I Just Think You’ve Got A Bug
by Lauren H

If you can still read this, congratulations, I can’t imagine what you’ve been through to get here, what you’ve had to do to make it this long. I can’t even imagine what I’ve done. I’m sure you know what’s happened; everyone must have figured it out by now.

The world’s gone mad. Plain and simple, we are in hell.

A bit melodramatic, perhaps, but it’s true. Okay, there isn’t any fire or brimstone, but there sure is suffering. But sometimes there’s fire, and depending on where you are, brimstone too.

Maybe you already know the story, but maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re looking for the answers. I have them.

I know the answers because I was there when it started. It seems grandiose, but I was the first one to see it happen. I was the first one to see the lights go out. Here’s what happened:

I woke up like normal one day, walked the dog and then went to work, came home and went to sleep. The day it started was not a normal day. It began when the sky lit a funny color at night. Usually it’s just the general fade from blue to pink to bruise to black. This night the bruise didn’t fade to black, it faded to green, like a real one.

I was on the balcony, enjoying the smoke drifting up from the apartment below, watching the sunset inadvertently. There’s this old lady who lives next to me, well, who used to live there, and she must have been seeing the green too because she said, “Lord in Heaven, I’ve never seen a sight like that in all my life.” Then she made the sign of the cross and shuffled back inside, presumably to prepare the way of the coming messiah.

She was pretty old, so if she’d never seen it, it must have been new. However, this was the same old lady who wore her scruffy pink slippers to the grocery store and stood in front of the fruit waiting for the face of God to appear. It might have been Mary. Either way, she was insane.

So I took one last heave and went inside. I quit smoking, but it’s a lot easier to stop when you can still get a nicotine fix. I went to sleep. Twenty minutes later, my alarm went off.

I worked in this greenhouse, huge industrial place, and I cleaned the floors. It was good work. But this day the sky was still green, and I couldn’t find the buckets anywhere. I looked for them; lo and behold they were in the big room. I generally didn’t clean in there until the afternoon, but since I was there I decided to just do it.

That’s when it happened. The glass shattered, the walls fell down. All the crazy scientists who worked there were gathered in the middle of the room. I was curious.

In the middle of these white coats was another guy, lying on the ground. He’d been smote by God. There was a hole in this guy’s head. One of the other scientists rolled him over, and there was a hole in the concrete too.

They all got really close to it, but I stayed back. There was a dead guy for Christ’s sake. I was more worried about that than a hole in the ground. It was a good move on my part.

The scientists pulled this rock from the ground; it was all green and glowing. And then it broke open. And the inside was all green and glowing. And crawling. Inexplicably they gathered closer, probably the thrill of discovery or something.

All of a sudden they were running around screaming. I’m not sure if you’ve heard a scientist scream, but it’s god-awful. They haven’t had much practice, so it sounds like nails, or a fork on a plate. Terrible.

This portly one fell down, right at my feet. He had a fluffy mustache, but more importantly he had green wiggly things on his face, mostly around his eyes and ears.
They were growing. They were eating.

As I stood there watching this, dumbfounded, the… were they bugs? We call them bugs, but I’m not so sure. Anyway, the bugs were slipping between his eyelids and his eyeballs. I saw them slide under the skin, inside his head. He had been screaming all this time, gesturing wildly for me to help him. Once they were in, he stopped.

You know how blind people look? Like their eyes are filled with two-percent? That’s kind of what it was, only the milk was green. Not bright green, but green in the way powdered milk is blue.

The portly guy stood up. After all that he just got up. Stood there. Did nothing. It was quiet in the greenhouse, all the other screaming was gone too. But the other scientists were standing up, except the first dead guy, hole in his head guy, because there was no coming back from that.

They chanted. You’ve heard the chanting, you’ve probably tried to imitate it too. For something so wrong, how can it be so lovely to hear? Some people have even told me they find it irresistible. Those people chant too now.

I left then, I never did like church, those droning hymns were too much for me. So I went home, told myself that the city had been taken over by the Pope, and headed west.

But it followed me. I can’t understand how it took AIDS a few years to spread, but this traveled so fast. And everywhere too. Across the ocean. Did Homeland Security not notice the dead eyes and inability to speak? You’d think if you saw a zombie coming towards you you’d run away. Seems people in this learned age would know to run away from other people with glowing eyes, with all the horror movies we’ve exposed ourselves to.

They seem okay at first, just people with bugs in their heads and songs on their tongues. The biggest problem was the sky. It never changed from green, it got darker and darker until the plants stopped growing. I worked in that greenhouse for a long time so I understand these things. Something about plants reflecting the green light and since there was only green light coming out of the sky all the plants couldn’t make food… it’s all very technical and I’m sure you don’t really care.

The point is all the plants died. Now we’re surviving off canned and non-perishable foods. What a life.

And as the sky got greener, the bug-infested got nastier. I won’t go into details, I’m sure you’ve got enough stories of your own, but I will say this: I never thought I’d have to arm myself with blunt objects before. Weird how sharp things don’t bother them, huh?

I have a theory. The bugs eat you. That’s why they can’t see, their eyes have been eaten. And the brain too, obviously. So they eat all the innards, you know, all the nice mushy stuff, and replace them with the new bugs that are born like every sixty seconds. Okay, got that? So the zombies are filled with bugs, but the bugs aren’t attached to the bodies so they don’t feel any pain.

When you stab them, the bugs just move out of the way. Brilliant. Any damage done to the body doesn’t matter, the bugs can move the body no matter what’s been hacked at or wounded. So blunt things work because you can stun the bugs under the surface. It’s best if you hit the head, but sometimes the legs will work in a pinch.

The problem we now face is how to kill them. Because I’ve seen headless ones I assume decapitation won’t work. Really that only leaves incineration. Which is what I’m off to do now. I figured I’d leave behind this note in case I’m not successful. Or even if I am, because now you know what to do.

Not to sound pessimistic, but the world is going to end. All of this zombie killing is just a way to pass the time. The world is ruined, we can’t live here anymore, not us humans. These are the choices: give in and become a zombie, fight a losing battle or move to Santa Fe and pretend to be normal.

Have Fun!

-Budd