blew it on a down payment and come time to pay for school I didn't have the money. I was doing okay too, ya know? Not straight A's, but close enough to get a partial scholarship, but when the money was not enough, they said I couldn't go anymore. My fault, I had to have this stupid car. My mom was so pissed, she beat me, I mean not a yellin' at or 'you are dumb ass', or even, 'take that goddamn car back right now and get into school', a physical beating, with a goddamn cast iron skillet. You ever been hit by a goddamn cast iron skillet? It hurts, probably she would have killed me, maybe by accident, but my old man was around and after about half a dozen whacks he got the pan away from my mom. Then, to make it clear where he stood on the matter he whacked me once too and told me I was a dumbass and said 'Dumbass is what dumbass does.' What the fuck does that even mean? Anyway I had to spend a few nights out at a friends before my mom let me come back home. That was three months ago, since then I just worked the package factory and tried to keep up with the car payments and insurance. You know what full coverage on a new car costs in North Denver? The insurance was more each month than the car payment, it pretty much ate up eighty percent of my cash every month, the rest went to gas and going out, no progress in getting back to school this fall. I filled out loan applications, my mom scraped, my dad saved. I was going back in a month. I had worked a little after high school, missed a year otherwise I would have graduated from Red Rocks this past spring. Now I am thinking an associate degree in computer science ain't going to be worth much anyway. So I have been working and working, but I missed a few nights here and there, one of them was last Friday, it was an 'extra night' of work, we have been having a lot of those, good money but when you have to work Saturday through Wednesday, you have to have Friday off, I mean working both of the best nights of the weekend? So I called in sick, went out had a good time and when I showed up on Saturday I was talking with my co-workers on my shift about the good time I had been having, while they were all working. My supervisor heard me in the break room. Sunday I showed up for work and was handed a last paycheck and let go. Fucking bastard, people like him never went out when they were young, never had a good time. I mean I am a good worker, but I need a night off. Didn't matter. I couldn't go home, my mom would know right away, so I called up my friends and did another dumbass thing, we started drinking at a friend's house, older guys had gotten a keg and were having a little party.
'I drank hard, around midnight I remembered that I needed to get home. Only I was in no condition to drive, you know? I did anyway. Got pulled over three blocks from the party, about two miles from my house. The guy looked at me, knew I was drunk off my ass and said, 'It's your lucky night, we got a lot of fights tonight, so here is what we are going to do. I never saw you, you never drove. You get out of this car right now, put your car keys in your glove box. Lock the door, shut it and walk home. Come and get your car tomorrow. Unless you want to do this some other way?' Dumbass I may be, but not fucking stupid, I tossed the keys in, then, you know it took me awhile to figure out how to lock the goddamn doors, I had never done it manually before. The cop, he was a good guy, but he laughed at that, kinda made me mad, but I hid it, I didn't need no 'Tom Jones Whitebread American Cop' putting a beat down on my ass. Long story short I got home about one, my mom came unglued, but the walk had cleared my head a bit and the extra time let me make up a good cover story, same thing basically, but only I got off a little early hit my friends party, got a little drunk and got a lucky break. My mom was not happy, I almost thought she was going to go for the fry pan again and dad was already sleeping. Instead she just said to go to bed and stop making stupid decisions. That was the last time I saw her.
'Monday I had nothing going on, so I thought, I will stop making bad decisions, I will get up and find a job, make my family proud, make myself proud. I ended up sleeping all day, got up about two pm, watched a little television, all news crap, I switched over to a music channel and just chilled. I fired up my dad's old pc and checked my email, updated my internet blog, read a few of my friend's blogs and then hit some Grand Theft Auto New York City, a good game, well about seven that night I realized no one had come home, no mom, no dad, no little brother. My brother worked at the 'Water City' amusement park, usually the full day, ten in the morning until six at night, he had my parents old car and I was hoping he would give me a ride over to my car when he got in. They never came home. At eight I called my mom's work. Nothing. I had to look up the number for where my dad worked, I had never bothered him before. He worked at a foundry, and they were pretty good about letting him out on time every day too. No answer. I called 'Water City', could not get through. By nine I was scared. One thing that had to go when I picked up the car was my cell phone. I just couldn't afford an extra sixty dollars a month, not when I made such a mess of buying a car. So I called around to my friends, no one answered. You ever see that movie 'Twenty Four Days Later' I think it is called. Where the guy wakes up in a deserted city? That is how I was beginning to feel. I went outside. Everything looked normal, right? Only, no traffic. Now I live down a side street, we don't get a lot of cars or nothing, but there is a cross street a block and a half up that is pretty busy, a car every three or four seconds. I looked up there. No cars. I stood there and counted to one hundred and twenty. Not one car. Even at three in the morning on a Sunday a car will go by every ten seconds. At nine o'clock on a Monday night there should have been plenty of traffic. Something was wrong. I went back in and grabbed one of my dad's beers out of the fridge, then came back and sat on the porch. I popped it, leaving the door open, in case the phone rang. I sat there until almost ten thirty, when I finally saw someone coming down the street. You know it now, I mean you can see where this is heading. From what I saw on tv later, most everything started going to hell Monday, and I SLEPT through it. So much for not being a dumbass, huh?
