The World Is Going Crazy!

           It’s been 30 days since the planet Earth had become overrun with mindless zombies.

           It all started with some mad scientist-type psychopath creating an airborne toxin that was sold to the top bidder. I won’t say which one, but let’s just say that his people feared him greatly. This leader planned to detonate several explosive devices simultaneously in highly populated cities worldwide to kill off all of his competition. What he wasn’t expecting, however, was that the toxin didn’t fully kill the people; instead, it turned 99% of the population into zombies.

           The remaining 1% were mostly patients at mental institutions. It is believed that they were so doped up and zombie-like already, that the toxin did not affect them. My story is about one group in particular; the residents of The Stansfield Institute for the Mentally Challenged in the town of Shady Lake.

           The townspeople had run amok and the remaining survivors from the original wave of the infected were quickly eliminated. Even pets were going crazy and attacking everything and everyone in sight. The first to emerge from the walls of the institute was a 20-year resident named Charles Hanson III, but his friends called him “Shrek” because he was large, loud-mouthed, and vulgar. He also somewhat resembled the animated character of the same name. Shrek was a former Black-Ops Soldier who suffered from severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

           Shrek wandered out into the street and looked around. He was still unsure of what he was looking at. As far as he could tell, things were normal. Of course, this was the first time he was able to see outside of the walls of the institute in 20 years.

           The second on the scene was a delicate little fellow that they nicknamed “Jackknife”, but his real name is Jack Darlinson. Jack had been institutionalized for randomly stabbing people with a knife for no apparent reason.

           The third patient to leave the property was Cindy “Legs” Stratton. Legs had been locked up after she beat her husband within an inch of his life after assuming that he was having an affair. The judge told her that she had some anger issues to resolve. That was when she pulled away from the bailiff, rounded the back of the judge’s bench, and began kicking him fiercely.

           Last, but certainly not least, was the man they called “The Wizard”. Howard Lebowitz was a former accountant who went a little crazy when the mob boss that he was working for kept making his job more and more difficult due to his unresolved passion for money laundering. With no regard for his safety, Howard handed the books over to the police, and then he stabbed one of the mob’s top hitmen it the throat with his fountain pen.

Howard was given the name, “The Wizard” because of his magical way of making his clients look good when it came to hiding funds in plain sight when the tax man came calling. His fellow patients called him “The Wizard” because he had them believing that he could do real magic. After studying the schedule of the staff carefully, he would tell his friends which staff member would be walking through the door and when. They thought that he could see into the future.

Howard, having the most intelligence of the motley crew, decided to take charge of the situation. He saw that things were out of sorts and tried to organize his band of bumbling boneheads. Trying to explain to these drugged-up misfits that the town had been taken over by blood-thirsty zombies was not as easy as he had hoped.

Since each of them found peace and enjoyment out of causing pain toward others, Howard decided to lead by example. He found a cattle prod that was used by the orderlies to keep patients under control, and he walked up to the first zombie he saw and thrust it into the walking corpse’s eye. The semi-dead woman dropped to the ground and laid motionless.

The others soon followed suit and grabbed weapons of their own. Shrek pulled a fence post out of the ground like he was plucking a flower from the garden. Jackknife found a shard of glass that he wrapped at one end with material from his sleeve, and he used it as a blade. Legs preferred using her hands in feet so she could feel the impact of each blow, but she decided on a 6-foot length of rope as her weapon of choice.

Now armed and free from their bonds, the foursome made a pact to take back their town so they could run it their way.

One-by-one, the zombies began to drop. Jackknife laughed as his makeshift blade slashed through the rotting flesh of the walking dead. Cindy threw her rope around the necks of her victims and pulled them to the ground. From there, she would stomp on their heads until they stopped twitching.

Shrek swung his 8-foot long mast of hardwood around like a baseball bat taking out 2 to 3 zombies in one shot, while Howard gave all of those in his path an electric shock to the brain until smoke started emitting from their ears.

They acted like a bunch of school kids out having fun during recess. No fear to be found. What an unlikely group of heroes they were quickly becoming, unbeknownst to themselves, of course.

Shrek held up his post widthwise across his chest and ran full-speed into an unsuspecting crowd of the undead, bowling them over with no effort whatsoever. One of the fallen was the Sheriff. Shrek leaned over the corpse and pulled the tin star right off of his chest then proceeded to nominate himself as the new Sheriff. The others hollered out their praise and approval.

One of the walking dead started approaching the four zombie killers with his arms waving frantically above his head. Shrek raised his mighty staff to strike down the would-be assailant when Howard stopped him with a shout.

“Hang on, Shrek!” Howard yelled. “That’s not a zombie, it’s Keith Richards from The Rolling Stones! It looks like not even a zombie apocalypse can kill him.”

As he neared, Keith Richards started pointing toward his mouth. It appeared as if his tongue had been bitten out of his mouth. When Howard saw this, he said, “What good are you then if you can’t talk or sing? Kill him Shrek.” One quick swing of the post and Keith Richards split in two and bounced along the sidewalk like tumbling dice.

The town of Shady Lake, before the apocalypse, had a population of 6,132 people. These mental patients had single-handedly removed over half all before sunset. They decided to hold up in the movie theatre for the night.

Shrek broke through the door of the projection booth and Howard loaded a film into the projector while the other 3 took their seats in the theatre below. Once the movie started, Howard joined his friends. The movie for the night, ironically, was “Night of the Living Dead”, not the original 1968 version, but the 1990 version instead. By the time the film had reached its ending and the reel emptied into nothingness, the four friends had fallen into a deep sleep. The first “unmedicated” sleep they had in years.

By morning, they felt refreshed and ready to take on the world. As they exited the theatre, the sun was blinding to them. It was funny, but they couldn’t even remember seeing the sun the day before. Maybe it was a sign for clearer days to come.

Cindy had the rope wrapped around her shoulders while she finished off a bag of popcorn that she popped for her breakfast. The others started immediately into the bloodbath again.

Howard was pleased when he was confronted by his ex-wife. He was able to take out all of those years of built-up hate for her once and for all. Howard held nothing back as he prodded his ex over and over again, shouting out obscenities while doing so. Even after his zombie ex was finally finished, he continued his assault until Shrek pulled him off.

***

Another day flew by before they realized and the number of zombies was exponentially lower. Silent corpses lined the streets in every direction. It wasn’t until around noon on the following day that they finally saw the last of the zombies…including the pets. Jack tried to convince Howard to let him keep a maniacal Jack Russel Terrier as a pet, but he denied his request.

Jack, Howard, Shrek, and Cindy walked sluggishly to Ma’s Diner on Main Street. They took a seat in a booth, well, all but Shrek. He needed a chair and a separate table because of his girth. They looked at the menu and cluelessly looked around for the waitress to take their order. Howard asked if anyone knew how to cook and Cindy volunteered to give it a shot.

Twenty minutes later, Cindy returned with bacon and eggs for everybody. They gobbled down their food like it was their last meal when Shrek spoke asked if anyone else smelled smoke. They looked toward the kitchen where flames and smoke billowed out from behind the counter.

“Oops,” Cindy began, “I guess I forgot to shut off the grill. Maybe we should go?”

They gathered up the last few scraps of food into their blood-soaked hands and left the diner. They stood back across the street and watched the flames dance until the sun went down and all that was left were burnt embers and ash.

“What do we do next, Sheriff?” Jack asked Shrek. Shrek looked at Howard and then back at Jack and Cindy, smiled, and said, “This is our town now and we need to protect it. Starting tomorrow, we set up blockades around the town. This world has gone crazy, and it is going to take crazies like us to get it right again.”