“I told you, stupid,” Jeramee tells me as he comes back from looking out the window. “Zombies have taken over the WORLD!”
“Bruh, shut up,” Jeramiah says from his spot on the couch by the window, “Why are you always calling her stupid?”
“For real, Jeramee.” Shaynah adds.
Freeze...I probably should tell you who I am and what we have to do with the zombies that are outside.
First of all, my name is Kylie Bennett. About a month ago, a crazy scientist tested some kind of medicine on hospital patients. It was supposed to be able to cure the Flu 2 times faster. It sounded like it could work, especially because it’s Flu season. Long story short, it didn’t work and now everyone outside of this house is a part of what we call “The March of the Apocalyptic Zombies.” Stupid, huh?
Anyway, now it’s just me, my older twin brothers; Jeramee and Jeramiah, our cousin; Shaynah, and our dog; Beanie. Our families died early on, so we’re all we have left.
“Dude, I’m telling you! There are zombies everywhere,” Jeramee said, excitedly.
“Why are you acting 7 instead of 17, Jeramee?” I ask.
“It’s like a freakin’ video game out there,” he says.
“And you’re like, getting on my nerves in here,” I say and roll my eyes.
“Hater.” He says.
Right as he looks out the window, we hear a loud crashing sound. We all jump and turn to see a zombie coming through the window on the other side of the room. Instantly, Shaynah starts screaming.
See, that’s the one thing I hate about her. We’re all running towards the door and she’s still standing there screaming like she’s crazy. By now, I’m pretty sure that you’ve found out that she wasn’t that bright.
“Girl, come on!” I grab her and we run out of the door.
Meanwhile, Jeramee has his gun and is shooting up every zombie in sight. No, scratch that, he’s shooting up every zombie, car, cat, house, tree, and stop sign in sight. He’s doing too much...Typical Jeramee.
“Jeramee, let’s go!” Jeramiah says and pulls him by the collar down the street.
Everyone has a gun except Shaynah. She says that she hates the sound. So as we’re running down the street shooting zombies up, she’s crying and covering her ears. I swear, I’ve been tempted to shoot her multiple times over this last month.
We all make it safely to what we call “The Escape Van”, which is parked a few houses down. It’s fully loaded with everything we’ll need to survive if we ever had to flee. From blankets, to food, to weapons and ammunition. We’ve been getting it ready since a week after everybody started going all zombie on us.
“Get in! Get in! Get in!” Jeramiah yells as he hops in the driver’s seat.
We all get in, lock the doors, and buckle our seat belts, ‘cause you know, safety first. Jeramiah, since he’s the oldest, responsible person, starts the engine and zooms down the street. See, I’m responsible too, but since I’m only 14, i can’t drive yet.
“We’re going to die!” Shaynah says, still crying.
See, if she wasn’t my cousin, i would have been fed her to the zombies. She acts like she’s the younger cousin. I am though! I’m 14 and she’s gonna be 16 in 3 days! I should be the one crying.
“Kylie, feed her a cookie or give her a magazine with Lil’ Wayne on it or something,” Jeramee says. “Anything to shut her up!”
“Hey ya’ll look!” Shaynah says suddenly. She points out the window. “We left Beanie and now he’s a zombie dog.”
We all turn to look, and sure enough, there was our dog Beanie. He must’ve gotten bitten while we were running. Jeramee starts laughing and whips out his phone to snap a picture.
“This is going straight on Instagram,” he says.
“Dude, who’s gonna see it? Everybody you talk to is dead,” I say.
“They’re not dead, they’re just zombies,” he states.
“Yeah, and zombies can get on Instagram, right?” Shaynah says, sarcastically.
“Ya’ll tryna make me sound dumb,” he said.
“It ain’t that hard,” I say to myself.
“Drive, Jeramiah! Drive,” Shaynah says right as about a hundred zombies come charging at the van.
Now, there’s something weird that I’ve noticed about these zombies: They’re all retarded looking. It’s like if you made everybody in an insane asylum a zombie. All they do is scream like they’re on fire and run like someone shot their legs up.
We make it to the interstate in about 5 minutes flat. We drive until we reach the main highway leading to Georgia when we realize that there’s a problem. There are millions of abandoned cars everywhere. Now where have I seen this before? Oh yeah, in those cheap zombie movies. How cliché...
“Kylie, did you hear me?” Jeramiah says, “We have to find another way.”
“Agreed,” I said.
“Hey, do you know what that means,” Jeramee asks.
“What,” I say, unconcerned.
“We have to walk,” he says, sarcastically.
“Nope. I really thought that it meant that we should just stay here,” I say back, just as sarcastically.
“Look. There’s no time for arguing,” Shaynah says, “We need to get a move on.”
“True dat,” Jeramee says.
“See, that’s why you’re lame,” I say.
“See, that’s why you’re ugly,” he snaps back at me.
“Really?” I say.
“Ya’ll stop playing around,” Jeramiah says. “We need to get as far as we can before night rolls back around.”
