While reading Being a Writer: A Community of Writers Revisited by Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff last year I gave free writing another go. This is the product of that escapade. Please keep in mind this is a first draft and no revisions or editing were or will be done as part of that exercise. Also, this story is written in first person, not my forte and thus why it is written in that point of view.
Feel free to point errors and grammar out for when I do get around to editing this story. 🙂
Warning: dry humor/sarcasm and rambling
The Dead Can Run
Chapter One Part One
The day started off like any other day, I woke up and dressed for work. I got in the poor excuse of a car and drove the ten minutes to work. I got out and walked to the double glass doors, swiped my keycard and pulled the handle. It would not budge. I swiped again—nothing.
My face started to reflect my anxiety to get inside. I never thought I would get anxiety for not being able to get to work, but there I was standing in front of those stupid doors that had become my cage for the past two months. I swiped it a third time, heard the beep that said my card was recognized as one of its slave workers and pulled at the door.
Nothing.
Dammit.
I looked around the parking lot, empty and shrouded with the night that still refused to give way to the coming morning. I looked inside past the cheap glass and circular desk where the security guy usually sat when he wasn’t avoiding work. The second door I had to pass through every day to get to my cubical connected to another cubical which lead to rows and rows of cubicles was closed. I stared at the clock hanging in the wall inside laughing at me. I was now late, it’s big hand pointed to my write-up. It was five minutes past 7am and the parking lot began to wake.
I turned again to the first rays of light and sighed. There was nothing I could do but wait until someone came from either direction of the glass doors. I really didn’t like my job anyways; being late for the first time wouldn’t kill me. I moved to one of the benches closest to the doors and sat down letting my tired limbs rest and prepare for the next 8 hours of pure sitting and ear drumming against the headset that held one of the many endless yelling voices of grumpy customers and incompetent humans who were too stubborn to learn the technology they were buying from us.
A shuffle, a banging against the second door, and wood breaking brought me back to the double glass doors. What met me there wasn’t the lazy security guy whose job I would give anything to have but a handful of blood soaked moaning coworkers. Their clothes were poorly kept, their hair a bigger mess than my own, and their teeth contained even more blood and chunks of something I didn’t wish to know. Their bloodshot eyes stared at me and their movements became more meaningful.
Zombies.
That is the word that came to my mind, to the endless whole in my brain that we call imagination or whatever. Zombies, that is what greeted me at the doors and caused my tired limbs to freeze up on the spot. The gargling of bloodied gums and what used to be white teeth clean of any tar, at least tar visible to the Seeing Eye, and hands painted in red banged against the thin barrier that stood between them and me. Those walking dead things you shoot when playing Call of Duty, those undead you love watching at the movies and crave to give you the reason to cling to that guy you like but are too much of a coward to make the move. Those grotesque flesh eating used to be humans that once bitten you join their army of horror, those are the things that made my chest seem like it would burst and my still pumping heart would fall to the ground near my unmoving feet.
A single crack in the glass broke the trance these zombies had laid over me and my feet became moving objects once more. My hands reached for my purse hanging to my side and unzipped what held my only salvation. At the same time my feet ran back to my car, the poor excuse for a car that was both newer then 60% of the cars you saw in the streets and yet refused to work properly for its year and model.
Another crack, another ear full of moaning and groaning from the zombies that used to bully me at work and fight over the tables and seats during lunch, and I was running. I clung hopelessly to my purse, still unable to leave the attachment of my citizenship, pictures of my son, and the few scraps of money I had saved. The keys slipped in my sweaty fingers and hit the pavement just as the zombies broke through the newly replaced glass.
Enchanted Tales of the Romantic Kind 