Everyone has something that they missed the most since this whole ‘zombie apocalypse’ hullabaloo started.

I suppose that your typical person would say that they miss such things as getting a full night’s sleep or air conditioning or their various family members that met their demise at the hands of the living dead.  Sure, those things were nice.  I can’t say that there haven’t been times that I would have killed for a little froyo.  Like, straight up murdered a bitch, torn someone limb from limb to get a taste of that sweet cold treat.  And you have no idea what I would do for a Klondike bar.

Here’s a hint: it’s pretty murder-y.

Still, as much as frozen dairy products are somewhere on my list of things that I miss, it’s not at the top.  Nah.  What I miss most is a good conversation.

Have you ever tried to converse with a zombie?  There’s not much positive to say about it.  They mostly just grunt and groan, with the occasional whistling of escaping gas as their bodies decay.  In essence, it’s pretty much the same experience as talking to your typical horny teenager.

What I’m getting at is that there isn’t much satisfaction in verbally sparring with the undead.  Well, most of the undead.  I happen to be a card-carrying member of that special fraternity, and I’m quite able to keep up my end of a conversation, thank you very much.  I’m discerning enough to realize that I’m the exception rather than the rule, however.

Oh, how silly of me.  I forgot to introduce myself.  You really should have said something instead of letting me go on like this.

My name is Mitch, and I’ll be your body’s devourer this evening.

Sorry, that might have been a bit of a spoiler.  While I’m certainly more evolved than your standard zombie, I still have that whole eating humans for fun and profit thing going on.  That’s not the best news for you, but if I’m being honest, I’m not really taking your feelings into consideration here.  I’m selfish like that.  Someday I’ll take some time to really work on myself.  Today is not that day.

That’s the bad news.  Here’s the good news.  I’ve been so starved for a good conversation that I’m going to keep you alive for a while.  We’ll spend some time together and get to know one another.  Maybe we’ll make some smores.  Oh!  I know!  We’ll have a sleepover!  We can talk about clothes and which boys we think are dreamy.

I’m sure it’s going to be hard for you to talk since I’ve eaten your tongue.  That’s okay.  I can talk enough for the both of us.  Do you see what I’m doing here?  I’m acknowledging your difficulties and offering a possible solution.  I can feel myself growing as a person.

Let’s see, where to start, where to start…

I suppose there’s no place to start like the beginning.

I’m not going to bore you with much of my human life.  Frankly, it wasn’t very remarkable.  I worked at a boring deadend job to pay the rent on a pathetically small apartment.  You look the type to know exactly what I’m talking about.  Not a whole lot of progress up the ladder of life, huh?

You can probably relate to the next part as well.  The cost of living went up, and yet magically my paycheck didn’t grow to keep up with it.  When I heard that a new drug trial at the local university was paying $500 to have a single syringe jabbed into your arm, well, I knew that I had to jump at the chance.  People who are well-off, the people that don’t really know what a struggle everyday life can be for the average joe, probably think that isn’t enough to be shot up with a mystery drug.  Those people don’t know how life works, not really.

How it used to work, anyway.  I’m still finding myself misusing those pesky past and present tenses.  It’s not like rising inflation means anything here in Ye Ol’ Zombie Apocalypse.

So I got the shot.  I was told that it was a new type of flu vaccine.  It likely was.  Hell, it might have been a really good one.  I haven’t had the flu once since that trial.

You’d think that the strange mysterious medication would be the catalyst for making me the way that I am.  It’s likely part of it, but not the zombie part.  No, that came the way that most do: from a bite.

I was walking out to my car after getting my shot when a guy jumped out at me from around a corner.  Before I could react, he sank his teeth deep into my forearm.  I’d like to say that I fought him off with my overwhelming manliness, but truthfully I think it was my frightened screaming like a small child that made him release and take a step back.  I’m sure that he was suitably impressed with my truly Herculean running away, however.

I went back to my apartment, fully intending to let my shiny new wound heal on its own.  I woke up in the middle of the night sweating, though, and to my untrained eye the bite mark looked infected.  Without much in the way of options, I got my ass out of bed and went to the emergency room.

Not immediately, obviously.  I got dressed before leaving the apartment.  I sleep completely in the nude, or at least I did before I no longer needed sleep.  You’re welcome for that mental image, you randy little pervert, you.

By the time I arrived at the hospital I was soaked in sweat and feeling all kinds of awful.  There was no one else in the waiting room, so I was pretty confident that I could get my injury looked at and treated fast enough to get back home for a few hours of sleep before work.  Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

The woman at the front desk barely looked up as I approached.  I explained my situation to her, and she lazily typed at some keys on her computer as I did so.  It’s possible that she was creating and filling in a patient file for me.  There didn’t seem to be enough typing for that, though.  If I had to take a guess, I’d say that she was updating her Facebook status.

