Friday 24 May 2013

Night Of The Living Living

Edgar woke up, well, he's not really awake, but he's not in that state where his eyes are shut and the world is dark.  No, now he's in the awake state, the one where he gets up from wherever he was before - very rarely a bed these days - and begins his day.
    A regular day for Edgar involves shuffling around town, sometimes shuffling into buildings, but, if the weather's ok, he'll shuffle around the high street and into the park, maybe sometimes along the promenade.
    There are lots of other shuffling people shuffling past him, but he doesn't recognise any of them, beyond the fact that they're shuffling as well and occasionally they'll groan or murmur towards one another, almost as if they're saying hello, not that Edgar knows why he'd say hello to anyone, or knows anyone to say hello to.
    In fact, Edgar doesn't even really know he's Edgar, and the only reason anyone would ever know he's Edgar is because of the name badge he still has hanging from his work shirt.  But, quite why anyone would ever need to know his name is another question altogether, as nobody that Edgar shuffles by every day is capable of reading that name badge, let alone forming the sounds to utter the word Edgar.
    But, despite all of that, Edgar, as much as he was capable of doing so, had become distracted by someone uttering a familiar sound.  It had a certain lilting, sing-song to it, and was high pitched, in stark contrast to the bassier groans and whimpers he was used to encountering.
    "Uhhhwuuuhhh!" it brightly sang, slowly drawing Edgar around, his head twitching trying to place the location of the noise.
    As his ear became more accustomed to the repetition the sound began to take shape: "Uggwurr... Egggwurrr... Edggwwwwurrr... Edgar... Edgar... Edgar..."
    Edgar blinked his dry eyelids, lolled his bottom lip from side to side and moaned.  He began toddling towards the sound, it was coming from down a slip road leading off of the promenade onto the beach.
    With increasing eagerness, or perhaps just the slope's gradient forcing him to up his pace, Edgar reached the lower walkway and twisted his head, seeking the next repetition of the word, that strangely familiar word.
    "Edgar!"
    There!  It was coming from a tunnel leading towards a public convenience.  Edgar shuffled ahead, pressing on into the darkness, not able to be the type of person who might be cautious about this sort of thing, because Edgar had lost any real personality a long time ago.
    Suddenly, Edgar felt different, he felt smaller, and his body wasn't working in quite the way it had been a moment ago.  If Edgar had really been able to realise what was going on, Edgar would have noticed that he was being restrained.
    He swung his head from side to side, like a dog trying to bite its own elusive tail.
    If he had been able to see what was restraining him, he would have seen a person dressed in a welding mask and leathers, with thick black leather gloves, a leather apron over their leather jacket and leather trousers, tall leather boots, and duct tape wrapped around every conceivable join from sleeve to cuff, neck to head.  If anything this person looked less like a person and more like a sentient sofa.
    If he had been able to understand what this person was saying he would have heard this conversation:
    "Do it!"
    "I don't know if I can..."
    "You have to."
    "Why?"
    "Wh - Because you said you would!  Plus I'm the one wearing all of this, it's not like I can... Just do it, will you?!"
    "Oh, but, it's so... he's so... I... urgh... I don't know if I..."
    "You know it'll be ok once you do it.  You've seen me do it."
    "But, he's all... yucky..."
    "They're all 'all yucky', just do it!"
    "Ooooooo."
    "Do it or I'll let him go."
    "You wouldn't!"
    "I might!"
    "It's doubtful."
    "DO IT AND STOP CHANGING THE SUBJECT!"
    "Oh!  Hmph... Fine... Just don't look at me whilst I do it..."
    "Fine."
    "Are you looking?"
    "No..."
    Stepping in front of Edgar was a young man, late-twenties, dressed much more casually than his friend, though he was gripping a baseball bat in his hands.  However, once he was in front of Edgar he let the baseball bat fall to his side.  He took a deep breath, ran one his hands through his dirty blonde hair, licked his blush pink lips, leaned forwards, his eyes wincing, and kissed Edgar on the mouth.
    It was a long kiss, lingering, sensual almost and Edgar was dumbfounded, he blinked and looked about himself, unable to quite understand what was occuring until finally this man pulled away and Edgar said:
    "What the Hell are you doing?!"
    "See, it worked," the leather sofa with his arms around Edgar beamed, and Edgar understood every word.
    "Oh my God," Edgar exclaimed suddenly, hunching over and retching, "What's that smell?!"
    The leather sofa and the young man laughed and high-fived as Edgar dry-heaved.
    "Oops, sorry," the young man said leaning down and placing a hand on Edgar's back, "that smell, um, that's you old chum."
    "It's me?"
    "Your clothes will probably smell a bit like, well, like rotting flesh."
    "Good God, why?"
    "Because that's what's been in them for the past, well, five years at worst I'd reckon."
    "Why am I wearing a dead man's clothes?"
    "Well, because up until," the young man checked his watch, "one minute ago, you were a dead man."

So, Edgar's new acquaintances told him all about the time he had missed.  Firstly, they asked Edgar to recall the last thing he remembered, really clearly remembered, but there seemed to be a long foggy gap in his recollection.  Eventually he dredged up a memory of going to meet his girlfriend June at a cafe, but didn't remember what they talked about.
    "When was that?"
    "It was... in the Autumn sometime...?"
    The leather sofa, whose name was Brian, nodded, "Autumn five years back I would say, probably late October actually, because people thought it was a Halloween flashmob or something for a while."
    The young man, Ken, laughs, "Yeah, a lot of the people who survived to begin with were actually dressed up like zombies, y'know, because they saw the mob and wanted to be part of it!"
    "Yes, but," Brian's tone and expression, now visible since he'd raised his welding mask, were impenetrably serious, "a lot of innocent people got killed because they were just dressed up as zombies also."
    Ken sheepishly toed the ground, "I know, but you kind of have to see the funny side now."
    Brian shook his head, turned his attention back to the still bamboozled Edgar.
    "So," Edgar asked, "you're telling me there was a zombie apocalypse and the entire human race was brought to the brink of extinction?"
    With very little regard for the magnitude of such a sentence, Brian and Ken responded at once; "Yep."
    "Good God!"  He let it all sink in, and then looked up to his new friends; "How did you survive?"

It turns out that only Brian had survived, and he had rescued Ken via the same method that Ken had rescued Edgar, and the two of them were part of a small alliance endeavouring to turn the population back into regular people and not the shuffling corpses that roamed listlessly about hungering for brains.
    Edgar was, naturally, rather curious as to how they had discovered that a mouth-to-mouth transfer of bodily fluids would turn a zombie back into a generally-accepted-to-be 'normal' human.  At this point, both Ken and Brian became sheepish.
    "Look," Ken began, "we live in a modern age, we're not that sheltered to certain people's... um... perversions..."
    Edgar's face contorted.
    "Well,when things started there were people who weren't so dismayed at the outbreak of the undead, people who perhaps were drawn to them sexually, y'know, even before the 'un' part of the name was introduced."
    Edgar held the back of his hand to his mouth.
    "Well, someone saw one of these underground zombie movies and... saw y'know, it happen... the, er, the kiss of life as it's become known."
    Edgar exhaled, trying to wash the pictures from his mind.
    "I know it's not to everyone's tastes, but, look, it happened, we found out, and now you're alive again, so, it's not such a bad thing, right?"
    Edgar weighed it up in his mind, it did feel nice to be able to weigh things up in his mind again.
    "So, what's the plan?" Edgar asked.

And so, the three of them set off together, their intention to gradually reawaken members of society and restore human civilization on a planet that had become gradually ravaged by brain dead monsters.

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