'Anyway this fat, white chick comes walking down the block, she has a t-shirt on, some sort of concert shirt, like 'Bare Naked Ladies' or something like that and these green stretchy shorts, no shoes, one of her fucking knees looks like it is missing, I mean totally not there, she was limping along, this fat chick and I was like, 'Oh Shit!', thinking she musta come out of a car accident or something, I ran in to call 911. Well this fat bitch slowly trudged in after me, you know how it is, I tried to tell her to sit down, she was hurt, lay down on the couch or floor, I mean she is the only person I had seen in hours and she is hurt. She came right for me opened her mouth, it was all red and bloody inside and she was attacking me. I tried to be 'nice' thinking, hey she is fucked up and hurt she does not know what she is doing. But she kept coming, and coming and coming. I hit her in her flabby belly, that blow ripped half her shirt off, disgusting man, totally gross. I am an ass man myself and her jumbo sized flabby titties did more to freak me out than her trying to bite me. I ended up shoving her away onto her ass and I ran into the kitchen. I yelled at her to stay the fuck out of my kitchen or I was going to brain her. She came in anyway, I grabbed the cast iron skillet off the stove and slammed her up against the head, not as hard as I could, I mean I still didn't want to kill her. She barely hesitated before grabbing me, I slid backward and let her have it again, but she just kept on coming. I…I…I started whacking her full on, finally something just snapped and she stopped moving. Funny, huh, I mean here I had this half naked, dead white chick in my kitchen and I am thinking, 'I just made another dumbass move. Oh Lord I am going to prison for this for sure.', when actually for the first time in two years I had done the right thing. I got scared then, went out and looked to see if anyone had seen what had happened.' Kevin laughed, 'I hadn't seen anyone since the night before in a goddamn city and I am worried that someone happed to be walking by on the side walk and notice me killing a woman in my kitchen. The coast was clear, I shut my front door and dragged the white girls body into the back yard. We have one of those crappy storage sheds in our back yard, I opened it up and took her body in there, it barely fit, man that shed is crammed full of all the shit we never needed, but could not get rid of. I could barely get the door closed. Again I looked around the backyard and made my way back into the house. There was blood all over the kitchen, not the red, 'Oh shit I just cut myself' kinda blood, but nasty black stuff, like half dried. I spent until midnight cleaning that shit up with the bleach out of the laundry room. I went back into the living room and turned on the news, fully expecting to see a swat squad being broadcast live outside this black guy's house, my house, you know what I mean? And I was not let down about the live coverage, this was only a few hours before the stations when off the air, they were showing people attacking other people here in the U.S.A., the reporter called them zombies and said one bite was fatal, you had to hit them in the head, destroy their brains and they stopped moving. They named a few places to go, to gather for help. I think they said Coors Stadium. Then I saw the light, I was not going to spend my life in prison the chick I killed was one of them! I went back in and got another beer while I thought about what it meant that my brother and parents had not come home.
'I cried as I watched the news. I mean I knew, then I just knew my family was gone and the last contact I had with my dad was when I headed off to work and he told me not to hot-rod, watch out for the cops, my brother I hadn't seen since Saturday and, of course the last contact I had with my mom was seeing the look in her eyes when I told her the lie about being pulled over by the cops. Not a good ending man, not a good ending at all.
'I must have fallen asleep in front of the television, the next thing I knew I was waking up to static about five in the morning. I turned off the tube and stumbled upstairs into my own bed. I didn't wake up again until I heard them in the house, not zombies, looters running from zombies. Sounded like white guys, white guys with