Yeah, that’s true. So we each grab a backpack and fill it up with as much stuff as it can hold and begin our walk. It’s dark by the time we make it outside of Georgia.
I know what you’re thinking, but we didn’t walk for 8 hours straight. We rested every other hour. Yeah it meant that we had to fight of endless amounts of zombies, but it’s nothing that we couldn’t handle. Especially with Jeramee shooting everything up like it was a war game on the Xbox 360.
Every time he saw one coming our way, he would go into full attack mode. He was more excited than scared. It’s like this zombie apocalypse was made especially for him. All it needed was a sticker that said “Property of Jeramee Josiah Bennett” and he’s probably be the happiest guy on the planet.
Shaynah, on the other hand, got over her fear of guns real quick when she realized that the only way to survive was to kill the zombies. She hung around with Jeramee and pretty soon, they were making a game out of the amount of zombies they killed.
I just kinda chilled with Jeramiah. I was always close to him, but these last couple of months have brought us even closer. I can proudly admit that he’s my favorite brother. Now Jeramee, that’s a different story. I stop at merely tolerating him.
“How long before we get to Atlanta?” Shaynah asks.
I take out my road map and look at it. We are exactly 30 miles outside of Atlanta. It’s getting kind of dark so we might as well stop.
“We have 30 miles left,” I say. “We need to find a safe play to lay low until the morning.”
We walk nother two miles when it happens. Out of nowhere a huge crowd of zombies come charging at us like we stole their money or something. So, of course we take off in the opposite direction.
“Run! Run!” I yell as loud as I can.
We make it as far as the end of the street when they get to Jeramiah, who was the slowest of us all. He doesn’t try to run away either. He just stops.
“Jeramiah what are you doing?!” I yell. “Come on!”
“No, you guys go ahead while I hold them off,” he says. He’s a good yard away from me but I can still see the single tear run down his face. “Go! You’ll get a good mile and a half head start if you just leave now. Go!”
They’re ganging up on him and soon all I see is him shooting himself before a whole bunch of those crazy zombies have at his body.
“No! Jeramiah!” I scream. I try to run to him but Jeramee and Shaynah have gotten a hold of me and are pulling me away. “Let me go! Let me go!” I scream as tears streak down my face.
“No, we have to keep moving,” Jeramee says as he and Shaynah pull me behind them as they run like they’re in a burning building.
“But Jeramiah is dead,” I cry over and over as I try to keep up with their hurried pace.
“We know,” Shaynah says, “We have to get to Atlanta by morning though or else we’ll all be just like him.”
I don’t say anything else as they pull me through streets and alleys until they come to an abandoned house. Jeramee checks to see if it’s clear while Shaynah stays and guards me.
I shake uncontrollably. I don’t know how I’m going to live without Jeramiah. He was the only one in my family that actually understood me. Now he’s gone and I’m left here with a brother that thinks everything is one big video game, a cousin that’s probably just as scared as I am, and a world full of zombies that act like they’ve just ran away from an insane asylum. Wouldn’t you say that life was just peachy...?
“Alright, everything’s clear,” I hear Jeramee say.
I get up and follow Shaynah into the house. There’s 3 rooms with a bed in each one but we all decide to bunk in the room closest to the front door in case of an emergency.
“We have to sleep in shifts,” Jeramee says. “I’ll stay up while you two get some sleep and then after 2 hours, I‘ll wake you up Shaynah. Cool?”
“Yeah,” she says.
“What about me?” I ask.
“You just rest. We got this.”
And that I do. I lay on one side of the bed and Shaynah lies on the other side. About 10 minutes later, I’m face asleep and the next thing I see is the sun shining through the window.
“Wake up,” Jeramee say. “We’re only 5 miles away from Atlanta and we can make it there in 2 hours flat if we start now.”
So we get up, eat something, and then head out for another day of walking. Hopefully our last.
At about 12:00 p.m., we come to a stop in front of a dome. On a sign right that hangs beside the door is says to knock three times and wait. So Shaynah knocks and we wait. We wait for 10 minutes to be exact before the doors creak open and a short, black haired man walks out.
“Welcome to Atlanta,” he says with a slight smile and ushers us inside hurriedly before the doors close with a bang and lock with a clank.
After a couple of evaluations and hundreds of tests, we’re assigned living quarters, school times, and everything else. It’s cool. Everything is all high tech and it feels a little like home. If only I had my mom and other brother to enjoy this with.
They saw we shouldn’t dwell on the past but the nightmares have become inevitable since I got here. There’s always my mom and Jeramiah in every single one. I feel like Katniss and Peeta from The Hunger Games. Hmm...That was my brother’s favorite book.
I always wondered what it would feel like to die. That’s crazy huh? I’m only fourteen and I haven’t really lived my life yet. I have a lot going for me. Especially because I’m smart. Hmm...If only I had thought about that before I pulled the trigger on the second week I was in Atlanta. I never said I was the one that could live through grief...