When I finished my explanation of the events that had brought me to that exact moment, the woman instructed me to take a seat and a nurse would be out to get me as soon as possible.  I politely asked how long she thought that would be.  She informed me that things were busy that evening and that it would likely be a while as I had a non-critical injury.

I looked back at the empty waiting room.  I then looked over her shoulder at the group of ten or so nurses and doctors gathered around a desk watching YouTube videos.  Finally, I looked down at the mangled mess of greenish gray flesh and oozing puss on my arm.  I opened my mouth to say something, but the look she flashed me made it clear that she would likely kick my ass if I said something further.  I went over to one of the uncomfortable plastic seats and sat down to wait my turn.

A little over three hours later, I died in that very chair without anyone coming to check on me or a single other person coming into the emergency room.

Under normal conditions, my death might have been the catalyst for something.  Maybe it would have led to some change, not just at that particular hospital but in the medical industry as a whole.  My pale lifeless face could have been the poster child for better patient care around the world.

Or nobody would have given a shit, and after a twenty minute investigation it would have been ruled that nothing could have been done.  You be the judge.

We’ll never know for sure, because that was the night that the zombie apocalypse began, so everyone had something else on their minds.  Those selfish assholes.

Would you like to know what it’s like to die?  No, scratch that, who gives a fuck about that, right?  I bet that you’d like to know the answer to the other big question, don’t you?  You know the one that I’m talking about.  You want to know if there’s life after death.

I’m here to tell you, no matter what you think the answer to that question is, it will surprise you.  Here goes.  Is there life after death?  Well…

Sorry, my friend, no spoilers here.  You’ll know soon enough anyway.  As much as I like the sound of my own voice, I can’t keep talking forever.  When these lips stop flapping, the teeth start chewing, catch my meaning?

So there I was, dead in a chair that had made my ass go numb way before that death occurred.  Then, all of a sudden, I was alive again.  One minute I was gone, and the next I was back.  Just like that.

I opened my eyes and looked around the waiting room.  Things look different when you’re looking through zombie eyes.  It’s tough to explain.  Everything is a bit dimmer, just a smidge, but it’s also sharper and more vibrant.  It’s like when a light that was too bright has been turned down and you’re able to see better because of it.

I knew immediately that I had died.  Trust me, that’s not the kind of thing that you mistake for something else.  I wasn’t going to believe that I simply nodded off.  When you die, you know you died.

I’m sitting there all confused, and it takes me a few minutes to process that I died and came back.  You’d think that would be confusing as hell, or maybe even frightening.  Not to me.  No, all that I was concerned with was classifying what I was now.

I ran through the options in my head, leaning hard on too many nights of watching horror movie reruns.  Clearly I was a card-carrying member of the undead, but what kind of undead?  I could easily discount options such as Frankenstein’s monster as I wasn’t a stitched together pile of corpses.  My owning of a physical body dismissed the possibility of being a ghost or specter or banshee.  Too bad about the banshee part.  I know for a fact that screaming at people until they die would never get old.

A vampire, maybe?  That could have been a fit.  A quick check of my dental condition revealed that I was lacking the fangs typically associated with vampires, however, and I didn’t have any urge to say things like, “I vant to suck your blood.”  Another possibility ruled out.

That just left zombie.  I have to admit that I felt a bit disappointed that was the last option left on the table.  It wasn’t exactly a glorious new life that I was looking at.  Just a bunch of shambling around while moaning and wanting to eat brains.  That’s not what I wanted for my afterlife.  Pre-afterlife.  Post-afterlife.  Whatever the right term for it is.

As I sat there feeling bad for myself, the doors to the emergency room opened.  Half a dozen men and women walked into the hospital.  Walking isn’t really the right term.  They shambled in.  All of them were in pretty rough shape, with skin torn away from their bodies and bones exposed in various places.  They moaned at random intervals like a poorly trained choir.

There was no intelligence in their eyes.  They seemed to be operating on autopilot, walking in a certain direction simply because they had randomly started moving that way.  Watching them carefully, I reflected on how what I was seeing was the unfulfilling future in store for me.

But was that correct?  These were brainless husks.  I was clearly still in control of my faculties.  If anything, I felt more clear mentally than I ever had when I was alive.

It took a minute or so of thought before I came to the conclusion that the medical test I had been a part of had changed things for me somehow.  The injection had taken place before I had been bitten.  While it hadn’t stopped me from dying and become undead, it had allowed me to retain my mind.

That was my working theory then, and it’s my working theory now.  A better explanation hasn’t come along, at least not yet, so it’s what I’m going with.

I watched as the zombies looked at me for a brief moment before turning away and continuing on to the door that connected the waiting area to the examination rooms.  They reached it and started to bang on it with their hands while pressing their bodies up against it.  There was no way that they would be able to break through it, but bless their hearts, they just kept trying.

