I sat there in the darkness, quiet and alone. It felt like millenia, just... being there. I snapped open my eyes, all twenty-eight of them. I could see several distinct scenes: a woodland, a junkyard, a morgue, and the dead reactor of a power plant. A twitch happened in my left arm. Arms, fourteen of them, moving very slowly. I take my legs and walk forward just a bit, a slow shamble.
Aha! Something just outside the door of the morgue, out there in the main body of the hospital! It looks like a nurse of some sort. Human... female... young. I vaguely remembered her from the time when I was human, the time I could walk as one man. Her name was Becky. She works in the operating room alongside a doctor who's name I could never remember.
She smells fresh. If only I could inch my way over to her, to take a tasty little bite. Her back was turned, checking the time on the wall. 7:15, precisely fifteen minutes to sundown.
Movement in the woodlands! I could see with my eyes, the same and different ones watching Becky, the nurse. Carrying a torch, holding a book, screaming loudly at me. One of those priests. This explains the building I'm standing behind. I never did feel the pain as my body caught fire. Didn't even notice my head falling off.
I didn't really have to care, either, because before I knew it, I was clawing deep inside the earth, coming up just behind the priest. There was my dead body and head over on the grass across from me, and I scrambled my way out of the dirt and grass, slowly but surely. He started running away from me, toward the church.
There wasn't just fourteen copies of me; I had a sort of given power, I made that clergyman feel fear deep down inside. He ran up to the church door and found it locked. What kind of priest would lock his own church like that? Well, a priest wouldn't. Little things like that, temporary traps are not outside my grasp, even though I don't have the proper understanding about how they work.
Two of my most broken legs bound together by a common torso suddenly felt the urge to leap, and within seconds I was on that priest, trapped up against the door. I managed to get a bite off of his shoulder; nothing too serious. Then I saw the flames coating my arms and body in short order, and this instance of me fell over and died.
The sun dipped a little lower, the air got a little colder, I got a little stronger. All of me got a little stronger, though that's really not saying much. The young girl's alarm clock read 7:17, napping there on that cot inside the police station. My battered and bruised forms lurked under the floorboards under her bed, and around looking through the window. It was time to strike. I pressed even the slightest amount of force on the wall with my body. My new arms were weak as all hell, but my torsos were where it's at.
The girl screamed and hollered something that sounded like "sambi", and screamed at my doorway instance. All it took for me was to reach an arm up through the floorboards and grab her leg.
Where did my arm go? Why the hell did she sleep with a flare gun? When I was human, no one slept with weaponry, but I figure it must be my induceable fear, striking itself in the hearts of many.
She was looting the gun store, the nurse was. Becky. Such a fucking slut she was, hanging out at the high school's entrance, going home with whatever handsome boy was available at the time. A childfucking pedophiliac she was. I found within me the power to savor her, shortly before she grew cold. However, there was but one of me over there. I turned my attentions back to the girl in the station, cowering and shrieking in the corner. She gazed in awe and looked upon the situation in triumph, as my dismantled, rotting body parts buried back under the loamy fall soil.
Two of me were scraping through the turf, rising up against the wall. Through the window there were guns, lots of them. And a stained slut. Each of me took a cornering wall, with me going through the angled door between them. Relentlessly I marched upon her, as she unloaded into me and me and me with a pistol, and I enjoyed the freshness, the tenderness as if it was solely for me.
I'll take her victims as my own victims.
I saw him from the gas station, the priest. He dashed towards a blue truck in the middle of a field, the buildings of the town surrounding it on all sides. He was carrying a can of gas along with him. Isn't there myself at the gas station, though? I should have seen him. No, he had to get it from the church. I used to be his altar boy. He had that gas in the back room, ready to burn the church to the ground when the collection plate ran dry. "God's a bastard," he said, "he won't give you nothin'. A man must reach for himself what he can reach for."
Perverting the concept of God. The preacher man will die. There we were, six of us, equally spaced out. I could see the holy man quivering in fear from all sides. He spun around in quick circles, scoping me out. He slammed the car door once he climbed inside. Mine are slow, but if I want us to go somewhere, I'll get there. I bodymashed the car door, dropping it to the ground with an arm too weak to hold it, denting the driver's side frame, pressing my teeth right to his skull. A loud noise, goo was leaking from a head, a bullet found home, but I gnawed away, my massive jaws penetrating his skull. Old, expired gray matter. Shriveled and sour, the bad notions of life.
The car's radio proudly proclaimed to the tasty automobile operator that it was 7:26. A sliver of sun was all that remained, peeking off the peak of a distant hill. I hefted his body up and took it with me and me, and drug it off to the junkyard.
Her name was Sally, the quivering mass inside the diner. I never got to see her stealthy maneuver from the police station. There she was, frantically searching the diner for the chef's keys. Just like Sally, obnoxious and arrogant, thinking she can have anything she wants. Just because she was popular in high school doesn't make her the apple of anyone's eye. A sweet surface, and once she's at home, she's swearing her father up and down with all manner of curses. Demanding a car, requiring an all new mid-to-late fall wardrobe, just like (yet subtly different than) the one she got two weeks ago, dumping her football jock quarterback boyfriend simply because he was having financial troubles (most likely from her, in our -- my opinion). Greedy and ignorant.
Most of the world could do without her, but if I strip her of her brains, everything that is wrong with her, she can be my girlfriend, dating a new instance of me every night. That might be a problem, though, one instance of me dating another one.
A few of me shambled under the truck, lying on my stomachs, ready for her to come running out. Several more hid behind trees. Sometimes one of me can be seen as stupid, because I'm not paying attention to each single instance of me, but here, now, I most likely appear as bright as anyone would accept me to be, back when I was alive.
Sally came running out, the keys in her right hand moving with the sprinting motion of her arms. She dropped herself in the truck, not even noting the absence of the door. At that second I got to my knees and to my feet, keeping my backs bent at a 90 degree angle. She screamed about sambi once more, as I lurched in around her and under her.
The last sliver of sun was lost to the horizon, and I became omniscient, omnipotent. Hundreds of me filled that town square, and I removed her from the truck, taking her living, breathing, thinking form to the junkyard to lay with Father, her father.
He's already approved of me dating her, and we're a happy couple, though I have to admit at times it feels as though I'm a ventriloquist. Romance is never quite perfect.
This was inspired by the board game Last Night on Earth. Playing the zombie side is always fun.
And about the skippy cuts in the story: I always thought zombies have a much shorter frame rate of thought than us people do.