zompires

He’s sitting across the table from me. There’s a woman next to him. Her face is nondescript. He’s ogling me, as you would a sixteen ounce T-bone. It seems fitting. I’m paid handsomely as what amounts to a mobile blood bank. He pays cash to drain a pint or so every month. He has quite a few like me to keep him satisfied. I don’t know why I know that. There are more like him in the background.

I got the thirst, or something like that, from a cheesy plastic toy shaped like a cyclone with a green base. There’s a small plunger next to the static vortex with the cartoon eyes and giant smile. I don’t know how I know that either.

The bar has a few levels, one more like a set of apartments, one similar to a restaurant, and another, the first floor, appearing as any other bar outside a city center would. We’re in the restaurant area. He reaches across the table with his left arm. I grab it quickly and take a mouth-sized chunk out of the inside of his forearm. It’s squishy and slimy. his face twists to one of horror. the woman next to him is somehow gone now.

...everything fades to darkness.

When the images come back, I’m on the other side of the same table, or one just like it, and there’s a woman in the booth behind me leaning over my shoulder. She rubs her cheeks along mine and her hair falls over me. I hear her breathing heavily. I turn toward her, and in a raspy voice that’s not my own, say “bite me and I kill you,” fully expecting to make good on the threat. The group of zombies, or vampires, or zompires have taken me in.

There are dozens of these zompires around me, stuffing flesh into their respective maws, biting their victims, some willingly giving themselves up to it, violently, tearing muscle off the bones of those that struggle. I converse with them easily, but I’m helping those that fight them. how do I know that?

...the images fade again.

I’m in the hallway upstairs. There are gunshots coming from downstairs, or behind me, or in the room to my right, or everywhere at once. Bodies of the first set of zompires and those that fight them are scattered about the floor and some lay in morbid positions on the stairs. All hell’s broken loose. David Boreanaz is down the hall with what appears to be some form of machine gun, firing erratically.

I step back, and to my right, into what was a bedroom, now a large bathroom. I grab onto a large sheet of plastic, foggy and thick, and spin toward the corner, using the plastic to shield me from the fighting around me.

Ryan Pinkston, from Punk’d, is using some sort of fan and odd ninja-looking moves to subdue the zompires. A kid, who looks only in his late teens, in a Wisconsin Badger sweatshirt is fighting with silver stakes. He seems to be directly out of a Blade film. Blood sprays and spatters across the plastic shield, the walls, and onto my shoes.

Those fighting the zompires capture one. They have him lying, restrained, on newspapers in one of the rooms. They’ve injected some sort of serum. His arm is pulsing, green, hissing, and oozing to the point it appears to be falling off. he’s screaming in agony. I step back and grab the handle of the door.

...every thing’s black.

I walk into a bathroom, checking my appearance. the cyclone toy is on the shelf under the mirror. The view pulls back, and I see myself, my reflection, and a large portion of the bathroom. The walls are layered in grime, brown with mold, and covered in many layers of dust. Pan down to the bathtub and shower, covered in filth. A body crouches inside the tub, wrapped in a brown-stained shower curtain. It’s still. Blood lines the edge of the tub and smears the curtain.

...pan out...

With a hitch in my breath, I wake up in darkness. Sweat has soaked the pillow casing and it turns cold as I twist my head and roll to the other side of the bed. four in the morning. My breathing is short and my heart’s racing. I lean over, flip on the light, and write down pieces of an already fading set of random synapse-bursts, interpreted as imagery, cross-referenced to memory.