The woman who had so kindly greeted me when I had arrived wasn’t scared.  If anything, she looked completely pissed off.  She screamed at the assembled undead to get away from the door and form an orderly line at the desk.  A couple of them obliged with the getting away from the door part and started banging on the thick glass separating the receptionist from them.  Not the desired result.

I felt a twang of pity for those zombies.  Even if we were worlds apart in the mental arena, these were still my brothers and sisters.  We were united in our undeadness.  I couldn’t just sit there and let them suffer when all they wanted was a nice hot meal.

I stood up and went over to join them.  That’s when I got yet another surprise in a night full of surprises.  The group of zombies stopped their futile assault on the door and moved out of the way so that I could pass.

I don’t control other zombies or anything like that.  I have found that other members of the undead have a certain… respect for me.  It’s like they can instinctively sense that I’m a bit different than they are.  I don’t think it’s too much of an ego stroke to throw around the word ‘superior’ in this case.

Reaching out, I tried the door knob on the off chance that it was simply unlocked.  It wasn’t, but it didn’t really matter as the pressure I put on it was enough to break it completely free from the door itself.  I stared at the broken knob for a couple of seconds before dropping it to the ground.  Apparently my zombiehood came with an extra scoop of super strength.

You experienced that firsthand, didn’t you?  I tossed you around without breaking a sweat when you happened upon me.  Hopefully this doesn’t hurt your ego, but I did it with only three fingers.  I could have used just two, but hey, why do a job if you’re not going to do it right?

One of the doctors chose that moment to attempt to come into the waiting room.  He pushed the door open, both his expression and his voice filled with anger.  After taking one look at the people that were interrupting his precious YouTube time, though, he thought better of it and attempted to go back the way that he came.

I lunged forward and grabbed him by his shirt collar.  My movement was faster than it had been as well.  I was Captain Fuckin’ America without all the pesky moral grandstanding.

Throwing him to the ground, I reached up and easily tore the door off of its hinges.  I brought the corner of it down as hard as I could at the point where his arm connected to his shoulder.  There was a rather wonderful squishing sound, and suddenly the man and the arm were no longer part of the same body.

My new zombie compatriots swarmed over the doctor and turned him into nothing more than a smear before going through the doorway and into the hospital proper.  Soon they were gone, and I was all alone.

Not entirely alone.  There was still the arm.

I picked it up and stared at it.  Human arms are heavier than you realize.  We don’t really think of ourselves in terms of individual limb pounds, so there’s your fun fact for the day.  Arms are heavy.  That’s knowledge that’s sure to come up often in everyday life.

I’m sure you can guess what my internal debate was about.  I was a zombie.  This was a human body part.  Zombies eat human body parts.  Was I, a zombie, going to eat this body part?

Yeah, you know what?  I was going to eat that leg.

Why not, right?  It was only natural.  No one bats an eye when a lion eats a gazelle.  It was the exact same thing.  I was a majestic white tiger descending from its hiding place to feast upon… whatever a white tiger eats.  Pandas?  Are white tigers in China with pandas?  It doesn’t matter.  Whether they live in the same place or we just play pretend, the metaphor still works.

I slowly raised the leg up towards my mouth.  If I’m being honest, and I’m only honest with you my faithful companion, I was extremely curious.  Come on, admit it, if you were in the same situation you would have been, too.  Human was the forbidden meat.  It could have tasted like anything, even something completely different from anything else.

My lips were less than an inch from my mysterious treat when I felt a hand on my arm.  I turned my head to find a zombie staring at me.  He was missing the skin on both sides of his mouth, creating an open path straight through the lower part of his head.  One eye was slightly out of its socket.  He was wearing a tuxedo suit that was covered in blood and other assorted types of gore.

“Goddamn, are you really going to eat that fucking arm?” he demanded, proving immediately that he was no normal zombie.

And that, my friend, is how I met Ulysses S. Grant.

You’re wondering if I’m talking about the former president of the United States, or someone else that by some strange coincidence had the same name.  Unfortunately, you’re going to have to just keep wondering that, because here is where I call an end to Storytime with Mitch.

Oh, how rude of me.  That’s my name.  Mitch.  I’d ask for yours, but I cannot express in words how little I care about what your parents named you when you came sliding out from between your mother’s legs.

With regards to my story, I’ll have to pick it up at a later time with another meat puppet.  All you humans look the same to me anyway, so I doubt I’ll even know the difference.

So, here’s the good news.  You’re not going to have to go to the trouble of remembering my name, and you’re not going to have to wonder about the 18th president for very long.

The bad news is the reason you don’t have to retain said information is because, as I stated oh so long ago, it’s time for you to meet your untimely end.  I will consume you, keeping you alive for as long as possible while I do so to keep that fresh meat taste intact, and your final resting place will be within me.  It almost sounds religious when I put it like that, doesn’t it?

This brave new zombified world is my church, the screams of the remaining humans as they’re devoured are my hymns, and you, my friend… you are my communion.

Shall we get started?