Last night I had a dream about zombies. I’m not sure why. I haven’t been watching more zombie films than usual lately, just [rec] and the Walking Dead, which and both of those were over a week earlier. This was an actual dream, it’s legitimately not made up. And is probably the longest dream I’ve ever had in that it seemed to start when I first went to bed and finish when I woke up.
I was in the middle of a zombocalypse, although the problem is you don’t know their zombies until they’re trying to bite you. It’s like a real zombie attack would be, you start with confusion over why a bunch of junkies are trying to bite you.
Once I got the picture, I ran off from the zombies, they were the slow moving kind because even in my subconscious I like to pay homage to the originals.
In that sort of weird dream way I saw a house up a hill and made my way there. Probably because it was double story house that reminded of night of the living dead.
In the house were 8 different people who never really got implanted into my memory; this meant I knew they’d die.
We green our own food and had two permanent guards stationed outside.
One bad night we lost one person. He was eaten in front of us as we defended our house.
To stop this happening again we put tight string around the perimeter of the house at waist high, in four different rings, with bells attached So that zombies would ring four different bells before they got close. And if a guard saw or heard the zombies they could also ring the bells directly to get us all up quickly.
It worked for a while, but they must smell you, because the first attack is only two or three, but then there’s 4, or 7, then 20. Before long we were having four people on patrol, then six. It didn’t matter, you couldn’t sleep anyway. You were more useful outside the house half asleep because you can react quicker.
We lost two more one night, and one of my fellow bleeders gets bit and I have to shoot her in the head. She’s a young girl, but I do what I have to. After that night we started to fight. Everyone had their own plan, but none of them are that feasible. We just continue to get more scared and tired.
One night while I’m asleep I hear them break in into the house. I don’t know what has happened to the rest of them. The only way out is to fight down the stairs past about 5 zombies.
Zombies are slow, but they’re not easy to kill. Hitting them hard enough on the head to stop them is not easy and in a hall or stairway you can’t get around them easy. Also, you get tired from hitting them, taking zest out of your next shot, and swinging a cricket bat straight down is not something you’ve learnt to do from a MCC coaching manual or a lifetime of playing cricket.
Somehow, mostly with luck, I get past them all and once I’m in the open I manage to slip away.
For weeks I roam around barely keeping alive, killing the odd zombie, eating whatever food I can find. Quite often it was raw dead birds.
One day I see what appears to be a young couple stacking up zombie corpses out the front of a house.
I go over, but when I get close the guy takes out a gun and points it at me. Soon I realise why, I’m skinny as fuck, probably look like a psycho, have some zombie’s guts on me and am holding a samurai sword in one hand and an old Duncan Fearnley in the other. Not sure what it was a Duncan Fearnley, I’ve never used one.
Eventually they trust me and I help them with the bodies that they are building up to mask their smell. It’s a good theory. And for a couple of weeks we live pretty comfortably.
Then one day a zombie just turns up, and over the following days more come. We kill them, but once 7 turn up at once, I know this place isn’t safe, I try to convince the couple, but they don’t believe me.
Now I’m walking down a train track and I think almost look enough like a zombie to get by. Until I pass a bunch zombies eating a dead dog, and they smell me.
They come over and I attack them. It’s not as easy as it first was. I have to hit them three or four times to get them to re-die. I can no longer run around, I’m barely quicker than they are, so I end up with one on top of me inches away from biting me. I mange to roll him over and then break his jaw with the handle and smash him over and over again with the bat, even long after he’s stopped moving.
I don’t even hear the helicopter suddenly I’m being whisked away to a safe haven by the government. They ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a cricket writer that leads them to sitting me next to someone I recognise. I might look like shit, but this guy looks fresh as a daisy, he even smells like he’s showered and he looks very refreshed.
“Hi, I’m Mitchell”
Jarrod.
“Nice to meet you.
How the fuck did you manage to survive?
“Don’t know really, I just did”.
You don’t have a scratch on you, did you even run into a zombie.
“No, managed to avoid them, lucky, huh?”
Fucken cunt.
And then I woke up.
