Brain Matter: A Zombie Nightmare

I had dinner at one of those Chinese buffets last night. You ever been to one of those? An all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of mostly lukewarm items from the big book of clichéd Chinese cooking? Bland fried rice. Chow mein noodles that look more like spaghetti noodles that got delivered to the wrong restaurant. Mystery meat on a stick. Health code violations longer than a Jean Auel novel. A place where you’ll see many variations of the “Fat American”, but rarely if ever see a Chinese person dining there?

Yeah. I love those places.

Except my digestion doesn’t. By the time I got home, I could feel Mount Chippy preparing to blow. Luckily, I was able to get home and into the bathroom before there was a meltdown. As a veteran of such emergencies, I always keep an ample supply of entertainment in the bathroom; a book, magazine, IPAD, you name it. I reached over and slid the window open. I was set.

About ten minutes later, I could hear an odd banging sound coming from outside the window. The sound died off, and I chalked it up to the neighborhood cats wrestling in the flower beds again. It was a common occurrence, living way out here in the boondocks as I do.

Then I heard the banging again, followed by a hollow thump. OK. Not cats. Maybe some of those stupid neighbor kids playing football…

At 8:30 at night? That didn’t seem right…

That’s when I heard my wife scream. Not her usual I-just-saw-a-spider-in-the-kitchen girlie yelp, but a full-throated wail of terror. As I was still not quite done in the bathroom, I called out her name. When she didn’t respond, I called out again, even louder.

That’s when the door to the bathroom exploded inward, and I came face to face with five of my neighbors, whose names I never bothered to learn but were all now incredibly, indisputably dead.

It’s the Zombie uprising!, a little voice in the head shouted, Run!

I stood up, my stomach in clenched knots of pain, pants still around my ankles. The zombies were blocking the door, and even if I was able to barge my way through them (I’m 6’6 and weigh over three hundred pounds. Yes, the thought crossed my mind) I could see a handful of other zombies in the hallway and stretching into the kitchen. Going that way was not prudent. The only other way out was the bathroom window, which was the size of a large pizza box.

Funny how I never noticed how small that window is. I knew I was only going to get one shot at escape. With a superhuman effort, I lunged for the open window as the zombies at the door reached for me, and…

Stuck.

I found myself lodged in the window. The zombies in the bathroom tore into my legs with abandon. I screamed until my voice gave out, and my screaming attracted more zombies to the house. As my vision swam then began to darken, my wife Amy, now a zombie, stumbled up to me, her arms outstretched…

“Hey, wake up!”

I opened my eyes. I was laying on the couch, my iPad on my chest. How droll, I thought to myself. It was a dream. “I’m up, I’m up.”

“Good, because the kids and I are hungry, and there isn’t anything in the house to eat, so I thought we’d go out. I thought we’d go to the Chinese Buffet.”

I sat up in a flash. “NO! Not the Chinese Buffet! I am NOT eating there again.”

“Why?” she asked. “I thought you liked that place?”

“I did, but that shit always goes right through me, and I don’t want to be stuck on the toilet when the Zombie apocalypse hits. Let’s go get Indian food instead.”

She shrugged. “Whatever. Indian Food works.”

I stood up and stretched. “And we should look into getting a new, and much bigger window in the bathroom.”

“You are a total weirdo.”