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[It's Blog Like It's the End of the World Day today (actually it was yesterday, but who's counting?), so here's a quick, 500-word zombie story.]

“Last One In”

The scariest thing about this, to me, is that my Internet access still works. I mean, here we are, with the actual world ending, and I can still check my Gmail. I can blog. I can see how my stock portfolio is doing. Right up until the end. My final prayer before I die? I can send it by SMS.

There is something so weirdly comforting about that.

All those disaster movies, the Hollywood doomsday scenarios — civil engineers watch them, too. The first thing that happens in all those movies is, the power goes out. Everywhere. That overhead shot of the city with all the grids going black one by one, real life isn’t like that. The people who run these things, they have contingency plans. Redundancies. Backups. A harsh winter windstorm might knock the power out for a few minutes in a few places, but an apocalypse? They plan for those.

So the lights are on, including the little blinking ones on my cable modem. My cell phone works, even though there’s no one left to call.

Another case where the movies are wrong, is with reanimated corpses climbing out of their graves and feasting on human flesh.

I mean, they got it mostly right, but the devil’s in the details, you know? Like, in the movies, when they bite you, it’s usually on the arm or the hand. Someplace they can grab hold of easily while you’re trying to get away. Sometimes the shoulder or the side of the neck, all vampire style. In real life, as we all started seeing three days ago, they’re a little more determined than that.

They go for the face.

Every. Single. Time.

I’d say “imagine”, but I guess if you’re reading this, you don’t have to. You’ve seen. You know.

And this is it. This is how the world ends. Not with a bang or a whimper, but with a hundred pounds of cracked bones and rotten meat shaped like a person, eating you alive. Starting with your face.

Starting with your friends.

I was bitten, too, of course. Well, nicked, if you want to get technical about it, but it’s all the same. I’m not the smart hero who herds everyone into a mall or an abandoned military base so they can make a Final Stand. No, I’m the idiot who sees his best friend, the guy he roomed with for three years, screaming and writhing on the ground with half his face gone, and says, “It’s okay, man, I got you.” My dumb ass says, “We need to get you to a hospital.”

My friend, he snaps his jaws at me while I’m trying to hoist him up into a fireman’s carry, and he takes a little piece of my cheek. And more than the act itself, more than the searing, horrific pain of it, it was the chewing that really got to me. I never thought of myself as food before — but then, who does?

So, yeah. The lights are still on. The computers still work. All those smart-phones are this close to being the smartest things on the planet.

Not having any experience beyond seeing all those movies with their shitty, half-assed research, I don’t exactly know how this works. How long I’ve got before it happens. But since I’ve got this whole great big Internet to myself now, I think it would be a crime not to spend the rest of my life

just

surfing.

*****

© Copyright 2007 Frank Beaton

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It’s twenty-five dollars for a finger. For a speculum, it’s forty.

Testicular tumor exam—that will get you a hundred. You get an extra twenty if they do an ultrasound.

The amounts are set ahead of time. Haggling is not allowed. The prices are printed on a little menu they hand you when you first go in, when you first sign up.

The menu is laminated.

Penile torsion examination: thirty-five dollars.

This is how I make my money. All these fingers and instruments up my ass, this is how I pay my rent. My car insurance.

Six of them are in line, scribbling on notepads and listening closely. They’re in line, all waiting for their turn to put their fingers inside me. Every week, sixty-five people assure me that I do not have prostate cancer.

This is how I buy groceries.

There’s a man with a clipboard. Every finger, every tug and prod, he writes them all down. At the end of the session, I initial the sheet. This is my invoice. I give it to the hospital administrator when I’m done. They next day, they mail me a check.

A laparoscope photographing my colon—that’s seventy-five dollars.

This is education. My butt, they tell me, is an invaluable diagnostic training tool.

My asshole will save lives.

*****

© Copyright 2006 Frank Beaton

(After Palahniuk. Obviously.)

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