Happy Z -DAY A Story by Record Scratch CHAPTER ONE: One Hell Of a Morning I sat staring at the bloody corpse that had once been my brother, now laying on the floor with most of his- no you can’t even call it that anymore, IT’s head missing. I sat there leaning against the wall staring until I decided to get up and get ready to face this new world I woke up in. Maybe I should take this back a bit lets start at… lets say last night. I sat at my desk just like any regular night talking to my friends and listening to music, but tonight was different. Tomorrow was my birthday so all my friends were saying “Happy Birthday” and the such. My parents left a note saying they would be back tomorrow morning and have a good night. The next morning the sun was streaming in through my curtains as my alarm clock woke me up earlier than usual. I grumbled, “Of all the days this damn thing goes off early it’s a Saturday!” but this morning I noticed something strange, it was unnaturally quiet except for police sirens wailing in the distance. I couldn’t even hear the familiar sounds of my brother trudging around the living room to watch TV nor the sound of my dog barking outside. I scratched my head, “Hmm he must have decided to sleep in for once” I opened my door quietly and stretched as I walked into the living room. A I walked I looked out the window like I always do and to my surprise saw a man running from a woman who was carrying what seemed to be… “An arm!?” he ran down the street with her close in pursuit. “What the hell?” I muttered to myself as I flicked on the TV, all over the screen were news reports of some kind of disease and people eating other people, I thought back to the woman running outside I could only think one thing to myself and that was zombies. As I flipped to the next channel it was a live broadcast from the middle of town, it was chaos. Cars were slamming into each other sending glass flying over the pavement, people were being eaten by other people, guns were going off and people were screaming and it all mixed into a loud cacophony of mayhem. I barely heard the reporter say “All residents are advised to stay inside their house and to avoid the infected, and that the military is trying to control the outbreak.” She was about to say something more when two of those things tackled her sending a spray of blood onto the screen, that’s all I saw before the screen cut to black and a commercial, I dimmed the volume and that’s when I heard it, a scratching noise coming from down the hall from my brother’s room. I tried to find something to defend myself with in case he had been infected, but only managed to grab a kitchen knife from the drawer. As I stood at the end of the hall looking at his door it seemed to grow larger and the scratching developed into full scale banging. The door shook with his efforts and suddenly it stopped, then the door creaked open slowly, but just a bit, what happened next shook me to my core, a set of cold, gray looking fingers gripped the edge of the door and threw it open as the thing that used to be my brother ran out, his shirt stained with blood and his flesh grey and lifeless with a crazed look in his eyes, and an infected looking bite on his arm. As he rushed at me I readied the knife and tried to muster all the courage I had in me. Yeah that didn’t go down too well. He tackled me and it took all my strength to hold him back from biting me. “Get off me you freak!” I shouted as I slashed at his neck with the knife, I inflicted a cut across his throat that should have been fatal, but all it did was make him more angry, I managed to kick him off and ran into my parents room and locked the door. I could hear him getting up and knew I didn’t have much time. I ran into my father’s closet and grabbed the black case and unlatched it clumsily. I sighed in relief as I saw the revolver inside with a box of shells next to it. I hurriedly took out a couple shells from the box and picked up the gun and started to load them in, as I started my brother had begun to bang on the bedroom door. In my panic I dropped a shell and muttered “Shit!” as I quickly picked it up and dropped it in before closing the revolver and cocking the hammer back. By now the door had begun to splinter due to my brother’s uncanny strength. I ran over to the door and aimed at the door as it finally broke and my brother thrust his arm through the hole. “I’m sorry…” was all I managed to get out as I pulled the trigger sending him reeling back with the force of the slug. As he fell back a mix of grey matter and blood shot out of his head coating the carpet and the wall behind him with a bright vermillion spray. I opened the door and stood there looking at the corpse of what had once been my brother, now a bloody mess with almost half of its head missing. I slowly sat down and leaned against a wall thinking of what I had just done “God, I killed him!” I muttered to myself as I sat there staring, and from that moment I realized the world of shit I was officially in.