Trouble's Safe

I won't waste my time trying to tell you of how long ago this started, how i've never known the taste of a soda, the sweetness of chocolate, or even the comfort of playing video games.

When I was born, it was in a dirty empty shower stall in a gymnasium locker room.
My father couldn't help assist my mother because he was busy with my uncle fighting off the invading horde. They long and hard though, my father used a dumbell for most of the fight until a flailing undead's hand snapped his wrist.

My uncle fought with a chair, the only handy weapon he could find at the time. But it was moderately effective from what my mother had told me. Her screams and the undead's clamoured like morbid church bells heralding my entry into the world of the dead.

All three of us survived that day, my Uncle was bitten and disembowled when a crawling zombie chewed through his ankle. Once he was on the ground there had been no saving him, I would hear my father say that over and over again whenever he reflected that night.

I had always hated that my birth also marked the anniversary of my Uncle's death, like some sort of sick twist to assure any hope of having a happy birthday. There was never any of those images i saw on those greeting cards that i once saw in a flooded store when scavening with my father once.

My mother, she died of course. While we were out scavenging for anything we could find and use, my mother thought she had heard us enter the house, so she went to check.
She should have known better, by that point i was 12 years old, so they had been doing this sort of thing for awhile now. She let her guard down beacause of lack of incident, the thought of being in an actual secure location made her instincts lax. One had been locked in an upstairs closet, overlooked for weeks after moving in because no one had thought of ever checking a single closet. So it sat in there and waited, and waited until it finally heard us moving in. It had been in there for so long that it had rotted in half and it's legs had falled on top of it's torso. We had attributed the smell of decay to our enviroment.

The door came open that day, the thing pushed hard enought to break the wooden door frame and spueeze it's rotting body out and down the hallway to greet my mother as she came upstairs. It grabbed her ankle and tanked her, sending her down the stairs with it gurgling after her, She broke her left leg in two places, the zombie had landed only a few feet from her. She had crawled backwards into the living room, the thing following her, dragging it's entrails and rib fragments with it.

A shard of bone severed my mothers femoral artery, she bled internally. The zombie must have sensed this, because that was what it first went for. It got a hold of her blood engorged left leg and bit into it, pulling her in closer. I'd like to say that she died from her internal bleeding before she fett any pain, but it's hard to tell from what we found when we got home.

Up to that point, my fathe had done all the killing. My entire role in scavenging with him was to collect the items we needed. When I found that monster eating my mothers face and intestines, I beat it's head in with the lead pipe that I secretly kept on me at all times.
When my mother blinked at me I was filed with hope!

But when she stared at me like the way she did, an almost sexually hungry way, it sickened and frightened me. She looked as though she were orgasmic over having an orgasm, then her face turned to one of excrutiating pain, then it stayed that way. Her eyes moved to me and her mouth gaped wider, a horrid odor and noise emitted from her.
A smell and scream of death.

I wanted to crack her skull open so badly because I knew she wasn't my mother,
but I couldn't bring myself to destroy the one who made me. That was when my father made it to the scene. He had seen me kill the zombie and had waited quietly in the dark behind me. He must have known that his wife would turn, and he took upon himself to be the one to end her. He grabbed me up and shoved me behind him roughlyl and angrily.

"No, you will not kill her!" he had shouted at me, his voice cracking at the end and tears wetting his eyes.

He turned back to face the twitching and writhing woman in front of him. He knew he should quietly kill her with either a bludgeon or a blade, but he didn't have the conviction to do that.
So he lifted up his pistol, the one he had kept all those years in the range bag on the shelf in the closet, the one his very wife had protested about him keeping for all those years.

"What if we have kids one day? Don't you want to protect them and keep them safe?"

"Exactly why I have it," he had said that one day when he finally produced it from an empty coffee can.

That was the first time I had seen it before, and I had yet to see my father use it.

"Turn away son," was all he said.

I obeyed and looked away, telling myself it wasn't worth crying over a zombie.
I suddenly jumped to the loud report of the pistol being fired. The small room made the gunfire echo, amplifying it and scaring me. I couldn't hear, only that ringing.

I saw my father pick me up by my arm and push me along out of the room.
He said something to me but I didn't hear it, something like "It's done".

He grabbed our bags, the ones we kept packed and ready in case of an emergency, some plastic bags filled with canned goods, and we made our way out of the house.

I didn't question my father until we were far away from the house.
"Why are we leaving her?!" I had asked, not understanding the urgency of the situation.

"No time, those things have heard that gunfire and will be on that place in moments. No time to bury or burn her body. She not ours anymore son."

I didn't like that answer but I kept silent. My father had been doing this for years, so I figured he knew what he was talking about. But then, if he was so good at surving, why was my mother dead? I asked him that, refusing to go any futher until he answered me.

He stopped, spat, turning to look at me, his ball cap pulled low over his eyes so I couldn't see them. He walked up and slapped me hard across the face, sprawling me out onto the street.

"Now get your ass up and let's go. We don't have time to argue about things that can't be helped now or ever. Your mother would want us to live and that's what we'll do.

And so we escaped into the night, hiding and surving. My father taught me how to shoot, how to fight, scavenge, defend myself. How to tell when a group was friendly and when a group was marauders.

He kept us alive until I was 19, when he came down with the flu. We were weak, not eating well, living out in the cold and open. He succumbed to it one night while trying to sweat out the fever. He died peacefully at least, holding my hand. But when I went to release his hand from mine, he wouldn't let go. I looked at him in shock and he looked right back, blinking once before his eyes glazed over with death.

That was when I learned that no matter what, even if you die from anything other than a zombie, you become one of them. This new knowledge frigthened me. I took my fathers head off with a machete.

Now I've been on my own for 2 years since that date. Scavenging, surviving, hiding, trading, whatever it takes here in this hell hole.

This is how things just are.