The Day I Died (Final Draft)

    My small one bedroom apartment smells like dirty gym clothes that have been sitting in a locker room for weeks. The sink in the kitchen is overflowing with dirty dishes and the trash is so full that it’s contents have spilled over the edge. I’ve been meaning to clean this place but I’ve just been too lazy. I’m sitting on the couch watching my best friend, Nathan, play some type of zombie video game while I nurse my fifth glass of rum and coke. I suppose I could ask him to clean the place up since he’s unemployed and has been living here for over a year, but I doubt he’d do it.

     “I really think this shit could happen bro.” Nathan startled me for a second because we had been sitting in silence for so long. The only sound has been the gargled and mushy sounds of the flesh hungry zombies and the shotgun Nathan is using to put them to sleep.

     “What?” I asked.

     “Zombies dude. It could totally happen. It all starts out in a hospital. Some dude is going to eat a plate of year old meatloaf that was injected with rabies and will wind up at the doctor to figure out what made him sick. Next thing you know, everyone’s dead!” Nathan cried. I stared blankly at him as I swallowed what was left in my glass.

     “Did you hear me Xavier?” Asked Nathan.

     “I did.” I replied. Even though I heard him, I wasn’t really listening. Nathan is an alarmist and a conspiracy theorist. Needless to say his cheese slid off of his cracker a long time ago. He converted his parent’s basement into a survival shelter with stashes of dried food and water that could last him five years.

     “I’m off to bed.” I say to Nathan as I stand up and head towards my room. He’s too busy performing zombie genocide to even notice.   

Despite my body aching from my hangover, I get out of bed and prepare myself for another day. My head is throbbing so bad that I can feel it radiating throughout my body. My heartbeat is keeping cadence with the throbbing as if it were performing some sort of weird hangover ritual. I’m a janitor at the local hospital downtown in the most beautiful part of the city, Shadow Falls. I also work part time at a gas station in order to help pay for my school. I often wonder where my life went so wrong because I’m a thirty-eight year old man who scrubs toilets and sells cheap cigarettes for a living rather than chasing the American dream.

After taking a nice hot shower I put on the green monkey suit the hospital forces me to wear and tie my black boots before sitting down at my desk to finish up on some homework. After I am finished I walk out into the kitchen to grab a cup of warm piss that Nathan refers to as coffee. It tastes like he made it with his tears, regret, and broken dreams. Perhaps that’s why I don’t mind guzzling it down every morning because my coffee would taste exactly the same.

     The fresh crisp air and the smell of the morning dew give my body something fresh to soak in as I step out the front door. My stomach takes it as a compliment and slowly starts to settle. I sip on Nathan’s caffeinated sorrow as I stumble towards my 1985 Chevy Camaro and drive off to work. I’ve owned this car for twenty years and it unfortunately represents the monotony that is my life. I drive the same car I use to take my high school girlfriends on dates in. I’ve worked at the same two jobs for the past ten years before coming back to my place every night to get drunk and watch Nathan live his life through fictional characters. My life sucks. 

     The park across the street from the hospital catches my eye as I pull into the parking lot. This park epitomizes the beauty of this peaceful community. The beautiful flowers sprouting up everywhere, the golden colored leaves hanging from the trees, and the plush green grass makes this place feel like heaven on earth. Some of the best times of my life were spent walking over to this park and just sitting on the bench doing nothing. It was the most relaxed I’ve ever been in my life.

     My thoughts wander elsewhere as I enter the emergency room to see four doctors pinning a patient down into his bed. The man is snarling at everyone while he tries to break free from the grasp of the doctors. His skin tone is gray and his eyes are bloodshot with rage. His yellowish brown teeth protrude from his mouth as he lashes out and bites Dr. Stevens in the neck.

     I stand frozen for a few moments as other doctors and nurses rush to the aid of Dr. Stevens. I then watch in horror as the patient breaks free and sprints right towards me. The thudding in my heart is beating faster to the cadence of my throbbing headache, which is speeding up from all of this chaos. I only manage to get ten feet away from the rabid looking man before being tackled onto my face. I feel the flesh on my shoulder being torn into through my uniform and the warm trickle of blood flowing from the wound. I scream in agony until someone finally pushes this freak off me. I try to pick myself up but my body can’t move. Instead, darkness fills my vision.

     My eyes flutter open to the faint glow of the emergency exit lights. I’m still in the emergency room and it seems no one bothered to help me. I feel weak and the pulse of my heart radiating through my body has vanished. The sights around me are horrific. The dark emergency room is slathered in blood and pieces of what I can only assume are human flesh and guts. There are bodies lying all over the floor; the bodies of the doctors who tried to hold the rabid patient down as well as many others. It looks like a scene out one of Nathan’s games. I have to leave and find help, but as I step outside I realize that I have been unconscious for quite a while. The power is out in the city and the only available light is coming from the fire that is burning half of the park down. Melancholy drapes over the night sky and I notice that there are other injured people sulking along the streets and through the park. My vision isn’t so great in the dark but I am able to make out that these people look like the rabid man who bit me. I look at the burning park and see that it is littered with bodies. Ironically, the pond in the center is reflecting a beautiful orange glow from the same fire that is making this park look like hell on earth.

     My breath begins to get shallow and my body feels weaker. My legs feel like rubber as I limp over to the nearest bench in the park to sit down. Suddenly, despite the aching pain in my back, I feel relaxed. All my worries are fleeing my body like rats fleeing a sinking ship. It doesn’t matter that I am a thirty-eight-year-old janitor dying on a park bench or that I never accomplished the life that I wanted. It doesn’t matter that my apartment is a wreck or that my breath is getting shallow. It doesn’t matter that the dirty rabid people slowly creep towards me or that Nathan’s ludicrous prediction was insanely correct. The only thing that matters is how relaxed I am at last.