then, well, fuck Dylan Thomas and fuck the guy with the samurai sword.
He missed the head-shot, sunk the blade into the dead guy's shoulder. Trying to free the blade, which just would not budge, he missed the three creeping up on him.
I could have yelled at that moment, warned the guy, maybe fired off a couple of shots.
I did nothing.
And I may have mentioned this before, but I don't take chances.
Yelling at this guy, maybe would have saved his miserable and yet somehow inspirational life, but it might have attracted unwanted attention to me. Killed us both. Bigger risk, though, would have been if I actually saved him, a guy willing to chase a zombie with nothing but a mail order samurai sword. I save him today, he repays me tomorrow by getting me killed. No thanks. I have things to do, people to see.
That was days ago, though. I have new problems now.

“Man, these gas prices are killing me,” Rodney joked for the fourth time in thirty gallons. Rodney was a big guy in a ball hat that never left his head and a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He looked natural pumping gas. He smiled a lot, but still intimidated me with his size. I'm tall enough, don't get me wrong, but the man easily had two-hundred pounds on me and it all looked like muscle. Scary the Cable Guy, my wife and I called him when he wasn't around. Which, believe me, wasn't often enough.
Suzie, his wife, laughed. A high, shrill cackle that bounced off every wall and seemed to echo down the street and right out of town.
“Keep it down,” I said, scanning the empty street around the deserted gas station. Plenty of abandoned cars jammed together, but no bodies. It took us an hour to move enough cars to get the truck up to the pump.
“Don't you tell me to shut up!” Suzie stood tall and gangly like a baby giraffe on ice skates. Her bleach blond hair had grown dark roots and been pulled into the tightest ponytail I'd ever seen. She wore a pink tank top that displayed the large Q tattooed across her cleavage.
“I didn't tell you to shut up, Suzie, just, please, keep it down...”
“Did he or did he not just tell me to shut the fuck up?”
Rodney shrugged his sunburned shoulders. “Don't pull me into your crazy shit.”
I sighed, rubbing my face with my hand. The pistol hung at my side as heavy as a brick. She took this as a surrender and launched into her victory speech.
“That's right,” she said, “I'm a bitch and I know it.”
“We all know it,” my wife, Elise, said emerging from the gas station office carrying a cardboard Penzoil box full of supplies, a package of Hostess cupcakes resting on top. “And now they know it, too.”
We all turned to look.
Three zombies moved toward us, slipping silently between the tangled maze of parked cars.
Elise dropped the box into the back of the truck, handed me the cupcakes and stepped into a clearing between two nearly identical SUV's, pulling her pistol from the holster at the small of her back. “You ready?” She had somehow transformed from a poetry writing, hippie chick to Sydney Bristow in the space of one intense year. Her long brown hair had been cut down to a manageable length and slim, lithe figure was now cut with delicate muscle.
“Yup,” I said, setting the cupcakes down with one hand while bringing my pistol up in the other. We both settled down on one knee, like I did when I proposed, except this time I have a gun, not a ring, though I'm calmer now then I was then. We take careful aim as the three dead men move closer. The middle one shambled on a smashed leg and moved slower than the other two.
“Left,” she says, calling her shot.
“Right.”
“Now,” Elise whispered and the simultaneous shots went off in one flat crack. Two zombies drop.
“Holy shit,” Suzie says. “Look at that one, Dave, he's got the same shirt as you.”
He does. The thing is wearing an old Alice In Chains T-shirt. “Huh, that's creepy.”
“I got him,” Suzie said, whipping her Tec-9 out of her purse and, without aiming sprayed the street. The gun was too heavy for her, but she wouldn't take a smaller one.
It takes a special kind of marksmanship to lay down that much fire and hit nothing at all.
One bullet popped a windshield, spider webbing the safety glass.
Another bullet rang off a stop sign.
The rest went into a store front church. The doors had been boarded. The painted glass collapsed releasing the congregation into the full sunlight of the afternoon.
“Oh, shit,” Rodney said, dropping the pump on the ground.
“Get in the truck,” I said.
A dozen of the less recently deceased poured out of the store front church. The smell makes my eyes water from nearly a block away.
“You get in, “Elise said, drawing aim on the closest one, a blue haired old lady dressed in what looked like an enormous doily. Crack. The woman fell.
“I'm not leaving you,” I said. I took aim on an onrushing parishioner. Squeezed off a shot and hit nothing. Did I say something about a special kind of marksmanship?
Elise dropped him with her next shot. “I'm a better shot and...”
The truck pulled away.
“C'mon,” Rodney shouted, slamming the breaks on. “Time to go.”
I scooped Elise up in my arms. Her small frame weighed nothing and my pumping adrenaline lifted her up and dumped her into the back of the truck. I turned to cover our escape, but her boot thumped twice on the bed of the pick-up as she rolled.
The truck sped away.
Rodney must have taken the thumps as the universal “all clear drive away” signal.
I ran without looking behind me.
Elise steadied her gun and aimed, seeming to be aiming right at me.
The gun cracked and I flinched, tripping on the curb, dropping the pistol. Going down hard, I tried to catch myself. The pavement dug into my outstretched palms. I stumbled back to my feet and tried to catch the truck as it slowed to maneuver the maze of parked cars.
I ran.
“Come on, Dave,” Elise screamed. “Don't look behind you, honey. Just run!”
I looked behind me.
The zombie sunk its teeth into my left shoulder.
I fell.
The world spun as the hoard of zombies struck me, tripped over my fallen body, grabbed at my clothes, my hair, my eyes.
The truck screeched to a halt, as Elise dove from the back.
Rodney was out of the truck almost as fast, scooping her up in his huge arms. I saw Suzie slipping into the driver's seat as Rodney pulled the hysterically screaming Elise into the back.
The trucks tires screeched as it rocketed out of town. Leaving me.
I felt teeth all over.