Day 00.1
"Yeah, I get that." The man glances out the window, he seems very edgy, "My name's Jake by the way."
The five of you are held up on the top floor apartment of a two-story duplex in the heart of Minneapolis, MN. Jake stands next to a open window nervously smoking a cigarette.
"What are we going to do about Waldo? He's delirious, he's lost a lot of blood..." Jake motions to the dying man laying half way between the kitchen and the dining room.
"You are in deep trouble.. I hope it is your imagination.." Waldo lays mumbling to himself, his lips are coated with his own blood. The sounds of the walking dead can be heard outside. They are crowded in droves around your building. The doors leading into the building and into the apartment have all been boarded up, it seems safe, for now.
"And what about you dude? Your arm looks fucked up.. what if you turn into one... one of them?" Jake finishes his cigarette and tosses it out the window and onto the crowd of walking dead below.
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Ed gestures to Waldo's twitching body, "Well if I turn into a flesh-eating freak then so does he. And then, well, we're all fucked aren't we?!"
Ed appears to calm down after a few seconds while staring at the sea of putrid corpses dancing below. There was something, oddly mesmerizing about the low-pitched droning and the slow, steady shuffling off bare feet on stone. Almost, peaceful...
"Name's Ed by the way. Put that on my tombstone."
I walk out of the room, and rest my head against the wall of the hallway. After I collect myself for a few minutes, I head into the bathroom and grab a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a towel.
Going back to the room with the others, I toss the bottle and rag to Ed. "Good to meet you, Ed, Jake. I'm Kurt. Try swabbing that wound out, maybe it'll stave off whatever the fuck is messing up Waldo there."
I look over to Jake. "You got any more of those, buddy?"
"Your tombstone, eh? You'd be so lucky."
A short, pudgy fellow with a greasy comb-over wipes sweat off his brow with a tattered handkerchief. His wrinkled button-down shirt is covered in blood from having helped carry Waldo up a flight of stairs. The sweat and blood is mixed into a pungent reek which, under normal circumstances, would start steel-stomached men retching. However, the "circumstances" that moan and shuffle just outside and below the window are anything but normal.
The fat man notices Ed eyeing him less than amiably. He shrugs at Ed, and chuckles lightly.
"No disrespect. I'd love a tombstone right now myself."
The man turns towards Jake.
"Where was I? I coulda been at home. I'd've died how I shoulda with my wife'n kids. I coulda been at the game with Tom'an 'em. Then at least I'da had a few cold beers before alla this. Hell, I shoulda probably been by the Home to see ma. I wonder if she's walkin' now..."
A disgusted look comes across the man's face as he turns to stare blankly out the window. He swallows against a dry mouth and licks dry swollen lips. He sighs heavily.
"But I wasn't. I was at godawful work for that fuck-all Tompkins. Fat lot'a good comin' in Saturday did me now. Cept I'm alive."
He coughs deeply, the sweat returning to his furrowed brow.
"Not sure I wanna be though. Not sure I wanna be. I'm Ralph bytheway. Nicetameetcha."
Ed catches the bottle and rag, raises his dark eyes to meet Kurt's gaze, and says somewhat reluctantly,
"Thanks."
While Ed massaged a peroxide-filled rag over the gash in his dark ebony skin, his mind played a movie in his head about the last few hours of his life; one without a happy ending no doubt.
After regaining consciousness in some sort of operating room in an obscure, four-story building, Ed looked down at his body and saw hundreds of cords and plugs sifting in and out of his body, making him look like a Christmas tree from Hell.
Figuring out how to maneuver the last cord from his body without passing out brought him to what he figured to be about an hour of wasted time.
"I've gotta get the fuck outta here," he thought.
His legs still worked fine, so time had not atrophied them.
"Musta only been out a day or so."
What Ed remembered next was a loud crashing sound of glass on tile, screaming, and his feet pattering on the cold floor as he ran like hell from that empty building. He didn't look back; he didn't want to see what was back there.
When his legs began to feel like cinder blocks, he spotted a small, pudgy man carrying a bloody body into a building nearby. Figuring these weird mother fuckers chasing him weren't the good samaritan types, he dashed madly for the entrance, expending the rest of his energy.
The man carrying the body was already up the stairs inside the building once Ed arrived, and he clambered up the stairs after him. As he passed, he noticed two men behind him boarding up the entrance to the building.
"Just in time," he thought. "Maybe there is a god."
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