By: Keon Gatheru
View all Keon Gatheru's works
My name is Bobby and I am a 12-year-old zombie. Two weeks ago, I was a normal kid who was popular. Then, a group of scientists were working on a serum to make you live longer. My uncle Tommy was one of the test subjects. At first, everything was fine. Uncle Tommy was living a normal life. Then four months after the break-through, four of the people who passed the test were pronounced dead. The docs could not find any cause of death. The only thing that could have killed them was a virus that was found. All of the other test subjects were taken to the hospital. After a series of tests, no traces of the virus were found. But Uncle Tommy was different. He was hostile and jumpy. My mom was the first to disappear, then dad. The only one that was left was me. I thought of calling the police, but I thought better of it. The police would probably laugh and tell me off.
One night, I was in my bed thinking out loud: How was I supposed to live all alone? A low and raspy voice answered, “You could join us. We could overthrow The Humans. The voice was barely audible, but I knew who it was: Uncle Tommy.
“What have you done with my parents and what do you mean ‘us’?” I snapped back.
“They’re zombies, of course. We have been taken for granted for far too long. You humans think that you could outsmart us any day, but we are a different kind of zombie. The serum enhanced our intelligence, so now we are twice as smart as you humans, maybe even smarter,” Uncle Tommy boomed.
“Well, you will never catch me, I am too fast for you.”
Then I bolted out of the house. The night was cold and eerie. About five blocks away, I felt something cold and clammy grab my shoulder and squeeze my pressure point. White, hot pain shot through my body. “There is no escaping,” a sad voice entered my ear, and then I blacked out. I woke up in a dark room, a needle in my bicep. A mind-numbing stench was coming from somewhere that I could not pinpoint. I lifted my arm to sniff my armpit, but got a blood-cutting shock. My arm was rotting. The second I took a look at it, it was gone. “What is wrong with me?” I sobbed. I was dripping with sweat by now, billions of thoughts in my mind. Uncle Tommy’s zombie minions snapped me back to reality. “Oh good, you woke up. Sorry for the pain I caused you,” the one on the left told me as he dragged me to a massive sanctum. Down the hall, sitting on a massive throne, wearing a massive crown was my Uncle Tommy.
“Well well well well well well–”
“Would you stop saying ‘well’ and cut to the chase?”
“Why are you so grumpy today?” he answered.
“Maybe because you turned me into a rotting diwit with no life!” I yelled.
“Now there is no need to insult me. I gave the chance to see the new world with humans as our pets working for us, so that we don’t need to do anything.”
“You are a psychopath, you know that,” I told him. “You killed my parents, you turned me into a monster and–”
“Don’t you talk to me about monsters!” Tommy boomed, “Humans killed us without a thought, then you go on to be worshipped as a zombie hunter. While we mourn the deaths of the zombies, you guys laugh and frolic in the fields.”
Now his eyes were bugging out and he was trembling with rage. In our eyes, humans are the monsters. This got me thinking all this time we were sort of the monsters inside of our heads. What if we created them to cover up for all the bad things humans have done to monsters and each other?
After the tour, Uncle Tommy told me three things. One: his real name was Thomas. Two: I was to be enrolled into the zombie academy and that my parents were waiting for me back at the sanctum. Then he told me to be safe and hoped that I could forgive him for all the pain he caused the past day. I told him that I was fine and that I should visit, so then he left.
As Thomas said, my parents were at the gate of the sanctum. The second my mom saw me, she started sobbing. When I got to them, my parents were hugging me so tight, I thought I would throw up my rotting guts.
“I thought that we had lost you forever,” my mom said through fits of sobbing. “Well, I am safe in your arms, aren’t I?” I whispered in her ear. “Let’s go home, I want to see where I will live from now on,” I told her, as I pulled away from her hug.
“Okay, but stay close. We don’t want to lose you in the crowds,” she replied.
She and Dad took one of my hands and walked me straight into my life from now on. That was only the first; I hope that not every day is like this, I thought.