As I feverishly scan page after page of my blood stained bible, verses that I never really paid much attention to seemed to hint that this wasn’t some random event that just happened. "...and the LORD will send a plague on all the nations that fought against Jerusalem. Their people will become like walking corpses, their flesh rotting away. Their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths..." There were several other biblical passages that allude to a plague that would decimate mankind in the end times. Could we have been receiving warning of the impending rising of the undead from antiquity? We didn’t have to go far to rationalize this. I mean after all, prophets in ancient times may have seen exactly what happened, but didn’t understand the science behind it to describe it accurately. They may have seen the biological cause engineered in a lab and unleashed upon the world, but could only use simple words to describe it. There were so many end times’ prophecies that it could make ones head spin. Almost all of them didn’t point to an exact cause of the apocalypse, but the bible seemed to point to the undead several times. The bible was rife with resurrection, the dead coming to life, and stories of the end of times. Perhaps, the referenced plague God would use to wipe the earth clean was a plague of Zombies. One could argue the end of times prophecy referencing locusts and say that zombies could also be considered as a locust, devouring all life. Before this epidemic, all we could do was speculate and prepare. But how would one properly prepare for something like this?

After all, stockpiles of food and supplies would not be enough to adjust to the sight of seeing Miss Jenkins gorging herself on the innards of Father Mitchell. Or enough to even fathom the idea that I would have to kill the very people that regularly filled the pews of our small church every Sunday. Poor Miss Jenkins. Long gone was the sweet gray-haired senior who played our church organ every Sunday for the past ten years. The same woman who sacrificed her weekends to assist with meetings, prayer groups and every other event the church held. No. Instead, she was replaced by a shell of a human being with ghastly towering features that made me freeze in terror, unable to peel my eyes away from her. Her face was sunken in, eyes unfocused. Her mouth twitched and drooled as if craving for something. Anything. Me. The smell of her rotting face made my stomach churn and it was all I could do not to vomit then and there. Her nails were dark and bloody, but I couldn’t be sure if it was only Father Mitchell’s blood dripping from them. Finally I saw her gross discolored skin close enough to see that it was falling apart. It was falling away from her muscles, her bones. I saw everything that I never wanted to see. And as she sat on that floor, ripping his intestines out and chewing on them like they were Grade A prime beef, I realized that the world I knew would no longer be the same. Even as I write this I can still hear her outside the office in which I’ve been held up for three days. A sickening combination of low moans and what sounds like chewing. Ignore her. Ignore the horrors for the past few days. Ignore the fact that any food I had is gone. Ignore the hunger that seems to overwhelm me.

There is nothing left. Only me. And my thoughts. Oh, and let’s not forget, Miss Jenkins clawing at the barricaded door. Another thought keeps my mind occupied. Something that most didn’t notice until of course it was too late. The dead remember! Everything. It doesn’t matter if they’ve been in the ground ten years or crawled out of a drawer in the morgue before anyone could identify them-they all remember! All of them! Do you realize what this means? It means that if they can crawl out of a grave after ten years of being worm-food and volleyball courts for maggots and still remember where they lived and who they loved and…and all of it…then it means those memories, those intangible bits and pieces of consciousness that we were told are part and parcel of this mythical, mystical thing called a soul…it means it never went anywhere after they died. It didn’t return to humus or dissipate into the air or take possession of bright-eyed little girls like in the movies… It just hung around like a vagrant outside a bus station on a Friday night. Which means there’s nothing after we die. Which means there is no God. Which means this life is it. Karma is just the punch-line to a bad stand-up routine, and every spiritual teaching ever drilled into our brain is utter bullshit. Ha! Mark Twain was right after all, with his ending of The Mysterious Stranger. “…There is no purpose, no reason, no God, no devil, no angels or ghosts or ultimate meaning; existence is a lie; prayer is an obscene joke. There is just…nothing…” Life and love are only baubles and trinkets and ornaments and costumes we use to hide this fact from ourselves. The universe was a mistake, and we, dear friends…we were a nothing but a mere accident. That’s what it means…and that makes me so…sick. Because I…I was kind of hoping, y’know? But I guess hope is as cruel a joke as prayer, now.

I was always told growing up that suicide was a one-way ticket straight to hell. Not that I necessarily buy into all that now. So now there is nothing left for me except to walk over to the door of this office that has been my cell these last few days, say a quick and meaningless prayer to a God that was never there to hear it in the first place.

...Amen!