11, Matt Turner

11

Matt Turner

“Hey, neighbor!” yelled Bill as he furiously waved across the ten foot barbed wire fence.

Eric plastered a huge grin on his face and waved back to Bill. Bill raised his shotgun in salute, then blew the brains out of a zombie that was trying to clamber up his fence.

“Y’know, when I first built this thing, I thought I’d use it to keep out them Mexicans, but now…” Bill guffawed and shot the zombie once again for good measure. Eric smiled and turned back to his vegetable garden. He only had a white picket fence to protect his yard, but it had looked so cute when he’d first bought the house. Then Bill Randall had moved in next door, and Eric’s property value had plummeted dramatically.

A zombie started to drag itself over Eric’s fence. Eric quickly grabbed his Buddhist staff (imported straight from the mountains of Tibet) and daintily walked over to his fence, praying that Bill wouldn’t notice.

Bill noticed. “Want me to get that one for ya, neighbor?” he called down from the makeshift hunting tower he had built on the top of his roof.

Eric furiously shook his head. “No, no, no, I’ve got it!” he yelled as he poked the zombie with his staff.

“Ya sure?” Bill put down the shotgun and pulled out his highly illegal sniper rifle. “I really feel like a headshot right now!”

Eric prodded the zombie again, accomplishing nothing but enraging it even more. For a split second, he thought of how useful it might be to have a stockpile of high-powered weaponry like Bill, then he violently pushed the thought away. Guns were evil, twisted instruments of Satan himself, and Bill….well, Bill was just a narrow-minded hypocritical redneck.

BLAM! A significant chunk of brain and bodily fluid splattered across Eric’s hand-woven hemp shirt.

“Sorry neighbor! That one was sneakin’ up on ya!”

Eric couldn’t speak, he was so furious.

“I didn’t graze ya, did I?” called down Bill. He grinned. “That’s a whole lotta blood on ya, Eric m’boy.”

Somehow, Eric found the strength to sputter out, “Zombies are people too!”

Bill frowned. “What the hell you talkin’ ‘bout?”

“You didn’t have to kill it!”

Bill stared blankly at Eric, who suddenly felt that something more than a couple of fences separated them. “But I like killing things…” Bill mumbled.

“What about the natural rights granted to every human being, infected or otherwise?!” Eric screamed. “Zombies are a repressed group of people who are hunted and persecuted their entire undead lives! They are the 99%! They are!”

Bill simply reloaded his rifle. “Mister, I’m on a roll! I’ve killed at least fifty-seven of those things this month, and I sure ain’t stopping now. Oh wait, look out!”

At least half a dozen zombies suddenly lurched over Eric’s pitiful fence. BLAM! One fell with a gigantic hole in its face. BLAM! Eric fled to the safety of his house and slammed the door just as Bill opened up with his AK-47. BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM! “SUCK ON THIS, YOU STINKIN’ REDS!”

For the rest of the day and night, Eric hid in his bedroom closet, listening to the terrifying screams of the zombies and the even more terrifying rebel yells of Bill. There must be a big pack of them, he thought. And then: What do you call a large group of zombies? A pack of zombies? A horde of zombies? A clique? A team? Or do you just say ‘a large group of zombies’?

Morning finally came, and Eric wished for something to calm his nerves. Lighting his very last joint, he decided to take a pleasant walk outside. He opened his front door to find a dead body. And another. And another.

“Hey neighbor!” Bill waved to Eric as he sucked greedily on a cigarette. What a disgusting habit, Eric thought as he took a puff on his joint. “There was a big clique of zombies comin’ through here last night!”

It was then that Eric truly saw the devastation. No less than fifty bodies lay sprawled across the yard, all in various stages of dismemberment.

“A couple tried to climb down your chimney too, but don’t worry, I got ‘em!” Bill chuckled and waved his bloodstained katana. “I wanted to save some ammo, so I pole-vaulted into your yard and killed ‘em with my samurai sword! Pretty cool, huh?”

“My vegetable garden….” Eric moaned. As far as he could tell, it was buried underneath a particularly large clump of bodies.

“Yeah, sorry ‘bout that.” Bill waved something dead and furry at Eric. “I got some squirrels though. Want some?”

Eric was mortally offended. “I, sir, am a vegetarian, and therefore a better example of humanity than you.” He sniffed in contempt and turned back inside, narrowly avoiding a dead zombie that fell from the roof.

Bill watched him go inside, then shrugged to himself. “I have weird friends,” he told the squirrel. The squirrel said nothing.

Inside the house, Eric swore to himself. Those poor squirrels! Bill was a murderer, with his fascination with guns, and eating meat, and constant playing of Johnny Cash…

Right on cue, a few bars of guitar music floated into Eric’s living room. “Love is a burning thing…”

Eric hated Johnny Cash, not so much because of his music, but because Bill seemed to have some sort of weird obsession with him. I hate that man, he thought. I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.

BLAM! “That makes ninety-seven!” Bill bellowed.

Once again, Eric whimpered and retreated to the comfort of his bedroom closet, where he tried to meditate. Even though Eric didn’t strictly believe in shallow Western concepts like hell, he couldn’t help but picture Bill’s two-hundred-and-fifty pound body being consumed in a lake of eternal hellfire. He allowed his mind to dwell on that picture, and felt a wave of serenity wash through his body. At last, he had peace….

WHUMP! KA-BOOM! An explosion rocked the very foundations of every building in the neighborhood. Eric rushed to a window just in time to see Bill blow up another car with his RPG. Bill smiled and waved. “Hey neighbor!”

Eric groaned and decided to go to bed. Which he did.